The Wright Brothers
The Dramatic Story-Behind-the-Story
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The incredible true story of the origin of human flight, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough.
On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot.
Who were these men and how was it that they achieved what they did?
David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly human story of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing.
In this thrilling book, McCullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers' story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mechanical invention is close to a religious calling in this reverent biography of the pioneers of heavier-than-air flight. Pulitzer-winning historian McCullough (Truman) sees something exalted in the two bicycle mechanics and lifelong bachelors who lived with their sister and clergyman father in Dayton, Ohio. He finds them especially Wilbur, the elder brother to be cultured men with a steady drive and quiet charisma, not mere eccentrics. McCullough follows their monkish devotion to the goal of human flight, recounting their painstaking experiments in a homemade wind tunnel, their countless wrong turns and wrecked models, and their long stints roughing it on the desolate, buggy shore at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Thanks largely to their own caginess, the brothers endured years of doubt and ridicule while they improved their flyer. McCullough also describes the fame and adulation that the brothers received after public demonstrations in France and Washington, D.C., in 1908 cemented their claims. His evident admiration for the Wrights leads him to soft-pedal their crasser side, like their epic patent lawsuits, which stymied American aviation for years. Still, McCullough's usual warm, evocative prose makes for an absorbing narrative; he conveys both the drama of the birth of flight and the homespun genius of America's golden age of innovation. Photos.
Customer Reviews
The Wright Brothers
A great book about determination and innovation.
It would have been helpful to have more information about the failure of the American motor industry to supply a motor to power the plane. That the Wrights had to build their own motors is huge condemnation of The American manufacturing industry. Also, assuming spark plugs were available, it seem very strange that the Wrights persisted with an internal make and break spark.
Anyway.a very readable history of amazing endeavour in the face of doubters and ignorance.
Jon kirkwood