Old Bird

Old Bird PDF Author: Gail Hewlett
Publisher: Troubador Publishing
ISBN: 9781848763371
Category : Air pilots
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
For a mother to teach her son to drive is perhaps not so unusual, but for her to teach him to fly? Given that the year was 1911, that was most likely a first. But Hilda B. Hewlett had already achieved a first in the world of aviation. Three months earlier she had become the first English woman to gain a pilot's licence. How was it that the middle-aged wife of a well-known author came to be counted among the early aviation pioneers? A daughter of the vicar of an impoverished parish in South London, Hilda Beatrice Herbert was born in 1864 and married Maurice Hewlett, a barrister in Antiquarian Law, in 1888. He aspired to be a writer and Billy, as Hilda was affectionately known, encouraged him. When, ten years later, he published his best seller, a romantic historical novel, The Forest Lovers, the Hewletts began to enjoy unimaginable prosperity and Maurice was on his way to becoming a full-time writer and a member of the literary London scene. Billy, meanwhile, was acquiring a reputation for unconventionality. She already drove and maintained her own car, but it was whilst watching a new-fangled contraption of an aircraft rise and fly above a muddy field that Billy was fired with an all-consuming desire. To own and fly just such a machine she was prepared to endure cold and hunger, boredom and poverty. It was a venture that was to take her into aircraft manufacture throughout WWI and to settle her, eventually, as Old Bird - her grandchildren only ever knew her as Old Bird - in New Zealand.

The Dawn of the Drone

The Dawn of the Drone PDF Author: Steve Mills
Publisher: Casemate
ISBN: 1612007902
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
“[A] slice of largely-forgotten military history . . . a fascinating exploration of some magnificent men and their flying machines.” —The Sunday Post In the dark days of World War I, when flying machines, radio, and electronics were infant technologies, the first remotely controlled experimental aircraft took to the skies and unmanned radio controlled 40-foot high-speed Motor Torpedo Boats ploughed the seas in Britain. Developed by the British Army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy these prototype weapons stemmed from an early form of television demonstrated before the war by Prof. A. M. Low. The remotecontrol systems for these aircraft and boats were invented at RFC Secret Experimental Works commanded by Prof. Low, which was part of the organization of “back-room boys” in the Munitions Inventions Department. These audacious projects led to the hundreds of remotely controlled Queen Bee aerial targets in the 1930s and hence to all the machines that we now call “drones.” Starting well before WWI and, for the lucky ones, extending well beyond it, the lives of Archibald Low and many of his contemporaries were extraordinary as were the times they lived through. They were around for the first epic aircraft flights and with the aid of the very technologies that had enabled the development of drones, they saw air travel transformed from the precarious to the routine. It is astonishing that the origins of the first drones are not common knowledge in Britain and that the achievement of these maverick inventors is not commemorated. “A focused and engaging look at one arena of behind-the-scenes scientific research and the larger-than-life personalities who populated it.” —Booklist

A History of Aviation at Brooklands in 100 Objects

A History of Aviation at Brooklands in 100 Objects PDF Author: Nigel Spooner
Publisher: Air World
ISBN: 1526790947
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
At the dawn of the twentieth century mankind had not yet achieved powered flight. The main motive power then was provided by steam engines – heavy, dirty and inefficient. If one wanted to travel ‘over seas’ one had to travel on them. A journey from London to New York, by steam-driven train and ship, took more than 6 days. By the time the same century drew to a close in December 1999, air travel was the normal choice for long journeys. Millions of people every day flew comfortably and safely in pressurised aluminium airliners propelled by simple, clean and efficient gas turbine engines. The same journey from London to New York could be achieved at supersonic speed in less than 6 hours. For much of that century, many of the extraordinary developments that moved aviation from fragile wood and fabric biplanes to supersonic transports were achieved on 330 acres of low-lying former estate farmland in Surrey, England. The estate was called Brooklands. Those marshy acres were transformed from 1907 into the world’s first custom-built motor-racing circuit, then a rapidly developing aerodrome, and finally one of the country’s largest aircraft factories, employing tens of thousands of people. Nearly 19,000 aircraft of many different types were built at Brooklands during nine decades of peace and war. By the 1980s however it was being eclipsed by larger manufacturing sites elsewhere, with longer runways and better communications links; its owner, by then called British Aerospace, finally closed the factory in 1989. This book tells the history of those amazing developments through 100 of the key aircraft, engines, places and other objects that can still be seen, either in or near Brooklands Museum or in other locations around the country. It also highlights the stories of six designers whose inspiring creativity produced aircraft, engines and weapons ranging from Camel to Concorde, Fury to Harrier, Wellington to Viscount, Merlin to Olympus. Between them, Thomas Sopwith, Barnes Wallis, Rex Pierson, Sydney Camm, Stanley Hooker and George Edwards were responsible for much of what was designed, built and flown, not only at Brooklands but elsewhere too. The book is arranged in successive historical episodes but the many links between the objects and the designers should allow readers to follow different paths if they so wish. It is not intended as a technical reference but rather to inspire the reader to seek out the objects and discover more about them.

Magnificent Women and Flying Machines

Magnificent Women and Flying Machines PDF Author: Sally Smith
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750999195
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
'Lively history of British women aviators.' Daily Mail 'Compelling stories of female pioneers whose soaring ambition achieved firsts in the field of aviation.' Britain Magazine 'This lovely book offers a welcome and enjoyable read and provides a timely testament for these unsung pioneers of aviation.' Maggie Appleton MBE, Chief Executive Officer, RAF Museum 'A real celebration of the women who defied tradition and followed their dreams into the sky. Readable and entertaining, this book is a worthy tribute to Britain's woman aviation pioneers.' Sharon Nicholson FRAeS, Chairwoman of the British Women Pilots' Association Just eighteen months after two Frenchmen made the world's first ever flight, a fearless British woman hopped into a flimsy balloon and flew across the London sky for nearly an hour. Since then, many other remarkable British women have decided to defy traditional society and follow their dreams to get into the sky. For the first time, Magnificent Women and Flying Machines tells the stories of the pioneers who achieved real firsts in various forms of aviation: in ballooning, parachuting, gliding, airships and fixed-wing flight – right up to a trip to the International Space Station! Full of entertaining adventure, here at last is a proper record of Britain's wonderful women of the air.

Out Of Control

Out Of Control PDF Author: Kevin Kelly
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 078674703X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 666

Book Description
Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

A Night to Remember

A Night to Remember PDF Author: Walter Lord
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805077643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
A cloth bag containing eight copies of the title.

Complexity

Complexity PDF Author: M. Mitchell Waldrop
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 150405914X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Book Description
“If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly

No Future

No Future PDF Author: Lee Edelman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385988
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself. Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.
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