Lighter Than Air -- An Illustrated History of Balloons and Airships, Johns Hopkins UP '09, $35, 191 pages, ISBN #0801891272. Index, additional reading, source notes, two appendices, dozens of b&w and color glossy images.
Early in this decade, as I was writing Race to the Sky, a biography of the Wright brothers, I found Tom Crouch to be the kind of historian who is generous with his own research findings rather than protective of facts he might get to use later in his own writings. Actually, as senior curator of the Division of Aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, he could hardly be anything else, but the fact remains that Crouch is one of the most knowledgeable authorities on the history of flight today.
In his latest book, Crouch slices off a portion of that history and presents it in accessible fashion in a lushly illustrated volume. His focus is on the history of balloons and airships, a saga beginning with the Greek philosopher Archimedes ("If an object immersed in a fluid weighs less than the amount of fluid displaced, it will rise. That's all there is to it.") to balloonist Steve Fossett, who disappeared while flying a light plane in the Nevada desert in 2007.
From Tom Crouch's introduction:
"The invention of the balloon struck the men and women of the late eighteenth century like a thunderbolt. In the fall of 1783, half of the citizens of Paris, one of the largest cities on the globe, flocked to witness two of their fellow beings leave the surface of the earth aboard a wondrous craft that was the product of human brains and hands. The crowds were the same everywhere a balloon flew. The spectators who gathered in such huge numbers were just becoming accustomed to the idea of change. The old certainties of their grandparents' world were giving way to an expectation that the twin enterprises of science and technology would provide the foundation for 'progress.' In an age when human beings could fly, what other wonders might the future hold?'"
