Showing results by publisher "MuseumAudiobooks.com" in Science & Engineering

The pioneering advocate of wilderness preservation, John Muir (1838-1914) was influential in the creation of many national parks.

Fifty Years on the Trail is the true story of John Young Nelson (1826-1903), an early frontiersman, military scout, interpreter, guide, and saloon owner. Nelson ran away from home as a young teenager to adventure in the west. He worked on farms, served as a cabin boy on a Mississippi steamer, and became an apprentice with a group of traders traveling west from Missouri. After meeting a band of Sioux, he got himself adopted into the tribe, learned how to live off the land and became a Sioux warrior.

The New Organon is the second part of Bacon's philosophical work, The Great Instauration on the renewal of the sciences, which was published in 1620. The title refers to Aristotle's work Organon - meaning “trumpeter” - a treatise on logic and syllogism. Bacon’s work offers a new method of investigating nature, named “the Interpretation of Nature”.

Fanny Kelly (1845-1904) was a North American pioneer captured by the Sioux and held captive for five months. Her ill-fated party was attacked by chief Ottawa on the Oregon Trail. She escaped when Sihasapa people took her to Fort Sully.

William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. Born in Argentina, he spent his youth studying the local fauna and flora and observing the natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier. Far Away and Long Ago is a record of the years 1840-50 on the Pampas. The abundant wildlife was easily observed and the author became a naturalist with a great talent for description. Hudson observed the birds, beasts and plants: the cowbird - the red willow, the armadillo, and the opossum - where adventurous Gauchos herded cattle.

John Muir (1838 -1914) was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas in the United States. In the late 1800s, Muir made several trips to the relatively unexplored territory of Alaska. Travels in Alaska, originally published in 1915, describes the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness and its inhabitants as observed during his travels between 1879 and 1890. In poetic prose, he describes the area’s magnificent glaciers and its animals like bears, bald eagles, wolves and whales.

In 1898, the British were building a railway line between Mombasa in Kenya and Uganda. At the Tsavo River in Kenya where a bridge needed to be built, the project was suddenly interrupted by two man-eating lions that targeted the camps of the workers. Over a period of nine months, the lions killed scores of people. These lions were deliberately hunting people, preferring humans over any other prey, and they seemed to have supernatural abilities in evading all attempts to stop them. Colonel J.H. Patterson, the chief engineer in charge of the project, finally managed to eliminate them.

The life story of Billy Dixon, a buffalo hunter and scout from the Texas Panhandle who was active as far as Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma, offers a genuine depiction of life on the old western frontier. Billy helped found the town of Adobe Walls, ended a siege during the Second Battle of Adobe Walls with a long-distance shot, and received the US Medal of Honor for his bravery at the Buffalo Wallow Fight. Billy later served as postmaster at Adobe Walls, sheriff of Hutchinson County, Texas, and state land commissioner.

Creative Evolution is a 1907 book by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. The work proposes a version of orthogenesis in place of Darwin's mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by the “élan vital”, a vital impetus that may also be understood as a natural creative impulse. The book also developed concepts of time which influenced writers like Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. Bergson's term "duration", for example, refers to an individual, subjective experience of time, as opposed to the mathematical, objectively measurable clock time.

Frederick Courteney Selous (1851-1917) was a British explorer, hunter, and conservationist. In this work, The Lion in South Africa, he describes his numerous encounters with wild lions and notes that as far back as the 1890s, lion numbers were shrinking from overhunting.

Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre (1823-1915) was a French naturalist, entomologist, and author known for the engaging style of his popular books on the lives of insects. In The Life of the Spider, Fabre’s careful observations of the species tarantula, the banded epeira, the Narbonne lycosa, the crab spider and the labyrinth spider are presented in lively descriptions. He also compares the various species, all of which are industrious predators and highly talented weavers.

Margaret Sanger was an American sex educator and birth control activist. Woman and the New Race argues for the legality of birth control, which was closely tied to the labor and the Eugenics movements. Sanger believed that birth control would free women from the bondage of forced motherhood.

Inventor and scientist Nikola Tesla believed in the existence of life on other planets. One night in his laboratory in the Colorado mountains, he noted electronic signals that he deduced came from intelligent life on another planet. While we have still not been able to prove the existence of alien life, Tesla’s article from 1901 provides an arresting look at the possibility of interplanetary communication.

Warren Angus Ferris (1810-1873) was a trapper, cartographer and diarist in the Rocky Mountains from 1830 to 1835. In 1829, he joined the American Fur Company to explore the Rocky Mountains. He kept a journal of his travels which were published as the book Life in the Rocky Mountains (1940), which gives an account of the Platte River Valley, Cache Valley, the area around Salt Lake City, and Snake River Country. Ferris found Native American guides and made a detour into what is today Yellowstone National Park.

On Horsemanship, also sometimes titled The Art of Horsemanship, is a treatise written about 350 BCE by the Athenian historian, soldier, and student of Socrates, Xenophon (c. 430-354 BC). The treatise is a "hands-on" manual which deals with the selection, care, and training of horses in general.

In reading ‘electrical oscillator’, you will probably automatically think ‘earthquake machine’. This charming title aside, electrical oscillators at its core employ an amplifier whose output is fed back to the input, so the signal regenerates and sustains itself. In this 1919 publication, Tesla further expands on one of his most famous inventions.

The New Atlantis (1627) is a utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon in which he describes a vision of the future of human discovery, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humanity. The novel portrays a utopian world where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the dominant qualities of the inhabitants.

On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin is a work of scientific literature considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. The book introduced the theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection, backed by a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. The evidence was gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and the author’s subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation.

In this text written for The Electrical Experimenter, Tesla shows himself to be the real "Father of the Wireless". He fully discredits the Hertz theory and explains that the real Hertz waves die out even after traveling a short distance. He expands further on the reactions of this theory he felt has held strength for too long and introduces his own revolutionary alternative.

The naturalist, author, and advocate for preservation, John Muir (1838-1914) was also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks". In the spring of 1869, John Muir was looking for ways to fund his explorations of California’s Central Valley region, when a ranch owner offered him a job herding sheep in the Sierra Nevada. In The Yosemite, Muir chronicled his experiences of the beautiful wilderness in appealingly descriptive prose. The audiobook is a treasure trove of portrayals of the shifting phases of the year in Yosemite.