Customer Reviews

Speedboat

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Published in 1988 jointly by United States Historical Society and Mystic Seaport Museum Stores, this gorgeous and entertaining book is profusely illustrated throughout with B&W photos, drawings, and sketches. It includes an index, bibliography, and list of illustration sources. Physical dimensions of the book: 9-1/2 in. x 12-1/4 in. x 1 in. The dust jacket photo is of Miss Minneapolis, the first mile-a-minute boat, at speed during the Gold Cup races of 1917. The text on the dust jacket makes a better review than I could write myself, so here is it what it says in a largely accurate but rather breathless fashion:

Exhausts rumble in the distance. Varnished mahogany glistens in the light. Newsreel cameras whirr. A rain-soaked crowd of a half-million watches in hypnotic silence as two nations battle for supreme speed on water. This is a part, a small part, of a story that spans two centuries. It is a tale of millionaires and mechanics, the famous and the forgotten, of robber barons and backwoods geniuses, of engineers and smugglers, of men who saw time and distance as adversaries.

Ben Franklin's design for a jet-propelled boat, the fastest steam yacht in the world, pioneer autoboats, runabouts, rumrunners, hydroplanes, Gold Cup winners, torpedo boats, ocean racers: they are all here. This is the story of speed on water. Some who shaped it had famous names: Roosevelt, Ford, Olds, Packard, and Steinway were among them. Others were silent pioneers, obscure but vital, whose names were lost to those who followed.

The men, the machines, the victories amid the failures are presented here, not only in words, but with more than 200 photographs and drawings. Climb aboard C.R. Flint's 10,000 horsepower Arrow for a record run, stand off the 12-mile limit with bootlegger Bill McCoy; blast under a bridge at 120 miles per hour alongside Gar Wood in Miss America X, watch the moon rise over the trees from the cockpit of a Hacker runabout, smell the cordite and the jungle from the deck of a PT in the South Pacific. SPEEDBOAT takes you there.

The only history of American performance boats, SPEEDBOAT traces their development and the exploits of the men who built them from the Revolutionary War through the Twentieth Century. Fast boats have always had a role on the nation's waters: for racing, recreation, smuggling and war. Sometimes the roles have been difficult to distinguish.

The first American powerboat, the rapid and sometimes deadly sport of steam racing, the early sputterings of the gas engine, the critical role of automotive and aviation pioneers, a minister who designed rocket­boats, a gambler who made a boatbuilding postmaster famous, a wiry, determined man who built dump trucks for a living and demolished speed records as a hobby... they are all here.

Stunning images of fast boats, some­times beautiful, sometimes bizarre, fill the pages of SPEEDBOAT. Take a time journey into the minds of great designers, look over their shoulders as they draw their next record­breaker, visit musty boatworks and machine shops where the history of speed on water was made with wood and steel.

Based on thousands of hours of research and hundreds of interviews, author D.W. Fostle places the machines and the men who built them in the context of their times. A revolution in Brazil, financial panics, the advent of mass production, engineering ad­vances on land and in the air -these events and many more shaped the search for speed on water. The richly detailed story is told here for the first time.

Fascinated by the history of American technology, D.W. Fostle has written about fast boats for Nautical Quarterly and Wooden Boat and on classic cars for Road & Track. He has also written on the history of the computer. A graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in communications, and with graduate studies at Michigan State University, he is a consultant to the computer industry.