Makers of Many Things

A charming 1916 journey into the factories and workshops where ordinary miracles take shape. Tappan turns the mundane into the magnificent, revealing how a stick of wood becomes a friction match, how trees transform into paper, and how clay ends up as the dishes on your table. The prose sparkles with infectious curiosity that made early twentieth-century children and their parents marvel at industrial ingenuity. Each chapter opens a door onto a different craft, showing processes that have changed only slightly in the century since. This is a book for anyone who has ever looked at an everyday object and wondered about its journey, perfect for reading aloud or satisfying the peculiar hunger children have for knowing exactly where things come from.