Heroes of the Golden Age (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781808480003)

Imagine a city of a million people, its streets lit by lamps, its libraries holding more books than anywhere on Earth. Scholars travel for months just to read a single manuscript. The year is 850. The city is Baghdad. And the people working there are about to change the world.

Between the years 750 and 1500 - the Islamic Golden Age - Muslim scholars made some of the greatest discoveries in human history. They invented algebra. They measured the size of the Earth and got it almost right. They built mechanical clocks shaped like elephants. They wrote the medical textbook that universities used for six centuries. And almost no one taught you their names.

Heroes of the Golden Age fixes that. In thirty short, gripping chapters, young readers meet the real men and women behind the modern world - the doctor who first described smallpox, the engineer who tried to fly, the teenager who built instruments to map the stars, the traveller who journeyed seventy-five thousand miles by camel and boat.

Each chapter is just a few pages, can be read in any order, and ends with What we still use today.