This month I have chosen two books about some of the extraordinary people who helped to create the modern world.

The first, Imagination and a Pile of Junk, Hbk £16.99, is a celebration of inventors and the eccentricities that motivate them.

In his whistle-stop tour of inventions large and small, the scientist Trevor Norton details the slow development of many everyday objects.

For example, 20 years after anaesthetics were invented, some hospitals in Britain were still operating without them, and the idea of vaccination had to wait almost a century before it was fully accepted.

Many inventors also dismissed their own ideas: radio had ‘no future,’ electric light was ‘an idiotic idea’ and X-rays were ‘a hoax’.

Best of all, the head of the GPO rejected telephones as unnecessary as there were ‘plenty of small boys to run messages’.

In his amusing account, Norton answers such burning questions as ‘How did embroidery save thousands of lives?’ and ‘Why did it take a world war to get women to wear bras?’ It’s a great mix of the history of crackpot ideas and outstanding inventions that demonstrates the process of inventiveness both at its best and worst.

The second, Sea Devils, Hbk £18.99, is a compelling account of pioneer submariners and their astonishing underwater contraptions. Some made perilous voyages, whilst others sank like stones, and John Swinfield traces the history of these early submarines and the personalities who built and sailed them.

Throughout its perilous history, the submarine has been the subject of fierce business, military and political shenanigans, eventually winning acceptance amidst the chaos and carnage of the First World War, during which pathfinder submariners achieved an extraordinarily high tally of five Victoria Crosses.

Sea Devils is an immensely readable, entertaining and authoritative chronicle of low cunning, high politics, wondrous heroism and undersea tragedy.