The Wind and Beyond : A Documentary Journey into the History of Aerodynamics in America

The airplane ranks as one of history’s most ingenious and phenomenal inventions. It has surely been one of the most world changing. How ideas about aerodynamics first came together and how the science and technology evolved to forge the airplane into the revolutionary machine that it became is the epic story told in this six-volume series, The Wind and Beyond: A Documentary Journey through the History of Aerodynamics in America.

Following up on Volume I’s account of the invention of the airplane and the creation of the original aeronautical research establishment in the United States, Volume II explores the airplane design revolution of the 1920s and 1930s and the quest for improved airfoils.

Subsequent volumes cover the aerodynamics of airships, flying boats, rotary-wing aircraft, breaking the sound barrier, and more.

In 2005, the Society for the History of Technology awarded its first annual Eugene S. Ferguson Prize for outstanding and original reference works to The Wind and Beyond. The citation read in part:

“The Wind and Beyond is remarkable in its breadth of vision. Its purview includes not just aerodynamical theories and research results, but also innovative airships and airship components as well as the institutions in which and through which aerodynamics developed…Each [chapter] essay is original in two ways. First, each is a first-rate piece of scholarship in its own right. Second, the very decision to include these narratives is significant: they comprise roughly 10 percent of the contents of the volume, but they make the other 90 percent both accessible and meaningful to the nonspecialist reader, simultaneously enhancing the value of and enlarging the potential audience for the whole volume….The Wind and Beyond will be a boon both to students and to established scholars in several ways. Like many similar collections, it provides one-stop access to documents that were previously scattered in many different places.

Going beyond other similar collections, however, The Wind and Beyond makes the documents intellectually as well as physically accessible…The end result is an eminently readable reference work, one that is truly, as its title suggests, the beginning of a journey rather than the end.”