The invention of flight craft heavier than air counts among
humankind's defining achievements. In this book, aviation engineer
and historian John D. Anderson, Jr., offers a concise and engaging
account of the technical developments that anticipated the Wright
brothers' successful first flight on December 17, 1903. While the
accomplishments of the Wrights have become legendary, we do well to
remember that they inherited a body of aerodynamics knowledge and
flying machine technology. How much did they draw upon this legacy?
Did it prove useful or lead to dead ends? Beginning with the
earliest attempts at flight, Anderson explains how Leonardo da
Vinci first began to grasp the concepts of lift and drag which
would be essential to the invention of powered flight. He describes
the many failed efforts of the so-called "tower jumpers," from
Benedictine monk Oliver of Malmesbury in 1022 to the
eighteenth-century Marquis de Bacqueville. He tells the fascinating
story of aviation pioneers such as Sir George Cayley, who in a
stroke of genius first proposed the modern design of a fixed-wing
craft with a fuselage and horizontal and vertical tail surfaces in
1799, and William Samuel Henson, a lace-making engineer whose
ambitious "aerial steam carriage" was patented in 1842 but never
built. Anderson describes the groundbreaking nineteenth-century
laboratory experiments in fluid dynamics, the building of the
world's first wind tunnel in 1870, and the key contributions of
various scientists and inventors in such areas as propulsion
(propellers, not flapping wings) and wing design (curved, not
flat). He also explains the crucial contributions to the science of
aerodynamics by the German engineer Otto Lilienthal, later praised
by the Wrights as their "most important" predecessor. In telling
the dramatic story of the Wright brothers' many experiments at
Kitty Hawk as they raced to become the first in flight, Anderson
shows how the brothers succeeded where others failed by taking the
best of early technology and building upon it using a carefully
planned, step-by-step experimental approach. (They recognized, for
example, that it was necessary to become a skilled glider pilot
before attempting powered flight.) With vintage photographs and
informative diagrams to enhance the text, Inventing Flight will
interest anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the miracle
of flight. "I have long thought that need exists for a book,
suitable for undergraduates, that would tell the connected
prehistory of the airplane from Cayley to the Wrights. In light of
the recognized excellence of his technical textbooks (with their
stimulating historical vignettes), I can't think of a better person
than Professor Anderson for the job. He has the rare combination of
technical and historical knowledge that is essential for the
necessary balance. Inventing Flight will be a welcome addition to
undergraduate classrooms."--Walter G. Vincenti, Stanford University
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