Scamehorn covers such topics as amateur pilots, aviation contests and meets, the development of airmail, military aeronautics, commercial air transport, the expansion of airports, flyers and flying achievements, and state and federal regulation of aeronautics. He also traces national and international aviation progress from the free balloon to the dirigible. He then describes aeronautical activities and experiments by such people as Octave Chanute, Glenn Curtiss, Thomas Scott Baldwin, Otto Lilienthal, Samuel Pierpont Langley, and others that lent support to the Wrights' flight at Kitty Hawk.

Of interest to both armchair aviation enthusiasts and professionals, Balloons to Jets illustrates the evolution of commercial aviation from its origins with the military and the itinerant flyer to Charles Lindbergh's successful transatlantic trip in 1927 and the subsequent explosion in public interest in flight. This reprint features a new foreword by Gene Abney, the former director of the Illinois Department of Aeronautics.