I'd definitely recommend it if you can get hold of a copy.
It's an interesting slice of engineering history in its own right -- Shute has the technical writer's skill of conveying large amounts of relatively abstruse information to the reader while making it enjoyable to learn about the subject -- and also intriguing where you can see the parallels with some of the novels he would write/was writing. I do find it a little scary just how much of the work he describes has since been taken over by computers; he was originally employed on the airship project as Chief Calculator, crunching figures non-stop to ascertain stresses on a trial and error basis and re-running calculations if and when the results failed to add up. That's an entire sphere of employment that no longer exists at all.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-09-15 11:14 pm (UTC)It's an interesting slice of engineering history in its own right -- Shute has the technical writer's skill of conveying large amounts of relatively abstruse information to the reader while making it enjoyable to learn about the subject -- and also intriguing where you can see the parallels with some of the novels he would write/was writing. I do find it a little scary just how much of the work he describes has since been taken over by computers; he was originally employed on the airship project as Chief Calculator, crunching figures non-stop to ascertain stresses on a trial and error basis and re-running calculations if and when the results failed to add up. That's an entire sphere of employment that no longer exists at all.