The Big Hop - David Rooney

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Résumé :

In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in the Big Hop: an audacious race to be the first to fly, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.

Celebrated on both continents, the transatlantic contest offered a surge of inspiration-and a welcome distraction-to a public reeling from the Great War and the influenza pandemic. But the seven airmen who made the attempt were quickly forgotten, their achievement overshadowed by the solo Atlantic flights of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart years later. In The Big Hop, David Rooney grants the pioneering aviators of 1919 the spotlight they deserve. From Harry Hawker, the pilot who as a young man had watched Houdini fly over his native Australia, to the engineer Ted Brown, a US citizen who joined the Royal Flying Corps, Rooney traces the lives of the unassuming men who performed extraordinary acts in the sky.

Mining evocative first-person accounts and aviation archives, Rooney also follows the participants' journeys: learning to fly on flimsy airplanes made of timber struts and varnished fabric...

Biographie:
David Rooney is a historian and curator specializing in transport, technology, and engineering, and the author of About Time and The Big Hop. For almost twenty years he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London....

Sommaire:

Praise for About Time

Abundantly clever...[L]ovely and engaging...with myriad fascinations on every page.
- Simon Winchester, New York Times Book Review

Fascinating...A valuable intellectual journey at a moment ripe for contemplation.
- Michael O'Donnell, Wall Street Journal

Insightful, globe-spanning.
- James Gleick, New York Review of Books

People say time is money, but David Rooney knows better. In this information-packed swoop through history and into the future, he exposes time's many identities along with the hidden agendas of clocks. Time is knowledge. Time is power. Time is faith. Time is destiny.
- Dava Sobel, author of Longitude

Not merely an horologist's delight, but an ingenious meditation on the nature and symbolism of time-keeping itself...I will never hear the pips, or ask 'what's the time?' in quite the same way again. A striking success.
- Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder