The Wind and Beyond
A Documentary Journey into the History of Aerodynamics in America
Volume II: Reinventing the Airplane

James R. Hansen, Editor
with Jeremy Kinney, D. Bryan Taylor, Molly Prickett, and J. Lawrence Lee
The NASA History Series. NASA SP-2007-4409.

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.

Subsequent volumes cover the aerodynamics of airships, flying boats, rotary-wing aircraft, breaking the sound barrier, and more.

In 2005, the Society for the History of Technology awarded its first annual Eugene S. Ferguson Prize for outstanding and original reference works to The Wind and Beyond. The citation read in part:

“The Wind and Beyond is remarkable in its breadth of vision. Its purview includes not just aerodynamical theories and research results, but also innovative airships and airship components as well as the institutions in which and through which aerodynamics developed…Each [chapter] essay is original in two ways. First, each is a first-rate piece of scholarship in its own right. Second, the very decision to include these narratives is significant: they comprise roughly 10 percent of the contents of the volume, but they make the other 90 percent both accessible and meaningful to the nonspecialist reader, simultaneously enhancing the value of and enlarging the potential audience for the whole volume….The Wind and Beyond will be a boon both to students and to established scholars in several ways. Like many similar collections, it provides one-stop access to documents that were previously scattered in many different places.

Going beyond other similar collections, however, The Wind and Beyond makes the documents intellectually as well as physically accessible…The end result is an eminently readable reference work, one that is truly, as its title suggests, the beginning of a journey rather than the end.”

Download The Wind and Beyond, Volume II: Reinventing the Airplane, Part 1

PDF format, 5.6MB, 188 Pages.

Download The Wind and Beyond, Volume II: Reinventing the Airplane, Part 2

PDF format, 4.0MB, 189 Pages.

Download The Wind and Beyond, Volume II: Reinventing the Airplane, Part 3

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Foreword

Airplane travel is surely one of the most significant technological achievements of the last century. The impact of the airplane goes far beyond the realm of the history of technology and touches upon virtually every aspect of society from economics to politics to engineering and science. While space exploration often claims more public glory than aeronautics research, many more individuals have been able to fly within the Earth’s atmosphere than above it. Thus aeronautics and air travel have had an enormous practical impact on many more individuals.

The first two volumes in the Wind and Beyond series and the succeeding four now in preparation all cover the impact of aerodynamic development on the evolution of the airplane in America. As the six-volume series will ultimately demonstrate, just as the airplane is a defining technology of the twentieth century, aerodynamics has been the defining element of the airplane. The forthcoming volumes will proceed roughly in chronological order, covering such developments as 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. As with Exploring the Unknown, the documents collected during this research project were assembled from diverse 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 History Division. 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.

The format of this volume also is very similar to that of the Exploring the Unknown volumes. Each section in the present volume is introduced by an overview essay that is intended to introduce and complement the documents in the section and to place them in a chronological and substantive context. Each essay contains references to the documents in the section it introduces, and many also contain references to documents in other sections of the collection. These introductoryessays are the responsibility of Dr. Hansen, the series author and chief editor, and the views and conclusions contained therein do not necessarily represent the opinions of either Auburn University or NASA.

The documents included in each section were chosen by Dr. Hansen’s project team from a much longer list initially assembled by the research staff. The contents of this volume emphasize primary documents, including long-out-of-print essays and articles as well as material from the private recollections of important actors in shaping aerodynamic thinking in the United States and abroad. Some key legislation and policy statements are also included. As much as possible, the contents of these volumes comprise an integrated historical narrative, though Dr. Hansen’s team encourages readers to supplement the account found herein with other sources that have already or will become available.

Please note that the chapters in this series are numbered sequentially. Thus the first chapter in this second volume is referred to as chapter three and so forth.

For the most part, the documents included in each section are arranged chronologically. Each document is assigned its own number in terms of the section in which it is placed. As a result, for example, the fifteenth document in the first chapter of this volume is designated “Document 3-15.” Each document is accompanied by a headnote setting out its context and providing a background narrative. These headnotes also provide specific information and explanatory notes about people and events discussed. Many of the documents, as is the case with Document 3-15, involve document “strings,” i.e., Document 3-15 (a-e). Such strings involve multiple documents—in this case, five of them (a through e) that have been grouped together because they relate to one another in a significant way. Together, they work to tell one documentary “story.”

The editorial method that has been adopted seeks to preserve, as much as possible, the spelling, grammar, and language usage as they appear in the original documents.

We have sometimes changed punctuation to enhance readability. We have used the designation [abridged] to note where sections of a document have not been included in this publication, and we have avoided including words and phrases that had been deleted in the original document unless they contribute to an understanding of what was going on in the mind of the writer in making the record. Marginal notations on the original documents are inserted into the text of the documents in brackets, each clearly marked as a marginal comment. Page numbers in the original document are noted in brackets internal to the document text. Copies of all documents in their original form are available for research by any interested person at the NASA History Division or Auburn University.

While the Exploring the Unknown series has been a good model in many ways, this volume indeed represents an expedition into uncharted waters. Dr. Hansen and his team have crafted a landmark work that will not only be an important reference work in the history of aeronautics, but interesting and informative reading as well. We hope you enjoy this useful book and the forthcoming volumes.

Dr. Steven J. Dick
NASA Chief Historian
Director, NASA History Division

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