This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the plane and the rigid airship - huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. John McPhee chronicles the perhaps unfathomable perseverance of the aircraft's sucessive progenitors. Since the explosion of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey, energy-efficient, lighter-than-air ships have given way to gas-guzzling jet aircraft. But in the 1960s, an unusual band of inventors, engineers and investors, again in New Jersey, created the Aereon, a strange, wingless hybrid airplane/dirigible. The Aereon--the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed-- promised to be a safe workhorse of the skies, capable of carrying the payload of entire freight trains with minimal cost. In this exquisitely crafted tale of back-to-the-drawing-board perseverance, McPhee tells the story not only of the Aereon, but of any product development team. He astutely delineates the team members' personalities and interactions, delves back in time to the origins of lighter-than-air craft and the history of propellers, and in the end, makes us wonder why this promising technology hasn't been perfected. Like Aramis: Or the Love of Technology , this is a splendid book about a potentially superior aircraft which has yet to be adopted. “It's a book Leonardo da Vinci would have warmed to, a set of experiments he's have changed.” ― Paul West, The Washington Post “What gives [McPhee's] writing its powerful fascination is the strange, raw quality of fact: it all really happened, just the way . . . McPhee watches so intently that the Aereon and its people become real and important to the reader.” ― John Skow, Los Angeles Times “McPhee has a genius for writing about unusual people whose activities border on the eccentric, and the Aereon project abounded with them. His engrossing account can be read at a sitting.” ― Donald R. Morris, The Houston Post John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker , where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are , with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written over 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed By John McPhee Farrar, Straus and Giroux Copyright © 1992 John McPhee All right reserved. ISBN: 9780374516352 Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, The I N GREAT SECRECY, on a private airstrip about fifty miles southwest of New York, Aereon 7 got ready to fly. Conditions were good. It was a clear August evening in 1970, humid, but not remarkably so for that time of year near the coastal plain. In dark stands of ash and oak by the field, leaves were not moving. A wind sock, almost half a mile away, hung still; and far beyond that, on the horizon of this flat landscape, stood barracks of the state police, where no activity was discernible, and where the flags of New Jersey and the United States hung without motion from tall poles.The 7, as the aircraft was called, was bright orange. It had no wings. It had a deep belly and a broad, arching back. Seen from above, it was a delta. From the side, it looked like a fat and tremendous pumpkin seed. Stabilizing fins, vertical and anhedral, framed the trailing edge. The aircraft's shape had been figured out by a computer inValley Forge, Pennsylvania, and the computer had sought a shrewd and practical compromise between an airfoil and a sphere. The 7 stood on tricycle landing gear. Above and just behind its nose was a plastic canopy. Mounted above the aircraft's trailing edge was an engine fitted with a pusher propeller. Aereon 7 had cost about five thousand dollars. To reach this moment, though, well over a million dollars had been spent in the past eleven years. The money had been drawn from various individuals, many of them in New Jersey, in amounts ranging from five hundred dollars to three hundred thousand dollars. Nothing had been contributed by the government or by any major aircraft corporation. By training, the several men attending the aircraft were all engineers (aeronautical and mechanical) except one, and he was a Master of Theology. His name was William Miller, and he was of middle height and middle weight and had a look in his clear blue eyes that all at once seemed to be prayerful, patient, lonely, trusting, and nervous. E