This book review was originally posted to my ko-fi page.
Science - 🔬🔬🔬
Difficulty- 📖📖📖
Target Audience- Space Enthusiasts, Marketing Persons
In a sentence? The art of advertising meets the passion of the space age.
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The 1950s kicked off the golden age of science fiction, where imagination was the only limit to what the future may store. Rocket engineers around the world began creating theoretical rockets, confined to the scribbles of academic notebooks. Each eagerly hoped for the future reality of space travel.
During the Cold War, the aerospace industry began fueling young engineers via trade magazine ads placed in journals like Missiles and Rockets and Aviation Week. In between dry articles, colorful visuals of rockets aiming for outer space excited young engineers were placed by companies like Lockheed, Douglas Aircraft, and Westinghouse. Everywhere from near-Earth orbits to the rocky regolith of Martian topography.
"Gravity was history,
and soon so would be the confines
of our solar system itself."
--
This book provided a refreshing perspective of the age-old tale of how man reached the moon. What stood out to me were the visual themes Prelinger identified, including the interaction of our bodies and space.
What interested me that I hadn't considered before were these trade magazines. Aviation Weekly has an archive since the early 1900s, which spans the entirety of human flight, including space flight. It definitely needs to be investigated.
Overall, the book was enjoyable, including many examples of beautiful 1950s and 1960s trade ads.
Megan Prelinger is a historian and archivist. She and her husband, Rick Prelinger, founded the Prelinger Library and created the Observatory Library hosted in the Exploratorium, both located in San Francisco, CA.