It Looked Good on Paper: Bizarre Inventions, Design Disasters, and Engineering Follies

Many stories I had forgotten or never knew about. This book spans history an civilian/military follies. It shows that greed and folly know no bounds.

It Looked Good On Paper is an interesting, fun read about design issues. I recommend it.

Brought as a gift 😁 l almost kept it for myself ! 😂 so interesting

This book has two troublesome patterns that distract from the remaining content: errors and opinions.The more noticeable of the two are factual errors that seem to be present in a noticeable percentage of stories. The errors are sometimes insignificant, but can also go to the core of the topic.While not as frequent as factual errors, there are many stories in which the viewpoint and fundamental assumptions of the writer must be shared by the reader. Lacking such common ground the reader is left wondering why the story was included in a book titled "it looked good on paper".I don't recommend this book for someone who lacks familiarity in the areas discussed, as otherwise it has a high likelihood of leaving the reader with an inaccurate impression of past events.

what could possibly go wrong? A nice collection of things that did.Well researched, organized and written. Good continuity. recommended

This is one of a series of books with similar theme - historic tidbits that are funny, amazing and 'in theory at least' true! Great fun to read and perfect book to keep on hand as you can pick it up, read a chapter in a few minutes, and put it down without having to follow some great thread of storyline (each chapter is stand alone)

We gave this to my son, who is an engineering student. He loved it.

this books shows you that not everything on paper works out,its funny and sad about the disaster that they drew

Although there are a few nuggets embedded in these articles, many are not well written, and much of the information is very old hat. In at least one case with which I am intimately familiar, much of the article is either incomplete or misleading. And because the articles are written by different people, the quality and coherence is very uneven. Not recommended.

Unfortunately this book was neither as funny or interesting as i first thought.I felt that it got bogged down in much of the irrelevant detail of the chapters instead of being more concise and cover more subjects.For a book of this type it was also missing some much needed sarcasm and humour that such titles usually contain.not as clever as it should be and not as funny as it could be.

Interesting reading for engineers

My parents suggested i read some books about engineers before i settled on my engineering course at university, this book is a good read if you are interested in general knowledge about the history of engineering...

Some stories read well and are remotely funny.Those subjects that I know about are poorly researched and often out-right wrong.