Product Description

The boys are back after 40 years! Author's Edition with previously unpublished text restored from the original manuscripts.

A strange sea monster appears on the lake ...a fortune is unearthed from an old cannon ...a valuable dinosaur egg is stolen. Watch out as the Mad Scientists turn Mammoth Falls upside down!

Take seven, lively, "normal" boys -- one an inventive genius -- give them a clubhouse for cooking up ideas, an electronics lab above the town hardware store, and a good supply of Army surplus equipment, and you, dear reader, have a boyhood dream come true and a situation that bears watching.

In the hands of an author whose own work involved technological pioneering, the proceedings are well worth undivided attention, as the boys explore every conceivable possibility for high and happy adventure in the neighborhood of Mammoth Falls. To the unutterable confusion of the local dignitaries -- and the unalloyed delight of Bertrand Brinley's fans -- the young heroes not only outwit their insidious rival, Harmon Muldoon, but emerge as town heroes. Here, captured under one cover, are the fun-filled escapades of the young scientists whose exciting capers debuted in Boys' Life magazine 40 years ago.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13381 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 217 pages

Review
...filled with spirit of adventure and good-natured fun... In fact, Henry Mulligan, chief Mad Scientist, reminds me of me! -- Homer Hickam, Author of October Sky

For better or worse (better, I think) the Mad Scientists' Club was a major influence in my youth. -- Glenn H. Reynolds -- InstaPundit.com, October 11, 2004

Fun and gentle, the books paint a picture of a more innocent boyhood where scientific know-how could save the day. -- USA TODAY, December 3, 2002

When I was a kid, some of my favourite books were about young geniuses. ...I loved Bertrand Brinley's Mad Scientists -- Kenneth Oppel, author of Barnes & the Brains series, Silverwing series

About the Author
After attending Stanford University, where he majored in Economics and Speech, BERTRAND R. BRINLEY was a methods and procedures analyst for Lockheed Aircraft's engineering department. He entered the Army in 1944 and served fifteen years in a variety of infantry and public relations assignments, including position of aide-de-camp to the chief of the United Nations delegation during the Korean armistice negotiations. He retired from active duty in order to devote himself to writing, and held a commission as major in the United States Army Reserve. He later worked in technical writing and public relations positions for the Martin Company.

The author of Rocket Manual for Amateurs, Bertrand Brinley lectured extensively to schools and civics groups on space age topics. His articles and stories appeared in Harper's Magazine, Boys' Life, Family Weekly, Woman's Day, The Microwave Journal, Electronics Illustrated and The Book of Knowledge.

Bertrand Brinley is well-known for his beloved tales of the Mad Scientists' Club, whose further antics can be found in The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club, The Big Kerplop! and The Big Chunk of Ice.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dinky Poore didn't really mean to start the story about the huge sea monster in Strawberry Lake. He was only telling a fib because he had to have an excuse for getting home late for supper. So he told his folks he'd been running around the lake trying to get a closer look at a huge, snakelike thing he'd seen in the water, and the first thing he knew he was too far from home to get back in time.

His mother and father greeted the tale with some skepticism. But Dinky's two sisters were more impressionable, and that's how the story really got out. They kept pestering him for so many details about the monster that he had to invent a fantastic tale to satisfy them. That's one of the troubles with a lie. You've got to keep adding to it to make it believable to people.

It didn't take long for the story to get around town, and pretty soon Dinky Poore was a celebrity in Mammoth Falls. He even had his picture in the paper, together with an "artists conception" of the thing he'd seen. It was gruesome-looking -- something like a dinosaur, but with a scaly, saw-toothed back like a dragon. Dinky was never short on imagination, and he was able to give the artist plenty of details.

It was the artists' sketch in the newspaper that got Henry Mulligan all excited. Henry is First Vice President and also Chief of Research for the Mad Scientists' Club and is noted for his brainstorms. Neither Henry nor anyone else in the club actually believed Dinky had seen a real monster, but we were all willing to play along with the gag -- especially when Henry suggested that we could build a monster just like the one shown in the newspaper.

Customer Reviews

The Finest Science-Based Stories For Boys Ever Written
There have been plenty of science-based children's stories written over the years, but Bertrand R. Brinley's Mad Scientists' Club stories are something special. A combination of excellent true-to-life writing, simple yet sound science (with a single exception), and a gently wicked sense of fun have produced a marvelous collection of stories that seem as clever and fresh as when they came out more than forty years ago. The secret? The fact that the Mad Scientists of Mammoth Falls use science not for building great inventions or solving great mysteries, but primarily for playing clever pranks on the well deserving.

In "The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake", Dinky Poore makes up a story about seeing a sea monster in order to explain being late for dinner. His fellow club members decide to build a sea monster. Hi-jinks ensue.

In "Night Rescue" the boys make clever use of simple scientific principles in order to rescue a downed Air Force pilot.

In "The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls" the boys liven up Mammoth Falls' Founder's Day celebration with a flying man.

In "The Big Egg" the boys try to hatch a fossil dinosaur egg. (!) It gets an A for story and an F for science.

In "The Secret of the Old Cannon" the boys use a combination of cutting edge science (for 1963) and simple basics to solve an unsolved bank robbery (and embarrass a couple of sneaks trying to take credit for their work).

In "The Great Gas Bag Race" the boys come up with a truly brilliant concept for winning a balloon race.

In "The Voice in the Chimney" the boys hilariously haunt a house.

I find it difficult to put into words just how much fun these stories are. I enjoyed them as a boy; I enjoyed them as a man; I'll read them to my children; and I'm sure that they will pass them on to their children. Mr. Brinley wrote three more books about the Mad Scientists' Club: The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club, The Big Kerplop!: The Original Adventure of the Mad Scientists' Club, and The Big Chunk of Ice: The Last Known Adventure of the Mad Scientists' Club, all of them great, but this, the first one is IMHO the best.

Note: the Purple House 40th anniversary reprint of The Mad Scientists' Club is worth picking up even if you own an older edition because the text is based on the original manuscripts, restoring a number of passages that had been cut for space reasons when they were first published in Boys' Life. It also includes an introduction written by Bertrand's son Sheridan and a chronological listing of the stories so you can read them in the order they were written (the order of the stories in the book was not changed). Reading them chronologically clears up some confusion over places, geographical references, and characters, though according to internal references "The Big Egg" takes place before "The Secret of the Old Cannon".

An absolutely seminal work for children...and adults.
I sincerely believe that The Mad Scientists' Club was the reason I started reading voraciously as a kid and that the trend has continued into my adulthood. A series of stories first published in the popular 60's magazine Boys' Life, the words practically leap off the page with thier exuberance and brilliant ingenuity. The club is comprised of six 'junior geniuses', with our narrator as one. Each is given a distinct personality, and by the end we know (and in the case of former club-member and now sworn arch-enemy Harmon Muldoon, despise) each one of them like they were old friends. I still have my copy, completely tattered though it is, because I've re-read it at least 100 times. Even now as I write this review, I have to be careful not to start reading for fear of being swept up in the fun.

And each tangled situation our boys find themselves in (or in fact, help to create) is more outrageously inventive than the last. The real kicker is how authour Bernard Brinley keeps the prose totally accessible to youth but throws in enough engaging characters, thrilling action sequences and hilarious dialogue to entertain even adults sick of reading thier kids sugary-sweet Disneyized junk. He even sneakily gave me an education in basic mechanics by expertly describing the various machinery the boys build to wreak their harmless havoc on the citizens of little Mammoth Falls.

And I see here on Amazon.com that Brinley has continued the series with other books. If he brings even 10 percent of the sheer brilliance he displays in the first one, no adult should have a problem inducting thier children into this club.

Brains Can Be Cool!
Like many of the other reviewers of this book, I read it repeatedly as a boy. I identified with the characters. I loved the way they used their intelligence and knowledge of science to get themselves in and out of mischief, and sometimes to help people. And let's not forget to mention Brinley's easy reading style and Geer's terrific illustrations. But one lesson I took away from this book (and its sequel) was that it was perfectly fine to be a skinny geek who was interested in science. These guys solved all kinds of real life problems without the benefit of brawn, large amounts of money, or even magic (a la Harry Potter).