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 American 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. The house
they lived in had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but there were
books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father, and they never
stopped reading.
When they worked together, no problem seemed to
be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such
mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a
public high school education, little money and no contacts in high
places, never stopped them in their “mission” to take to the air.
Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took
off in one of their contrivances, they risked being killed.
