Jane’s, The Greatest Aircraft Reference Book of All Time

     Born on August 6, 1865, in Richmond, Surrey, England, and eventually to become the prescient, patron saint of aircraft and military ship identification, John Frederick Thomas Jane started life as the intellectually gifted son of a Devonshire clergyman. Jane’s great imagination, stellar memory, and most notably, his superb intellectual skills became the hallmarks of what soon would become an extraordinary life. 
     Jane fathered a plethora of aircraft, ship, and miscellaneous other books that would set precedent for all time. Today, these world-famous tomes sustain his memory and serve as primary specification and reference resources for everyone from the casual airplane and military ship buff to the national intelligence agencies of virtually all of the world’s military services and governments. 
Jane’s brilliance first came to the fore early in his life. Among the many childhood signs, he created – while playing with friends and undertaking imaginary sea battles on a pond near his Surrey home – a unique visual signal system that permitted silent communication between participating “combatants.” The system proved so sensible and intuitive, the British Royal Navy later adopted it for use during full-scale ocean maneuvers.
     Jane also proved a gifted chemist, albeit with a primary interest in the more aggressive side of the science"¦explosives. After several destructive, but non-injurious experiments, one of his instructors at Exeter school, where he was enrolled as a student, noted "He can expect to go a long way"¦in one direction or another."
     By the time he was a teenager, Jane had become an exceptional warship artist. The quality of his work was in fact considered among the best of its era. As the drawings accumulated, so was planted the seed for his first literary work"¦a proposed book entitled, Ironclads of the World. By the late 1880s, his reputation as a 
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