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. Index. 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) - (six-volume series), 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. Volume II explores the airplane design revolution of the 1920s and 1930s and the quest for improved airfoils. Aerodynamics has been the defining element of the airplane. 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 A major repository of primary source materials relative to the history of the civil space program is the NASA Historical Reference Collection in the NASA Headquarters History Office.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.