Book Review: The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

The Wright Brothers

Author: David McCullough

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Date of Publication: May 5, 2015

Pages: 320

     David McCullough is a two time Pulitzer Prize winner (for biographies of Harry Truman and John Quincy Adams) and has won multiple other awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Here he turns his incredible research and writing skills towards Orville and Wilbur Wright, the designers and pilots of the first controlled, sustained and powered flight of a heavier than air aircraft.

The Wright Brothers National Memorial
Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina

                           

      The first part of this book details the early childhood and education of Wilbur and Orville Wright in Dayton, Ohio.  There were five Wright siblings.  Their mother, Susan Koerner Wright, was the more deductive and logical thinking parent and fostered an inquisitive nature in all of her children.  Their father, Bishop Milton Wright, was a clergyman who traveled a lot for work.  He brought the boys a toy "helicopter" back from one trip. The toy was basically a propeller on a stick with rubber bands which would fly when released.  Both Orville and Wilbur were fascinated with this toy and proceeded to build their own versions when the original finally broke.  Neither Orville or Wilbur attended college, starting a printing business instead.  Wilbur had planned to attend Yale, but was injured in an ice hockey accident and following a prolonged convalescence joined Orville in his new business venture.  Orville had designed and built his own printing presses.  One of their first clients was a high school classmate and friend, Paul Laurence Dunbar, the renowned African-American poet who was publishing his own newspaper at the time.   As bicycles became a more popular mode of travel Orville and Wilbur opened their own cycle shop and later began manufacturing their own brand of bicycles.  All the while, they maintained their interest in flight.  They used the proceeds from their business success to fund their own experiments in aircraft design.  They even developed their own wind tunnel to test different wing designs.  They began building gliders based on a bi-wing design originated by the Chicago engineer Octave Chanute.  They were disappointed by the amount of lift they were getting with their initial gliders and began to question the equations and calculations of Otto Lilienthal, a German aviation pioneer.  Wilbur made his own calculations based on their wind tunnel experiments and used these to perfect wing shape and design of the Wright gliders

Reconstruction of the Wright Brothers
living quarters and workshop.
Kill Devil Hills, N.C.

The 1903 Flyer replica with the Monument
in the background.

     Lift was the first of three major problems which had to be solved in order for the first flight to be successful.  The others were control and power.  At this point in the story, the Wrights had moved their glider testing to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  They had asked for wind data from the National Weather Service and found the the Outer Banks of North Carolina were the second windiest place on the continent (Chicago was first).  The brothers wanted privacy and secrecy as they carried out their experiments, so the Outer Banks became their first choice.  The Outer Banks in 1900 was an obscure sand bar, reachable only by boat.  It was described by contemporaries as harder to get to than Tibet (many modern vacationers on a summer Saturday or Sunday may think it is still so).  

     The chapters that describe the experiences on the Outer Banks are fascinating.  Wilbur made the first trip North Carolina in 1900 and made it as far as Elizabeth City.  It took him four days to find someone with a boat who had heard of Kitty Hawk.  It then took three days to get from Elizabeth City to Kitty Hawk.  The total isolation and harsh environment is very vividly described here.  Over the years the Wrights were aided by the few locals including the staff of the Kitty Hawk life saving station (that building is now The Black Pelican Restaurant).  Solving the control issue was difficult but Orville and Wilbur studied the many birds on the Outer Banks to help them decipher how to smoothly and predictably control direction and elevation during flight.  They found the turkey buzzard particularly helpful!  These large ungainly birds use the tips of their wings to alter their direction and the brothers used that concept to better control their glider.  

The original motor from the 1903 Wright Flyer
Kill Devil Hills, NC

     The final piece of the puzzle was how to power the glider to sustain flight.  They approached the automobile manufacturers of the day who told them that an engine with the weight limitations and power requirements was impossible to build.  This is when Charlie Taylor played an integral role in the whole project.  This fellow was a machinist whom the brothers had hired to manage their bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio while they were off doing their experiments in North Carolina.  When the brother explained their engine problem to Charlie he built a four cylinder gasoline powered engine out of aluminum which was light enough for the glider but could produce more than the needed horsepower.  The Wrights also had to design their own propellers since their were no precedents for this.  Nautical propellers were useless and the Wrights carved their own propellers which closely resembled the toy helicopter of their youth.  This set the stage for the first successful flight, piloted by Orville (chosen by a flip of a coin), at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903.   The news traveled very slowly in those days and their was great skepticism in the aviation community that the Wright Brothers had actually accomplished the first flight.   The next section of the book details their refinement of their "Wright Flyer" which was accomplished closer to home in Huffman Prarie, an 84 acre cow pasture eight miles north of Dayton.  The remainder of the book describes how the brothers presented their invention to the world.  The United States government was slow to recognize the importance so Wilbur took the flyer to France and demonstrated its efficacy through multiple exhibition flights at Le Mans.  Eventually the U.S. recognized the Wright's invention and its potential.   Orville was then able to perform exhibition flights at Fort Myer, Virginia.  There is a video of a 1909 flight at Fort Myer on YouTube.  The first air crash fatality occurred at Fort Myer when a guy wire came loose mid-flight interfering with the propeller.  Orville crash landed, killing his military passenger and being seriously injured himself.

Replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer - Kill Devil Hills, N.C.
(The original is in the Smithsonian National Air and Space
Museum, Washington, D.C.)

     Following the exhibition flights the Wrights formed their own production company and spent the ensuing years perfecting their design and fighting patent infringements in the courts.

     Wilbur died of typhoid fever at age 45 in 1912.  Orville lived until 1948 and died of a heart attack.  Orville lived long enough to see the terrible effects of the airplane in warfare and even witnessed the atomic bomb dropped from a descendant of his invention.  In his later years Orville wrote: 

  "We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong ... No, I don't have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is, I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses."

     

     McCullough's book very thoroughly tells the Wright Brothers story as the fable that it has become: that two humble brothers, both high school drop-outs, confirmed bachelors and bicycle mechanics, together solved the problems which allowed man to fly.  This equal effort, equal ingenuity and equal credit fable is challenged in a recent article by William Hazelgrove in the December, 2018 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.  In his article "Why Wilbur Wright Deserves the Bulk of the Credit for the First Flight" Hazelgrove asserts that Wilbur had the imagination and deductive reasoning required to figure out what needed to be done to create a flying machine.  Orville was the "historian" - recording events as they happened on paper and on film.  According to Hazelgrove, the fact that Orville lived so much longer allowed him to write the history the way he saw it - with shared credit given to both brothers.  Hazelgrove uses the brothers' own writings to justify this viewpoint, especially when Wilbur describes "his" flyer and "his" propeller when writing to his father.  McCullough used the same resources to create his book but did not jump to this conclusion.  A 1930 article about Orville Wright recently republished in The New Yorker magazine points out that in an Encyclopedia Britannica article (also published in 1930) about the first flight, all of the credit is given to Wilbur with almost no mention of Orville.  That encylcopedia article was written by Orville Wright.

     Regardless of which account you adhere to, the story of the Wright Brothers is a fantastic testament to creativity, problem solving and "thinking outside of the box".  McCullough's book is a very readable and entertaining as well as instructive read.  I recommend it highly to anyone who has visited or plans to visit the Outer Banks!

The first powered flight at Kill Devil Hills, NC, December 17, 1903

The Wright Brothers Memorial Monument at Kill Devil Hills, illuminated during a Light Art exhibition, August, 2018