A jetliner—no matter how uncomfortable—is arguably the closest humans have come to having a time machine. Board one in New York, go to sleep, and wake up Africa. Pretty cool, no?
So it's ironic that the term "jet age" today sounds almost quaint, suggesting a time of black-and-white televisions, men in hats and women in gloves. The jet engine is a truly amazing invention that remains at the cutting edge of many technologies, including software, aerodynamics and synthetic materials.
Some fun jet facts: The inferno inside a jet engine is hotter than the surface of the sun and would melt the turbine's blades if not for some very clever management of airflow. Engineers first use computer models to shape that airflow inside a jet, and only then design the fan blades that can move air exactly as needed.
The jet engines on today's biggest planes move so much air that just one could evacuate an average American house in less than a second. Yet for all their power, jets have essentially only one moving part, a spinning central shaft. Consider that while staring at the tangle of technology under the hood of a Prius.
By Sam Howe Verhovek
Avery, 248 pages, $27
Air travel is so common today that it is easy to imagine passengers and airlines in the era of propeller planes waiting impatiently for the jetliner's arrival. Instead, as Sam Howe Verhovek relates in "Jet Age," his breezy and fact-filled history of "the race to shrink the world," jet engines were a tough sell.
Frank Whittle, the brilliant British military pilot and engineer who began patenting jet designs in 1930, struggled for years to get funding and time to pursue his idea. Even after World War II, when a competing Nazi design showed what fighter jets could achieve in battle, U.S. airlines were slow to see jets' potential for passenger travel.
It took another Brit, airplane designer Geoffrey de Havilland, to awaken postwar America's aviation behemoths. While Lockheed and Douglas were still churning out rumbling, low-flying propeller planes, De Havilland's jet-powered Comet began breaking records in 1952. Only after seeing Comets scorch the stratosphere at 500 miles an hour did Howard Hughes want jetliners for TWA and Juan Trippe get interested for Pan Am.
Among American plane makers, it was a military contractor that had struggled in the prewar passenger-plane market—Boeing—that first took up the jetliner challenge. In retrospect, the outcome seems obvious. The Boeing 707 inspired the term "jet set." Boeing's iconic 747 "Jumbo Jet" opened jet-setting to the masses.
But in 1952, that outcome was far from obvious. Mr. Verhovek zeroes in on the mid-1950s, when Comets first seemed to own the world and then started plunging from the sky in pieces. The Comet's fatal design flaw—the result of an insufficient appreciation of the danger of metal fatigue—holds resonance today as both Boeing and Airbus struggle to master the next generation of jetliner materials, composites of carbon fiber and plastic.
A longtime reporter for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Verhovek has an eye for detail and historical context. He zips through the history of powered flight, paying special attention to aviation's dinosaurs, Zeppelins. He also sprinkles this quick read with juicy tidbits, such as the first known members of the "mile-high club" (who were only about 500 feet up in an open-cockpit biplane, but achieved their notoriety in 1916, merely 13 years after the Wright Brothers' first flight).
Although "Jet Age" inevitably centers on technology, Mr. Verhovek wisely focuses as well on the outsize personalities behind world-changing innovations. There's Mr. De Havilland, a manic depressive who was so dedicated to aviation that he kept going after two of his three sons died testing his planes. Mr. Whittle, we learn, sniffed Benzedrine to stay awake, popped tranquilizers to sleep and shriveled to just 127 pounds while developing the jet engine. And Boeing chief executive Bill Allen, a meticulous lawyer, bet the company on passenger jets when not a single U.S. airline wanted one.
Mr. Verhovek uses a delightful conceit to take readers from the earliest passenger flights—with their wicker seats, stench of vomit and dismal safety—up to jet travel. Rather than discuss the evolution of planes, he gives an exhaustive history of stewardesses. (The term, coined in 1925, was meant to be temporary, until a better one could be developed. It was only decades later that "flight attendants" arrived on the scene.)
Like jet travel, stewardesses were at first a tough sell to airline managers. The first ones, employed by Boeing's airline, which became today's United Airlines, were all registered nurses. Once aloft, they were an instant hit among overwhelmingly male airline passengers, and United's rivals rushed to hire their own. "In the annals of marketing brainstorms, the idea of the stewardess ranks in the pantheon," Mr. Verhovek notes wryly.
"Jet Age" appears to break little new ground in its account the history of aviation, but that doesn't diminish the book's appeal. Mr. Verhovek spins a fine yarn that includes big money, war, sex and power. In fact, he sets up and presents the pivotal mid-1950s so engrossingly that the book's dénouement, after the 707 wins key orders, comes off as a bit rushed. Yes, we all know how the story ended. Yet I was left wanting even more fly-on-the-wall detail of exactly how Boeing vanquished not only a redesigned Comet, but also Douglas's competing DC-8 jetliner. And Mr. Verhovek could have teased more tension out of what he calls just "a twist" in the tale: Britain's 1958 sprint ahead of the U.S. to fly passenger jets across the Atlantic, one year to the day after the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into space with Sputnik.
Mr. Verhovek may also have written the Comet off too completely. He notes that while all 707s have ended scheduled passenger service, dozens are still used by the U.S. force as midair refueling tankers. In noting the Comet's passing from service, he fails to note that Britain's Royal Air Force has kept flying a fleet of Nimrod MR2 surveillance planes that are built on Comet airframes. In fact, the Nimrods are now being completely rebuilt so that, it is hoped, they can provide for decades to come. The Comet is dead. Long live the Comet.
—Mr. Michaels is a Journal reporter based in Brussels.