Jay Spenser

The Airplane by aerospace industry writer Jay Spencer, former assistant curator of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum and the Museum of Flight in Seattle, is the definitive history of how we invented and refined the amazing flying machines that enabled humankind to defy gravity. A fascinating true account certain to enthrall and delight aviation and technology buffs, The Airplane is lavishly illustrated with more than 100 photographs and is the first book ever to explore the development of the jetliner through a fascinating piece-by-piece analysis of the machinery of flight.… (plus d'informations)

This huge tome took me eight years to write, but I knew that if I didn’t record the history of the helicopter, nobody ever would because that industry’s pioneers were getting well along in years. It is the definitive work in its field and I’m proud of it. - Jay Spenser Igor Sikorsky, Frank Piasecki, Arthur Young, Stanley Hiller, Jr.
Spenser offers not only the personal aspects of the innovators but he puts their inventions in perspective in the civil and military growth appendices. The research is very in depth as would be expected from an author who works in close proximity to the result of the entrepreneurs' work. Spenser includes the Dorsey Bill of 1938 as the progenitor of the military helicopter industry, a point missed by most works who skip straight from the abandonment of the autogiro to the marginal employment of helicopters in WWII when addressing the helicopter's timeline. I would recommend this book for historians and enthusiasts as the writing is well-substantiated while at the same time written in a compelling manner.
No one person or group invented the helicopter. Basically unstable, filled with unreliable parts, and assailed by countless forces and vibrations, the helicopter presented its inventors with problems that were more complex than those faced by the Wright brothers four decades earlier. In the United States, four men became the pioneers who, working independently along parallel lines during the 1940s, solved the problems of technology and created the conditions for America to succeed in bringing this new machine to volume production.
Russian-born Igor Sikorsky was a visionary whose pathbreaking experience spanned fixed-wing and rotary-wing aviation, thus linking the "earlybirds" to the "whirlybirds."'s ideas and showmanship propelled his company (later to become Vertol and today Boeing Helicopter) to the forefront as the world's supplier of big helicopters. Arthur Young's invention of the Bell helicopter was part of his lifelong quest to reconcile mathematics, science, and fundamental philosophy in an integrated theory of how the universe operates. Stanley Hiller, Jr.'s company was the first to define and manufacture a civil helicopter to truly meet the needs of the marketplace, and he was the only pioneer to succeed in the absence of either military or corporate support.
American inventiveness, entrepreneurship, corporate practices, government influence and financing, and efforts to solve human problems of rescue and transportation through improved technology come together revealingly in Jay Spenser's fascinating contribution to transportation history.… (plus d'informations)