Like Sex with Gods: An Unorthodox History of Flying (review)

A volume in the Centennial of Flight series from the Texas A&M University Press, Bayla Singer's book is a whimsical yet thoughtful look at "the various ingredients" that led to human flight and the "mutual relationship between flying and other human activities" (p. 6). From this simple starting point, Singer journeys through the history of the human passion for flight. The yearning to fly has a variety of undercurrents, notes Singer, including mythology, religion, sexuality, empowerment, and liberation. For instance, "deities fly, and deities create . . . if one imitates God one is godly" (pp. 13, 26). Flying, therefore, makes us minor deities, just as procreating makes us creators. One of Singer's initial observations is that our ability to fly is an invention of the imagination, not some larger necessity; this is a look at that imagination.

The book has two parts: the dreams and mythology of flight, and the theory and practice of flying. The former concerns the host of values with which humans have vested flight. It is Singer's most original portion, highlighting the cultural values attached to flying. The theory and practice of flight, the second part of the book, is unusual in its own right, if less original—and then only because others also have sought to explain how we got into the air. But previous efforts rarely go beyond a mix of the technical essentials and some biographical background, whereas Singer looks for new links and ideas, providing us a new perspective. Even on a familiar subject, Singer has a different take. Otto Lilenthal's work with gliders is well known, but who knew that he and his brother, Gustav, shared an "ethical" motivation for flying—to say nothing of the revelation that he had a brother?

As with all good social histories, language plays an important role because of what it reveals about ourselves. It is, nevertheless, difficult to accept the premise that today, when we speak of aviation in romantic terms, we are wittingly invoking the cultural implications of centuries past. Humans are, after all, confined by known language and familiar metaphors. Nor is aviation the only passionate undertaking that lures us into evocative sexual, religious, or mythical frames of mind, although that is Singer's implication. Sailors have waxed poetic about the sea from the beginning, and still do. Singer's crop-duster's rhapsodic description of flight (p. 178) could just as easily have come from a car buff describing a '65 Pontiac GTO. Scratch a railroad enthusiast, find a romantic.

This is a true social history of flight, in the tradition of Joseph Corn's Winged Gospel, really the only other book of this kind (Robert Wohl's Passion for Wings is too narrow to fall into this category). Yet Singer goes far beyond Corn; her scope is global rather than national, and she is more interested in the millennia before humans achieved any flight at all than she is in the years in which we did manage to cheat gravity. If you want to read about the first airplanes and aeronauts, you would be better off picking up almost any traditional book about flight. Efforts to broaden their appeal notwithstanding, previous studies remain consumed with nuts-and-bolts and hagiography. Singer will give you physics, but in an unusual fashion. The space she devotes to Otto von Guericke and the Magdeburg hemispheres, for example, is not what you'd expect in a history of flight, but it is relevant and space well spent.

The glossary is useful, the time line much more so, and the latter reveals a great deal about Singer's scope. Among those on the time line are the Roman poet Ovid, Sir Thomas More, Evangelista Torricelli, Emanuel Swedenborg, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. There are twenty-two images, but you'll wish there were more.

Students should be asked to read this book—in concert with more traditional books...