Books

Conquest of the Moon - 1950s Astrogators

Conquest of the Moon - 1950s Astrogators

Bruce Ediger

Conquest of the Moon (Viking Press, 1953, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Fred Whipple) describes a lunar expedition that could be accomplished with the technology of 1950.

Von Braun and company left no detail unexamined. One of the less obvious categories that they put a lot of effort into is navigation, or in this context, astrogation.

Peter Graves

Peter Graves

Bruce Ediger

Circa 1970, I read a large number of grade school reading books. One of them had a story in it about a boy who performed various athletic feats. The passage I remember from this book was the boy’s manager saying that his diet was rich in iron, and the boy was getting a part-time job as an anchor.

Marooned on Mars

Marooned on Mars

Bruce Ediger

I recently read this book because I vaguely recalled reading it as a youngster. For the first third of the book, my recollection seemed correct, but then the book diverged from what I remembered. Maybe I didn’t read it back in the late 60s after all.

When Life Almost Died

When Life Almost Died

Bruce Ediger

An interesting popular geology and paleontology book. Long, but it has a lot of great ideas, I recommend reading it.

How Steam Locomotives Really Work

How Steam Locomotives Really Work

Bruce Ediger

Everybody who’s had kids knows that they love trains. I’ve visited the Colorado Railroad Museum and the Forney Transportation Museum several times because of kids. Both museums have a variety of steam locomotives. The Forney has a partially restored Union Pacific Big Boy.

I ended up wanting to know how locomotives worked, and why they look the way they do. Unfortunately, the emphasis at museums is always on how cool steam locomotives are, or the “gee whiz” factor. None of the museum gift shop books seemed to have this sort of content, tending more towards the stamp collecting aspects (4-8-8-4!).

My lovely wife gave me a book, How Steam Locomotives Really Work by P. W. B. Semmens and A. J. Goldfinch as a present.