Aircraft Propulsion: A Review of the Evolution of Aircraft Piston Engines

This, the fourth number of Smithsonian Annals of Flight , was the Fourth Lester B. Gardner Lecture, delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 8, 1962, and at the Smithsonian Institution, October 5, 1962. Subsequently it was published in the General Appendix to the Annual Report . . . of the Smithsonian Institution . . . for the Year Ended June 30, 1962 (1963).As presented here, the text has been revised, enlarged, and updated. Its 72 illustrations, many of them new, include a number of engines, aircraft, and the materials in the collections of the National Air and Space Museum.With it, for the first time, appears the bibliography which accompanied the original manuscript and which, for lack of space, could not then (1963) be printed. This has since been edited and expanded to approximately double its original length by Dr. Richard K. Smith while he was serving on the Museum staff. Its nearly 600 entries, most of them contemporary accounts, cover the whole range of engine development and related activities from the early beginnings. This bibliography should be a useful and welcome tool, both for the airplane enthusiast and for the historian of aviation technology.Extract from the Forward, written by S. Paul Johnston, July 1, 1969.