3 h 45 minAudiobook11 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the empty space around you is full of something that has weight, pushes, and lifts?
In Rollo's Philosophy: Air, Jacob Abbott turns an unseen part of everyday life into something worth exploring. Rollo's subject is air: what it is, how it behaves, and why it matters. Simple trials and common objects make the questions approachable, without difficult formulas.
The exploration moves from air as a real substance to its weight, pressure, and motion. Wind gives sailing boats and windmills their power; birds, kites, and balloons invite questions about lift. Along the way, Abbott's clear, kindly teaching offers a glimpse of how children learn science in his nineteenth-century books.
What you’ll discover
- Something where nothing seems visible Explore the idea that a space can hold air even when it looks empty.
- The push of air Discover how air's weight and pressure underpin questions about pumps and barometers.
- Wind at work Connect moving air with the useful force behind a sailing boat or windmill.
- Questions in the sky Let birds, kites, and balloons draw your attention to how air holds things up.
- A patient way to learn Enjoy plain explanations that bring science close through simple trials and familiar objects.
Who will love it
Readers who like to see science worked out with bellows, lamps, umbrellas and boats, and parents or teachers who want a warm family tale that explains how air, fire, wind and sound behave.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Flying takes strength, and air is real
- A bellows proves air is a real thing
- We live at the bottom of an ocean of air
- Warm air rises when cool air pushes under
- A fire needs fresh air to live
- Gravity, wind and sound all move air
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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Rollo's Philosophy: Air
by Jacob Abbott
Rollo and Jonas test the air with bellows, a hollow stump and a boat caught in a squall.
Easy read2–5 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Rollo's Philosophy: Air is a book of science for children by Jacob Abbott, the American author who wrote a whole series of Rollo books in the nineteenth century. Its aim is to teach how air behaves by wrapping each lesson in an ordinary day on a family farm.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Flying takes strength, and air is real
The book opens with a walk across crusted snow, where Rollo, Lucy and Nathan lose their way in a snowfall. That evening Nathan reads his father a rhyme about fins and wings and announces that he wishes he could fly. His father answers that the trouble is not a lack of wings. The trouble is a lack of the strength to work them. Making wings would be easy for clever mechanics, he says, because finding the power is the hard part of almost every machine.
Mr. Holiday then separates two kinds of strength. A boy is absolutely stronger than a robin, since he can hold it and lift more than it can. He is not relatively stronger, because he is not stronger by as many times as he is bigger. To make the point, he asks the boys to imagine climbing a ladder hand over hand while the ladder sinks under their weight. That is the bird's task, pulling itself up on air that keeps giving way.
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What is Rollo's Philosophy: Air about?
It is a teaching book in which Rollo, his brother Nathan, cousin James, Jonas and their parents learn how air works. Flight, bellows, pressure, balloons, chimneys, fire, gravity, wind and sound are each explained through a small scene.
Who are Rollo, Nathan and Jonas?
Rollo is the older boy who loves experiments and sometimes shows off. Nathan is his little brother, full of questions. Jonas is the thoughtful hired man who knows the workshop, the fire and the weather, and teaches by doing.
What does philosophy mean in the title?
In Abbott's day, philosophy meant the study of how nature works, what we now call science. The title promises a lesson in the science of air, taught by experiments the children can try with ordinary things.
The author
Jacob Abbott
1803–1879 · American children's writer
Jacob Abbott was an American writer born in Hallowell, Maine, in 1803. He wrote children's books, including the Rollo series, during the nineteenth century. He also worked as a teacher and minister and founded a school in Boston. He later lived in Farmington, Maine, where he died in 1879.
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