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A beguiling tale of how a rather ordinary pair of brothers invented the first successful airplane and thereby changed history. A wonderfully told story with a lavish picture gallery that I think most readers could appreciate. It leaves you with the illusion that if you have enough persistence you might achieve personal ambitions of your own that could prove important. Yet they have some combination of the “right stuff�� at the right time and the right place that appears to be quite special and not easily replicated. McCullough does a great job in laying out these qualities and circumstances and conveys the wonder and magic that lies between the ingredients of a recipe and the kind of creation achieved by a master chef.

The setting of the Wrights�� origin is the industrial town of Dayton, Ohio, at the turn of the 20th century, which is blessed with a congenial combination of working and middle class families. Wilbur is 4 years older than Orville, but they are inseparable. Their father is a Protestant minister who takes over the management and editing of a national newsletter of the denomination. Their mother dies when they are young, leaving their older sister Kathleen to run the household. The family environment was very supportive of the brothers to fulfill whatever life they might seek. Calvinist moral principles of hard work, humility, and modesty prevailed, but strong expectations about religious practice were not enforced. Wilbur was accomplished in math and science in high school and might have gone to Yale if he hadn’t gotten laid up for a long time by a hockey injury. Orville was more playful and less studious, but he had ambition enough to start a local newspaper after high school. When that failed, he and Orville start a bicycle repair shop which advances to a small production operation. Kathleen goes to Oberlin and takes a position as a high school Latin teacher after she returns to the household.


Orville and Wilbur, inseparable as twins

Wilbur plants the seeds of their journey by sending away to the Smithsonian Institute for literature and resources about the science of flying and history of attempts at human flight. He was always fascinated by nature and curious about the methods by which birds achieve that capability. Their new hobby becomes fooling around making kites and gliders just for fun. Orville is engineer enough to conceive of a mechanism to change the shape of the wings and thus control lift. He seeks a setting where they have steady winds and a flat place without trees for safe testing of their evolving glider models. That’s how they ended up setting up a summer camp at Kitty Hawk on a sandy island of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Their limited financial resources and the challenges of weather, mosquitoes, and remoteness of the setting called for much sacrifice to attend to their obsession. Only a few members of the remote fishing community witnessed their early successes with gliders in 1990 and 1901. Orville’s correspondence with another enthusiast, Octave Chanute, a civil engineer in Michigan successful in hang-glider innovations, led to an invitation to give a presentation of their glider work at an engineering society in Chicago, which was the first step to outside knowledge of what they were beginning to achieve.

The instabilities in control their craft made Orville lament that they were 1,000 years from safe controlled flight. Their designs were hampered by inaccuracies in the equations to predict lift and drag. Orville led extensive efforts back in Ohio to use a homemade wind tunnel to make measures for various wing shapes, which led to better wing designs. With the added invention of the first moveable vertical rudder they achieved controlled glider flight (i.e. with turns and landings) in 1902, and, in 1903, with the addition of a motor and primitive props they accomplished the first well controlled flight of fixed-wing motorized airplane. Lateral roll was controlled by wing-warping, pitch (up and down motion) by a forward elevator, yaw (side to side)by the rear rudder. That sounds so fast, but it belies the thousands of launches they made, numerous failures and modifications, and occasional disastrous and costly crashes. They lucked out in having access to a gifted mechanic in their bicycle shop, Charlie Taylor, who devised and machined a lightweight gasoline engine to power their craft.


Controlled glider flights like this one by Wilbur at Kitty Hawk in 1902 represented the big breakthrough in airplane development. I am impressed with the craft's elegant design.

Somehow they took a licking and kept on ticking. Their particular teamwork in thinking seems to have been critical for their successful problem solving, the way they challenged each other, thrashed out positions in argument, then ended up persuading each other to move toward alternative viewpoints. The special skills they developed as pilots was almost as important as the technology for their long range success. That the two remained bachelors, a mystery in itself, contributed to their long range focus. Media coverage was minor, and the world at large remained ignorant of the milestones they made. Their 1903 patent application was rejected. McCullough provides tantalizing clues to their amazing perseverance:

What the two had in common above all was a unity of purpose and unyielding determination. They had set themselves on a “mission.��

“The strongest impression on gets of Wilbur Wright,�� an old schoolmate said, “is of a man who lives largely in a world on his own.��

Wilbur also, it was agreed, had “unusual presence��, and remained imperturbable under almost any circumstance, “never rattled,�� his father was proud to say.

All this is only half the story. McCullough’s narrative makes an equally fascinating tale out of the years of effort it took the Wright brothers to create and demonstrate practical models, garner widespread appreciation and understanding of their accomplishment, and attract financing for commercial production. In a field outside Dayton, accessible by trolley car, they devised a derrick catapault and tested models that could accommodate a sitting pilot instead a supine one, turn in good control, and stay aloft as long as fuel permitted. Lots of people came to witness their feats, but what little local media coverage they got was distorted, and their success was disbelieved by the authorities that counted. The first accurate accounts were made by a beekeeper they befriended in his column in “Gleanings in Bee Culture.�� Meanwhile, other aviation pioneers had some disastrous failures, including a killing crash by a French glider innovator and well publicized crash of an expensive, publicly funded attempt by the Smithsonian Institute on the Potomac River.

The Wright’s tried and failed to get the U.S. Department of War interested in a demonstration and sale but succeeded with government and private industry representatives in France. McCullough creates a great perspective for abstemious Wilbur travelling in style to France by a Cunard line ship, a stay at a first class hotel in Paris, and presentation of a convincing business case to investors and government military representatives. Though shy and prone to avoid public speaking, he was amazing in his articulateness and capabilities in expressing himself in writing. Money, power, and class did not impress him as much as competence and honesty. A hefty offer of a sale was rendered pending successful demonstration that met certain performance standards. However, the official aviation club snubbed him and cast doubt and insults in the media.

Orville remains quite a cipher as state of mind and feelings in this period can only be read between the lines in his terse letters home. McCullough, who has written another book about the charms of Paris, spends some time reflecting on his choices for leisure activities while there. Instead of monuments, festivals, night clubs, it is the gardens, opera, church architecture, and art museums which he most appreciated. A bit of a surprise to some for this provincial small businessman with a high-school education. He succeeds in securing a racetrack in Le Mans for a demonstration site, but he has to do a lot of engineering to repair and replace the plane after it arrives terribly damaged in its shipment. The demonstration amazed thousands and garnered full accolades from world media and the doubtful community of aviation peers and competitors. Orville initiated a parallel process of demonstrations at Ft. Myers, Virginia. Despite overall success, a prop failure led to a terrible crash which crippled him and killed a lieutenant assigned as passenger on the flight.

After the family recovered from the disaster, more demonstrations in France, England, and Germany were pursued, a patent was awarded in 1906, and many lucrative contracts ensued. Ideas for use of planes grew fast, with postal delivery and military reconnaissance among the first. The dream of humans conquering the flight of birds was fulfilled, and the harnessing of air travel for innumerable benefits was at hand. An uplifting and human story told well. Kind of makes one proud to be human and to appreciate the American capacity for ingenuity.