The Wright Brothers

McCullough begins the book by describing Wilbur and Orville Wright at length from a 1909 photograph. He emphasizes their many similarities and then notes their differences. “What the two had in common above all,” he concludes, “was unity of purpose and unyielding determination” (8). They were on a “mission” to conquer the problem of flying.

From there, McCullough backs up to look at the family’s background. The father, Milton, was a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren, and with him the mother, Susan, had five children: Reuchlin, Lorin, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine. As bishop, Milton was eventually responsible for the church’s entire district west of the Mississippi River and traveled often. Though the family moved a bit in the early years, they eventually settled in Dayton, Ohio. There, in a house on Hawthorn Street, the youngest three children lived with their father until well into their adult lives. Susan died of tuberculosis in 1889. The older brothers, Reuchlin and Lorin, married young and had families of their own.

Bishop Wright had a large book collection and encouraged his children to read. Wilbur was an outstanding athlete and student who aspired to attend Yale University. A hockey accident when he was in high school, however, put an end to that dream. He convalesced at home for three years and became an avid reader. He then helped Orville put out a small local paper, which the latter had started in 1889 while in high school.

When the nationwide bicycle craze hit in the early 1890s, both brothers got into that and opened a bike shop near the house. At first they only repaired bikes and sold those made by others, and competition kept their profits slim. Wilbur began thinking about taking college courses to help him enter a profession, admitting that he wasn’t much of a businessperson. However, after they started making and selling their own bicycle models, business picked up, so Wilbur stuck with it. Their sister, Katharine, went to Oberlin College and started a career in town as a high school Latin teacher.

In 1896, Orville contracted typhoid fever and was housebound, though not as long as his brother had been. Around that time, Otto Lilienthal, a German aviator who had devised his own glider and tried to fly it, died in an accident during a test flight. Wilbur began reading the published accounts of this incident, and as Orville convalesced, Wilbur read some of them aloud to his younger brother. This stirred Wilbur’s childhood interest in flying, and he began studying in earnest how birds flew.

With Orville recovered and the bike shop prospering, Wilbur pursued his interest in flight and in 1899 wrote to the Smithsonian Institution for more materials. Orville, too, became swept up in the idea, and together the two studied the information the Smithsonian sent. A book called Empire of the Air, by a Frenchman named Louis Pierre Mouillard, deepened Wilbur’s resolve to learn from the flight of birds.

McCullough details what the brothers were up against. Many prominent 19th-century scientists and inventors worked on the problem of flight without success, including Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Samuel Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution whom Wilbur wrote to and a former professor at what is now the University of Pittsburgh, was himself working on a flying machine. These were men in high places with substantial sources of funding.

That summer, the Wright brothers first tried to build a flying machine. In their bike workshop, they made a model biplane kite with five-foot wings. They attached cords to the wings to control “wing warping,” based on something they’d learned from observing birds in flight: Subtle changes to opposite wing tips—one up, one down—caused the bird to bank and turn. They thought they could apply this principle to the wings of flying machines to control turning. After Wilbur tested the model, they began looking for a location with suitable weather and enough wind. After reviewing national weather records, they chose Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on the Outer Banks along the Atlantic Ocean.

In early September 1900, Wilbur arrived in Norfolk, Virginia. Kitty Hawk, just to the south, was still somewhat undeveloped at this time, with only a small fishing village and a weather station. Just finding someone with a boat who would take him there took four days. In Kitty Hawk, Wilbur stayed with the family of William Tate, a former postal head with whom he’d corresponded, until Orville joined him at the end of the month.

In the meantime, Wilbur built a camp near the water and got to work assembling their flying machine, which they’d packed up back home and shipped. This full-scale version of the biplane model had a wingspan of 17 feet, and each wing was 5 feet wide. It was only a glider, as they needed to work out the issue of equilibrium, or balance, before adding a motor. Wilbur controlled the glider by lying on the lower wing when conditions were good; when they weren’t, the brothers controlled it from the ground with attached cords. Experiments began in early October.

Living full-time at the camp now, the brothers were in constant contact with the outdoors. During their downtime, they assiduously studied the many shorebirds, watching intently how they floated on the wind and making drawings. In mid-October, they took the glider four miles south to Kill Devil Hills, where conditions were even better, to focus on crewed gliding. Here, they had success: Wilbur flew for up to 400 feet at a time.

Using what they’d learned, the brothers returned home and began building an improved flying machine, which they were ready to test by the summer of 1901. They returned to Kitty Hawk that July. Just after setting up camp, they suffered from a severe mosquito infestation that the locals said occurred only every decade or more. (It was so bad that Orville said his bout with typhoid fever was easier to endure.) After that subsided and they took the glider out, Wilbur flew more than 100 yards. Still, they considered it a failure. A problem caused the glider to either nosedive or rise too high to sustain forward motion. The curvature of the wings seemed off, so they paused tests for a few days to flatten the wings a bit, making their curvature closer to that of the old machine. This made the glider more responsive.

After wrapping up tests, they left for home dejected, especially Wilbur. As Orville later put it, Wilbur was at such a low point he declared that “not in a thousand years would man ever fly” (63). What concerned them was that they’d used the exact specifications and ratios that respected pioneers of flight, like Lilienthal and Langley, had devised—but they seemed all wrong. The brothers decided to start anew and calculate their own figures.

Wilbur and Orville perfected their plane during a third trip to Kitty Hawk. The despair didn’t last long, and the brothers tackled the problem before them with their customary determination. They particularly needed a way to measure precisely the “lift” and “drag” of a wing’s surface. Lift is the force created by the unequal amount of pressure above and below a wing due to its curvature. Drag is the same as air resistance, the force applied to a moving object in which friction resists its movement. These two dynamics are crucial in sustaining flight.

Just after they returned, the brothers received the first public recognition of their work. Octave Chanute, an engineer who had also studied gliding and someone they’d contacted for advice, invited Wilbur to speak at a meeting of the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago that September. Wilbur’s speech, “Some Aeronautical Experiments,” was later printed in publications such as Scientific American and the Smithsonian Institution’s annual report.

To observe and measure lift and drag, Wilbur and Orville constructed a wind tunnel 6 feet long and 16 inches square so that they could test various styles of wings that they made from hacksaw blades. This was time-consuming and demanding, but the brothers stuck with it. As a prestigious British journal later put it, “Never in the history of the world had men studied the problem with such scientific skill nor with such undaunted courage” (70). They paused in December to prepare for the upcoming season at their bicycle shop, but they were ready to continue testing by the summer of 1902.

Back in Kitty Hawk in August, they tested their largest glider yet. This machine, based on their wind tunnel calculations, had a wingspan of 32 feet. Both Orville and Wilbur flew it, and they were satisfied with the results. One idea that helped was to combine both the rudder and wing warping in one control: the hip movements of the pilot lying on the lower wing. They felt much better this year as they left for home at the end of October. They had accomplished successful gliding; the next step was to add an engine.