This richly illustrated book chronicles lighter-than-air flight from Archimedes' discovery of the principle of buoyancy to the latest in sport balloons and plans for future airships. Far more than a timeline of events, "Lighter Than Air" focuses on the people--flamboyant and daring, heroes and scoundrels--who made history in the sky. Here are the eighteenth-century pioneers who first took to the skies, the peripatetic aeronauts who criss-crossed two continents a century later, the airmen who manned the great rigid airships, and the intrepid balloonists who flew their craft across oceans and continents in the years following World War II.

The first half of the volume recounts the invention of the balloon, the golden age of the professional aerial showmen in Europe and America, the use of balloons for aerial reconnaissance, and the key role of balloons in scientific research. The second half presents the rich tale of the airship from eighteenth-century dreams to twentieth-century reality. These chapters describe the early development of the pressure airship, the emergence of the rigid airship and its golden age in the first half of the twentieth century, and the military and civil applications of these aerial behemoths. The author concludes by discussing modern blimps, sport balloons, and dreams of a future for airships.

The highly accessible text is complemented with a wealth of prints and photos from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., the Musee de l'Air et de l'Espace at Le Bourget, the Zepplin-Museum at Zepplinheim, and the Imperial War Museum in London. Written by award-winning aeronautical historian Tom D. Crouch, "Lighter Than Air" brings to life the color and excitement of buoyant flight.

In a new era of global commerce, revolutionary technologies, and world war, the sheer exhileration of flight captured the imagination. Tom Crouch weaves the people, machines, and ideas of the air age into a compelling narrative. Yet the documentation of amateur enthusiasm in the face of practical reality and consequences does not simply offer a narrative of unalloyed progress. Moments of exhaltation are tempered by bitter disappointment and stark terror. Blind alleys are the price of technical progress. In the end, there is no more fascinating cast of characters than those who wrote the history in the sky. Theirs is an engaging story of realizing an extraordinary dream and riding it. TOM CROUCH is the author of the "sensitive and intelligent" (The Sunday Telegraph), "most readable, authoritative and balanced" (New Scientist), The Bishop's Boys (Norton). "Tom Crouch tells [the story] in huge detail and remarkably well" (The Guardian).

The story of a handful of talented American engineers and adventurers who labored to conquer gravity in a flying machine.

When Orville and Wilbur Wright soared over Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina's outer banks and solved the problem of aerial navigation, they wrote the last chapter in a long story. For decades prior, a small community of engineers, scientists, and dreamers—men named Chanute and Langley and Herring—had tried to make the ascent in every conceivable craft, from kites and gliders to an assortment of powered flying models.

This fascinating assortment of characters and contraptions comes to life in Tom Crouch's classic A Dream of Wings. In the quest for flight, aeronautical societies were formed and broke apart, successes were celebrated, hopes rose and fell, and lessons were learned and built upon. The dreamers who blazed the path to a flying machine are bravely realized in these delightful pages. 55 b/w illustrations.

The reissue of this definitive biography heralds the one-hundredth anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight.

Brilliant, self-trained engineers, the Wright brothers had a unique blend of native talent, character, and family experience that perfectly suited them to the task of invention but left them ill-prepared to face a world of skeptics, rivals, and officials. Using a treasure trove of Wright family correspondence and diaries, Tom Crouch skillfully weaves the story of the airplane's invention into the drama of a unique and unforgettable family. He shows us exactly how and why these two obscure bachelors from Dayton, Ohio, were able to succeed where so many better-trained, better-financed rivals had failed. 50 b/w photographs.

"A pleasure...turns the magnifying lens on the clan and cultural roots of two unusual individuals.... [Crouch] movingly—even beautifully—unfolds their story."—Washington Post Book World

"[A] superb biography."—Los Angeles Times

"Crouch interweaves family drama with the history of aviation in a riveting saga of ingenuity, competing claims, public adulation and technical innovation."—Publishers Weekly

A fascinating examination of the strategies and uses of air power in the First World War, Sky on Fire covers not only developments in military hardware and tactics but also how public policy and political considerations shaped the ways air power was deployed. Providing an excellent balance of data and statistics as well as human insights, Fredette's book is essential reading for readers interested in the air power, both historically and in contemporary conflicts.

First Flight This compact National Parks Service Handbook describes the lives of America's first pilots, the Wright brothers, and their invention of the first successful heavier-than-air-machine--the airplane. In addition to their personal history, the book describes sites where the brothers conducted their experiments, such as Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. It also describes their development of the first "practical" airplane-the 1905 Wright Flyer III, preserved today at the Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, Huffman Prairie Flying Field in Dayton, Ohio. Illustrations tracing the Wrights' progress, maps, and a fold-out chart depicting the 1903 Wright Flyer and the principles of flight make this publication an indispensable guide to the Wright brothers' story.

Over half a century after its initial publication, F. Stansbury Haydon's well-researched book remains the definitive work on the creation of the United States Balloon Corps during the Civil War. Haydon explores his topic down to the last detail, from the amount of fabric used to manufacture every balloon that saw federal service, to the formula for varnish used to seal the envelopes. He explains the technical operation of mobile gas generators that T. S. C. Lowe designed to inflate balloons in the field and provides the precise cost of each rubber hose used in their construction.

"Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War" raises large and important questions about technological change within a military bureaucracy. The book begins with an introduction to the history of military ballooning since the wars of the French Revolution, with special attention to discussions of military aeronautics in the United States since the time of the Seminole Wars. Haydon also demonstrates the complicated maneuvering among American balloonists who sought to aid the army before the Battle of Bull Run and shows how the attitudes of various officers toward the balloons changed during the ensuing months of 1861-62.

First published in 1941 as "Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies," this volume received compliments in the "London Times Literary Supplement" for its exploration of "the attitude of soldiers toward innovations." A reviewer in the "Military Engineer" praised the book both for its extensive scholarship and "as a lesson to all military men of the difficulties and misunderstandings which arise whenever a new means of conducting war is introduced into army circles." This edition includes a new foreword by Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of the Aeronautics Division at the National Air and Space Museum.