This is the story of the dream of flying, and of the men who down through the centuries have brought the dream to reality.
It begins with accounts of the people who made experiments with feathered wings. If a bird can fly, they said, why can't a man fly? So all their devices were based on observations of birds in flight.
The came those who studied clouds and their movements across the sky. They tried to understand the principles that operate to keep masses of vapor airborne, and so the first balloons were made.
After a long time, with successive new discoveries of the principles of physics to help with construction and operation of flying machines, men were at last able to ride in the air.
Every part of A Bridle for Pegasus is fully alive with a marvelous feeling of period and place. From the first chapter, the pitiful legend of how Daedalus and Icarus tried to fly home from Crete to Sicily, to the final breath-taking account of experiments in stratosphere flight, the book is charged with strong feeling for people and for the importance to society of the science of flying. Even if you know beforehand what came of the Montgolfier brothers' experiments, or how balloons were used in the Civil War, or what happened to Amelia Earhart, each episode has fresh interest in its relation to the whole history of flying.
The dream has come true in ways that even at the beginning of this century could hardly have been imagined. What's to come of it from now on is in the hands of the generation who read A Bridle for Pegasus; and it will be a rare reader indeed who will not be stirred by the possibility of what he himself will see or perhaps even do in the future development of flight.
—from the dust jacket
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