What do you think?
Rate this book
More With Less: Paul MacCready and the Dream of Efficient Flight
In the 1970s a group of California visionaries developed an interest in lightweight, low-powered machines. Scientist and engineer, Paul MacCready, pulled them together to build a plane capable of winning a long-standing prize for human powered flight. Their other successes included a man-powered plane, a solar powered plane, a solar-powered car, an 18-foot flapping wing flying replica of a pterodactyl for a Smithsonian-sponsored IMAX film, and a high-altitude unmanned solar airplane that can perform the same functions as orbiting satellites. Paul Ciotti tells the story of the individuals who made up this group, but ultimately More with Less is about Paul MacCready himself, an American dreamer whose tough minded inventiveness altered our scientific skyline.
251 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2002
1 person is currently reading
21 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 25, 2025
A love letter to efficiency using the life and accomplishments of aeronautical engineer / genius / dreamer Paul MacCready as its vehicle. This book encourages one to look to nature for inspiration and start from first principles in order to “do more with less” while solving hard engineering problems.
An interesting book with a cast of eclectic characters united by the common goal to solve human powered flight and other tough challenges. Practical nuggets throughout, and fun to read
“At a certain level, engineering is aesthetically satisfying to the soul”
An interesting book with a cast of eclectic characters united by the common goal to solve human powered flight and other tough challenges. Practical nuggets throughout, and fun to read
“At a certain level, engineering is aesthetically satisfying to the soul”
February 13, 2016
A good biopic of an interesting visionary who pursued dreams not often highly valued in his own irascible way. I appreciate the way Ciotti did the research to make everyone related to MacCready an interesting character, interspersing an appreciation for technical detail with hippies living out of vans, nerds building models in their basements, and companies throwing the world of resources at winning races. The story of the Gossamer Condor was perhaps the most touching.
Choice excerpts:
"When MacCready talked about 'mother nature, the engineer', he meant it quite literally...'Through evolution birds have achieved solutions to fluid mechanics questions we haven't even asked yet.'...
With global positioning satellites a pilot can now accurately determine his place anywhere on the planet, but for eons migrating birds have been flying thousands of miles to specific destinations using the sun and stars, sky polarization, and magnetic fields. 'A homing bird can be taken away from its home in a black box, released and will come back to where it started', says MacCready. A monarch butterfly, hatched in the United States and three generations removed from an ancestor that migrated from Mexico, carries enough genetic information in its 'tiny' brain to find its way back to its winter quarters in a specific tree in Mexico." (215)
"In many ways educators are like generals in that they are always fighting the last war, but nowadays, argues MacCready, the world is changing too fast. 'Whatever you were trained in, it's the wrong field twenty years from now.' What the schools should be teaching is not what is needed to succeed in school, but what is needed to succeed in life: 'motivation, breadth, rationality, questioning, creativity, considering consequences and goals, personal interaction, integrity, respect, empathy, optimism, excitement, enjoyment, even edging toward wisdom--in other words, effectiveness, passion, and satisfaction in life.' " (207)
"Having spent my college education half in humanities and half in engineering, I was used to engineers being regarded as much less interesting than lawyers, activists, artists, or college professors. It's hard to deny that many engineers, frankly, are dull, and even the best of them may find it difficult to compete socially with lawyers or businessmen. Success in those professions requires a certain level of dominance, self-assurance, and people skills, but little in the way of fidelity to known facts...Engineers, in contrast, are constrained by physical reality, the laws of nature and demonstrable facts. When they are wrong, there really are observable consequences: wings fall off, transformers explode, buildings collapse. Unlike lawyers, an engineer can't turn a losing issue around with a single clever quip--'If [the glove] doesn't fit, you must acquit.' By virtue of constantly having to contend with physical facts, engineers subscribe to what Paul MacCready called 'a philosophy of creative reality.' Instead of relying on 'gods, spirits, and the supernatural,' they have to operate in 'the real material world.'" (185)
"As with everything else, getting around on purely human power can be taken to extremes. A few years ago, as I drove back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas at 80 mph in air-conditioned comfort, sipping a cold can of orange soda and listening to Vivaldi, I passed a line of cyclists wearing high-visibility Day-Glo orange vests, riding on the shoulder with their overstuffed paniers, pedaling slowly through a vast and empty sun-baked landscape, buffeted by passing cars, gasping from the heat, physical exhaustion and tailpipe emissions.
It didn't make sense. A hundred years ago people set off on foot on strenuous month-long safaris to the heart of Africa not because they enjoyed discomfort, danger, and disease, but because it was the only way to get there. It used to be that if you wanted to reach a mountaintop, you had to claw your way up hand over hand at great effort and risk. Nowadays, one's elderly grandmother could fly quickly and safely to the same peak in a helicopter and be sitting in a rocker on a wool rug sipping tea when you painfully hauled yourself up the final precipice. In such a situation, doing something the hardest way possible doesn't seem heroic. It feels deliberately perverse, a step backward, a neo-Luddite fantasy of returning to some golden pre-industrial age.
But at the same time, using powerful machines to whisk us anywhere with little personal effort or involvement doesn't seem quite right either. For a specifics which has come so far and done so much with walking, over-reliance on internal combustion engines is a bit like cheating. It puts people with no strength, courage, determination, or skill on the same level as adventurers for whom in past ages we had the greatest admiration and respect. In the same way that absolute political power corrupts absolutely, so does power of technology."(162)
Choice excerpts:
"When MacCready talked about 'mother nature, the engineer', he meant it quite literally...'Through evolution birds have achieved solutions to fluid mechanics questions we haven't even asked yet.'...
With global positioning satellites a pilot can now accurately determine his place anywhere on the planet, but for eons migrating birds have been flying thousands of miles to specific destinations using the sun and stars, sky polarization, and magnetic fields. 'A homing bird can be taken away from its home in a black box, released and will come back to where it started', says MacCready. A monarch butterfly, hatched in the United States and three generations removed from an ancestor that migrated from Mexico, carries enough genetic information in its 'tiny' brain to find its way back to its winter quarters in a specific tree in Mexico." (215)
"In many ways educators are like generals in that they are always fighting the last war, but nowadays, argues MacCready, the world is changing too fast. 'Whatever you were trained in, it's the wrong field twenty years from now.' What the schools should be teaching is not what is needed to succeed in school, but what is needed to succeed in life: 'motivation, breadth, rationality, questioning, creativity, considering consequences and goals, personal interaction, integrity, respect, empathy, optimism, excitement, enjoyment, even edging toward wisdom--in other words, effectiveness, passion, and satisfaction in life.' " (207)
"Having spent my college education half in humanities and half in engineering, I was used to engineers being regarded as much less interesting than lawyers, activists, artists, or college professors. It's hard to deny that many engineers, frankly, are dull, and even the best of them may find it difficult to compete socially with lawyers or businessmen. Success in those professions requires a certain level of dominance, self-assurance, and people skills, but little in the way of fidelity to known facts...Engineers, in contrast, are constrained by physical reality, the laws of nature and demonstrable facts. When they are wrong, there really are observable consequences: wings fall off, transformers explode, buildings collapse. Unlike lawyers, an engineer can't turn a losing issue around with a single clever quip--'If [the glove] doesn't fit, you must acquit.' By virtue of constantly having to contend with physical facts, engineers subscribe to what Paul MacCready called 'a philosophy of creative reality.' Instead of relying on 'gods, spirits, and the supernatural,' they have to operate in 'the real material world.'" (185)
"As with everything else, getting around on purely human power can be taken to extremes. A few years ago, as I drove back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas at 80 mph in air-conditioned comfort, sipping a cold can of orange soda and listening to Vivaldi, I passed a line of cyclists wearing high-visibility Day-Glo orange vests, riding on the shoulder with their overstuffed paniers, pedaling slowly through a vast and empty sun-baked landscape, buffeted by passing cars, gasping from the heat, physical exhaustion and tailpipe emissions.
It didn't make sense. A hundred years ago people set off on foot on strenuous month-long safaris to the heart of Africa not because they enjoyed discomfort, danger, and disease, but because it was the only way to get there. It used to be that if you wanted to reach a mountaintop, you had to claw your way up hand over hand at great effort and risk. Nowadays, one's elderly grandmother could fly quickly and safely to the same peak in a helicopter and be sitting in a rocker on a wool rug sipping tea when you painfully hauled yourself up the final precipice. In such a situation, doing something the hardest way possible doesn't seem heroic. It feels deliberately perverse, a step backward, a neo-Luddite fantasy of returning to some golden pre-industrial age.
But at the same time, using powerful machines to whisk us anywhere with little personal effort or involvement doesn't seem quite right either. For a specifics which has come so far and done so much with walking, over-reliance on internal combustion engines is a bit like cheating. It puts people with no strength, courage, determination, or skill on the same level as adventurers for whom in past ages we had the greatest admiration and respect. In the same way that absolute political power corrupts absolutely, so does power of technology."(162)
January 23, 2025
An engaging and entertaining book, about someone I did not know much about but who touched so many areas and projects at the periphery of my awareness. Sometimes I felt the author was a bit awkward, but included a lot of great quotes, interviews, and context from a large cast of characters in MacCready's orbit
I took two lessons from this book on innovation.
First, regarding the man-powered plane, the reason MacCready attributes to other teams failing was that they took the exact same approach as those before them, simply trying to do it better. What MacCready called "digging the hole deeper". They were dogmatic and didn't have the out of the box thinking required to innovate.
Second, McCready credited the solar car win in part to its robust design that could "withstand 40mph winds" which other cars could not. He chose to design for robustness despite a no specific "requirement" saying it was needed. Intuitively and intelligently applying conservatism can be critical in designing a successful vehicle to travel through a rough environment.
Another book I'd recommend to anyone who liked this one is "how to build a spaceship" about the starting of the XPrize and Burt Rutan designing SpaceshipOne.
I took two lessons from this book on innovation.
First, regarding the man-powered plane, the reason MacCready attributes to other teams failing was that they took the exact same approach as those before them, simply trying to do it better. What MacCready called "digging the hole deeper". They were dogmatic and didn't have the out of the box thinking required to innovate.
Second, McCready credited the solar car win in part to its robust design that could "withstand 40mph winds" which other cars could not. He chose to design for robustness despite a no specific "requirement" saying it was needed. Intuitively and intelligently applying conservatism can be critical in designing a successful vehicle to travel through a rough environment.
Another book I'd recommend to anyone who liked this one is "how to build a spaceship" about the starting of the XPrize and Burt Rutan designing SpaceshipOne.
January 14, 2025
I enjoyed this book and the many lessons about thinking simply, getting something that works (it doesn’t matter how it looks!) and persevering through failures. It was interesting to learn more about the concept of sailplanes, gliders, human powered vehicles, and more (pterodactyls?).
There were many stories / side details that didn’t always support the story and were somewhat distracting, but overall this was an enjoyable read.
Favorite quote: “It’s the closest anyone has gotten to realizing man’s age old dream of flying like a bird…making a partnership with the atmosphere instead of breaking it to your will”
There were many stories / side details that didn’t always support the story and were somewhat distracting, but overall this was an enjoyable read.
Favorite quote: “It’s the closest anyone has gotten to realizing man’s age old dream of flying like a bird…making a partnership with the atmosphere instead of breaking it to your will”
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews