Development of the Lifesaving Rocket

316 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ticular attributes of the works he lists. While I was pleased to find one of my own books extensively cited by the author, I was somewhat dis­ enchanted to discover that the editors had misspelled the title every time it appeared. Such strictures aside, however, Rae has written a most readable and useful book; we should be grateful to him. I. B. Holley, Jr.* Development of the Lifesaving Rocket: A Study in 19th Century Tech­ nological Fallout. By Mitchell R. Sharpe. Huntsville, Ala.: George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, 1969. Pp. 72; 57 illustrations. Free. Were the provisions of the Food and Drug Act applied to literary works, Mitchell Sharpe would be in trouble for mislabeling. His slight monograph was called an essav by those of the National Space Club who named him the winner of the Goddard Historical Essay Award for 1968. The author says, by way of his title, that he has written a study in technological fallout and that the paper concerns the develop­ ment of the lifesaving rocket. But, if an essay is, as Webster maintains, “a literary composition, analytical or interpretive, dealing with its sub­ ject from a more or less limited or personal standpoint,” either Sharpe is perpetrating a fraud or the judges are very casual about definitions. Development of the Lifesaving Rocket is a marginally competent scissors -and-paste job. It is antiquarianism, nearly raw and not very well seasoned. It contains occasional references to technological fallout, but they go together with the balance of the composition about as well as pits in a cherry pie: you are on the lookout for them, but good man­ ners do not require your swallowing any. There is no analysis, no evaluation, no appraisal, no blending, and not much evidence of solid scholarship. Of exhaustive research there was an abundance. Sharpe has pieced together a staggering quantity of nonrandom information about all of the lifesaving rockets proposed, developed, built, or used in the Western world in the past 150 years. (Why in the name of von Ranke were not the various dimensional summaries, usually stated to two decimal places, put into an appendix?) And there are dozens of illustrations—most with­ out the least indication of source, and many two or three pages removed from the relevant textual reference. It seems probable that the author has actually dredged every substantial published work that deals in any detail with lifesaving rockets. He has sorted the details according to the individuals without reconciling them, unfortunately: it does not seem likely that Edward Boxer joined the army at fifty-three, jumped from captain to general in five peacetime years, was promoted to major gen­ eral at the age of eighty-five, or lived to be, as the text suggests, 114. Some of the technical details have an odd ring, too: would a practiced • Dr. Holley, of Duke University, is the author of Ideas and Weapons and Buy­ ing Aircraft, a volume in the official Army history of World War II. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 317 designer of fireworks seriously propose building a lifesaving rocket with an interior diameter of J millimeters? Or a length of 50 millime­ ters? Most pencils are larger. It is tempting to write a paragraph or two about the advisability of having some formal training in historical methodology before under­ taking historical analysis. But that is not necessarily relevant to what Sharpe has capably done—collect data scraps concerning all lifesaving rockets. Yet it is not likely that a trained historian would so casually assume that Henry Trengrouse, a cabinet maker who lived toward Land’s End, was “undoubtedly familiar with the role played by the Congreve rocket in the destruction of Copenhagen” a few months earlier. This was the year of Jena, Austerlitz, Friedland, Tilsit, and the total collapse of Continental resistance to the Empire. Is it not at least as probable that the rural craftsman who subsequently used paper-tube rockets to carry lifelines did indeed get his inspiration from a fireworks display, as is suggested by one authority Sharpe mistrusts, and that he knew as much about Congreve rockets as the average accountant knows about

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