I just read a fairly interesting book about the British Spitfire fighter plane of World War 2. The war bits were fairly boring, actually, but the development story was all the more interesting. I find it fascinating to read about how aviation engineers in the 1930s experiment and guess their way from the slow unwiedly biplanes of World War 1 and the 1920s to the sleek very fast aircraft of 1940 and beyond. It is a story that also has something tell us about contemporary software development and optimization.