buyers\' guides

Inventing Flight: The Wright Brothers and Their Predecessors

The invention of flight craft heavier than air counts among humankind's defining achievements. In this book, aviation engineer and historian John D. Anderson, Jr., offers a concise and engaging account of the technical developments that anticipated the Wright brothers' successful first flight on December 17, 1903. While the accomplishments of the Wrights have become legendary, we do well to remember that they inherited a body of aerodynamics knowledge and flying machine technology. How much did they draw upon this legacy? Did it prove useful or lead to dead ends?

Beginning with the earliest attempts at flight, Anderson explains how Leonardo daVinci first began to grasp the concepts of lift and drag which would be essential to the invention of powered flight. He describes the many failed efforts of the so-called "tower jumpers," from Benedictine monk Oliver of Malmesbury in 1022 to the eighteenth-century Marquis de Bacqueville. He tells the fascinating story of aviation pioneers such as Sir George Cayley, who in a stroke of genius first proposed the modern design of a fixed-wing craft with a fuselage and horizontal and vertical tail surfaces in 1799, and William Samuel Henson, a lace-making engineer whose ambitious "aerial steam carriage" was patented in 1842 but never built. Anderson describes the groundbreaking nineteenth-century laboratory experiments in fluid dynamics, the building of the world's first wind tunnel in 1870, and the key contributions of various scientists and inventors in such areas as propulsion (propellers, not flapping wings) and wing design (curved, not flat). He also explains the crucial contributions to the science of aerodynamics by the German engineer Otto Lilienthal, later praised by the Wrights as their "most important" predecessor.

In telling the dramatic story of the Wright brothers' many experiments at Kitty Hawk as they raced to become the first in flight, Anderson shows how the brothers succeeded where others failed by taking the best of early technology and building upon it using a carefully planned, step-by-step experimental approach. (They recognized, for example, that it was necessary to become a skilled glider pilot before attempting powered flight.) With vintage photographs and informative diagrams to enhance the text, Inventing Flight will interest anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the miracle of flight.

The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Leonardo Books)

It may be trite to say that new technology changes the way we see ourselves and the world, but it's crucial that we explore those changes fully. In The Robot in the Garden, computer scientist Ken Goldberg curates a collection of essays on telerobotics by critics, philosophers, and engineers, addressing questions as fundamental as, "How does mediation affect the knowledge we acquire?"

This book is a heady look at how remotely operated machines are affecting our beliefs and understanding of our interactions with each other and with the environment; while it's unlikely that every piece will interest every reader, anyone concerned with the future of art, technology, or society will find plenty to think about. Judith Donath, of MIT's Media Lab, asks how we define identity over the Internet and other electronic means of distant communication. Media art critic Machiko Kusahara reviews the current work of five telerobotic artists and their questioning of attitudes toward fundamental concepts like presence and absence. Philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus cuts to the chase and examines knowledge itself in "Telepistemology: Descartes's Last Stand." Knowing that we know something is hard enough without miles of cables between our minds and the objects of our knowledge, but is technologically mediated information really different in kind?

Eighteen essays in all contribute to the discussion of remote action. As we expand our bodies to include webcam eyes and robot arms, such questions become more and more important to thinking people, and we can start looking for answers with The Robot in the Garden. --Rob Lightner

The Robot in the Garden initiates a critical theory of telerobotics and introduces telepistemology, the study of knowledge acquired at a distance. Many of our most influential technologies, the telescope, telephone, and television, were developed to provide knowledge at a distance. Telerobots, remotely controlled robots, facilitate action at a distance. Specialists use telerobots to explore actively environments such as Mars, the Titanic, and Chernobyl. Military personnel increasingly employ reconnaissance drones and telerobotic missiles. At home, we have remote controls for the garage door, car alarm, and television (the latter a remote for the remote).

The Internet dramatically extends our scope and reach. Thousands of cameras and robots are now accessible online. Although the role of technical mediation has been of interest to philosophers since the seventeenth century, the Internet forces a reconsideration. As the public gains access to telerobotic instruments previously restricted to scientists and soldiers, questions of mediation, knowledge, and trust take on new significance for everyday life.

Telerobotics is a mode of representation. But representations can misrepresent. If Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" was the defining moment for radio, what will be the defining moment for the Internet? As artists have always been concerned with how representations provide us with knowledge, the book also looks at telerobotics' potential as an artistic medium.

The seventeen essays, by leading figures in philosophy, art, history, and engineering, are organized into three sections: Philosophy; Art, History, and Critical Theory; and Engineering, Interface, and System Design.