J. W. Dunne. An Experiment With Time. Library of the Serialist International, 2010 [1934]. Third edition. A curiosity, this. Dunne was Britain's first military aeroplane designer, and would have been its first military aeroplane pilot too, if his designs had flown at the first attempt in 1907-8. Ultimately Dunne had little lasting influence on British aviation, and he's much better known for this book, an attempt to explain dream premonitions scientifically, leading to his theory of 'serial time' (as I understand it, the past and future are simultaneous with the present, treating time like a spatial dimension). His ideas intrigued many people, from H. G. Wells (a family friend) to J. B. Priestley (Time and the Conways) and even the great astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, who perhaps should have known better. This is a facsimile edition published by the Library of the Serialist International, for which this post will shortly be the only Google hit! I think it's a local print-on-demand production; even though I doubt it has much aviation content I couldn't very well pass it up when I saw in the university bookshop.
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Dunne did rack up a notable aeronautical first though. You've seen a replica of Australia's first military aeroplane; a Burgess Dunne was the Canadian military's first, and the RCAF Museum at Trenton, Ontario, has a replica on show. When I saw it they had just the fuselage displayed.
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It's almost like, and I'm just throwing this out there, the first guys to go up in untested, homebuilt flying machines were a bit nuts. Or that they had hit their heads in some kind of accident at some point.
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JDK:
Thanks, I didn't know that. According to Wikipedia he also helped with the initial design of the Westland-Hill Pterodactyl in the 1920s, which I also didn't know.
Erik:
A fair point -- but on the other hand your Wrights, Bleriots, Santos-Dumonts and Grahame-Whites didn't seem to drift into weird science. He seems to have been one out of the box.
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