Word: glider
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first raised enthusiasm for his work -- than almost anything that has been put on view in the past quarter-century. In his later years (he died in 1976) Calder seemed dull and overexposed. Nobody could love and only a hurricane could budge the red mobile that hangs, like a glider beefed up to the size of a DC-3, from the roof of the East Building of Washington's National Gallery of Art. Calder's genius in the '20s and '30s was for making extraordinarily delicate and literally "wiry" sculptures that danced at a breath. However close...
...solution, in retrospect, was simple. "If you start with a hang-glider- size plane and triple its size up to a 90-ft. wingspan while keeping its weight the same," MacCready explains, "the power needed to fly it goes down by a factor of three" -- to only about 0.4 horsepower, in fact, which a trained cyclist can generate for many minutes at a time...
...wingspan of 96 ft., it weighed only 55 lbs., and MacCready's two older sons, Parker and Tyler, were soon flying it for short distances, rising a few feet above the ground. After another ten months and many crashes and revisions, Bryan Allen, a bicycle racer and hang-glider pilot, successfully flew the Condor around the Kremer course, ensuring MacCready's place in history...
...flying lessons and soloing at 16. He studied mechanical engineering at Yale, enrolled in the Navy during World War II and took fighter-pilot training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Returning to Yale, he switched his major to physics and with a few friends bought an Army surplus glider. Soon he was totally absorbed in soaring, which he continued while earning his master's & degree in physics and a doctorate in aeronautics at California Institute of Technology...
...range to a then record 29,500-ft. altitude. After graduation, he went on to become the first American to win the International Soaring Championship, at St. Yan, France in 1956. While soaring, and daydreaming, he also conceived the MacCready speed ring, a simple indicator now universally used by glider pilots to determine the optimum speed they should use in flying between thermals, or updrafts...