To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight
By James Tobin
Free Press, 433 pages, $28
The Flyers: In Search of Wilbur and Orville Wright
By Noah Adams
Crown, 221 pages, $22
Today, the Wright brothers’ fabled 1903 flyer occupies a place of honor in the great hall of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. It is a magnificent thing to see, the graceful, fragile flying machine suspended in mid-air as if it were still soaring over the deserted dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., the way it did on a bracing December day a century ago.
It is also a poignant sight. For as James Tobin shows in his enthralling new history of the Wrights, “To Conquer the Air,” when the flyer broke the bonds of gravity it also broke the heart of the Smithsonian’s director, one of the most respected scientists of his day, who desperately wanted for himself the triumph that instead fell to two obscure bicycle salesmen from Dayton, Ohio.
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By birth a Boston Brahmin, by training an astronomer, the Smithsonian’s Samuel Langley was not the sort of person likely to be drawn to the dream of manned flight, an undertaking dominated in the late 19th Century by adventurers, tinkerers and cranks. But there was something about the possibility of building an airplane that fascinated Langley. He worked slowly and carefully at first, studying the skeletal structure of birds, floating toy gliders over the National Mall, trying to understand the forces that kept objects aloft. Once the preliminary work was done, Langley took his project to that most generous of public agencies, the U.S. military, which in 1898 granted him $50,000 to build a workable “aerodrome.” It was an extravagant sum, surely enough to set Langley apart from all those flight enthusiasts piecing together fanciful flyers in garages and back-yard barns.
All but Wilbur and Orville Wright. The Wrights were thirty-something bachelors, living with their younger sister, Katherine, and their stiff-necked minister father, when they caught the flight bug. To be more precise, Wilbur–Will to family and friends–caught the bug, then passed it on to his little brother, who forever after remained the collaboration’s junior partner. Neither Wright had any formal training in engineering or aerodynamics. But their work with bicycles gave them the mechanical skills required to build an airplane and the appreciation for balance needed to make it work. What’s more, Will proved to be a brilliant experimenter, gifted in his ability to conceive new approaches to vexing problems, exacting in his observations, relentless in his determination to perfect his creation. While Langley and his crew sweated away on their aerodrome in a secluded corner of the Smithsonian, Will and Orville spent part of four summers testing ever-more-sophisticated gliders on an empty stretch of North Carolina’s wind-swept Outer Banks, building toward the day when they had a design upon which they could mount an engine and take wing.
The Wrights’ triumph at Kitty Hawk did not end the great race for flight. Only gradually did word of the brothers’ triumph seep out, and when it did the news was met with understandable skepticism. Orville and Wilbur were rank amateurs, after all, almost completely unknown within scientific circles–Langley first heard of them almost a month after the flyer’s maiden voyage–and to think that they had managed such an extraordinary feat stretched the bounds of credulity. So the Wrights began the second leg of the race, trying to prove that their claims were true, that they had in fact conquered the air. That contest pitted Will and Orville directly against Langley and his supporters–in the skies over Paris and New York, in court, and finally in the Smithsonian itself, where the Wrights’ legacy was to be disputed long after the brothers and their competitors were gone.
It is always a challenge for an author to tell a tale that, at least in its basics, most readers already know. But Tobin, recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his marvelous biography of Ernie Pyle, manages to make the Wrights’ story utterly absorbing. The trick is to handle the mechanics of airplane construction with the lightest touch–no long discussions of lift and drag to weigh down the book–while making Wilbur and Orville into characters compelling enough to capture the imagination.
A less talented writer might have stumbled over the brothers’ stolid, Victorian demeanors: When the flyer passed its final test, Will wired the news home with a typically effusive message: ” ‘Success assured keep quiet.’ ” Tobin turns the Wrights’ taciturn natures to his advantage. Unlike the imperious Langley, these quiet, careful, fiercely proud men seem to deserve their victories precisely because there was no bombast about them. Langley tested his ill-fated aerodrome before a horde of reporters gathered along the Potomac River, not far from his Smithsonian offices. Except for a handful of locals who gathered to watch, on the day their flyer first lifted off the ground the Wright brothers were alone, testing their genius in the company that mattered to them most: each other’s.
National Public Radio’s Noah Adams covers much the same ground in his breezy book, “The Flyers.” He, too, traces Will and Orville’s long struggle not only to get their flyer airborne but to prove their achievement to the world. And like Tobin, he uses the Wright family’s considerable private correspondence to give his book dramatic power. But Adams isn’t interested in presenting a comprehensive history of the brothers. “The Flyers” is, at heart, a travelogue, recounting Adams’ recent visits to the places where the Wrights’ story unfolded.
It is an idiosyncratic account, as travel writing tends to be. Sometimes the trip meanders off course. When Adams walks through the Dayton cemetery where the brothers are buried, his attention wanders to the odd plots–the gypsy tribe interred on a hilltop, the grave of a well-known 19th Century madam–that have no connection to the straight-laced Wrights. Another chapter takes Adams to the air show in Oshkosh, Wis., a celebration of amateur aeronautics that Orville and Wilbur never attended and, with its large crowds and vigorous exhibitionism, probably would have despised.
At the same time, Adams misses some obvious stops. He doesn’t visit the Wrights’ cycle shop, for instance, now strangely situated near Thomas Edison’s laboratory and the home of ketchup magnate H.J. Heinz in Detroit’s Greenfield Village, an outdoor museum built by another homespun genius, Henry Ford.
When he gets in the right place, though, Adams is a marvelously evocative guide. In one of his final chapters he walks through Hawthorn Hill, the grand home the Wrights built for themselves once their fame was secure. As Adams describes the now-empty house, he also tells the story of Orville and Wilbur’s sister, Katherine. Fifteen when her mother died in 1889, Katherine spent the next 37 years cooking, cleaning, caring and cheerleading for the men of her family. Her selflessness in sustaining a secure and comfortable home helped make possible her brothers’ triumphs. But when she at last did something for herself–falling in love at 52 in 1926–she was banished from Hawthorn Hill. Under Adams’ confident hand, the rupture makes for affecting reading.
Readers might not pick up these books expecting to be caught in such powerful personal stories. Everyone knows that the Wrights have earned their place in history because they built a machine that for the briefest of moments did the impossible. When tourists stand beneath the flyer in the Smithsonian museum, all they see is Will and Orville’s delicate wood-and-canvas creation, which in its first flight stayed aloft just 12 seconds, traveling 120 feet before settling into the sand. But as Tobin and Adams understand, the truly gripping story isn’t the flyer itself–no matter how great its accomplishment–but the arc of the brothers’ lives and the shadows they cast over the lives of rivals and loved ones.
