The Wright Brothers
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Average rating4.1
Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story of the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly. On a winter day in 1903, on the remote Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, changed history. The age of flight had begun with the first heavier-than-air powered machine carrying a pilot. Far more than a couple of Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, the Wright brothers were men of exceptional ability, unyielding determination, and far-ranging intellectual interest and curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. They grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing, but with books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father. And they never stopped learning. Nor did their high-spirited, devoted sister, Katharine, who played a far more important role in their endeavors than has been generally understood. When the brothers worked together, no problem seemed insurmountable. Wilbur, the older of the two, was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few people had ever seen. Nothing stopped them in their "mission," not failures, not ridicule, not even the reality that every time they took off in one of their experimental contrivances, they risked being killed. In this thrilling book master historian David McCullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence, to tell the human side of a profoundly American story. - Jacket flap.
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I am not normally a reader of non-fiction let alone historical near-biographical non-fiction. Having said that, this was an extremely interesting book written about the Wright brothers. It was recommended to me by a coworker who knew nothing about my reading habits but he talked it up so much that I had to give it a try and I was not disappointed.
Reading about the early 1900s really puts into perspective the differences in attitudes and the differences in how we react to new inventions; new technologies. Its easy to become jaded and apathetic about the insane things that come out these days. Reading about the excitement and wonder of watching a plane fly really puts those things into perspective.
Interestingly, I went from reading this book to Mary Roach's Packing for Mars. David McCullough's style, of course, is more descriptive from a historian's point of view. He dwells mostly on the period when the Wright Brothers worked tirelessly to invent their contraption that led to human flight.
He does offer painstaking details in documenting their efforts at developing their invention but Wright brothers didn't accord him much drama to get excited about. Perhaps that's a good thing but the Kitty Hawk experiments were vividly described and perhaps were the best part of the book; after which it starts to lag. I preferred McCullough's John Adams but perhaps that was the nature of the time period he was writing about. Getting excited by brothers who undoubtedly worked hard and by the dint of their labor and ingenuity gave us the greatest invention of all perhaps wasn't meant to be.
Overall, I would still recommend this book just so you can learn more about the process of invention which mostly isn't about one ‘Eureka' moment but hours of continually slaving over and perfecting your invention to solve one tiny problem. Rest may or may not fall in place. All said and done, they were still the Wright stuff!
I didn't know much about the Wright Brothers before I read this David McCullough book. I didn't know the brothers were close. I didn't know the brothers never married. I didn't know that they lived with their sister and their father until they died. I didn't know that the brothers had no formal education past high school. I didn't know that the brothers learned many of the concepts they used in their invention of the airplane from their bicycle shop.
I learned a lot about the Wright Brothers from this great book.
A song sticks in my head from a childhood Golden record I had...”The Wright Brothers were right....”
