Review of First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane (Hardcover)

By Bill Marsano. The centennial of flight has given us a spate of Wrighteous books this year, but few can match this one for expert knowledge and for pleasurable reading. Heppenheimer is an aviation expert and writer who has covered the ground exceedingly well. Most important, he avoids the folkloric view of the Wrights as a couple of plucky, red-cheeked mechanics who somehow kicked an airplane into being for a lark. They were, in fact, a pair of solid and serious young Midwestern businessmen who looked the part: Even in the workshop they customarily wore jacket and tie. They flew with their hats on. Generally they resembled a couple of bankers who are about to turn down a loan application. Beyond that, they were not merely mechanics but natural-born engineers and self-taught scientists who observed, studied, tested--and learned from their mistakes as well as their successes. Most of us have heard the 'story' of the Wright Brothers--this book helps us comprehend the astonishing magnitude of their achievement, which took them less than five years, working part-time and paying their own way.

Heppenheimer brings a lot of color into his story--the Wrights and others are revealed to us as human beings rather than icons--and he goes far afield, too, bringing us the stories of those others who preceded and competed with the Wrights. The result is a nicely rounded saga of man's long struggle to progress from wishes to wings. He also answers a question people often forget to ask: The Wrights produced the first man-carrying powered airplane in 1903; they set the world on its heels when, in 1908, they went to France for their first large-scale public demonstrations (before an extremely skeptical audience)--so how was it that they faded so quickly from the scene? I won't reveal the answer here (though I will suggest that the facts seem to pre-figure the later struggle between the Apple and the PC). And I will strongly urge you to read this book.



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