Wright Brothers soar again in new bio

Few Americans have been as justly celebrated as Wilbur and Orville Wright, the two Dayton, Ohio, bicycle makers who made the first powered flight on the sands of Kitty Hawk, N.C., in December 1903. Many had tried to fly but failed. The Wright Brothers soared, at least for a few seconds, their way into history.

And few historians have captured the essence of America — its rise from an agrarian nation to the world's dominant power — like David McCullough. From the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the digging of the Panama Canal, the presidencies of John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman, McCullough has defined American icons and revealed new dimensions to stories that long seemed exhausted.

Now, in The Wright Brothers (*** out of four), McCullough has turned his focus to Wilbur and Orville, as well as their lesser-known sister, Katharine, and their invention of powered flight. With McCullough, their story gets iconic treatment, which they mostly deserve. Their discovery was legitimate, despite the efforts of scoundrels and con men of the time who claimed they had beaten the brothers into the air.

McCullough has masterfully used his access to the Wright Brothers' papers at the Library of Congress, pulling telling details and weaving them into a story of inspiration, dedication and sometimes frustration.

The Wright Brothers lacks the heft of McCullough's 1992 biography Truman, or of John Adams, McCullough's detailed revival of the second president's life and times. By comparison, this is a relatively simple story of how the brothers drew their inspiration and turned it into reality. It started with a letter from Wilbur to the Smithsonian Institution on May 30, 1899.

"Wilbur seated himself at Katharine's small, slant-top desk in the front parlor to write what would be one of the most important letters of his life," McCullough writes. "Indeed, given all it set in motion, it was one of the most important letters in history."

In it, Wilbur asked for books and pamphlets about aviation, and of particular value were those of French-born engineer Octave Chanute and Samuel Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian. Once they arrived, the brothers pored over the details to draw inspiration for their own invention.

It's easy to forget that the world had few experts in aviation before the brothers made their first flights. Aside from Chanute, Langley and German glider expert Otto Lilienthal, who died in a crash of one of his creations, no one had come close to flight. The brothers were making things up as they went along; they set the standard for those who followed.

And in this age of immediate media coverage, it's remarkable that even after the first flights, the brothers received almost no press attention. The first reports were wrong or overblown. The thought that anyone could fly seemed inconceivable to most journalists, and their accomplishments were mostly ignored until two or three years after they happened.

It would take Amos Root, the editor of a rural Ohio publication about bees, to truly break the news.

"It was to be he, the Ohio bee man, who would recognize as no one yet had the genius of the Wrights and the full importance of their flying machine," McCullough writes. "He would describe in detail what he saw happen at Huffman Prairie (a 1904 flight, near their home in Dayton), and further, he would describe it accurately. It was not the Dayton papers that finally broke the story — or the Chicago Tribune or The New York Times or Scientific American — but Amos Root's own Gleanings in Bee Culture."

All of this is told by McCullough is his trademark graceful style and with a justified appreciation of what the Wright Brothers did and why it matters.

However, he sometimes lacks a critical appreciation for their failures, such as what author Lawrence Goldstone showed in last year's Birdmen, his account of the pioneers of aviation. In Goldstone's persuasive portrayal, Wilbur Wright's obsession with protecting his patents often kept him from innovating. By the end of the first decade of the 1900s, Wilbur had let his fixation with fellow aviator Glenn Curtiss get the better of him. The brothers lost their chance to improve their invention, and they had lost their competitive edge by Wilbur's death in 1912.

McCullough gives this scant attention, writing only that the Wrights eventually prevailed in nine patent infringement suits. It's this omission that stands out as a flaw in what is otherwise an elegant, sweeping look at the two Americans who went where no others had gone before and whose work helped create a national excellence in aviation that continues today.

The Wright Brothers

By David McCullough

Simon & Schuster, 262 pp.

3 stars out of four