DREAM MACHINES

A Pictorial History of the Spaceship in Art, Science and Literature, a 1993 rare imported edition with a foreword by Arthur C Clarke. This solid, encyclopaedic chronological volume on spaceship design will be a sheer delight to anyone whose pulse quickens at the latest news from NASA. Covering space travel concepts from 360 BC to 1994 AD, the author provides diagrams, specifications and background to history's major schemes for conquering space. Airborne adventure began in 360 BC when Archytas of Tarentum constructed a model pigeon which was made to fly by the reaction of steam or compressed air escaping from holes in its tail. In 150 AD Ptolemy described the sun and planets as orbiting round the earth, and ten years later the first novel of inter-planetary travel appeared. The middle ages saw the creation of steam- or dynamite-powered rockets, and in 1623 a probably apocryphal story describes a manned rocket flight over the Bosporus. Cyrano be Bergerac's fictional journey to the moon followed a few years later. In 1828 a famous cartoon depicted a man on a rocket-propelled flight with Heath-Robinson-style accompaniments and in 1865 Jules Verne published the space travel classic novel From the Earth to the Moon, with mathematical calculations and convincing diagrams. With the 20th century hundreds of space ships were first imagined and then made a reality. Hermann Oberth's Model E formed the basis for the spaceship Friede in Fritz Lang's 1929 motion picture Frau im Mond. In 1939 the British Interplanetary Society concluded a 2-year engineering study of a manned moon landing, based on hexagonal honeycomb clusters of individual rockets, and in 1949 the Canadian Rocket society planned a moon landing by 1960. The first manned space flight in 1961 ushered in the era of the Apollos, the Space Shuttle and finally the Mars-Mission proposals. 714pp, very well illustrated with dreamy line art and etchings, cutaways, magazine articles reproduced from 30s to the 90s, diagrams and black and white photos and interesting appendices on US and Soviet launch vehicles by size, Energia and Buran. Index, 22 x 28.5 cm.