Why Satellites Stay in Orbit: Cool 1964 kids' science book

Years ago, I read a bit of advice in The Whole Earth Catalog, which said a great way to get up to speed on a subject you are interested in is to read a children's book about it. It's excellent advice, and I've made use of it many times over the years. My second grade daughter recently wrote a report on Frederick Douglass. I knew very little about Douglass, but she had a Scholastic book about him, so I read it in 20 minutes. I now feel like I know almost everything I will ever need to know about him, and I have a great deal of admiration for this American hero. If I had purchased an adult-level biography of Frederick Douglass, I don't know if I would have ever opened the book.

The best children's books are the ones that were published before 1970. After that, the illustrations started to get crappy, and the writing took a nosedive, too. There are exceptions, but I found it to be the rule.

Here's a winner from 1964: Why Satellites Stay in Orbit, by Sune Engelbrekston and illustrated by Lee Ames. It's a very short book that does a terrific job of explaining precisely one thing: why satellites stay in orbit. This is the kind of book my eight-year-old daughter can read and appreciate. It's also the kind of book I wish I'd read when I took physics in high school. Why couldn't my teachers explain how satellites stayed in orbit as clearly as this book did? Maybe they did, and I was just too busy reading Mad while the teacher was going over the subject.

Why Satellites Stay in Orbit is out-of-print, but copies can be found on Amazon for as little as 99 cents

• [General Specific]

  @ Anon #25- I agree with you. Some of my favorites: Zen Shorts, by Jon Muth; Stellaluna, by Janell Cannon; Flotsam, by David Wiesner; and Not a Box, by Antoinette Portis.

• [Jonathan Frederickson]

  Looks like Amazon’s sold out. I get the feeling this article may have caused that. :P

• [Anonymous]

  I beg to differ about pre-1970s books being better than the more recent dumbed down ones.

  Perhaps it is true in general but there is one of set of modern books I think are absolutely great for kids: The Dorling Kindersley books. They all have a similar format: Lots of really high quality illustrations scattered around each page, with a paragraph or two of text associated with them.

  My wife bought a DK Visual Dictionary (actually more like an encyclopaedia) when our son was an infant. I figured he wouldn’t be interested in it until he was four. Nope, it was his favourite book from the age of one.

  Now, at the age of 11, he’s still into DK books. He’s brought a couple home from the library, huge beasts about an inch thick. After he went to bed a couple of nights ago I spent an enjoyable evening reading them. I learnt a lot.

• [jordan]

  That cover would make a stellar t-shirt.

• [Anonymous]

  Such simple material is good not only for getting acquainted with logical ideas, but different children’s books are good for helping an author, artist or songwriter overcome a mental block, because kids’ books often take adult concepts and distil them to their most fundamental elements. Some of them are nearly poetic with the degree of nuance and compassion they convey. “The Little Prince” and “The Tin Forest” are good examples out of many.

• [Nater]

  I often think “why the frack couldn’t my teachers have explained it that simply” when reading kids books with my son. And the older, the better in most cases. But especially with chemistry, physics and maths.

• [Anonymous]

  Because Mr. Clarke Said So!

• [SamLL]

  Frederick Douglass’s autobiography is great. You can read the whole thing here:

  http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/

  One of the works of literature in my life that was still inspiring even when forced to read it in high school.

• [jonw]

  I’d check wikipedia first. Especially when it comes to historical figures, a kid’s book is likely to be biased and oversimplified…

• [Roy Trumbull]

  I wonder if Arthur C. Clarke wrote anything about satellites for kids? He invented the geostationary satellite and wrote an article with the math in the 1940s. If he’d taken out a patent it would have expired before the first one was put into orbit.

• [Avi Solomon]

  Soviet-era children’s science books were cool too:
  https://sovietbooks.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/i-walk-in-space/

• [Rob Cruickshank]

  Cool that there’s an Echo balloon on the cover.

• [ackpht]

  Wasn’t it Einstein who said that you don’t really understand a subject unless you can successfully explain it to a child?

  • [aldestrawk]

    There is some truth to that, but I think that truth is about the ability to explain something, simply and clearly, having the prerequisite of understand the subject very well. However, there is a further difficulty in explaining things to lay people and children in a way that is useful and not misleading. Such a perspective is given by Richard Feynman, in this video discussing why it is impossible to explain magnetism to a lay person.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM

    Feynman once served on a California state commission which reviewed math and science textbooks for all the school districts. His judgment was that all the books were universally lousy because the authors didn’t understand their subjects and the books were always a little bit wrong in their explanations. This is from a chapter in his book “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman” which I recommend heartily.

    A specific criticism of this children’s book is, why introduce a scientific term like “force” when the example given is wrong. Force has a common meaning, but they talk about two different forces. Are those really different types of forces and is one inherently stronger than the other?
    I am not saying we should give up on science and math books for children. I am saying we shouldn’t mislead them with wrong information and that sometimes means we don’t try to give an explanation when the child, or person, doesn’t know the prerequisite concepts.
    All in all, teaching and writing textbooks should be one of the highest paid professions because it is so difficult to do really well.

• [babylost]

  I have a TON of books like this in my attic. I will see if I can post some pics up and link to them later.

• [wfrancis]

  Rather than buying a children’s book, you might want to pick up a collection aimed at adults, like the Great American Bathroom Book. This book has a two page synopsizes of many, many great works of literature (fiction and non-fiction) plus tons of useful books. Plus tons more, including rules for games, vocab builers, popular sayings, etc. When you have a few minutes to kill there’s hardly a better way. It’s a thick book, too; I’ve had my copy for 10 years and haven’t yet read every page in it.

  http://www.amazon.com/Great-American-Bathroom-Book-Single-Sitting/dp/1880184044

• [penguinchris]

  I would love to be able to easily purchase a reprint collection of books like this, curated by present-day scientists to ensure there’s nothing terribly incorrect or out of date. I agree that modern kids books like this are mostly awful, and I would love my own kids (when I have any) to have access to all these wonderful old books.

  Heck, these could even be compiled and republished digitally as a PDF (and iPad app probably). I know you can find PDFs of many of the more famous ones (like the Golden Book of Chemistry) but you’re not going to be able to find a nice collection of more obscure ones like this.

  Getting 99 cent books on Amazon is fine, but it’d take a *lot* of research and work to find out which ones are particularly good and worth buying… work that I, and I think many parents, would be willing to pay handsomely for.

• [sla29970]

  Alas for the one diagram — When a satellite’s curve is getting smaller as it falls back toward earth it is travelling faster, not slowing down. The hard part is teaching what Larry Niven wrote in The Integral Trees: “East takes you out, out takes you west, west takes you in, and in takes you east.”

  • [Marja]

    I think the author was careful about that – if something (such as drag from the upper atmosphere) slows the satellite down, it shrinks the satellite’s orbit (and the satellite trades height for speed).

• [urbanhick]

  I agree that the bulk of childrens’ book out there are just plain junk, and we buy/receive a lot of books for our daughter. We avidly search out older (60s & 70s mostly) books. Most new books feature absolutely infantile plots and writing (even for older kids) which seems to assume all kids are idiots that can’t follow a plot line for more than 2 pages, and boring, derivative artwork. Yes, there ARE some wonderful anomalies like the abovementioned Zen books by Jon Muth, but for the most part they’re shockingly dumbed-down. I dunno – maybe they’re just trying to prepare kids for what the the rest of their lives will be like. TV-land, ho! Bring on the titties n’ beer!

• [KWillets]

  It’s a smaller angular velocity.

• [Tivrusky4]

  Agreed. Douglass’ autobiography is wonderful, and an easy read.

• [Stefan Jones]

  I like the illos; simple but stylish.

  I have, or had, a really AWFUL science book for kids. It has a title like “Science Wonders” and was of 1930s vintage. It was a collection of one-page articles, although calling them articles would be pushing it. Most of each page was a murky black-and-white illustration; below were maybe two paragraphs of explanation.

  I wish I still had it; I’d send it to Mark as an example of how not to do it!

• [jtegnell]

  The kids on the cover don’t look particularly impressed.

• [Brendon B]

  Seriously, though — you should read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. It’s an amazing read, one of the best works of non-fiction writing in American history.

  Also, it’s really short and in the public domain.

• [Anonymous]

  Makes you wonder.. Hmmm….

• [jeligula]

  If nothing else, children’s books will teach you about print design. If you are paying attention. Still, had I a need to learn about expressing a dog’s anal glands, I doubt that I would consult a children’s book.

• [P. Girouard]

  I don’t disagree with your statement about the wealth of knowledge to be found in children’s books, but your opinion of post 1970 illustrations as “crappy” is just wrong. To be sure, there is crap out there, but there always has been. There are also amazing illustrators, like Leo & Diane Dillon, Jerry Pinkney, Chris Van Allsburg, G. Brian Karas, Babette Cole, Dan Santat, Tony Ross, Peter Sis, Brian Selznick, David Wiesner, Simms Taback, these are just off the top of my head. Believe me, I could go on and on. And don’t get me started with authors! Do yourself a favor, visit a library and have the children’s librarian give you a little tour.

• [jphilby]

  Congrats on discovering the secret to instant scholarship. It’s not just children’s -books- before 1970 though, it was also -comic books-.

  In particular Classics Illustrated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics_Illustrated

  *Because of the pictures* (most ‘serious’ books of the era – and those before it – didn’t have pictures), after a couple of close reads, you’ll remember this stuff -forever-.

  • [aldestrawk]

    A wonderful friend of mine is a co-author of a comic book that explains calculus. I have looked through it but never actually read it, as I had taken calculus before it came out.
    Prof. E McSquared’s Calculus Primer: Expanded Intergalactic Version

    A quick glance at Amazon show there are a number of comic books that cover science and mathematics.

• [deredder]

  I agree with this advice. Just recently I was able to get a really good basic understanding in the diversity of marine wildlife from reading a children’s book. It was called “One Fish, Two Fish, something, something” – can’t quite remember the title but was it really inciteful.

• [artaxerxes]

  Generally speaking, I agree that children’s books often provide and excellent introduction to subjects that might seem too daunting when approached through books written for adult readers. I love to read and translate children’s books to learn new languages.

  But since my answer to people who say, “If you only read one book on this topic…” is always “read 5 to 10 more if you really want to gain a basic understanding of the subject,” I’ve got a couple of comments.

  Histories and biographies are always written from a biased position. It can’t be otherwise. The author is presenting his or her interpretation of events and characters and cultural prejudice influences those interpretations.

  The book on Frederick Douglass provides an excellent example of a book that would be particularly subject to political and cultural pressures. When I was in pubic school, in the 70s and 80s, American history was still presented as a whitewashed fairy tale. So I’d imagine that a book on Frederick Douglass that was written during the height of the Civil Rights Movement would exclude much ugly truth while presenting situations and actions in an unrealistically positive light.

  “Gone With the Wind” has remained a very popular piece of saccharine propaganda to this day. Town squares in the South still have monuments to the “bold, brave” Confederate soldiers. Through the 70s, in TV, popular fiction and movies, the South was still being represented as it was in “Gone With the Wind.”

  I don’t think the producers/writers of that film had read the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of excellent slave narratives recorded and archived by interviewers in a WPA program. Because those narratives put the lie to GWtW. And a lot of Faulkner’s work for that matter.

  So, again, go ahead and read the kids book first, then read several books by authors who write from different perspectives. By using your own experience and research you will arrive at a more accurate truth. You’ll be doing a service to your kids by teaching them that “truth” in history is a story written by the losers and the winners with different motivations. I can’t think of anything as important to teach one’s kids, especially at a time in history where we go to war over fabricated evidence.

  ps. I find it hard to believe that you feel that you know all that’s important to know about Frederick Douglass by reading one book, whether it was written for kids or not. That’s pretty damned depressing. At least read the man’s own book. It’s an amazing work and critical to understanding American history.

  • [chgoliz]

    I second this recommendation to use children’s books as a real help in learning another language.

• [Anonymous]

  Regarding the point about the art and writing in children’s books sucking in the Seventies and beyond, I can’t comment on the quality of books from the 1970s, 1980s, and so on. But if you go into the kids’ section of a bookstore, you’ll find that a lot of the best art being published today is being published in children’s books. It never fails to amaze me.

  • [pinehead]

    I’m not too greatly familiar with the realm of children’s lit, but I do know that Helen Ward is a hell of a good illustrator. She did the work for “Varmints,” which I could have sworn I learned of here, but I can’t find a relevant link to it now. Anyway, you can Google it and see some of her work there.

    Mark’s preference for the older art makes sense; his own artistic style has those same clearly defined, often retro elements to it.