Pioneers of Flight; From Early Times to the Wright Brothers

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Peter Burchard. The format is approximately 7.5 inches by 10.25 inches. 48 pages. Illustrations. DJ is worn, torn, soiled and chipped at edges. Ink gift notation (not from author) on fep. This work traces the history of man's attempts to fly from early experiments in the fifteenth century to the successful achievements of the Wright brothers in the twentieth century. Peter Burchard (March 1, 1921 - July 3, 2004) was an author, designer, and illustrator. He wrote the book One Gallant Rush (1965), about Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first African-American unit in the Union Army. It was adapted for the 1989 film Glory, which won numerous awards. Burchard served as a signal operator on convoys in the North Atlantic during World War II. During this time, his drawings were published by Yank magazine. He began illustrating books in 1947, the year of his graduation from the Philadelphia Museum College of Art. Burchard primarily wrote books about slavery, abolitionism, and the American Civil War. He wrote 26 books and illustrated over 100. The American Library Association and the Library Journal bestowed special recognition on his books, and he received a Christopher Award for the humanitarian value of his illustrations. Here are the stories, enriched by many splendid illustrations, of the early dreamers and experimenters of flight, among them Leonardo da Vinci, who as far back as the fifteenth century was drawing man-carrying machines and writing about them in his notebooks; Sir George Cayley, called "The Father of Aviation", who put a man-carrying glider into the air; the German, Otto Lilienthal, "The greatest of the gliding men" who died testing one of his own machines; and Samuel Langley of Washington, born a generation before the Wrights, whose experimental plane was launched from a houseboat on the Potomac River. The book ends fittingly with a description of the Wright brothers; firs sustained powered flights at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903.