The Wright Brothers

McCullough tells the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright from their Dayton bicycle business through the first powered flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and the demonstrations in France and at Fort Myer in 1908 and 1909 that finally established their claim. He drew on the brothers' correspondence, diaries and the family papers.

The most instructive material concerns their method. They identified control as the unsolved problem when others were pursuing power and lift, and worked on gliders for three years before attempting an engine. They built their own wind tunnel after discovering that the published lift coefficient tables from Lilienthal were wrong, and generated their own data across two hundred wing shapes. They taught themselves to fly the gliders before adding power, accumulating hours of practical experience that competitors with better-funded programmes never obtained.

McCullough emphasises that they had no college education, no external funding, no government contracts and no scientific establishment behind them, and that they financed everything from the bicycle shop's profits. He contrasts this with Samuel Langley's federally funded programme, which failed publicly twice. The later sections cover the years of disbelief, in which American newspapers ignored or denied the flights, and the patent litigation that consumed the brothers afterwards and which McCullough treats with less attention than it deserves.

The book is narrative history without technical depth, and readers wanting the aeronautics should look elsewhere. McCullough is admiring throughout and the brothers' commercial failures and litigiousness receive limited treatment. The account of how they identified the right problem and built their own data is the part with the widest application.