Reviews for Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

The average rating for Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-27 00:00:00 Tony Gibson I giggled so much reading this book that my coffee shop neighbor turned to me and demanded to know how a book clearly full of dry chemistry discussion could be so funny. The answer is easy to broadly furnish: when a motley gaggle of somewhat underfunded chemists are asked to find, somewhere on the frontiers of chemistry, substances that will, among other things, ignite upon contact and yet not be too explodey otherwise or burn through their containers, and a writer and chemist of the calibre of John D Clark decides to personally document the early days of such a search, hilarity is bound to ensue. It is somewhat harder to explain how hordes of bats and the smell of skunks figure into the story, nor how the wholesale destruction of test equipment, limbs, and the occasional warehouse add humor. By the end of Ignition!, one should not be surprised to find a bundle of laughs even in a dry explanation of how yet another ill-advised exotic chemical freezes too soon to be useful. Because by the end of the book, even for someone such as myself whose memory of Chemistry 101 is about as fresh as a tank of sludgy RFNA, the reader will have acquired some kind of the knowledge and sense these applied science heroes learned the hard way about rocket propellants, and likely some of same looney mentality towards horrifyingly unstable sounding compounds: "tetranitromethane? That's a terrible idea. Let's burn it and see what happens!" For rocket history and chemistry enthusiasts, I have no reservations recommending this book. For everyone else, you may still find enjoyment out of it by skimming the drier sections on details like optimum exhaust products and looking for the parts that go bang. In fact, the only flaw to the whole book, at least in the 2017 reprinting that I now own, is the unfortunate presence of perhaps three-dozen errors in the text ranging from the trivial (some missed or extraneous spaces) to the typographically minor ("mulecule") to the more-problematic (many strangely missing chemical terms in the explanatory prose following some of the reaction equations) to the untenable (one diagram is missing altogether, while one or two of the structural diagrams and reaction equations appear to be entirely incorrect; at one point Boron becomes Bismuth, a result that would surely have been quite spectacular). Ultimately, though, for the chemistry enthusiasts these errors are relatively straightforward to deduce around, and for everyone else they hardly matter anyway.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-29 00:00:00 Jeff Harris Informal is the right way to describe this book. The author basically gets us out for a drink and starts recounting about what he and his colleagues were up to in 50s and 60s. And with conversations between chemists like these: “Joe? You know that stuff you sent me to test for thermal stability? Well, first, it hasn’t got any. Second, you owe me a new bomb, a new Wianco pickup, a new stirrer, and maybe a few more things I’ll think of later. And third (crescendo and fortissimo) you’ll have a couple of flunkies up here within fifteen minutes to clean up this (—bleep—) mess or I’ll be down there with a rusty hacksaw blade. . . .” I specified the anatomical use to which the saw blade would be put. End of conversation. You knew just how crazy it could get. Now because this is a history of rocket propellants, the book can get technical at times, but nothing that can impede a 21st century reader who knows how to use the Wikipedia. Hell just an introduction by Isaac Asimov, whom the author knew personally was an excellent incentive to read this book.