From Our Authors

THE LEVELS OF EXPERTISE THAT our Invention & Technology authors achieve within the confines of a few thousand words often make us wonder what they could do on a larger canvas. As the works listed below prove, good magazine writers lose none of their effectiveness in the transition to book form.

the author of many space-related Invention & Technology articles through the years, has written Leaving Earth , a history of American and Soviet/ Russian space stations, just published by Joseph Henry Press (560 pages, $27.95). Zimmerman makes weighty claims for his subject, seeing space stations as not just a metaphor or reflection, but an actual cause, of what he believes is America’s decline since the early 1970s, as well as of Russia’s overthrow of Soviet rule and subsequent revitalization. “Just as the bold Soviet space program helped teach the Russians to live openly and free,” he writes, “the top-heavy and timid American space program of the late twentieth century helped teach Americans to depend, not on freedom and decentralization, but on a centralized Soviet-style bureaucracy—to the detriment of American culture and its desire to conquer the stars.”

This theme is taken up repeatedly, but not all the book is devoted to ideology. Zimmerman presents a profusion of striking vignettes, including a Skylab crew cobbling together a 25-foot-long tool with a wire cutter at the end to free a stuck solar panel and a desperate Soviet cosmonaut dashing blindly through a smoke-filled cabin to find the source of a sudden fire. He also explains how long-term spacestation occupants, on returning to Earth, “had to break the habit of simply letting go of objects when they were done with them” and of trying to float off their beds when they woke up.

by far the most prolific author in the history of Invention & Technology , marks this year’s aviation centennial with First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane (Wiley, 394 pages, $30,00). With his training as an aerospace engineer, Heppenheimer is well qualified to explain the state of aviation knowledge at the time the brothers began their quest and the obstacles they had to overcome to get into the air.

He also displays the obsession with detail that can be found in any good biography, as when he reports that the Wrights’ pantry in their camp at Kitty Hawk contained “cling peaches, pineapple, plums, coffee, sugar, cornstarch, salt, pepper, spices, flour, cornmeal, tea, cooking oil, as well as the Royal Baking Powder that Orville had picked up on arriving in Elizabeth City.”

Heppenheimer shows how Orville and Wilbur’s experience as bicycle mechanics led them to pursue solutions that other experimenters with far more extensive academic credentials, such as Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley, had neglected. First Flight is a fine account for general audiences of who the brothers were and how they learned to fly, as well as an explanation of their later struggles, much less expertly managed, to improve, protect, and profit from their invention.

a distinguished economist and historian who has written for Invention & Technology about cable cars and interurban railways, tackles another form of transportation with Lake Michigan Passenger Steamers (Stanford University Press, 364 pages, $75.00). Milton’s narrative begins with the founding of Chicago in the 1830s and ends with the collapse of the industry a century later (though the last passenger steamer from the dassic era, the Milwaukee Clipper , was not retired until 1970). The book also contains histories of the major steamship lines and a list of each firm’s most important ships. Along the way we learn that the counterclockwise circulation of water in northern Lake Michigan was discovered in 1869, when “Herbert Field was murdered in Manistee [in Michigan], but his body was found 30 miles to the north,” and that Chicago steamship lines did a regular business carrying couples to St. Joseph, Michigan, where they could take advantage of that state’s less stringent marriage laws and then return to Chicago in a bridal chamber.