Tom and his father are arguing about Tom's latest idea, a photo telephone. Mr. Swift is adamant that the idea won't work, but Tom has some ideas in mind, and refuses to back down. Tom read about a recent news event where a photograph was transmitted over telegraph lines, and there is no functional difference between the wires used for a telephone to those used in telegraphs.

Tom Swift is approached by the owner of a circus to use one of his airships to search for a lost hunter, who went missing somewhere in South Africa while searching for a tribe of giants.

Tom and his father are arguing about Tom's latest idea, a photo telephone. Mr. Swift is adamant that the idea will not work, but Tom has some ideas in mind, and refuses to back down. Tom read about a recent news event where a photograph was transmitted over telegraph lines, and there is no functional difference between the wires used for a telephone to those used in telegraphs. In the meantime, some shady occurrences are happening in the neighborhood. Tom and Ned are almost run over by a speeding motor boat, operated by a con-artist known as Shallock Peters. The feud between Mr. Peters and Tom begins when Mr. Peters refuses to acknowledge the accident. The animosity between the two only grows deeper as Mr. Peters tries to buy Tom out of some of his inventions, under the guise of making a profit. Tom refuses to allow anyone other than himself permissions to his patents, and this infuriates Mr. Peters. Later, Tom learns that his good friend, Mr. Damon, is having serious financial troubles. As the plot gets thicker and thicker, one of Tom's airships is stolen, and then Mr. Damon unexpectedly disappears. All this while Tom is desperately trying to get his latest invention working.

"Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone" by Victor Appleton is book number 17 in the original Tom Swift series.

The Hardy Boys meets Alex Rider in this start to a brand-new series starring everyone’s favorite inventor—Tom Swift! When your dad funds the Swift Academy of Science and Technology, you’re bound to have a bunch of tech at your disposal. So no one bats an eye when Tom and his best friend, Noah, test their new virtual reality drone before class. At the academy, once class starts and the drone is parked, their brainiac friends then launch into farfetched discussions about the curriculum. And when they watch a documentary about the FBI’s most wanted hackers from the eighties, they quickly start speculating that the academy custodian is one of them. At first, Tom dismisses the idea as another one of his friends’ conspiracy theories. But using their new drone, he spies the custodian acting suspiciously around school. As Tom and his friends search for evidence that the custodian is the missing hacker, the signs become impossible to ignore when Tom gets threatening messages that warn him away from investigating. And when someone releases a virus in the school servers, all bets are off as the adjoining servers at tech giant Swift Enterprises come under fire. Can Tom and his friends uncover the true culprit before it’s too late?

Tom Swift, Jr., and his friend, Bud Barclay, try to recover a missile, which was mysteriously thrown off course, containing valuable data from Jupiter.

Victor Appleton was a house pseudonym used by the Stratemeyer Syndicate and its successors, most famous for being associated with the Tom Swift series of books. The following series have been published under the Victor Appleton name: Tom Swift (1910-1941), Motion Picture Chums (1913-1916), Moving Picture Boys (1913-1922), Movie Boys (1926-1927), Don Sturdy (1925-1935), Tom Swift, Jr. (1954-1971) (technically, ""Victor Appleton II""), Tom Swift (Third Series) (1981-1984) and Tom Swift (Fourth Series) (1991-1993). Contract authors of these books writing under the name ""Victor Appleton"" included James Duncan Lawrence, Howard Roger Garis, John W. Duffield, W. Bert Foster, Debra Doyle with James D. Macdonald, F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, Robert E. Vardeman, Thomas M. Mitchell.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.