The Wind and Beyond: A Documentary Journey into the History of Aerodynamics in America; Volume II: Reinventing the Airplane [NASA SP-2007-4409]

Washington DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA History Division, Office of External Relations, 2007. Presumed First Edition/First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. xxvii, [1], 957, [1] pages. Illustrations. Diagrams. Index. Ex-Reference Collection (stamp on title page and no other marking noted). DJ has minor sticker residue. Inscribed by Dr. Lee on page facing the title page. J. Lawrence Lee an engineer-historian at the Historic American Engineering Records and was a chairman of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers History and Heritage Committee. James R. Hansen is a professor of history at Auburn University. A former historian for NASA, Hansen is the author of ten books on the history of aerospace. His book From the Ground Up won the History Book Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1988. For his work, The Wind and Beyond (NASA), he was awarded the Eugene Ferguson Prize for Outstanding Reference Work by the Society for the History of Technology in 2005. The airplane ranks as one of history's most ingenious and phenomenal inventions. It has surely been one of the most world changing. How ideas about aerodynamics first came together and how the science and technology evolved to forge the airplane into the revolutionary machine that it became is the epic story told in this six-volume series, The Wind and Beyond: A Documentary Journey through the History of Aerodynamics in America. Following up on Volume I's account of the invention of the airplane and the creation of the original aeronautical research establishment in the United States, Volume II explores the airplane design revolution of the 1920s and 1930s and the quest for improved airfoils. This series covers the impact of aerodynamic development on the evolution of the airplane in America. As the six-volume series demonstrates, just as the airplane is a defining technology of the twentieth century, aerodynamics has been the defining element of the airplane. Topics covered include such developments as the biplane, the advent of commercial airliners, flying boats, rotary aircraft, supersonic flight, and hypersonic flight. This series is designed as an aeronautics companion to the Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program (NASA SP-4407) series of books. The documents collected during this research project were assembled from a diverse number of public and private sources. A major repository of primary source materials relative to the history of the civil space program is the NASA Historical Reference Collection in the NASA Headquarters History Office. Historical materials housed at NASA field centers, academic institutions, and Presidential libraries were other sources of documents considered for inclusion, as were papers in the archives of private individuals and corporations.