More With Less

More with Less tells the story of Paul MacCready and his dream of low-powered, efficient flight. Paul Ciotti follows this inspired tinkerer, visionary and engineer from a childhood spent making elaborate model planes, to a 1970s Southern California subculture that included hang-gliding daredevils, eccentric designers and renegade aerospace executives. Working out of an abandoned hangar at an old WWII Army base near Bakersfield, the group built Gossamer Condor, an enormous but light and fragile plane that won a prize for man-powered flight that had eluded aeronautical engineers worldwide for the previous eighteen years (and dreamers for thousands of years before that). The success of the Condor led to a series of even more efficient vehicles that put MacCready's stamp on the modern world: a man-powered plane that flew across the English Channel; a solar plane that flew from Paris to London; a solar-powered car that won a race across the Australian outback; an 18-foot flapping-wing model of a pterodactyl that starred in a Smithsonian-sponsored IMAX film; and more recently a huge unmanned solar airplane for NASA that will be able to stay up for six months at a time, performing the same functions as orbiting satellites. More with Less is about an American original whose tough-minded inventiveness has expanded our scientific horizons. Book jacket.

A former Los Angeles Times writer, Paul Ciotti frequently writes about technology. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two sons