Sloan technology series

Turbulent Skies opens just after World War I, when intrepid aviators in fragile biplanes navigated by following railroad tracks. In Europe, with many overland routes in ruins, air transport provided a vital link for supplies and communication. And in America, as the escapades of the famous barnstormers thrilled a curious public, adventurers, entrepreneurs, and politicians alike seized upon the novelty...and earning potential. Commercial aviation came of age, and acclaimed author T. A. Heppenheimer takes us step-by-step through the ensuing decades, as discovery, development, and expansion bring the industry to its current globe-spanning status - with an annual revenue of $200 billion. Turbulent Skies comes alive with a wealth of fascinating personalities. Many of these names are familiar; some are legendary: William Boeing, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, and, of course, Charles A. Lindbergh. Alongside these icons are such equally intriguing figures as Juan Trippe, under whose guidance Pan Am set the industry pace for more than forty years; Jack Northrop, whose revolutionary monoplane launched Lockheed; Cyrus R. Smith, autocratic president of American Airlines, who advanced the concept of passenger air travel; and the controversial Frank Lorenzo, whose willfully destructive war against the unions brought down Eastern Airlines. Above all, Turbulent Skies is a thrilling look at the amazing achievements of aviation technology. While twin engines, turboprops, and the Concorde SST are among the marvels that already have become reality, Heppenheimer looks to a future where space satellites will transmit landing signals and high-level air traffic control systems will be housed on board aircraft. Compelling and informative, Turbulent Skies will enthrall aviation buffs and prove a valuable resource for all those interested in business and technology in the twentieth century.

In this work of history, science and politics, Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made; traces the path by which "the Bomb", the supreme artifact of twentieth-century science and technology, became the defining issue of the Cold War; and reveals how close the world came to nuclear destruction before the United States and the former Soviet Union learned the lesson of nuclear stalemate - a stalemate, Rhodes makes clear, that forced the superpowers to tenuous truce for more than four decades, in the end bankrupting and destroying the Communist state and foreclosing world-scale war. From the day in September 1941 when the first word of Anglo-American atomic-bomb research arrived in Moscow via Soviet espionage to the week of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Curtis LeMay goaded President Kennedy to attack the USSR with everything in the US arsenal, this book is full of unexpected - and sometimes hair-raising - revelations based on previously undisclosed Soviet as well as US sources.

"In the past man has been first. In the future the System will be first," predicted Frederick Winslow Taylor, the first efficiency expert and model for all the stopwatch-clicking engineers who stalk the factories and offices of the industrial world. In 1874, eighteen-year-old Taylor abandoned his wealthy family's plans for him to attend Harvard, and instead went to work as a lowly apprentice in a Philadelphia machine shop, shuttling between the manicured hedges of his family's home and the hot, cussing, dirty world of the shop floor. As he rose through the ranks of management, he began the time-and-motion studies for which he would become famous, and forged his industrial philosophy, Scientific Management. To organized labor, Taylor was a slave-driver. To the bosses, he was an eccentric who raised wages while ruling the factory floor with a stopwatch. To himself, he was a misunderstood visionary who, under the banner of Science, would confer prosperity on all and abolish the old class hatreds. To millions today who feel they give up too much to their jobs, Taylor is the source of that fierce, unholy obsession with "efficiency" that marks modern life. The assembly line; the layout of our kitchens; the ways our libraries, fastfood restaurants, and even our churches are organized all owe much to this driven man, who broke every job into its parts, sliced and trimmed and timed them, and remolded what was left into the work of the twentieth century.