As one might expect, The Wright Brothers, is a biography of Wilbur and Orville Wright, those crazy kids from Dayton, Ohio, who invented a flying machine.
As his his custom, David McCullough (The Path Between the Seas and The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris) writes crisply, telling the story without becoming bogged down in the details. He writes objectively, but not without admiration for what Wilbur and Orville accomplished or for the perseverance necessary to accomplish it. If anything, I was surprised at how quickly I read this book, particularly as compared to James Tobin's To Conquer the Air, which mines much of the same material but in a less lively fashion.
McCullough is careful to consider the contributions of others, and particularly of the Wrights' right-hand man, Charlie Taylor. Relegated to the dustbin of history, so to speak, it is Charlie who built much of the Wrights' machines, making their conceptualizations a reality. Or at least speeding them a long. (As a side note, I could not figure out where I had previously read about Charlie Taylor, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, and Louis Blériot. My first reason for starting a blog was a good one: with a few keystrokes, I realized I had read of their exploits - and those of the Wrights - in Tobin's work, as well as in Jim Rasenberger's delightful America, 1908.)
The final verdict: if what you remember about the Wilbur and Orville is limited to their invention of human flight, McCullough's book is an excellent refresher on their early beginnings, entrepreneurial spirit, and mechanical genius. The Wright Brothers is concise, but complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment