To dream the improbable dream, and make it soar

A human being on foot is “five times more efficient than a rabbit, twice as efficient as a dog, [and] almost as efficient as a horse.” Put that human being on a bicycle, and she or he is “3 times as efficient as a horse, 25 times as efficient as a passenger train, and 50 times as efficient as a car with a single passenger.” A buzzard can coast effortlessly for hours on a thermal wave.

These are just a few of the interesting points made by Paul Ciotti in his book “More With Less.” Connect the dots and what you’ve got is, well, maybe something like aerodynamic engineer Paul MacCready’s Gossamer Albatross, the paperweight aircraft with bicycle pedals that in 1979 became the first human-powered plane to traverse the English Channel.

Human beings have always dreamed of flying like birds, Ciotti reminds us. If by flying, you mean simply traveling in an airplane from one place to another, then that dream has been realized. But if by flying, you mean soaring or gliding through the air with the wind rushing against your skin, that is another matter entirely.

It is probably not just a coincidence that many of the people who have been exploring the possibilities of human-powered (as well as solar-powered) flight live and work in California. Among the best known is the visionary inventor and entrepreneur MacCready, the man behind the Gossamer Albatross. Although Ciotti’s sprightly and intriguing book places MacCready at the center of the story, the book also introduces us to an assortment of innovative, often colorful, individuals who are involved in realizing this challenging, but by no means impossible, dream: experts in analog electronics and aerodynamics, engineers, sailplane pilots, mathematicians and hang-gliding enthusiasts.

Take MacCready’s contemporary Richard Miller, for instance, who helped introduce hang-gliding to America. Unlike the conspicuously successful MacCready, Miller has led a hand-to-mouth existence, like that of an Eastern mystic. His book “Without Visible Means of Support” described the art of building and flying your own hang glider, but the title might also have described its author’s life: “I’ve never had money. I’ve never felt I was meant to have any,” he tells Ciotti. Now, in his late 70s, he continues to pursue the dream of soaring, using the energy of the air itself, as birds do.

“More With Less” also covers some of MacCready’s other projects, which have ranged from solar-powered automobiles, aircraft and satellites to creating a working mechanical replica of a pterodactyl, a giant flying reptile of the Mesozoic Era. “MacCready never doubted that his team could make the model fly. ‘Nature did it 60 million years ago,’ he liked to say. ‘We should be able to do it too.’ But live [pterodactyls] had big brains ... and continuous active control, not unlike a rider on a bicycle making continual small corrections. There was no way the fairly simple electronics of the ... model could match in sophistication the reflexes of a living creature....” The model flew, but not very well. Enough, at any rate, to perform very convincingly in the Smithsonian’s Imax film “On the Wing.” On a more practical plane, the work that went into creating the solar-powered Sunraycer for General Motors helped pave the way for electric and hybrid automobiles.

Ciotti’s approach is casual, almost haphazard, but there is method to his modus operandi. He glides from topic to topic, touching down on whatever seems interesting, whether it’s the effects of the 1970s oil shortages, the pluses and minuses of solar energy, early man’s prowess as a predator, the benefits of sweating, the engaging personalities of turkey vultures or the mystery of how prehistoric creatures like the pterodactyl ever managed to fly. He is able to avoid many a journalistic cliche simply by reporting what he actually sees and hears rather than what he expects to see and hear.

MacCready, he finds, is not, as some other journalists have portrayed him, “a whimsical soul walking around in a childlike state of wonder,” but a tough-minded, rather charmless character: quiet, introverted, given to speaking in a monotone, often tactless and tightfisted, but also single-minded, unpretentious, open to any reasonable suggestion and (it almost goes without saying) able to think outside the box: “He didn’t insist that everything be done his way; he wasn’t frightened by people smarter than himself; and he wasn’t wedded to any one approach.”

Not a perfectionist or even much of a craftsman, MacCready, as Ciotti shows us, has always preferred to go ahead and build something, then iron out the mistakes later, subscribing to the credo of another of his sometime colleagues, the extroverted, boisterous, womanizing, daredevil pilot Jack Lambie: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” Unfortunately, this anti-perfectionist credo, so liberating to explorers and inventors, is also evident in the way that this book has been copy-edited. Typos abound: “wings” for “winds,” “aestheic” for “aesthetic” and “Los Vegas” for “Las Vegas,” to name a few.

Fortunately, Ciotti’s enthusiasm and his ability to convey it come through loud and clear. His thought-provoking book not only pays tribute to the individuals engaged in the ongoing search for energy efficiency, but to the very idea of efficiency itself: “In a world without constraints,” he muses, “the need for efficiency vanishes, and in many cases, so does beauty too.”

*

More With LessMore with Less

Paul MacCready and the Dream of Efficient Flight

Paul Ciotti

Encounter Books: 260 pp., $26.95