Customer Reviews

Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity through the First World War

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This work offers an encyclopedic overview of the history of flight from the earliest legends through the First World War. Though his focus is on heavier-than-air flight, he also includes extensive coverage of the development of lighter-than-air craft and how it influenced aeronautical development. Throughout this book, Hallion demonstrates both an impressive range of knowledge and a welcome capacity for explaining some of the more technical details of aerodynamics - one that is especially welcome when it comes to explaining why so many of the Wrights' predecessors failed in their attempts to master flight.

The portrait Hallion paints is a fascinating one. He conveys the extent to which the Wright brothers built upon the achievements of both their predecessors and their contemporaries. Developments were reaching a critical mass, which - as Hallion repeatedly asserts - would almost certainly have led to heavier-than-air flight by 1910 (with the first flight most likely taking place in France). Nevertheless, the author does not underrate the Wrights' considerable accomplishment and its contribution to our history. Even after Europeans were first taking to the air in heavier-than-air craft, the Wrights' Flyer was still considerably superior to its counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic - as Wilbur Wright himself demonstrated in his 1908 tour of Europe.

As Hallion shows, however, Wilbur's tour represented the pinnacle of the Wrights' achievement. He describes the year 1909 as the year when the invention of flight ended and its refinement begins. In this phase the Europeans had a considerable advantage, for as the Wrights were pioneering flight the Europeans were focusing more on the scientific study of aerodynamics, something which Hallion sees as integral to the shift in aeronautical advancement from the New World back to the Old. Wedded to an increasingly obsolescent (and inherently dangerous) design, the Wrights no longer represented the leading edge of airplane development, one that was moving forward at a dramatic rate. Before the First World War ended, airplanes were already demonstrating speed, endurance, and applications that most people take for granted today but which almost none of the early pioneers had imagined were possible.

Yet while Hallion's book is one of the best histories of its subject, it has a number of annoying flaws. Foremost is the fact that this is very much a book of its time. The author constantly endeavors to make connections to modern concepts, with these portions - such as the conversion of currency amounts to their 2001 equivalents, or his repeated references to the events of September 11 - are likely to diminish the book's usefulness in the years to come. At times the encyclopedic nature of his account is almost annoyingly so (I have yet to find the trivia contest that required knowing that the commander of Germany's Zeppelin division was shot down by a plane which had taken off from the same city that had been a target of the first Zeppelin raid over England). Finally, he overemphasizes the historical impact of the airplane, especially in the First World War. He implies, for example, that the course of events at the battles of Tannenberg and the Marne was altered because of the use of airplanes, yet he offers no evidence to substantiate this claim beyond stressing the role the planes played as scouts while understating the other sources of information available to the commanders. Such claims are impossible to prove, of course, and only undermine the veracity of the author's historical judgment. Nevertheless, these problems should not detract from the overall value of this book in understanding both the long journey to flight and how it impacts us today.

The reason I give "Taking Flight" 5 stars is because there's no rating for 10. This is a masterful treatment of an extremely complex subject, and while the entire history of human flight is probably beyond any single volume, Hallion's tome approaches the definitive.
Apart from a thorough assessment of flight in myth, legend, and actuality, "Taking Flight" also assesses the cultral influences leading to Kitty Hawk and beyond. In these PC days it's refreshing to see an iron-clad argument as to why only western civilization could have produced powered flight. The progression from kites to balloons, dirigibles, and airplanes is rendered with authority and style.
In another 100 years, Dick Hallion's book will still be cited.

Composed by NASA historian and international authority on aviation Richard P. Hallion, Taking Flight: Inventing The Aerial Age From Antiquity Through The First World War combines primary sources such as journals, diaries, and memoirs of aviation pioneers, with a scholarly and meticulous recounting of the evolution of aviation technology. Black-and-white photographs and keen attention to detail distinguish this recommended trove of an informed and informative history which is especially recommended for aviation buffs and an invaluable addition to academic and community library Aviation History reference collections.

Richard Hallion's Taking Flight is wonderful. It's clearly written and extremely engaging. I didn't know much about flight pre-Wright brothers, and this book weaves the story of man's obsession with the skies from ancient times to the Wrights. It contains much more social and political history than I thought it would--making it the story of man and technology through the lens of flight. I think it's a great complement to all the Wright brothers books out in this anniversary year. I didn't read the notes in the back (there were simply too many) but you needn't read them. A great summer reading.

Richard Hallion's TAKING FLIGHT is a literary and historical tour-de-force. Hallion writes with grace, style, and consumate skill. He weaves an incredibly rich tale of remarkable individuals who, over the centuries, brought the gift of flight to the world. With a thoroughness and solid grounding that is evident in the rich range of sources he has examined, Hallion shatters myths and reexamines the invention of flight. This places the work of the Wrights and other pioneers in a historical context sadly lacking in most other books on the subject. Not content--wisely so--to limit his text just to the events surrounding the Wrights, Hallion transports the reader from the early kite and rocket-firing pioneers of China, to the churches of medieval Europe, and on to the Renaissance and Baroque eras when technologists first conceived balloons and studied winged flight. He details the early flights of balloonists and airship enthusiasts, and the slow, painful progress towards inventing the airplane. Intriguingly, he explores why America succeeded in this race--but then let Europe speed rapidly past it. Perhaps most remarkably, Hallion succeeds in presenting this detailed story without either drowning the general reader with jargon-laden prose, or boring the technical specialist with a "dumbed-down" text. TAKING FLIGHT has received plaudits from many reviewers, and it left this reader eager to read any successor volume that Hallion might write taking the story to the present. If you buy just one book on the invention of flight during this 100th anniversary year, this is the one!

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