Aviation History in the Wider View

Author(s): James R. Hansen

Source: Technology and Culture, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 643-656
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the History of
Technology
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Review Essays
AVIATION HISTORY IN THE WIDER VIEW
JAMES R. HANSEN

In May 1988 a newly formed aviation history advisory

Smithsonian Institution Press (SIP) held its inaugural m
SIP's offices in Washington, D.C. As one of the most act
in aviation history, the SIP and its director, Felix Lowe
advice of prominent scholars in the field on what hi

might do in the coming years to improve its offeri

several promising ideas surfaced during the meeting, o

prevailed: the need for more attention to the social

ramifications of aviation history. Too many books on av

and not just those published by the Smithsonian, ig

questions," board members argued. Books for airpla
been published in great abundance since aviation's ri

prominence during World War I, and since the end of

the number of scholarly monographs on a great variet

topics in both civil and military aviation history has grown

while that activity has gone on in testimony to bot

enthusiasm for flight and the recognized importance o

shaping the modern world, synthetic works taking a w
looking at the social motives, aims, and second-order co
the aviation enterprise have not appeared. In this re

history has fallen behind other fields of history (in

history), wherein broadly synthetic, contextual, and int

studies explore the meaning of a particular field of histo

what it means to others.

There was not enough time at this first meeting of the SIP advisory
board to discuss this riddle of aviation historiography at great length.
Nonetheless, the board felt strongly enough to recommend that the

Press consider commissioning a panoramic historical study of the

DR. HANSEN is an associate professor in the Department of History at Auburn

University and the historian for NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

? 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/89/3003-0009$01 .00
643

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644 James R. Hansen

place of aviation in the modern world, comparable in some ways
perhaps to Walter A. McDougall's Pulitzer Prize-winning book,...
the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York:

Basic Books, 1985). The person to undertake this project should

perhaps not be a specialist in aviation history, just as McDougall is not

a specialist in space history; rather, the person should be a distinguished historian cum generalist whose scholarship rests outside the
field of aviation history but whose experience in social or political
history or in the history of technology might provide a fresher and
bolder insight, a more complete and all-embracing understanding, and
a more provocative way of looking at the subject than might a contribution from any specialist. (The names of Daniel Boorstin, William

H. McNeill, and Thomas P. Hughes were among those mentioned.)

Lowe accepted the advice of his board with some enthusiasm and has
followed up on the idea.'
The discussion sketched here suggests much about the current state
of aviation historiography. More than any other recent indicator I
know, the recommendation by the SIP's board of advisers to commission an outsider to take a wider view sheds light on the common if

unspoken frustrations and anxieties, as well as the high hopes, of

specialists in the field. Something important is missing, they must

feel-something that can help put together that which is loose and
fragmentary; something that can make aviation history more meaningful in the overall record of human existence; something they find
themselves unable to provide.
The essay that follows is meant to explore this sentiment for a more
circumfluent aviation history and to raise some preliminary, perhaps
contentious, and, it is hoped, provocative ideas about how historians
of aviation might move toward a wider view of their subject.2 The
'Attending the May 1988 meeting were Smithsonian Institution Press editorial
advisory board members Roger Bilstein (University of Houston-Clear Lake City),
Sylvia D. Fries (NASA History Office), Richard P. Hallion (Andrews Air Force Base),

James R. Hansen (Auburn University), Von Hardesty (National Air and Space

Museum), William M. Leary (University of Georgia), W. David Lewis (Auburn University), and Alex Roland (Duke University). It was Roland who first suggested the need
for more scholarly attention to the social and cultural ramifications of aviation history.
2For more standard reviews of recent aviation historiography than are found in this
article, see the spring 1984 issue of Aerospace Historian (vol. 31, no. 1). In it there are
several fine review essays, including: William M. Leary, "Writings on Civil Aviation:
The State of the Art"; Clark G. Reynolds, "Writing on Naval Flying"; Michael Gorn and

Charles J. Gross, "Published Air Force History: Still on the Runway"; Horst Boog,
"Germanic Air Forces and the Historiography of the Air War"; Jacob W. Kipp, "Studies
in Soviet Aviation and Air Power"; Stephen Harris and Brereton Greenhous, "British

Commonwealth Air Forces"; Patrick Facon and Lee Kennett, "Writings on French

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Aviation History in the Wider View 645

argument I wish to put forward is that the kind of critical synthetic
treatment of aviation desired by the SIP's advisory board could very

well be provided by an outsider who sees the subject in a starkly

different light. If a Boorstin, McNeill, or Hughes (or perhaps, better
yet, a Fernand Braudel or some other representative of the Annales
school) addressed the social and cultural ramifications of aviation, the
result would undoubtedly be a single penetrating survey full of fresh
perspectives and new research questions that could fertilize the field
of study for years to come. For that reason alone it should be hoped
that the Smithsonian or some other press can persuade such a scholar
to pursue such a project. Such a contribution might revolutionize the
broader field of aviation history--even with its many buffs and other

nonacademic disciples-in the way that someone outside normal

practice might, according to the Kuhnian model, provoke a revolu-

tion in a science.

This might happen especially if the proposed study ventured to

consider some of the bolder social and technical prospects for aviation
explored by philosophers of aviation and by others concerned with
the future of aeronautics. Epistemologically, such a study might move
historians to look at the entire aviation enterprise in provocative new
ways. It might alert them to possibilities other than those that have
been realized, and it might lead them to ask new questions about why

certain possibilities have been ignored or dismissed out of hand. In

the process, by probing the limits of the conceptual framework that
has so far ruled our understanding of aviation's place in society,
everyone might gain insight into why things in aviation have happened as they have.
In Technology and Culture, where books in aerospace history get their
fair due and are reviewed in the context of a broad field of

interdisciplinary study, a number of reviewers, most of them sp

ists in the field, have commented for some time on the restric
vision of aviation historians. One thoughtful reviewer has ident
the "need for a more broadly contextualized and analytical histo
a vital 20th-century technological achievement."3 In keeping with

Military Aviation (with notes on the Belgian and Swiss Air Forces)"; Raymo

Proctor, "Writings on the Spanish Air Force"; Charles D. Bright, "Aviation Lite

a Changing Act"; and Alex Roland, "Writings on the Road to Space." A

interested in the state of aviation historiography should also consult the cat
under "Air" in Dominick Pisano and Cathleen S. Lewis, eds., Air and Space Histo
Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1988).

SJoseph Corn, review of Roger Bilstein, Flight in America 1900-1983: From the W
to the Astronauts (Baltimore, 1984), in Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 871-73.

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646 James R. Hansen

point of view, another T&C reviewer has praised a book that "works
in economic, engineering, and social history" for being more than just
"another wearisome airplane book."4
A qualified disdain for the buff and for those who concentrate on
the nuts and bolts of flying machines has been a persistent theme of
those who wish for aviation history with the wider view. As one writer

expressed it in a 1983 T&C review, the several aspects of aviation's

influence on modern life "cry for detailed analysis ... in the social
context of their origins. Yet, aside from a handful of first starts, the
literature on aviation is overburdened with picture books and hagio-

graphic accounts of particular pioneers from doomed Lilienthal to

unsuccessful Langley to the intrepid Wright brothers and their
imitators."5 On the other hand, a study focusing on the social and
economic impact of aviation is greeted as "a welcome departure from
the more narrowly conceived, hardware-oriented studies still common in aerospace history."'
Aviation historian Richard P. Hallion has observed that too many
studies of aviation become "bogged down in the minute details that
often afflict 'buff' literature with its fascination with this aircraft type

and that aircraft type." For those romantically attached to the flight of
Mustangs, Spitfires, and other airplanes of the past, these books are
satisfying enough; for serious scholars, however, they constitute a
"formidable body of not-always-significant literature that often hides
true historical significance in a morass of minutiae." Yet, according to
Hallion, "it is important to have some standard reference works that
examine the actual hardware produced for flight."'
Support for this last opinion can be found in book reviews written

by another distinguished historian of aviation, Roger Bilstein. In

Bilstein's view, academic historians should not look down their

noses-as they do-at books written by buffs. These books contain

mountains of raw information; without them, scholars would have a

much harder time finding the precise data that flesh out subjects and
put major trends and evolutionary developments into focus. It is in

4Richard K. Smith, review of James Sinclair, Wings of Gold: How the Aeroplane Developed

in New Guinea (Sydney, 1980), in Technology and Culture 22 (1981): 641-43.

5Bruce R. Wheaton, review of Paul Hanle, Bringing Aerodynamics to America (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), in Technology and Culture 24 (1983): 142-44.
6Corn, p. 872.
7Richard P. Hallion, review of John H. Morrow, Jr., German Air Power in World War I
(Lincoln, Nebr., 1982), in Technology and Culture 25 (1984): 663-64, and review of Peter

M. Bowers, Curtiss Aircraft, 1907-1947 (London, 1979) and Rene J. Francillon,

McDonnell Douglas Aircraft since 1920 (London, 1979), in Technology and Culture 23
(1982): 133-36.

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Aviation History in the Wider View 647

fact something in the buff's "penchant for the tedium of detail" that
often stimulates the scholar's basic insight.8

The difficulty for buffs and scholars alike is, again in Hallion's
words, to know "when to limit one's discussion to relevant aspects of
the subject." A large number of aviation historians either do not know
when to limit those details or simply cannot resist "the temptation to
wallow about" in them. The result is a general inability of aviation
historians to thread their way artfully "between the Scylla of too little
and the Charybdis of too much."'
Aviation history is thus regarded by many scholars, both insiders
and outsiders, as a field too full of "enthusiasm." The enthusiasts fall
essentially into two groups: those "well intentioned and often talented
individuals whose work suffers from the lack of professional training
in a demanding craft,"'" and those who have the requisite professional
training but who nonetheless become caught up emotionally in the
subject they are supposed to be examining critically.
Even those who do not start out as enthusiasts-because they come
to the subject not from the experience of model airplane building or

piloting or running an airline but from a humanistic academic

discipline-run the risk of becoming enthusiastic. In the process of
delving deeply into "the epic of flight," some critics have suggested,
the outsider may "go native," like an anthropologist who has lived so
long with the Masai that he now starts to dress and act and think like
one of the tribe. When that happens, and the historian becomes part
of the culture he is studying, his ability to evaluate and represent the
subject as anything other than a type of self-portrait is lost. Thus, in
response to a reviewer who criticized an author for taking "the same

uncritical stance toward aerospace endeavors common in books by

enthusiasts," the author in question acknowledged, tongue in cheek,
that he did in fact share "some affinity" with the enthusiasts, "for we
are legion, and the Force is with us.""
It is clear to anyone who visits the bookstore in the neighborhood
mall that, in comparison to the small audience for many other types
of history books, the aviation enthusiasts are in fact legion. Books
about airplanes abound, in the history section, in the transportation
section, and in the science and technology section, as well as on the

8Roger Bilstein, review of Joseph P. Juptner, U.S. Civil Aircraft (Fallbrook, Calif.,
1980), in Technology and Culture 23 (1982): 272-74.
'Hallion, review of Bowers and Francillon, p. 134.
'OLeary (n. 2 above), p. 16.

"Corn (n. 3 above), p. 872; Roger Bilstein, "Aerospace Historians, Aerospace

Enthusiasts" Technology and Culture 28 (1987): 124-25.

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648 James R. Hansen

tables for books with reduced prices. Unfortunately, in the scholar's
mind at least, most of these books are not worth reading, not even in

the back aisle of the store. Most of them resemble the most esoteric

treatises on ornithology, wherein concern for the bird is not on how it

flies or on what it contributes to an ecosystem but on the color and
texture of its feathers, the characteristics of its beak and claw, the
speckles on its egg, the sound of its mating call, and so forth. In other

words, what makes history in these books is the flying machines

themselves and, to the extent that this is mistaken or limited in what

it imparts about history, scholars seeking the wider view are bothered
by it greatly.

What bothers them even more is when this narrow "gee-whiz"

fascination with aircraft type captures and holds the minds of the

professional historians. There, many scholars believe, the flying

machines themselves should not play such a predominant role, and

much more thought should be given to the deeper social and

intellectual roots of the technology. Joseph Corn, a thoughtful commentator on the state of aviation historiography, wants much more
attention paid to the roles of "people, ideologies, and organizations."
A strong critic of Whiggish beliefs in technological progress, Corn
asks to see the "human agents" behind the historical developments:
"Who exactly used these flight technologies and for what particular
purposes, with what motives, and with what particular consequences.
And who really benefited from their use?" Without answers to these
questions, Corn suggests, aviation can only appear as a false benefac-

tor, an independent force for positive change that somehow is

supposed to move society ever upward in a "spiral of progress.""2 In

such a guise, its historical development must look "more rational,

linearly progressive, and inevitable than it surely was.'"13
One likely reason for the treatment of aircraft as an independent
and autonomous force in history has been the deeply rooted human
notion that there is something either "magical" or "organic" about the
machine, and about this especially wonderful machine in particular.
In an attempt to adjust psychologically to the growing presence of

powerful new machines in our world, we have given them human

names and endowed them with the most familiar qualities of life. A lot
of good has probably come from this instinct not only to animate but
also to project life into our technology. "Tin Lizzie" has probably run
"Corn (n. 3 above), p. 872.
13James R. Hansen, review of Laurence K. Loftin, Jr., Quest for Performance: The
Evolution of Modern Aircraft (Washington, D.C., 1985), in Technology and Culture 28
(1987): 734-36.

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Aviation History in the Wider View 649

better and lasted longer because it has been cared for lovingly as a
member of the family. Conversely, to the extent that our understanding of Mother Nature has been "mechanized" since the 17th century,
much of value has been lost.

In terms of promoting a subtle understanding of a technology as

complex and dynamic as an aircraft, however, the inclination to

breathe life into the machine has been misleading. We have treated
aircraft as if they were alive, and as if each type of aircraft, like a
species of bird, possessed its own distinct vital force. The product of
this animism in aviation literature has been the kind of ornithology

described earlier, to be found in the neighborhood bookstore. The

airplane itself tends to make the history. The people who design,
build, and use the airplane, and all of the social institutions that go
along with those activities, play a subordinate role, as if they were all
passengers in a plane that flies itself.
One partial answer to this problem lies in a "demystification" of the
aeronautical enterprise. This can be done, some argue, through closer
and fuller consideration of the history of such things as aeronautical
engineering, aeronautical research and development, aircraft design,
and aviation's financial, commercial, industrial, and military infrastructure. In the past several decades, dating back at least to Irving Brinton
Holley's landmark 1953 study Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial
Weapon by the United States during World War I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press), historians have made significant progress in all of

these areas. In each one, the roles played by people, ideas, and organizations in the development of aviation now loom larger than ever before. This development has led one close observer to call the history
of aviation "a field of scholarship that is just beginning to come into its

own."14

Still, the focus of study in aviation history has not strayed too far
away from the flying machine itself, and many would say it never
should. No one calling for the demystification of aeronautics or for
aviation history in the wider view has suggested putting a stop to the
historical study of aircraft. The desire is for more broadly conceived
studies that ask, for example: Where have our ideas for aircraft come
from? How have certain ideas got weeded out and others become a
part of conventional wisdom? Why have aircraft been used in the ways
that they have been and not in others? Answering these questions
requires more thoughtful work in engineering, social, political, and
'4W. David Lewis, review of Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with
Aviation, 1900-1950 (New York, 1983), in Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 874-77.

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650 James R. Hansen

intellectual history than has been common in aviation history up to
this point.

It also requires comparative studies. Without a doubt, one of the

major limitations of aviation historiography in the United States and

elsewhere has been its nationalistic orientation and bias. Few scholars

have studied aviation in international or global perspective; no big

picture has ever strongly emerged. Instead, the majority of scholars
have limited their work to the American, or the British, or some other
national scene, and have succumbed to a tendency to generalize from
the one national experience they know something about to a foreign
experience about which they know very little and assume quite a bit.
There are only a few exceptions to this tendency; for example, John

H. Morrow, in examining the early development of German air

power, has made some remarkable comparisons among German,

British, French, and American experiences in military aviation during

World War I. His current researches promise to take the comparative
approach much further, through a careful examination of the relationships among governmental, industrial, and military leaders and
institutions in the major nations involved in the development of air
power from World War I to the start of World War II.15 Yet Morrow's
contributions are international only to the extent that they consider
different experiences of Western industrialized nations in the first
decades of the century. What is still needed is studies of aviation in
non-Western regions, studies comparable to James Sinclair's Wings of
Gold, a fascinating look at how the airplane developed in New Guinea.
The need for non-Western studies becomes especially clear when

one realizes that the areas where air travel is now growing most
rapidly are the Far East, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
The fastest-growing market for commercial airliners in the world,
according to both Boeing and Airbus, is Southeast Asia. Clearly, the

airplane is shrinking the globe and bringing its different peoples

together in new relationships. If aviation history is going to take the
wider view and explore the broader impact of aviation on the human
community, it must start to address non-Western settings and experiences, as well as the exchanges between the Western and non-Western.
To promote a more synthetic understanding of aviation's past and
present, it might be helpful for historians to give more consideration

to the shape of its future. Here the help would be heuristic. By

exploring ideas on such basic things as the shape of aircraft to come,

the possible social motivations behind future aircraft design, the social
[John H. Morrow, Jr., Building German Airpower, 1909-1914 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1976),
and German Air Power in World War I (Lincoln, Nebr., 1982).

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Aviation History in the Wider View 651

uses of these aircraft of the future, and the potential second-order
consequences of these uses, historians can project a range of proba-

bilities that might help them discover new meanings in our past
aviation experience.
Take, for example, what might be discovered about the development of aircraft design. In looking back through the story of the
human achievement of flight, both its history and prehistory, one
might see that powerful and long-lasting conceptual frameworks have

ruled over the design of flying machines. In the case of heavierthan-air flight, there was the period of many centuries, before Cayley,
when the ruling design concept was the flapping wing. This concept
suggested that the only way humans could fly was to imitate the birds
and build some sort of device that in one unified action provided not
only the lift necessary for flight but also the power or thrust. It was of

course from within this design concept that Leonardo da Vinci drew
his famous ornithopter. As long as this conceptual framework persisted, heavier-than-air flight remained a dream that led in practice

only to disappointing and even tragic results. Not that heavier-

than-air flight could not have happened earlier, in fact much earlier;
technologically, all of the materials necessary for a primitive hang
glider had existed by the time the pyramids were built in ancient
Egypt. It was probably the power of the flapping-wing concept in the
human imagination that prevented the actual flight of such a thing.
Then came the revolution in design brought on in the early 19th
century by the British scientist and inventor George Cayley (17741857). His radically new idea (based in part on his understanding of
Newtonian mechanics) was to divide the various functions essential to
flight and to have these performed by means of separate parts of the
airplane, that is, a stationary wing for lift, an engine (or engines) for
thrust, a fuselage to provide volume for payload, and aerodynamic

surfaces (such as a tail) to provide control in three-dimensional

movement. From Cayley's time to the present, airplane designers have

worked largely from within this conceptual framework. It is the

design concept on which the "classical" type of aircraft has been

based.

One might argue that, for the past thirty years or so, aircraft
designers have been freeing themselves more and more from Cayley's
conceptual framework. What has been liberating them is the objective

of supersonic flight. Beginning in the 1950s, in the wake of the

turbojet revolution, a number of aircraft designers recognized that,

for efficient flight above Mach 1, Cayley's design principles could not
be applied. No matter what motive power was used, airplanes of the
classic shape could not be made to fly economically at speeds much

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652 James R. Hansen

above the speed of sound, even if the wings were highly swept. The
airplane as conceived by Cayley, with separate wings and fuselage and

engines and control surfaces, had to be replaced by a new type of

aircraft in which all those things were blended into an overall lifting
system. This new aircraft concept has since led to what aeronautical
engineers call the aerodynamically integrated propulsive lifting body.

In recent decades, designers whose objective was supersonic flight

have come to realize that a new set of design principles has to be

thought out. In terms of the aerodynamic shape, this realization has
led them, first, to the concept of the slender delta wing (which has
since been used on a number of military aircraft as well as on the
Anglo-French supersonic airliner, the Concorde). At the same time, it
has also led to the radically new principle of controlled flow separation,
the sense of which runs completely against the conventional wisdom
of classical aerodynamics. This new principle suggests that, instead of
striving for an airflow that passes smoothly over a wing and delays

separation of the airflow from the surface as long as possible,

designers should provoke separation deliberately and indeed depend

on that (heretofore dreaded) phenomenon for a proportion of the

lifting force.'6

Beyond these basic changes in the classic conceptual framework of

aircraft design (whether they are evolutionary or revolutionary

changes is debatable), designers of future aircraft types have now
conceptualized the wave rider, a fully integrated propulsive lifting
body that in theory can fly along at very high speed on top of strong

shock waves that the moving body itself produces and contains
between its sharp leading edges. According to those who have

explored its theoretical possibilities, the wave rider will be not an

orbital transport or spacecraft but a genuine form of aircraft, primarily suited to flight at hypersonic speed (above Mach 5) over very long,
even global, ranges. Along with the classical subsonic aircraft and the
slender delta-winged type of supersonic aircraft, the hypersonic wave
rider would complete the array of aircraft types necessary to bring the
whole world within an easy traveling time of a few hours. By the time
this becomes technically feasible, some visionaries predict, the aviation
enterprise will be motivated by goals (such as easy mobility within a
global village) that are much different fronm the motivations that have
guided the development of aviation (such as the building and deployment of aircraft for the purposes of creating wealth and projecting
'6For a brief analysis of the conceptual changes in aircraft design brought on by
supersonic aerodynamics, see Kenneth Owen, Concorde: New Shape in the Sky (London,

1982), pp. 33-34.

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Aviation History in the Wider View 653

national power and prestige) during the first century of powered

flight.

By thinking about a future class of aircraft as radically different

aerodynamically as the wave rider-whether a wave rider ever comes
to fly or not-the historian should come to a deeper appreciation of
the power of conceptual frameworks not only in aircraft design but

also in his or her own research. In contrast to those who tend to

believe that things as they are now conceived are the lasting meas
of all things past, present, and future, the historian may learn th
very little about aircraft design is permanently settled. In fact, as
eminent aerodynamicist, Dietrich Kuchemann, has suggested, av
tion "is still far from mature and well established." The historian m
discover with Kuchemann that it is "a dangerous fallacy to preten
that our knowledge of the design of aircraft is nearing its peak an

reaching the 'ultimate,' that nearly everything worth knowing

already known, and that there is not much more to come." On the

contrary, aviation, and aircraft design in particular, "is only ju

growing up ... the main work still remains to be done.""'7 And as th

work is done, the impact of aviation on society is bound to be ver
different from what it has been up to this time.
A few more words about Dietrich Kuchemann and his vision of

aviation's future might make the point clearer. An expert in fl

dynamics, Kuchemann conducted basic aeronautical research first a

the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt at the University of G6ttingen

Germany and then at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnbor

ough, England, where he served from 1966 to 1971 as head of t

aerodynamics department. In the 1950s Kuchemann spearhead

the conceptual revolution in supersonic aerodynamics that I discuss

earlier. In the early 1960s he used the new design framework to h

identify and define the shape of the slender delta wing that w
eventually integrated into the Concorde. He died in 1976.

Near the end of his life, Kuchemann expressed a philosophy

aviation that historians interested in the wider view of aviation should

find thought-provoking. He expressed this philosophy in published

essays, in a course of lectures he gave to students in aeronautical

engineering at Imperial College in London, and in his posthumous

publication The Aerodynamic Design of Aircraft, a book that many

mistakenly consider merely an aerodynamics text. It is much more
than that. It is a visionary study, both technically and philosophically,
"'Dietrich Kuchemann, The Aerodynamic Design of Aircraft (Oxford, 1978), pp. 1-22.
See also Kuchemann, "An Aerodynamicist's Prospect of the Second Century," in The
Future of Aeronautics, ed. John E. Allen and Joan Bruce (London, 1970), pp. 24-38.

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654 James R. Hansen

in which aviation takes its place as an essential element in the
development of human society and in which aerodynamics is an
essential element, indeed the dominant element, in the development

of aviation.

According to Kuchemann, the primary social motivation of aviation

in the future will be bringing all parts of a "global village" within a
comfortable two hours' distance." From this projection of the future
social motivation for aviation, Kuchemann identified the need to
design a whole spectrum of aircraft (ranging from different subsonic
vehicles of the classical type to the hypersonic wave rider) that could
service a truly global network of routes and take passengers anywhere
they wanted to go on the planet in two hours or less.
In Kuchemann's view, then, the art of designing aircraft can have

more beneficial repercussions on the way the human community

wants to live than it has ever had before, and aviation can play a more
vital part in putting us more in control of, and in harmony with, our

environment than it has up to this point. "Never before have the

technical and social prospects in aviation been so varied and promising," he suggests. "There is a very long way to go.'"
Suggestive ideas in the philosophy of aviation such as Kuchemann's

are not as well known to aviation historians as they should be.

Conceptually, these ideas can be liberating. With a better appreciation

of the uncertainties and possibilities of aviation, it is more likely that
historians will penetrate deeply into the social and intellectual reasons
that the shapes of aircraft have evolved the way they have. It is more
likely that historians will ask how and why unconventional airplane
design concepts during specific periods (like flying wings and V/STOL
aircraft in the middle of the 20th century) often lost in competition
with what was the more conventional technology of flying. These are
questions about the technical development of aircraft that the wider
view of aviation history should embrace.
Even more important, consideration of future possibilities in aircraft design should encourage richer insights into the social aspects of
Vb. Kuchemann, The Aerodynamic Design ofAircraft, pp. 13-16. Kuchemann based this
figure of two hours in part on a demographic study by his daughter, C. F. Kuchemann,
showing how the spread of the railroad in 19th-century England increased distances
between marriage partners but increased them only up to the point of a maximum of

two hours' traveling time. Dietrich Kuchemann called this two-hour period the

"preferred maximum traveling time," and suggested that it seems to hold true around
the world regardless of culture or the means of transport. The demographic study is

C. F. Kuchemann, A. J. Boyce, and G. A. Harrison, "A Demographic and Genetic

Study of a Group of Oxfordshire Villages," Human Biology 39 (1967): 251.
19D. Kuchemann, The Aerodynamic Design of Aircraft, p. 2.

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Aviation History in the Wider View 655

aviation. There is a precedent for this: the goal of perhaps the most
synthetic historical study of aviation yet produced, William Fielding
Ogburn's 1946 study The Social Effects of Aviation (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin), was "to foresee the changes that are coming" because of the
trends in aviation technology. After highly speculative introductory
chapters, "On Predicting the Future" and "On Predicting the Social
Effects of Invention," Ogburn moved on to address the technological

trends in aviation; the probable future uses of aviation (excluding

military aviation, wherein, he argued, recent developments were too
secret and rapid for him to make a satisfactory study); and, finally, the
social effects of those uses. Regarding the latter, Ogburn examined in
detail each one of the following areas: population, the family, cities,
religion, health, recreation, crime, education, railroads, ocean ship-

ping, manufacturing, marketing, mining, real estate, newspapers,

agriculture, forestry, stock raising, government, public administration, international relations, and international policies.
Ogburn's general thesis was that aviation would continue to speed
the growth of "our social heritage" by helping to build "an efficient
size of the state" and by providing government with "opportunities

for greater efficiency and usefulness." Over the long term, "the
natural influence of aviation," unless it is "counteracted," will speed
the evolution of states and governments into still larger units; it "may

even facilitate a single political organization of the peoples of the

world." Before that happens "still far in the future," aviation will aid
in the development of large regional organizations that will be tied
together by "the desire for protection and power in a world where

wars are probable." Aviation will encourage this regionalism by

making possible "more contacts between the peoples of nearby states

in purely peacetime pursuits" and "by widening the gap between the
large nations and the small ones, and by increasing the bonds between
the central big power and the surrounding little states." This will be
the long-term global trend, according to Ogburn, "if the process takes
its natural course with little attempt at conscious control.""2
Although he viewed his book as a contribution to history and to the

social sciences generally, Ogburn hoped that The Social Effects of

Aviation would also be of value "to all who look ahead and want to

know how their lives, their businesses, their institutions, and their

plans will be affected by this great new transportation system." In this

regard, Ogburn in some ways pioneered what in the late 1960s came

to be known as "technology assessment." His views on the social

impact of aviation and its second-order consequences should be
20William Fielding Ogburn, The Social Effects of Aviation (Boston, 1946), pp. 705-8.

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656 James R. Hansen

especially interesting to readers of this journal; after all, Ogburn
served as the first president of the Society for the History of
Technology.
It has now been over forty years since Ogburn tried coming to grips
with the global impact of aviation, with no significant attempts by
historians to accomplish anything very similar. Still, there are reasons
to be optimistic about the future of aviation history in the wider view
just as there are reasons to be optimistic about the technical prospects
of aviation and their peaceful impact on world civilization despite the
ever-increasing destructive military uses of aircraft in our century.

There are more trained scholars working in the field than ever

before, many with valuable backgrounds in the history of technology;

the archives are more abundant and better organized; and there are

reliable avenues for discourse and publication at every level. Most

likely, the debate over the value of the contributions made by the buff,

by the more academically inclined enthusiast, and by the person who

sees the need for a more dispassionate view of aviation history will
continue, but as long as the debate remains cordial and guided by the

spirit of cooperation and inclusion, no harm and probably a lot of

good will come of it.

Whether or not the Smithsonian Institution Press decides to commis-

sion a synthetic study of aviation in the wider view, there is reason to

feel that such a study is not far off. It might come from an unexpected

direction. Or it might be shaken loose somehow from inside the field

of aviation history itself. As Richard P. Hallion noted in his review of
Walter A. McDougall's ... the Heavens and the Earth, "That such a work
is now available for the field of astronautics should be considered a goad
to historians of aeronautics to undertake a similar penetrating survey
of their own field."2' All of the basic monographs that might be necessary

for someone to build such a synthesis now exist. It just takes someone
with the inclination, the time, the vision, and the breadth of understand-

ing to do it.

2'Richard P. Hallion, review of Walter A. McDougall, ... the Heavens and the Earth: A
Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985), in Technology and Culture 28 (1987):
130-32.

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