Roger McCoy

This book tells the remarkable lives of the pioneers of science – from Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Darwin, Pasteur and Marie Curie, to Einstein, Freud, Turing, and Crick and Watson. A series of seventy articles, written by an international team of distinguished scientists, historians of science and science writers, provides an unrivalled account of the lives and personalities behind the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time. Organized thematically, starting at the ‘Universe’, and moving smaller through the ‘Earth’ and ‘Molecules and Matter’ to ‘Inside the Atom’, with the final two sections looking at ‘Life’ and ‘Body and Mind’, it covers all the major scientific disciplines, including astronomy, biology, biochemistry, chemistry, computing, ecology, geology, medicine, neurology, physics and psychology, as well as mathematics. The Scientists will intrigue budding scientists, those fascinated by the lives of great individuals, and anyone curious to know how over the centuries we came to understand the physical world around us and inside us.

As I look back over my life, I see how the good God has been good to me. We all have a journey that God has planned for us. When I took the wrong path, God redirected my path.My Life, My Story, My Way is not all about me but also about others whom God placed in my path to help me build my character. My character is the only thing going to heaven--not what I have done, not how much money I made or what type of house I live in but my character.God gave me a wonderful mother who demonstrated resilience, compassion, hard work, faith, and love for her family, especially me. God blessed me with a wonderful wife who believed in me and encouraged me to do my best and to have the faith that he will see me through.We all have struggles in life, but it is not the struggles we face but how we react to them. My book shows the struggles along my journey and how God was there to pull me through. God gave me all I needed to be successful and live the life he wanted me to live.

With our access to Google Maps, Global Positioning Systems, and Atlases that cover all regions and terrains and tell us precisely how to get from one place to another, we tend to forget there was ever a time when the world was unknown and uncharted--a mystery waiting to be solved. In On the Edge, Roger McCoy tells the captivating--and often harrowing--story of the 400 year effort to map North America's Coasts. Much of the book is based on the narratives of mariners who sought a passage through the continent to Asia and produced maps as a byproduct of their journeys. These courageous explorers had to rely on the most rudimentary mapping tools and to contend with unimaginably harsh conditions: ship-crushing ice floes; the threat of frostbite, scurvy, and starvation; gold fever and mutiny; ice that could lock them in for months on end; and, inevitably, the failure to find the elusive Northwest passage. Telling the story from the explorers' perspective, McCoy allows readers to see how maps of their voyages were made and why they were so full of errors, as well as how they gradually acquired greater accuracy, especially after the longitude problem was solved. On the Edge tracks the dramatic voyages of John Cabot, John Davis, Captain Cook, Henry Hudson, Martin Frobisher, John Franklin (who nearly starved to death and become known in England as "the man who ate his boots"), and others, concluding with Robert Peary, Otto Sverdrup, and Vihjalmur Steffanson in the early twentieth century. Drawing upon diaries, journals, and other primary sources--and including a set of maps charting the progress of exploration over time--On the Edge shows exactly how we came to know the shape of our continent.