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The Great American Jet Pack: The Quest for the Ultimate Individual Lift Device
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About The Great American Jet Pack: The Quest For The
Product Description For a few decades, jet packs seemed to be everywhere: on Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space, Thunderball, and even the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics. Inventors promised we’d all be flying with them now, enabling us to zoom around effortlessly in the sky and getting us to work without traffic jams and trains. What happened to the jet pack? In The Great American Jet Pack, Steve Lehto gives us the definitive history of this and related devices, explaining how the technology arose, how it works, and why we don’t have them in our garages today. These individual lift devices, as they were blandly labeled by the government men who financed much of their development, answered man’s desire to simply step outside and take flight. No runways, no wings, no pilot’s license were required. Soaring through the air with the wind in your face and landing anyplace there was room to stand—could this be done? Yes, it could be, and it was. But the jet pack was perhaps the most overpromised technology of all time. From the rocket belt to the jet belt to the flying platform and all the way to Yves Rossy’s 21st-century free flights using a jet-powered wing, this book profiles the inventors and pilots, the hucksters and cheats, the businessmen and soldiers who were involved with these machines. And it finally tells a great American story of a technology whose promise may, one day, yet come to fruition. From Booklist Gilligan flew one on the island. So did James Bond, fleeing from some baddies. So did Professor John Robinson, while he was lost in space. First thought up by sf writers back in the 1920s and turned into reality in the mid–1960s, the jet pack was the latest in a long line of personal flying devices that included flying shoes, wearable rockets, and a flying platform. It almost immediately entered the public consciousness, becoming a sort of pop-culture icon, the device that was going to completely change the way people got from place to place. It hasn’t yet, but as Lehto says, the story of the jet pack—of, indeed, the quest for the perfect personal lift device—is really part of the larger story of “man’s dream of flying.” It’s a fascinating tale, full of wild ideas and serious science (with, yes, a little kidnapping, torture, and murder), and Lehto tells it very well, focusing on the people for whom creating a functional small-scale flying machine was not just a puzzle to be solved but a calling. --David Pitt Review "While personal-flight prototypes edge from pipe dream to purchase order, this well-documented history provides a satisfying substitution." —Kirkus Reviews About the Author Steve Lehto is the author of Death’s Door: The Truth Behind Michigan’s Largest Mass Murder, a 2007 Michigan Notable Book; Chrysler's Turbine Car; and Michigan’s Columbus: The Life of Douglass Houghton.
