More with less : Paul MacCready and the dream of efficient flight / Paul Ciotti.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ciotti, Paul.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

MacCready, Paul B.

Aeronautical engineers--United States--Biography.

Aeronautical engineers.

United States.

Human powered aircraft.

Mechanical efficiency.

MacCready, Paul--Contributions in aeronautics.

Local Subjects:

MacCready, Paul--Contributions in aeronautics.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

259 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

San Francisco : Encounter Books, 2002.

Summary:

More with Less tells the story of Paul MacCready and his dream of low-powered, efficient flight. This mild-mannered but inspired tinkerer, visionary and engineer has had his gaze trained on the heavens since he was a boy making elaborate model planes. As a young man, he won the world championship in soaring and flew through powerful thunderstorms in fragile planes to study the physics of clouds. His life suddenly changed in 1976 when, as he drove cross-country with his family, idly watching circling hawks and vultures, he became fascinated with man-powered flight. At a time when most Americans were interested in bigger, faster, more sophisticated airplanes, MacCready wondered why people couldn't fly with the same effortless efficiency as these giant birds.

Author Paul Ciotti follows MacCready to southern California, where he entered a 1970s subculture that included hang-gliding daredevils, eccentric designers and renegade aerospace executives. Ciotti tells the story of these individuals, their passionate interactions, inspirations and failures and, perhaps most important, the love of efficiency that impelled them, under MacCready's quirky leadership, to build lightweight, low-powered machines.

Working out of an abandoned hangar at an old World War II Army base near Bakersfield, the group built Gossamer Condor, a huge, fragile plane that won a prize for man-powered flight that had eluded aeronautical engineers worldwide for the previous eighteen years -- and achieved a dream that had fired imaginations for thousands of years before that. The success of the Condor led to a series of even more efficient vehicles that put MacCready's stamp on the modern world: a man-powered plane that flew across the English Channel; a solar plane that flew from Paris to London; a solar-powered car that won a race across the Australian outback; an eighteen-foot flapping-wing model of a pterodactyl that starred in a Smithsonian-sponsored IMAX film; and more recently, an enormous, unmanned solar airplane for NASA that will be able to stay up for six months at a time, performing the same functions as orbiting satellites.

More with Less is about an American original whose tough-minded inventiveness has altered our scientific skyline. Writing with a shrewd eye for the human drama that always stands behind rapid technological advance, Paul Ciotti takes us directly to that intersection where biography and intellectual discovery meet and collaborate in creating a compelling story.

Contents:

1 From Rodent-Powered Aircraft to Stratospheric Satellites 1

2 The Moral Case for Efficiency 5

3 Alpha Males and the Twilight Club 10

4 The Case against Elegant Engineering 15

5 From King Bladud to the Wright Bothers 17

6 Building Self-Confidence 25

7 The Contest at St. Yan 33

8 Midlife Crisis 38

9 Man's Innate Desire to Fly 44

10 Hang-Gliding in Southern California 47

11 The Earth-Flip Hypothesis 53

12 The Otto Lilienthal Meet 61

13 Taras Kiceniuk and Icarus Ground Effect I 67

14 How Henry Kremer Changed Paul MacCready's Life 70

15 Lambie Luck 73

16 A Human Test Stand 82

17 Tales of the Mojave 86

18 The Shafter Connection 89

19 Reinventing the Wright Brothers 92

20 A Turn for the Better 95

21 The Case for Apparent Altruism 102

22 The Channel Crossing 106

23 Vikings versus the Emerald Isle 109

24 Why the British Didn't Win 118

25 Soft Energy and Lissaman's Broken Heart 120

26 How the Oil Crisis Changed the Country 122

27 Bob Boucher and the Eternal Plane 126

28 From Pointoise to "a Right Proper Piss-up" 135

29 "A Big Damn Bird Came Out of the Sky" 148

30 Biking Through the Gene Pool 160

31 Solar Deluge on the Bitumen 171

32 Electric Cars and Mental Blocks 179

33 Day of the Stratospheric Satellite 184

34 The Engineer, the Hunter and the Bear 190

35 Tao of the Carbon Dragon 195

36 Saving the World 10 Percent at a Time 202

37 Doctoral Thesis Immortality 210

38 Exploding Biomimicry 214

39 Why Blind People Don't Sky Dive 216

40 The Johnny Appleseed of Ornithopters 225.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-251) and index.

ISBN:

1893554503

OCLC:

49205136