The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

First Edition.
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed tells the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the airplane and the rigid airship- huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky.
It fies aerodynamically. It floats aerostatically. It carries bridges, buildings, fleets of trucks. It is a flying warehouse. It eliminates the need for roads, railroads, prepared harbors. Or so goes the dream.
With an arching back and a deep belly, it looks like a tremendous pumpkin seed.
Its carly and secret experimental development has taken twelve years’ time and one and a half million dollars. None of this capital has been put up by the government or by a big aircraft com-pany. It has come from private individuals. Much of it has been raised by the minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton, New Jersey, who initiated the project.
The book chronicles a perhaps unfathomable perseverance. Eight years after the founding of the Aereon Corporation, its tangible assets are the wrecks of many models and the wreckage of one eighty-foot-long triple-hulled rigid airship. Its drea.ne -progenitors turn for assistance to a com-put to august that it is approachable not in per: in but by teletype. The computer then de-si ge
Ee deltoid pumpkin seed.
The book has some of the ingredients of a spy story, reads as smoothly as a good novel, and is totally true. Some six or eight characters are developed in the round. The first flight of a deltoid Aereon is achieved by a master builder of model aircraft whose talent goes beyond the kit builder’s imagination. The twenty-six-foot, manned, proof-of-concept Aereon is constructed singlehanded by a rigger of naval airships who, of course, no longer has other airships to rig. The company is held together for twelve years by (successively) two theologians who dream separately of the missionary effect of the aircraft but share very little harmony together. The test pilot, an aeronautical engineer, has more courage than the front line of the Light Brigade, and a calculated disinterest.
He works for pay. Extraordinary people. An extraordinary story. Its characters live on the page as in life.