Series:

Epic Fails

4 total works

Cover of The Age of Exploration: Totally Getting Lost (Epic Fails #4)
Christopher Columbus is one of the most famous explorers of all time, but he was neither the first nor last adventurer to ever stumble upon a great discovery. From the Silk Road of Asia to the icy shores of Antarctica, our knowledge of the world today is in large part due to several intrepid pioneers, risking life and limb for the sake of exploration. After all, setting off into the dark unknown requires an enormous amount of bravery. But every explorer quickly learns that courage and curiosity aren’t enough to save you if you can’t read a map or trespass on somebody else’s land!

In this fourth installment of the Epic Fails series, authors Erik Slader and Ben Thompson introduces readers to an international cast of trailblazers and details every mutiny, wrong turn, and undiscovered city of gold behind the age of exploration.

Cover of The Race to Space: Countdown to Liftoff (Epic Fails #2)
Today, everyone is familiar with Neil Armstrong's famous first words when he set foot on the lunar surface: "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. Each time, we got a little bit more creative.

In 1961, When Alan Shepard desperately needed a bathroom after waiting for hours past his scheduled launch time, already sealed into his aircraft, Mission Control problem-solved by temporarily shutting down the rocket's power... so that he could urinate into his suit without shorting the electronics on board. Later, when things didn't go as planned aboard the Gemini 8, Armstrong managed to slow an uncontrolled spin by firing the craft's re-entry thrusters.

In this humorous first installment of the Epic Fails series, Ben Thompson and Erik Slader take readers through the numerous failures that comprised the Space Race, paving the way for humanity's eventual success at reaching the stars. The Epic Fails series 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.

Cover of Not-So-Great Presidents: Commanders in Chief (Epic Fails #3)

Cover of The Wright Brothers: Nose-Diving into History (Epic Fails #1)