Song of the Sky

In reviewing the Wright brothers timeline nothing of great magnitude registers for 1915. In October of that year Orville sold his interest in the Wright Company, notable enough, but maybe the recent release of David McCullough's biography is just co-incidence. New York Review of Books, among other industry usuals,  favorably  reviewed this latest volume by America's august historian. This, plus some general background chatter, reminded me of a long overdue wish to post something about Guy Murchie and his book Song of the Sky, which although primarily a scientific study of atmosphere is very much a product of aviation.

From Wikipedia:  
Guy Murchie Jr. (1907-1997) was a writer about science and philosophy: aviation, astronomy, biology and the meaning of life, He was, successively, a world traveler; a war correspondent; a photographer, staff artist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; a pilot and flight instructor; a teacher; a lecturer; an aerial navigator; a building contractor; and founder and director of a summer camp for children. He was a practicing member of the Baha'i Faith. His books included Men on the Horizon (1932), Song of the Sky (1954), Music of the Spheres (1961), and The Seven Mysteries of Life (1978). The latter three books were chosen for promotion by the Book of the Month Club. He illustrated his books with etchings and woodcuts of his own design.

Is that Renaissance man enough for you? And those biographical details followed a privileged Bostonian upbringing that, after his graduation from Harvard, he rejected to pursue traveling and making his own way in life.

Song of the Sky, Murchie's "exploration of the ocean of air", is for me one of those par excellence studies like Edwin Way Teale's American Seasons or John McPhee's Annals of the Former World that is staggering in its range and depth of detail and told in an authorial voice of genuine passion and humanism.

Three sections cover the following: 1. Navigation (The Craft; The Way; The Needle); 2. Atmosphere - the actual substance of air and it's dynamics at various altitudes and subject to various and combined forces e.g. wind, clouds, thunder, hail, rain and snow. And then these things amalgamated as the giant organ we call "weather." 3. The last section explores less tangible phenomena of weather such as sonic and photo aspects: the music of the weather around us, flares, rays, the sound barrier, etc. All these topics are investigated over a vast array of other details of earth and human history: growing seasons or maritime currents, for instance. And threading through the whole book is the vehicle, literally and figuratively, of flying. Aviation and its attendant navigational, mechanical, and industrial practices are the instrument by which and from which the observations of the study are realized.

Winds of the World

Magnetic variations of the world

Sky over US east coast from plane