Empires of the Sky by Alexander Rose

Empires of the Sky by Alexander Rose

The Golden Age of Aviation is brought to life in this story of the giant Zeppelin airships that once roamed the sky--a story that ended with the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg.

An] exhilarating history of the dawn of modern air travel.--Publishers Weekly

At the dawn of the twentieth century, when human flight was still considered an impossibility, Germany's Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin vied with the Wright Brothers to build the world's first successful flying machine. As the Wrights labored to invent the airplane, Zeppelin fathered the remarkable airship, sparking a bitter rivalry between the two types of aircraft and their innovators that would last for decades, in the quest to control one of humanity's most inspiring achievements.

And it was the airship--not the airplane--that led the way. In the glittery 1920s, the count's brilliant prot g , Hugo Eckener, achieved undreamed-of feats of daring and skill, including the extraordinary Round-the-World voyage of the Graf Zeppelin. At a time when America's airplanes--rickety deathtraps held together by glue, screws, and luck--could barely make it from New York to Washington, D.C., Eckener's airships serenely traversed oceans without a single crash, fatality, or injury. What Charles Lindbergh almost died doing--crossing the Atlantic in 1927--Eckener had effortlessly accomplished three years before the Spirit of St. Louis even took off.

Even as the Nazis sought to exploit Zeppelins for their own nefarious purposes, Eckener built his masterwork, the behemoth Hindenburg--a marvel of design and engineering. Determined to forge an airline empire under the new flagship, Eckener met his match in Juan Trippe, the ruthlessly ambitious king of Pan American Airways, who believed his fleet of next-generation planes would vanquish Eckener's coming airship armada.

It was a fight only one man--and one technology--could win. Countering each other's moves on the global chessboard, each seeking to wrest the advantage from his rival, the struggle for mastery of the air was a clash not only of technologies but of business, diplomacy, politics, personalities, and the two men's vastly different dreams of the future.

Empires of the Sky is the sweeping, untold tale of the duel that transfixed the world and helped create our modern age.

Alexander Rose received his doctorate from Cambridge University, where he focused on political and scientific history in his prize-winning dissertation. His writing has appeared in the New York Observer, the Washington Post, and many other newspapers, and he is the author of Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History. He currently resides in New York City.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780812989977
ISBN 10	081298997X
Title	Empires of the Sky
Author	Alexander Rose
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2020-04-28
Number of pages	624
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.