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Author: Michael G. Smith Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 0803286562 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 446
Book Description
Rockets and Revolution offers a multifaceted study of the race toward space in the first half of the twentieth century, examining how the Russian, European, and American pioneers competed against one another in the early years to acquire the fundamentals of rocket science, engineer simple rockets, and ultimately prepare the path for human spaceflight. Between 1903 and 1953, Russia matured in radical and dramatic ways as the tensions and expectations of the Russian revolution drew it both westward and spaceward. European and American industrial capacities became the models to imitate and to surpass. The burden was always on Soviet Russia to catch up—enough to achieve a number of remarkable “firsts” in these years, from the first national rocket society to the first comprehensive surveys of spaceflight. Russia rose to the challenges of its Western rivals time and again, transcending the arenas of science and technology and adapting rocket science to popular culture, science fiction, political ideology, and military programs. While that race seemed well on its way to achieving the goal of space travel and exploring life on other planets, during the second half of the twentieth century these scientific advances turned back on humankind with the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile and the coming of the Cold War.
Author: David Hanna Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1633886778 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
2022 History Book Festival Official Selection. The 1930s still conjure painful images: the great want of the Depression, and overseas, the exuberant crowds motivated by self-appointed national saviors dressing up old hatreds as new ideas. But there was another story that embodied mankind in that decade. In the same year that both Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power, the city of Chicago staged what was, up to that time, the most forward-looking international exhibition in history. The 1933 World’s Fair looked to the future, unabashedly, as one full of glowing promise. No technology loomed larger at the Fair than aviation. And no persons at the Fair captured the public’s interest as much as the romantic figures associated with it: Italy’s internationally renowned chief of aeronautics, Italo Balbo; German Zeppelin designer and captain, Doctor Hugo Eckener; and the husband-and-wife aeronaut team of Swiss-born Jean Piccard and Chicago-born Jeannette Ridlon Piccard. This golden age of aviation and its high priests and priestesses portended to many the world over that a new age was dawning, an age when man would not only leave the ground behind, but also his uglier, less admirable heritage of war, poverty, corruption, and disease. It was only later in the decade that the dark correlation between the rise of some of aviation’s superstars and the rise of fascism was to be revealed. But for a moment in 1933, this all lay in a future that still seemed so promising. In Broken Icarus, author David Hanna tracks the inspiring trajectory of aviation leading up to and through the World’s Fair of 1933, as well as the field of flight’s more sinister ties to fascism domestic and abroad to present a unique history that is both riveting and revelatory.
Author: E. N. Brandt Publisher: MSU Press ISBN: 1609173635 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
During World War I, in 1916, Herbert Dow, founder of The Dow Chemical Company, received news of “star shells,” weapons that glowed eerily as they descended over the trenches of the enemy, making them easier to attack. The critical component in these flares was magnesium, a metal that was suddenly in great demand. Dow, along with a half-dozen other U.S. firms, swiftly began manufacturing magnesium, but by 1927 Dow was the only U.S. company still in the business. Dow’s key innovation was a method of extracting the metal from seawater, an engineering accomplishment finally achieved at Freeport, Texas, only eleven months prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. Dow was the principal supplier of magnesium for U.S. and British planes during World War II, a distinction that ironically yielded an indictment from the U.S. government on monopoly charges. The company eventually became the world’s largest manufacturer of magnesium until 1990, when the Chinese entered the market and offered the metal at rock-bottom prices. Dow quietly ended its production of magnesium in 1998. Brandt’s history is an engaging look at Dow’s eighty-three-year romance with this remarkable metal.
Author: Steven Taylor Publisher: Air World ISBN: 1399036955 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 157
Book Description
In the summer of 1940, a new German aircraft began appearing in the skies over the British Isles. Unlike the rest of the Luftwaffes fleet in the Battle of Britain, these aircraft were flying at a height of 40,000 feet and higher way beyond the reach of the RAFs defending fighters. These virtually untouchable intruders were examples of the Junkers Ju 86P. The worlds first operational combat aeroplane equipped with a pressurized cabin, they were able to reach a maximum altitude of 42,000 feet. The Ju 86Ps introduction ushered in a new era of aerial warfare, where combat would take place at previously unimaginable heights. The Ju 86P was just one of many high-altitude aircraft projects developed by both the Axis and Allied powers during the Second World War. Others included the Vickers Wellington Mk.VI, Vickers Windsor, Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Junkers Ju 388, Heinkel He 274 and Henschel Hs 130. With pressurized cabins, such aircraft offered obvious tactical advantages: bombers and reconnaissance aircraft could operate safely above the maximum ceiling of the opposing sides fighters, prompting intense development especially by the British and Germans of pressurized interceptors to meet the threat they posed. Combat in the Stratosphere is the first book devoted exclusively to exploring the fascinating story of the development and operational history of aircraft designed specifically for high-altitude operations during the Second World War. But this is not a book solely about the machines themselves. It also focuses on the men who flew these revolutionary aircraft, both in the testing phase and in combat, and the physical challenges these courageous airmen faced, as they pushed themselves to the very edge of physical endurance in this desperate race to reach ever higher altitudes. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including air combat reports, British Cabinet files and Air Ministry documents, as well as first-hand accounts of aeronautical engineers and the pilots who flew these aircraft, Combat in the Stratosphere reveals the full story of this largely overlooked aspect of Second World War air warfare, high above the skies of Europe, North Africa, the Soviet Union and Japan.
Author: Michael Sean Reidy Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1576079864 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
This comprehensive volume explores the intricate, mutually dependent relationship between science and exploration—how each has repeatedly built on the discoveries of the other and, in the process, opened new frontiers. A simple question: Which came first, advances in navigation or successful voyages of discovery? A complicated answer: Both and neither. For more than four centuries, scientists and explorers have worked together—sometimes intentionally and sometimes not—in an ongoing, symbiotic partnership. When early explorers brought back exotic flora and fauna from newly discovered lands, scientists were able to challenge ancient authorities for the first time. As a result, scientists not only invented new navigational tools to encourage exploration, but also created a new approach to studying nature, in which observations were more important than reason and authority. The story of the relationship between science and exploration, analyzed here for the first time, is nothing less than the history of modern science and the expanding human universe.
Author: Alex Alice Publisher: First Second ISBN: 1250187575 Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 68
Book Description
In search of the mysterious element known as aether, Claire Dulac flew her hot air balloon toward the edge of our stratosphere—and never returned. Her husband, genius engineer Archibald Dulac, is certain that she is forever lost. Her son, Seraphin, still holds out hope. One year after her disappearance, Seraphin and his father are delivered a tantalizing clue: a letter from an unknown sender who claims to have Claire’s lost logbook. The letter summons them to a Bavarian castle, where an ambitious young king dreams of flying the skies in a ship powered by aether. But within the castle walls, danger lurks—there are those who would stop at nothing to conquer the stars. In Castle in the Stars, this lavishly illustrated graphic novel, Alex Alice delivers a historical fantasy adventure set in a world where man journeyed into space in 1869, not 1969.
Author: Craig Ryan Publisher: US Naval Institute Press ISBN: Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, before liquid-fuel rockets had launched us full-sail onto what John Kennedy would call the "new ocean", a small fraternity of daring, brilliant men made the first exploratory trips into the upper stratosphere to the edge of outer space in tiny capsules suspended beneath plastic balloons. They saw things no one had ever seen, and they experienced conditions no one was sure they could survive. This book tells the story of these brave and tenacious men as they labored on the cusp of a new age. The author captures the drama of their spectacular achievements and those of many of the other space pioneers who made America's stratospheric balloon programs possible. Their now largely forgotten programs supplied many systems and processes adopted by NASA. Unfortunately, some of the valuable lessons they brought back from the edge of space were ignored - in at least one case, with disastrous consequences. Craig Ryan's argument is compelling for the inclusion of these men's achievements in the broad history of space exploration and astronautics. In their day, before Gagarin and Glenn and American flags on the Sea of Tranquillity, these pre-astronauts were the space program.