Product Description

The inside story of how people invented and refined the airplane.

Who were aviation's dreamers and from where did they draw their inspiration? What lessons did inventors learn from birds, insects, marine mammals, and fish that helped us fly? How did the bicycle lead to the airplane, and hot water heaters to metal fuselages?And who figured out how to fly without seeing the ground, setting the stage for scheduled airline services in all weather conditions?

In this entertaining history of the jetliner, Jay Spenser follows the flow of simple yet powerful ideas to trace aviation's challenges. He introduces us to pioneers across continents and centuries, sheds new insights on their contributions, and evokes those key moments in history when, piece by piece, such innovators as Otto Lilienthal, Igor Sikorsky, Louis Blériot, Hugo Junkers, and Jack Northrop collectively solved the puzzle of flight.

Along the way, Spenser demystifies the modern jetliner. From wings to flight controls to fuselages to landing gear, he examines the parts of the airplane to show how they came into being and have evolved over time. The Airplane culminates in a discussion of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner and explores the possibilities for aviation's future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #370205 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-01
• Released on: 2008-10-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061259197
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
This history of the development of the airplane by Spenser, a former curator of the National Air and Space Museum and author of 747, recasts the Wright brothers' contribution as he widens the scope to aviation history in France, Germany and beyond. Spenser starts with the pioneering work of Yorkshire gentleman Sir George Cayley in the late 18th century, delineates the competitive race between inventors in the early 1900s and culminates (somewhat abruptly) in the world of modern jet airliner travel. Spenser's history reads like a textbook for young, aspiring engineers. Instead of a general chronological approach, Spenser divides the book into sections that each track the development of a different part of the airplane, from the fuselage to landing gear. While this allows him to show how the modern airplane is not a singular invention but rather the cumulative result of thousands of different inventors, trials and errors, it does diffuse the narrative. Still, Spenser's book stands as a smart, and occasionally wonkish, history of a thrilling machine all too often taken for granted. (Nov.)
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From Booklist
Spenser organizes his history of the airplane according to the modern machine’s major components––fuselage, wings, tail, landing gear, engine, and so forth. The ungainly look of early contraptions, on view in the included historical illustrations, underscores technical evolution as airplane designers mastered the physical forces of flight. The Wright brothers are important not only for being first aloft but also for conducting the most systematic research into the problem of flight control. Without a fuselage, however, their design was a dead end. The advantage of giving an airplane such a backbone becomes apparent in Spenser’s account of innovations in fuselage construction and of airplane types that embodied them, such as the DC-3. Spencer then explains wings’ transition from wire-trussed support to stronger cantilevered support, the development of piston engines, their replacement by jet engines, and improvements in on-board navigational and engineering instrumentation. A work better suited to readers interested in engineering than to those seeking a purely pictorial history of aviation, this well conveys Spenser’s knowledge of and  enthusiasm for his subject. --Gilbert Taylor

Review
"A smart .history of a thrilling machine all too often taken for granted." (Publishers Weekly )

"An engaging text.The lively writing and the number of photographs set it above many of its competitors." (Library Journal )

"A story with a new character and a new engineering problem on every other page, each served with a sense of delight in ideas that sent humanity aloft." (Seattle Times )

"This is a written like an episode of the old TV show Connections, and is just as entertaining." (Sacramento Book Review )

Customer Reviews

One Piece at A Time
I picked up Jay Spenser's "The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings" at the airport (how appropriate), and I haven't been able to put it down. Fans of James Burke's "Connections" will find much to like about Spenser's approach. Rather than setting out a chronological history of flight, Spenser explores the history of the airplane's component parts: fuselage, wings, empennage (tail assembly), controls, flight deck, landing gear, propulsion system, cabin comforts and system integration. The book is a bit redundant in spots, but that's to be expected given the overlapping nature of some of the discoveries involved--it's a small price to pay for a refreshing approach to the oft-examined history of flight.

Spenser explains all sorts of interesting things, like why biplanes looked the way they did (it has to do with the Australian invention of the box kite), why the Fokker DVII fighter was the only airplane to be specifically mentioned in the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, why jets have swept wings, why flaps are used to increase the size of an aircraft's wing on landing, and how the pioneers of aviation learned by trial and error (sometimes fatal error) to design and build aircraft that can each carry hundreds of people across continents.

Spenser's narrative is entertainingly attentive to the little quirks of history--for example, the Wright Brothers were accomplished bicyclists, and their understanding of the need to lean into turns and maintain balance contributed directly to their brilliant design of contol across all three axes of flight. The Europeans, in contrast, thought of airplanes as airborne sailing ships or automobiles, which caused them to invent flying bricks that could barely turn and couldn't begin to manage pitch, yaw and roll. By 1908, the Wright's carefull experiments had produced a fully controllable aircraft that could outfly anything anyone else had to offer. The world quickly overtook the Wrights, however, and the history of the airplane since 1908 has been the story of a million strokes of genius, each leading in its own fascinating way to the modern airplane.

Spenser has done a superb job of describing the process by which brilliant and courageous people, exchanging ideas and building on experience, have dramatically changed the world we live in.

A fantastic tale of the fascination of flight
Birds do it. Bees do it. But for most of history, people could not.

Even so, humans have long been fascinated by flight. Through the ages, many men (and women, though Jay Spenser gives little mention to Amelia Earhart and other female aviators) have tried to follow the example of birds and bees. Leonardo da Vinci filled many of the pages of his notebooks with figures of flying machines (all of them, curiously, with flapping wings like a bird's, an idea that never worked but fooled even Leonardo). Now flying machines fill our skies, and flying has become a commonplace to most Americans.

In The Airplane, Jay Spenser gives a history of the technology and the people behind flying. He has a fascination with both. The major figures are there -- the Wright Brothers, Octave Chanute, Charles Lindbergh, Otto Lilienthal. But many other people also make these pages. Hundreds of people. Focusing on the faces of airplane history makes the tale Jay Spenser tells more interesting than a bare history of technology would be.

But technology gets its share of attention. In fact, technology stars, with people playing only a supporting role. Jay Spenser organizes the book to follow, for the most part, different aspects of technology -- wings, landing gear, engines, the fuselage. He fills the book with a lot of pictures, too, which helps a lot in understanding the technology. The pictures are printed right next to the text, not gathered in the center in glossy pages. Still, they are printed well and look good, so the pictures add greatly to the book.

Focusing on those pieces of planes gives a unique, careful look at how technology can develop differently for different functions. For example, the Wright Brothers did a great job on their wings -- providing lift so great that a primitive, hand-built engine could power the plane -- and in controlling the plane in three dimensions. Not so great on their first engine (which could run only for a few minutes), or landing gear (they used skids long after others switched to wheels), or steering system (they used wing-warping, which quickly went obsolete, rather than ailerons). But that huge lift and their control scheme got them off the ground and, for several years, had the Wright Brothers soaring while all others hopped.

The Airplane does have its faults. Just a few examples of things I did not like. The writing was spotty, with some parts harder to get through than others. The last section on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner read like a Boeing public relations person wrote it. The section on engines told how radial engines were different from rotary engines, with the latter quickly fading from the scene, but did not tell the difference between the two (it took a look at the Internet to understand that difference). The reason for the Wright Brothers giving up their huge technological lead gets no mention. All those things could have been done much better.

But no book is perfect. In The Airplane, Jay Spenser tells very well how ideas gave us wings. He tells many tales that I had never heard before, and I have long been fascinated by the history of flight. Well worth reading.

A Great Introductory Text for Engineers
Jay Spenser's The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings is a significant addition to the literature on air and space. Gracefully and insightfully written, it is ideally suited for schools and colleges, the perfect introduction to flight for non-specialists and specialists alike. I guarantee that once you have read this illuminating and thoughtful book, you will never regard an airplane with a dismissive eye again. Bravo!