Culture | Early flight

Heavens above

Those magnificent men in their flying machines

Here’s one they made earlier

The Wright Brothers. By David McCullough. Simon & Schuster; 320 pages; $30.

THE journey from nutter to genius can be short. For Wilbur and Orville Wright, inventors of the aeroplane, it took just 12 seconds. In 1903 their 605-pound (274-kilo) contraption, dubbed the “Flyer”, lifted off the sand dunes of North Carolina and stayed aloft just long enough to make history. Elated, the brothers quickly learned to go farther, higher and faster.

The Wrights broke through against great odds, as David McCullough recounts in this enjoyable, fast-paced tale. Neither had any formal engineering training. They ran a bicycle shop in Ohio and decided to build an aeroplane after reading up on gliders. Having studied books and birds, they constructed first a glider, then a motor-powered craft, to test in the windy Carolina dunes. They worked with deliberation, taking time to master the basics of flying (such as how the wind works) and spurning pointless risk. Proceeds from the bike shop funded their efforts.

Scepticism was intense. Plenty of people dismissed the notion that man could fly at all. Just a handful watched the historic first flight, which Orville, the pilot, described as “an uncertain, wavy, creeping sort of a flight at best”. An unfortunate element of this tale was the apathy of the American government, which poured money into a different, failing machine and batted away the Wrights’ overtures. (As a result, the brothers lost valuable time between 1905 and 1908 as they scurried to sell their invention elsewhere.) Even the media paid little heed. When the Wrights tested a plane in their Ohio hometown of Dayton, after their successful efforts in North Carolina, the Dayton Daily News ignored the story.

Eventually, though, they got their due. Europeans were keen, even as the Americans shrugged. So the brothers and their helpers packed off their craft to France, where Wilbur eventually performed a test flight lasting close to two minutes in 1908 and won over the doubters. “He is not a bluffer,” one Frenchman declared. The French loved Wilbur’s modesty and unpretentiousness, and the way he carefully inspected every wire and strut on his aeroplane. Wilbur feared to let anyone touch the machine, and at one point slept in a shed to guard it.

This sentimental approach is at the heart of the book. “The Wright Brothers” lacks the heft of Mr McCullough’s two Pulitzer prize-winning works, on the American presidents John Adams and Harry Truman. He skims past the complexities in the service of a fun, fast ride. Why did Orville, who outlived his brother by decades, shun his sister Katharine (who had nursed him back after a nasty aeroplane accident) after she married? Why did the aviation field develop so quickly in the early 1900s, and why was France so especially keen to be involved? Also mentioned only briefly is the legacy of the Wright brothers’ aeroplane company. It lives on as the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, an industrial technology specialist, though its aircraft-making heyday was many decades ago.

Perhaps the Wright brothers’ most significant achievement was that neither died in flight. Recognising the danger, Wilbur and Orville never flew together until 1910, years after their debut, in the interest of preserving one brother’s life. They had a few crashes, one of which killed a passenger. But by 1909 Wilbur was confidently piloting a craft around the Statue of Liberty (albeit with a canoe underneath lest he fell into the water), and Orville soared above 2,700 feet (820 metres) in 1910 . The first Flyer and its successors excelled because the brothers were so careful. These are fine things to daydream about next time you take to the skies. For aeroplane reading, “The Wright Brothers” is hard to beat.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Heavens above"

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