To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight [Hardcover]

What was most interesting for me were how different the incentives were for the various compeitors. For some the incentive was the pure pursuit of science (the Wrights & Alexander Bell), for some the incentive was securing a place in history (S.P. Langley & Octave Chanute), and for some it was the quest for profit & commercial success, plain & simple (Glen Hammond).

Just the motives were extremely varied, so too were the approaches to solving the challenge of flight. Langley assumed that the biggest part of the puzzle was power; build an engine strong enough and the other details would just work themselves out. If Langley had had a jet engine available, he might have gotten away with it --- although I wouldn't want to be flying in any plane developed along those lines. The Wrights on the other hand, saw the challenge of lift to be the key to the puzzle --- build a device that could achieve near-vertical lift and you could probably manage without a super-powerful engine.

One comes away from this book with an enhanced respect for the natural scientific brilliance of the Wrights. So few of us actually have any knowledge of the systematic approach the Wrights took in solving the problem of lift in their little wind tunnel. Never ones to get ahead of themselves, the Wrights made sure they had explored every wing configuration they could think of before moving to the next stage of development.

Tobin could have ended the story with the Wright's first flight, but he is too good of a historian not to look at the larger picture. As soon as one battle was won, other battles needed to be fought. It is open to debate as to who ultimately won this war, depending on what your perspective was.

This was a great book. Tobin makes aerodynamics pretty understandable to almost anyone, and he has a great narrative skill. You will be left with a much greater respect for what a magnificent scientific feat achieving flight was --- after all, almost everyone else ultimately failed.

Although this book is not a biographical study per se, Tobin does offer a lot of information on the personalities of the Wrights. Tobin examines the many letters between the brothers, their father, and sister Kate to give the reader some sense of what these quiet, mysterious inventors working in a bicycle shop were like. Tobin also gives the reader some historical context for the times; for example, the popularity of bicycles at the turn of the century during which the Wrights had their own cycle company (pg. 45), or the importance of the photos in McClure's magazine of Otto Lilienthal gliding in his makeshift monoplane in 1894 two years before he met a tragic fate in another experimental flight (pg. 49) (photographs of things in motion being relatively new at the time).

The details in this book demonstrates exhaustive research. One learns, for example, that the brothers had two buzzers in their cycle shop so that, if the second buzzer rang, they knew the customer came in just to air up his tires and they could remain upstairs conducting their many wind tunnel experiments. Of course, Tobin describes each stay at Kitty Hawk where the brothers tried their machines, Wilbur's demonstrations in France, Orville's demonstrations at Fort Myer (where the brother was injured and one of Bell's young crew members was killed), and Wilbur's sensational circling of the Statue of Liberty. I agree with another reviewer that the famous first flight on December 17, 1903 is not emphasized. I did not realize I was reading about it when I got to it. It is buried among all the many test glides of the Wrights and the frustrations of Langley. But there are many books that cover this topic thoroughly. Tobin is looking at the larger picture in this book.

The book is 366 pages of text with occasional photographs and illustrations plus a middle section of photos. It does not become hampered by technical data. The mechanical element of flying machines is described (i.e. the observation of birds to determine how the wings should work) but not in a way that distracts from the human aspect of the story. This is the first book I've read on the Wright brothers and I enjoyed it very much. I also think it is a worthwhile book for those who've already read books on the Wrights as it is an overview of the quest for flight which may cover aspects of the story that other books do not.