“Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants” was written by John D. Clark and published by Rutgers University in 1972. It is a classic text on the subject… a text which has not been reprinted since except by some print-on-demand types. If you find a copy of this book for less than several hundred dollars, you’ve lucked out. It’s a good read, both informative and entertaining.
Fortunately, someone went to the bother of scanning the whole thing and posting it as a PDF. I’m honestly unclear about the copyright implications, if any… but the scan has been openly and freely available for some years, so…
http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
Hmmm. It seems that I’ve completely flaked out on the PDF reviews for quite a while. And nobody said anything. Makes me wonder if maybe there’s just no interest in these? Shrug, oh well, moving on…
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Cool! Thanks! I’ll actually read this.
Paul
I’ve had this one for years and read it many times. Very entertaining. Now if I could only find the similar PDF I have floating around by an engineer who was putting together something similar but had only got to the “collection of notes” stage. 🙁
There are a *lot* of those sort of things. I’ve got boxes of ’em, put together by engineers over the last fifty years trying to boil down various aspects of rocketry into something handbook sized. Most very dry and technical. Not too often you see humor. I tried that in my work… generally not exactly to great acclaim.