The Mad Scientists' Club - Hardcover

Brinley, Bertrand R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1930900104 ISBN 13: 9781930900103

Publisher: Purple House Inc, 2001

Synopsis

The six members of the Mad Scientists' Club experiment with new projects which include investigating a strange sea monster and the theft of a valuable dinosaur egg.

About this title

About the Author:

After attending Stanford University, where he majored in Economics and Speech, BERTRAND R. BRINLEY was a methods and procedures analyst for Lockheed Aircraft's engineering department. He entered the Army in 1944 and served fifteen years in a variety of infantry and public relations assignments, including position of aide-de-camp to the chief of the United Nations delegation during the Korean armistice negotiations. He retired from active duty in order to devote himself to writing, and held a commission as major in the United States Army Reserve. He later worked in technical writing and public relations positions for the Martin Company.

The author of Rocket Manual for Amateurs, Bertrand Brinley lectured extensively to schools and civics groups on space age topics. His articles and stories appeared in Harper's Magazine, Boys' Life, Family Weekly, Woman's Day, The Microwave Journal, Electronics Illustrated and The Book of Knowledge.

Bertrand Brinley is well-known for his beloved tales of the Mad Scientists' Club, whose further antics can be found in The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club, The Big Kerplop! and The Big Chunk of Ice.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Dinky Poore didn't really mean to start the story about the huge sea monster in Strawberry Lake. He was only telling a fib because he had to have an excuse for getting home late for supper. So he told his folks he'd been running around the lake trying to get a closer look at a huge, snakelike thing he'd seen in the water, and the first thing he knew he was too far from home to get back in time.

His mother and father greeted the tale with some skepticism. But Dinky's two sisters were more impressionable, and that's how the story really got out. They kept pestering him for so many details about the monster that he had to invent a fantastic tale to satisfy them. That's one of the troubles with a lie. You've got to keep adding to it to make it believable to people.

It didn't take long for the story to get around town, and pretty soon Dinky Poore was a celebrity in Mammoth Falls. He even had his picture in the paper, together with an "artists conception" of the thing he'd seen. It was gruesome-looking -- something like a dinosaur, but with a scaly, saw-toothed back like a dragon. Dinky was never short on imagination, and he was able to give the artist plenty of details.

It was the artists' sketch in the newspaper that got Henry Mulligan all excited. Henry is First Vice President and also Chief of Research for the Mad Scientists' Club and is noted for his brainstorms. Neither Henry nor anyone else in the club actually believed Dinky had seen a real monster, but we were all willing to play along with the gag -- especially when Henry suggested that we could build a monster just like the one shown in the newspaper.

About this edition

• Publisher: Purple House Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1930900104
• ISBN 13: 9781930900103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 217
• Illustrator: Geer Charles