Victor Appleton 3 hr 9 min read

When fire menaces the countryside, boy inventor Tom Swift builds an aerial fire-fighting machine to battle the blaze from above, and to foil the enemies who dog his every move.

Victor Appleton's 1921 novel is a rousing entry in the beloved Tom Swift juvenile series. Fast, wholesome, inventive. Read it for a classic boys' invention-adventure, Tom's newest marvelous machine, plucky heroics, and plenty of villainy, in the brisk, optimistic style that made Tom Swift a fixture of early-twentieth-century American juvenile fiction and a byword for young ingenuity.

In its time

Published in 1921, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

3 hr 9 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).