The feud between this nation’s great air pioneers, the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss, was a collision of unyielding and profoundly American personalities. He shows us exactly how and why these two obscure bachelors from Dayton, Ohio, were able to succeed where so many better-trained, better-financed rivals had failed. Using a treasure trove of Wright family correspondence and diaries, Tom Crouch skillfully weaves the story of the airplane’s invention into the drama of a unique and unforgettable family. The Bishop’s Boys by Tom Crouchīrilliant, self-trained engineers, the Wright brothers had a unique blend of native talent, character, and family experience that perfectly suited them to the task of invention but left them ill-prepared to face a world of skeptics, rivals, and officials. With a historian’s accuracy and a novelist’s eye, Tobin has captured an extraordinary moment in history. Thus their machines took two very different paths – Langley’s toward oblivion, the Wrights’ toward the heavens – though not before facing countless other obstacles. But while Langley saw flight as a problem of power, the Wrights saw a problem of balance. Meanwhile, the world watched as Samuel Langley, armed with a contract from the US War Department and all the resources of the Smithsonian Institution, sought to create the first manned flying machine.

To Conquer the Air by James Tobinįor years, Wilbur Wright and his younger brother, Orville, experimented in obscurity, supported only by their exceptional family. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off, they risked being killed. That they had no more than a public high school education and little money never stopped them in their mission to take to the air.

Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Orville and Wilbur Wright were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity. But it would take the world some time to believe that the age of flight had begun, with the first powered machine carrying a pilot. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers – bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio – changed history. In order to get to the bottom of what inspired two of history’s most consequential figures to the heights of societal contribution, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best books on the Wright brothers. “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance,” Orville remarked. There are countless books on the Wright brothers, and it comes with good reason, they were American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world’s first successful motor-operated airplane.

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