[U.S.] Steve Silberman: *Einstein’s Refrigerator—An Alternative Collection of Stories*, translated by Yang Rongxin, Nanhai Publishing Company, March 2003
I recently discovered that the special-price books sold by Welan are pretty good. Many worthwhile academic books—the ones that sell at a 25% discount at places like Boyatang, and so on—are marked down to 35% off; even more books that are normally sold at 50–60% off in ordinary discount bookstores (for example, books from Jiangsu People’s Publishing House) are sold at 70% off. Well worth picking up a batch~~
Among them there is one very interesting book, and as soon as it arrived I read it at once: *Einstein’s Refrigerator*. In fact, it is a little collection of odd anecdotes. “Einstein’s refrigerator” is one of the stories in it, and it tells how Einstein once devoted himself to inventing a new kind of refrigerator (and succeeded). There are also stories of Hollywood stars inventing “radio frequency spectrum” technology, the invention of the zipper, and the genius inventor Tesla, comparable to Leonardo da Vinci—a set of invention stories, some of enormous influence and others bizarre and amusing, yet all forgotten. Besides the “Part Three: Inventive Genius” made up of these stories, the book’s six sections in all also tell of a headless rooster, the king of farting, the strangest murder in history (this one is the most marvelous…), the sweetest great tragedy (a molasses flood whose crest was nearly ten meters high and whose fastest flow reached more than fifty kilometers an hour), a man who survived three separate shipwrecks in succession (including the Titanic and her sister ship), America’s “Emperor” Norton I, the drying up of Niagara Falls, and many other absurd, bizarre, yet true stories (at the end the author appends references and the URLs of online materials).
All these stories come from the author’s “Useless Information Website,” which makes it clear that these stories are of no use at all, and are there only to give readers a laugh. Although some of them (especially a few of the invention stories) still seem to have considerable research value, we might as well regard this book as useless light reading. Personally, I think that compared with celebrity gossip and scandal sheets, as well as stories like the Guinness World Records that attract ever more people to create records for the sake of creating records, these stories are even more astonishing. In any case, this really is a very interesting book. Reading books like this from time to time can effectively prevent oneself from becoming too serious.
March 13, 2007, 9:04 p.m.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply