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by David Rooney (Author)
In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in "the Big Hop" an audacious race to be the first to fly, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.
Celebrated on both continents, the transatlantic contest offered a surge of inspiration--and a welcome distraction--to a public reeling from the Great War and the influenza pandemic. But the seven airmen who made the attempt were quickly forgotten, their achievement overshadowed by the solo Atlantic flights of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart years later. In The Big Hop, David Rooney grants the pioneering aviators of 1919 the spotlight they deserve. From Harry Hawker, the pilot who as a young man had watched Houdini fly over his native Australia, to the engineer Ted Brown, a US citizen who joined the Royal Flying Corps, Rooney traces the lives of the unassuming men who performed extraordinary acts in the sky.
Mining evocative first-person accounts and aviation archives, Rooney also follows the participants' journeys: learning to fly on flimsy airplanes made of timber struts and varnished fabric; surviving the bloodiest war that Europe had ever yet seen; and battling faulty coolant systems, severe storms, and extreme fatigue while attempting the Atlantic. Rooney transports readers to the world in which the great contest took place, and traces the rise of aviation to its daredevil peak in the early decades of the twentieth century. Recounting a deeply moving adventure, The Big Hop explores why flights like these matter, and why we take to the skies.
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Praise for About Time
"Abundantly clever...[L]ovely and engaging...with myriad fascinations on every page."
-- Simon Winchester, New York Times Book Review
"Fascinating...A valuable intellectual journey at a moment ripe for contemplation."
-- Michael O'Donnell, Wall Street Journal
"Insightful, globe-spanning."
-- James Gleick, New York Review of Books
"People say time is money, but David Rooney knows better. In this information-packed swoop through history and into the future, he exposes time's many identities along with the hidden agendas of clocks. Time is knowledge. Time is power. Time is faith. Time is destiny."
-- Dava Sobel, author of Longitude
"Not merely an horologist's delight, but an ingenious meditation on the nature and symbolism of time-keeping itself...I will never hear the pips, or ask 'what's the time?' in quite the same way again. A striking success."
-- Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder
