Цитаты из книг — James B. Steele

Slowly gathering speed in the face of a blustery wind, the Hercules sliced through the water, then dramatically lifted off. Cruising at seventy feet above the water, the big ship flew for about a mile before Hughes set it down, gently and without incident. The unexpected liftoff caught everyone ashore by surprise. A gasp…

As he grew stronger, Hughes worried that the accident might have made him apprehensive about flying. He need not have. On September 9, photographers snapped pictures of Hughes, sporting a moustache to cover scars on his upper lip, at the controls of his converted B-23 bomber before ascending on his first flight since the…

The plane drifted into a beet field and bounced to a stop. Hughes climbed out unhurt; the racer suffered only minor damage. When he was told that he had set a land-speed record of 352 miles an hour, he coolly surveyed the H-1’s crumpled landing gear and muttered: “It’ll go faster.”

“He knew how to get answers,” recalled Robert W. Rummel, an engineer who worked on the H-1 and later worked closely with Hughes at TWA. “He had a habit which I did not really discover until years later. He would call me up and talk about something like wing efficiency. He would want to know my opinion. I’d tell him. Then…

Making the movie was the first great obsession of Hughes’s life. He had thrown himself into the production with a zeal that excluded all else, and it was not uncommon for him to work twenty-four to thirty-six hours at a stretch. He devoted himself to it with a ruthless determination that frightened even him. “Many times,”…

Abounding in nervous energy, he flitted from one hotbed of mining activity to the next—low-grade silver mining in the Colorado mountains, zinc mining in the wilds of Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and lead mining in rural southwestern Missouri—seeking his fortune “under the surface of the earth.”14 He did not find it,…