“Look here, boys,” said the Bishop, something concealed in his hands. The creation of a French experimenter of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Pénaud, it was little more than a stick with twin propellers and twisted rubber bands, and probably cost 50 cents. He felt predestined to study flight, he said, and related a childhood memory of a kite flying down onto his cradle.Īccording to brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, it began for them with a toy from France, a small helicopter brought home by their father, Bishop Milton Wright, a great believer in the educational value of toys. And starting about 1490, Leonardo da Vinci made the most serious studies. Learned monks conceived schemes on paper. Others devised wings of their own design and jumped from rooftops and towers-some to their deaths-in Constantinople, Nuremberg, Perugia. One savant in Spain in the year 875 is known to have covered himself with feathers in the attempt. Excerptįrom ancient times and into the Middle Ages, man had dreamed of taking to the sky, of soaring into the blue like the birds. Essential reading, this is “a story of timeless importance, told with uncommon empathy and fluency…about what might be the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished… The Wright Brothers soars” ( The New York Times Book Review).
He draws on the extensive Wright family papers to profile not only the brothers but their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them. In this “enjoyable, fast-paced tale” ( The Economist), master historian David McCullough “shows as never before how two Ohio boys from a remarkable family taught the world to fly” ( The Washington Post) and “captures the marvel of what the Wrights accomplished” ( The Wall Street Journal). Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off, they risked being killed. That they had no more than a public high school education and little money never stopped them in their mission to take to the air. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Orville and Wilbur Wright were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity. But it would take the world some time to believe that the age of flight had begun, with the first powered machine carrying a pilot. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers-bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio-changed history.
The #1 New York Times bestseller from David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize-the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly-Wilbur and Orville Wright.
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