Epic Fails

A hilarious nonfiction look at two of history's most epic "failures": the Wright brothers, whose countless crashes ultimately led to groundbreaking success. Although Orville and Wilbur Wright are celebrated today as heroes for their revolutionary contributions to science and engineering- they are acknowledged as the first men to successfully achieve powered, piloted flight-their success was hard-earned. (Spoiler alert: there were a lot of nosedives involved.) In fact, it took the self-taught engineer’s years of work and dozens of crashes before they managed a single twelve-second flight!

In this second installment of the Epic Fails series, explore the many failures that made up the Race to Space, paving the way for humanity's eventual success at reaching the stars. Today, everyone is familiar with Neil Armstrong's famous words as he first set foot on the moon: "one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." He made it look easy, but America's journey to the moon was anything but simple. In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, into orbit, America had barely crossed the starting line of the great Space Race. Later that year, our first attempt was such a failure that the media nicknamed it "Kaputnik." Still, we didn't give up. With each failure, we gleaned valuable information about what went wrong, and how to avoid it in the future. So we tried again. And again. And each time we failed, we failed a little bit better. The Epic Fails series by Erik Slader and Ben Thompson explores the humorous backstories behind a variety of historical discoveries, voyages, experiments, and innovations that didn't go as expected but succeeded nonetheless, showing that many of mankind's biggest success stories are the result of some pretty epic failures indeed. This title has Common Core connections.