David E. Fisher

Lord Hugh Dowding, who provided the organization and training that led to victory, has been all but ignored by U. S. biographers of Churchill and historians of the Battle of Britain. Yet his story is vital, both for its importance to the defense of Britain-indeed the entire free worldand for the intriguing character study that emerges from his ongoing conflict with Churchill and the British government during the crisis years of the empire.
Lord Hugh Dowding, Air Chief Marshall of the Royal Air Force, Head of Fighter Command, First Baron of Bentley Priory, lived in the grip of unseen spirits. In thrall of the supernatural world, he talked to the ghosts of his dead pilots, proclaimed that Hitler was defeated only by the personal intervention of God, and believed in the existence of fairies. How could it be that such a man should be put in charge of evaluating technical developments for the British air ministry? Yet it was he, fighting the inertia of the bureaucrats who ruled the Air Force, who brought the modern multi-gunned fighter into existence. And he insisted that his scientists investigate the mysterious invisible rays that would prove to be the salvation of Britain: radar.… (plus d'informations)

It must be über cool to be an inventor—the work taps what a person can give in ingenuity, creativity, a vision for the future, discovery, and potential for fortunes. On the other hand, invention is accomplished under competitive conditions in which financial stakes are tremendous and pressures severe. Patent battles can go on for years and years. An insecure way of life with sometimes debilitating consequences, as we learn in Tube: The Invention of Television.

Authors David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher relate the story of how TV sets (not programs) came to be. They take care to explain the technical aspects of how TVs were developed and make it interesting at the same time. I’m not a technical guy but I enjoyed and felt enlightened by their explanations.

The book also reminds us that significant inventions impact the language of the times. With TV there was considerable talk about what to call the people who would stare at the TV screen. Candidates included looker, looker-in, perceptor, audiobserver, lookener, audoseer, invider, telegazer, teleseer, televist, telspector, opticauris, visual, and adivist. The Times use of “viewer” was what caught on, and thankfully so. Who wants to be an opticauris? And imagine if “couch potato” had been the term of choice from the outset. Would TV have become so popular?

Appropriately for a medium bringing the adventures of heroes and villains into our living rooms, at one time or another most every actor in the drama of inventing TV seemed a protagonist or antagonist. The most notable in America were the inventor Philo Farnsworth, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) boss David Sarnoff, and Vladimir Cosmo Zworykin, a physicist from Russia who came to America and ended up heading the RCA lab. Farnsworth was so precocious that after convincing a bank to give him financial backing he had to have one of his associates act as his legal guardian in order to execute the paperwork. More than anyone, it seems, the actions of these men proved decisive to television’s development and commercial potential.

Tube also is a tale of instances of corporate skullduggery beyond legitimate competitive striving as well as occasional indifference to human suffering. The ungovernable caprices of governments played an important role too.

In the end, it changed the world, though not necessarily as TV’s inventors envisioned. RCA’s Zworykin observed, late in life: “I hate what they’ve done to my child [i.e. TV]. I would never let my own children watch it.” It doesn’t take much ingenuity to guess why.… (plus d'informations)

Wild Blue collects the most gripping accounts of what some would call the greatest achievement of the century: controlled flight. Charles Lindbergh takes readers wing-walking in a barnstorming biplane; Ernest K. Gann describes how the nocturnal spell of copiloting a DC-2 at night is broken by the unexpected terror of ice on its wings; a young ace named Chuck Yeager shatters the sound barrier and then loses consciousness in a violently tumbling rocket-plane. From the soaring to the harrowing, from flying a Piper Cub over the Rockies at the age of 14 to a nighttime carrier approach with an anxious, rusty lieutenant, Wild Blue puts readers right in the cockpit.… (plus d'informations)