BOOKS
High on Flight's Golden Century
Stand by for the next new media frenzy: The glorification of Orville and Wilbur
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On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright lay down in a homemade airplane, pulled a wire to shunt the machine forward, and slowly rose into the air as his brother Wilbur ran alongside. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered only 120 feet, “but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight,” Orville later wrote. A spectator was more succinct: “Damned if they ain’t flew,” he cried.
A flurry of books, exhibitions, and documentaries now celebrate the centennial of the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. Elizabeth Svoboda and Maia Weinstock survey some of the best.
To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight
James Tobin, Free Press, $28
To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight
In the race to become airborne, a number of better-bankrolled aviators nearly stole the show from the Wright brothers. Among them was Samuel Pierpont Langley, who built a “great aerodrome” with aid from the U.S. War Department. Hoisted by a 207.5-pound steel engine, it plunged into the Potomac River in a test in 1903. Langley’s friend Alexander Graham Bell led a team of engineers that designed a man-carrying kite formed of tetrahedral cells. It flew for seven minutes, then crumpled after being dragged through a lake. The secret of the Wrights’ success, Tobin shows, lay in their insight that flight required a finely balanced craft, rather than a powerful one.
The Wright Sister: Katharine Wright and Her Famous Brothers
Richard Maurer, Roaring Brook Press, $18.95
Katharine Wright gave up a career as a schoolteacher to become a secretary, nurse, promoter, and travel companion to her famous brothers, Orv and Will. Maurer highlights Katharine’s role in the Wright enterprise in this illustrated biography for young adults, written with the aid of thousands of documents from the Wright estate. A newspaper announcement of Katharine’s marriage, at age 52, to fellow Oberlin graduate Harry Haskell, described her as “one of the three members of the Wright family who made the invention of the airplane possible.” Orville was less generous: After Katharine married, he disowned her.
The Wrong Stuff? Attempts at Flight Before [& After] the Wright Brothers
Phil Scott, Hylas Publishing, $24.95
The Wrong Stuff: Attempts at Flight Before (and After) the Wright Brothers
Leonardo da Vinci filled a notebook with 500 sketches of flying machines, but his leg-powered imitation bird wings never lifted humans off the ground. Scott chronicles dozens of similar false starts from the Renaissance to the modern age, profiling such aviators as the Italian Gianni Caproni, whose 1921 flying houseboat reached an altitude of 60 feet before plummeting into Lake Maggiore. Flubbed early attempts don’t rule out future glory, though. As Scott notes, the Wrights’ craft rolled along a runway without rising an inch in its first demonstration for the press.
Writing on Air
David Rothenberg and Wandee J. Pryor, editors; Terra Nova, $29.95
Writing on Air (Terra Nova Book Series)
Air is not only the ether through which planes fly; it is also the breath of life, a habitat, and—in this anthology—inspiration for an eclectic mix of essays, poems, plays, and photographs. Painter and writer Stephen Petroff ponders Maine’s extinct songbirds, journalist Howard Mansfield recounts the checkered career of early airship pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont, and filmmaker Werner Herzog fights biting winds as he trudges across the German countryside to visit a dying friend.
