McCullough wisely focuses on the 15 years between the brothers’ “mission” and Wilbur’s sudden death in 1912. And his stories of the staid Wilbur baffling Parisians by refusing to smoke, drink or chase women keep “The Wright Brothers” from the “crash and burn” all too common in biographies. The loving detail McCullough brings to Ohio in the 1890s is mirrored in his portrait of Paris in the Belle Epoque. Still, no one in America seemed to care, so Wilbur went to Europe to bargain with eager Brits, Germans and French. Instead of being hailed as heroes, the Wrights faced two years of hard-nosed skepticism about their airplane’s “fabled performances.” Never concerned with fame, they labored on until they could fly for miles above the fields outside Dayton.

17, 1903: The Wrights’ first flight stretched just 112 feet, shorter than the wingspan of a 747. In three chapters at the brink of takeoff, McCullough provides just the right mix of engineering, emotive letters home and airborne moments.ĭec. Though locals in Kitty Hawk considered the brothers “poor nuts,” none could deny they were “two of the workingest boys” anyone had met.

And once McCullough follows them to the windswept Outer Banks of North Carolina, “The Wright Brothers” takes flight.

Leaving behind bikes to build gliders, the brothers soon outpaced competitors in England, France and at the Smithsonian Institution. With his ear for dialect and eye for detail, McCullough puts the Wrights in historical context, flushed out by vivid portraits of their loyal father and sister. Wilbur was a frenetic dreamer, living “in a world of his own,” a world that might have taken him to Yale if not for a grim hockey injury that led to three housebound years and the opening of a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Orville, younger by four years, was shy, moody and mechanical. McCullough does a novelistic job in distinguishing the brothers. no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own.” Yet the revolution the brothers made was honored by Neil Armstrong, who, within a human lifetime of their first flight, carried a piece of their plane to the moon. They “had no college education, no formal technical training. As McCullough makes clear, the Wright brothers were a rare blend of Midwestern mettle, lofty vision and homegrown know-how. What they did - the first powered flight with a controlled turn and landing - was a product of persistence as much as genius. To get to and from their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from Dayton … a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than a half mile. They had endured violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough