Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity through the First World War (review)

Every few millennia there is a convergence of the planets that makes possible such missions as those of the two Voyager spacecraft, which in the 1980s teamed up for a grand tour of the solar system. Though not on such a cosmic scale, there has been a fortuitous convergence in the field of aerospace history as well. Just in time for the centennial of the Wright brothers' first flight in December 1903, historians—among them such luminaries as Tom Crouch and Roger Bilstein, who began in the 1970s to produce a body of superb specialized studies and monographs—are now able to mine their personal bibliographies for synthetic overviews of the subject. Add Richard Hallion to that list. Hallion was among the first to do serious work in aerospace history, and, like Crouch and Bilstein, he is at a stage where he can consolidate his research into a survey.

Hallion has brought both depth and scope to the topic, beginning with prehistoric dreams of flight and tracing the course of aviation through World War I. Along the way, we learn that the Chinese deserve credit for being the first to fly (in kites), that their rockets and string-pulled toy helicopters were the first powered flying machines, that Sir George Cayley "almost single-handedly" created aeronautics (p. 105) by linking theories of flight with practice, that Alphonse Pénaud accomplished the first successful airplane flights with his rubber-band-powered models, and that despite his failures the much maligned Hiram Maxim brought respectability to the study of aviation. Above all, Hallion is unequivocal that the Wright brothers made the essential conceptual breakthrough in their understanding of three-dimensional control, and that they "and no one else, invented the airplane" (p. xvii). Even so, Hallion stresses that their design had removed them from the mainstream of aeronautical developments by the time they publicly demonstrated their invention at Fort Myer and Le Mans in 1908.

Equally significant, and here Hallion runs contrary to most previous interpretations, the Wright brothers did little to stimulate the transfer of the technology to Europe; Wilbur did not teach the French to fly, despite the famous statement by Léon Delagrange that "we are beaten. We just don't exist" (p. 233). Rather, by 1908 the French had already made great strides in the air and were poised to take the lead with all the advantages of the "fast second."

Hallion places aeronautics squarely within the context of questions familiar to historians of technology. The Renaissance emphasis on things that moved and the rise of science and technology in the West (even as they declined in Islamic and Chinese societies) were conducive to experimentation with flying machines. Hallion's generalization about the balloon as scientific and the airplane as technological nicely fits the complex dynamic between Edwin Layton's "mirror-image twins" of science and technology. Throughout the book Hallion treats aeronautics in a truly international context and displays a thorough understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of the technology.

Books of such wide scope inevitably have shortcomings that invite defeat in detail, to use a military term. Hallion's failings are also his strengths. He brings an infectious enthusiasm to the subject that sometimes obscures his objectivity. It is far from obvious that aviation has been the transformational technology that he would have us believe. From the military perspective, it is not clear that in its reconnaissance role the airplane profoundly changed the early course of World War I, nor can we say with certainty that joint air and space forces will always bring "shock and awe" to the battlefield and win present and future wars without having "boots on the ground." More specifically, we know from Mark Peattie's excellent recent study of Japanese naval aviation that we can no longer think of Midway as the "battle that doomed Japan" (p. 411). Sometimes, Hallion's...