I am going to be 62 in August. Flight has always been important to me. When I was a child living in Wayne, Michigan were under the flight path not too many miles from Metro Airport. We moved there in 1957-58 and the planes overhead were still propeller based airliners. Then the Boeing 707 appeared and I remember the roar, its massive size, and its low flight and it shook the chains in my hands as I sat on my swing set in awe. My father had been a pilot in WWII and flew transport planes. It turns out that my wife’s father was an RAF bomber pilot in WWII and came to Canada after being wounded after being shot down. He stayed in Detroit, got married, and my wife was their oldest daughter.
You can easily see that if flight had not come about, not only would all our lives have been different, some of us might never have been!
David McCullough has brought us a wonderful popular history, a survey, of the Wright Brothers and their bringing flight to the world. Yes, others are still put forward as having beaten them to the air, but as one of their early rivals noted, no one seemed to be able to fly until Wilbur showed them how then everyone could do it. All the other claimants are for getting off the ground for a bit, but not for controlled flight as the Wright Brothers accomplished.
This book covers their early life through their ten years of inventing flight, their 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, their flights at Huffman Prairie, their 1908 paper, the work Orville did with contracts to the U.S. Government and Wilbur’s work and exhibitions in France. Yes, there were rivalries, jealousies, claims for credit. But the reality in the final analysis is that Wilbur and Orville did this great thing with their high school educations and completely financed it themselves without any outside money from wealthy folks or the government.
The book is an entertaining and informative read with lots of photos. But if you get interested in the subject you can supplement this book with lots of fabulous information on the web and videos done about the Wright Brothers by people who actually knew them!
Wilbur died far too young and Orville lived through WWII and saddened to see their great gift to the world become the means of delivering death and horror in war.
Still, my life has been blessed by flight. Last year I took my four year old granddaughter, Amelia, to the Ann Arbor City Airport and we watched planes land and take off as I explained flight to her. She was fascinated. She charmed a very nice man who was the pilot of a Lear Jet that was getting ready to leave in a few hours. He invited her to wander around the inside of the jet to see how it looked inside. She was DELIGHTED. I was so happy to see flight beginning to bless her life and pique her curiosity, too! I bought her a model of the Wright Flyer and gave it to her Dad so they could build it together. They did and it is proudly in her room.
A great thing. And we owe it to Wilbur and Orville and what they began back in December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina!
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Saline, MI
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Reviews with images
Turn of the 20th Century comes to life, and so do Wilbur, Orville et al
As a fellow aviation author, this book was inevitably going to be a treat. I daresay the it surpassed even my high expectations.Turn of the 20th Century comes to life, and so do Wilbur, Orville and the other characters in this surprisingly well-detailed and compelling story.Rarely have I found myself lost in a nonfiction book, but this story unfolds as if the reader is living with the brothers in Dayton, milling "flying machine" parts above their bicycle shop and braving the paint-peeling winds and blood-sucking mosquito hordes of Kitty Hawk.The reader learns so much in a short and entertaining span, such as the tribulations of simply traveling through 1900 America, and the fact that the brothers were not credited for their famed 1903 powered flight until several years later—after enduring not only skepticism but ridicule. But, in the end, we cheer to find out, our heroes are fully exonerated, and even the haughty French aviators of the time capitulate when they realize that the Brothers had indeed mastered controlled flight and were leap-years ahead of their own inventions.The book drags ever so slightly toward the end, after the Wrights finally resolve all their conflicts, from safe and consistent flight to patent issues to internal family squabblings, but ends on a wonderfully uplifting note—with the very last line drawing a deeply heartfelt tear!Highly recommended for anyone, and especially for the historical or aviation enthusiast.The Last Bush Pilots
