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

This extraordinarily well-written and deeply nuanced work is the best of the recent spate of books celebrating the Wright Brothers and the 100-year anniversary of their invention of the airplane. Award-winning biographer Tobin (Ernie Pyle's War) provides a detailed yet truly exciting tale of the brothers' lifelong effort to stand "against the wave of popular doubt about the possibility of human flight." The book's strength resides in Tobin's careful depiction of two main elements of the Wright story. First, Tobin provides the fullest and most sympathetic account yet written of the close-knit Wright family and the impact of its ethic-"the Wrights versus the world"-on the brothers, at the same time that he recaptures the personal qualities that were forgotten after they became aviation icons. ("Will had a devastating dry wit, but there was more fun in Orville.") Second, Tobin is stunningly effective in presenting the intertwining lives of the brothers and an amazing cast of friends and competitors, including such inventors as Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian and creator of the doomed Aerodrome, and his friend and fellow flight enthusiast Alexander Graham Bell; Octave Chanute, one of the brothers' earliest supporters; and Glenn Curtiss, the brothers' main competitor. Tobin's final chapter, which details Wilbur Wright's historic flight in 1909 circling Manhattan, is a definitive account of the crowning final triumph of the Wrights' career.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this centenary of the airplane, Tobin re-creates the course, in its technological and biographical dimensions, of the Wright brothers' claim to its invention. This is such commonplace knowledge as to make its reiteration seemingly unnecessary, but its acknowledgment was not conceded at the time by the partisans of Samuel Langley and Glenn Curtiss. Tobin adopts this disputatious aspect to the Wrights' story to distinguish his work from standard biographies such as Fred Howard's Wilbur and Orville (1987), so he pays careful attention to the differences between the Wrights' attack on the problem of flight and Langley's. Langley had advantages: scientific eminence, publicity, and a government subsidy, but he never personally tried to fly, nor measured the performance of wings, as the Wrights did. Confirming their superior methods and diligence, Tobin proceeds to their difficulties in capitalizing on their flying machine, ascribing woes to their own reticence and the rapidity of rivals' progress. Perceiving the Wrights' us-against-the-world mentality, Tobin transforms thorough research into a flowing narrative with news for even connoisseurs of Kitty Hawk. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

David M. Kennedy

Author of "Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945," winner of the Pulitzer Prize

James Tobin explains with meticulous clarity the mysteries of nature and the challenges of technology that vexed the Wright brothers' pursuit of machine-powered flight. He also tells the riveting tale of their fevered rivalry with the imperious head of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel Pierpont Langley, with fabled inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and with the brash daredevil Glenn Curtiss. How two homespun Midwestern tinkerers prevailed against such formidable competitors in the race to achieve the miracle of flight is a tale as thrilling as it is inspirational. An utterly engrossing read.

"For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life."

So wrote a quiet young Ohioan in 1900, one in an ancient line of men who had wanted to fly -- men who wanted it passionately, fecklessly, hopelessly. But now, at the turn of the twentieth century, Wilbur Wright and a scattered handful of other adventurers conceived a conviction that the dream lay at last within reach, and in a headlong race across ten years and two continents, they competed to conquer the air. James Tobin, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, has at last given this inspiring story its definitive telling.

For years Wright and his younger brother, Orville, experimented in utter obscurity, supported only by their exceptional family. Meanwhile, the world watched as the imperious Samuel Langley, armed with a rich contract from the U.S. War Department and all the resources of the Smithsonian Institution, sought to scale up his unmanned models to create the first manned flying machine. But while Langley became obsessed with flight as a problem of power, the Wrights grappled with it as a problem of balance. Thus their machines took two very different paths -- his toward oblivion, theirs toward the heavens.

As Tobin relates, the Wrights' 1903 triumph at Kitty Hawk, however hallowed in American lore, was ill-reported and disbelieved. So, while the two brothers struggled to transform their delicate contraption into a practical airplane, others moved to overtake them as the leading pioneers of flight. In France, rivals scoffed at the Wrightseven as they rushed to imitate them. At home, the great inventor Alexander Graham Bell seized the fallen banner of his friend Langley and thrust it into the hands of a circle of young daredevils, urging them to get into the air. From this group emerged the motorcyclist Glenn Curtiss, fastest man in the world, whose aerial challenge to Wilbur Wright culminated in an unforgettable showdown over New York harbor.

"To Conquer the Air" is a hero's tale of overcoming obstacles within and without that plumbs the depths of creativity and character. With a historian's accuracy and a novelist's eye, Tobin has captured the interplay of remarkable personalities at an extraordinary moment in our history. In the centennial year of human flight, "To Conquer the Air" is itself a heroic achievement.

Ron Powers Co-author of Flags of Our Fathers What The Metaphysical Club was to the development of philosophic thought in America, this beautiful book is to the development of man in flight. Far more than a mere account of the Wright brothers' triumph, To Conquer the Air is a yeasty, richly drawn evocation of an era and of the strange, visionary, obsessed, and difficult men who battled one another to claim it in their name. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Prologue: Decoration Day, 1899

His father and sister had gone to Woodland Cemetery to plant flowers at the grave of his mother. His younger brother was busy elsewhere. It was a holiday, and the house was quiet. He could take care of the letter he had been meaning to write.

He sat, took out paper and pen, and wrote:

The Smithsonian Institution Washington.

Dear Sirs:

I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes....My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable. It is only a question of knowledge and skill as in all acrobatic feats.

He was thirty-two years old and unmarried. He was lean and bald. His lips were thin and he usually held them tightly shut; he may have been self-conscious about his teeth, which had been smashed in a hockey game years ago. His ears flared. Only his eyes saved him from outright homeliness. Ten years later, when he was one of the most famous men in the world, reporters had trouble getting him to say much about himself. So they remarked on his eyes as indicative of the character within. "This man is strange and cold," one said, "but of a coldness that is smiling and sympathetic....The countenance is remarkable, curious -- the head that of a bird, long and bony, and with a long nose...the eye is a superb blue-gray, with tints of gold that bespeak an ardent flame." He was a shrewd observer of people and of nature. Yet he once told his sister that "my imagination pictures things more vividly than my eyes."

The subject of his letter was not the sort of thing he would mention casually to a neighbor. On this block of Hawthorn Street, on the west side of Dayton, Ohio, the houses stood so close together you could name the song somebody was playing on the piano three doors down, and make a fair guess who was playing. Any news traveled fast, and the news that somebody hoped to fly like a bird would travel faster than usual. Aspirations here tended toward the sensible. The neighbors included four carpenters, two day laborers, a machinist, a printer, a motorman, a market vendor, an insurance salesman, three widows, and two clergymen. One of the clergymen was the young man's father -- quite a prominent man, a bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, a stout widower who kept house with his schoolteacher daughter and two of his four grown sons. Their home was number 7, second from the corner of Hawthorn and West Fourth.

"When I saw this house," a visitor said later, "I felt its pathetic preeminence in a street of meager homes." It was narrow but it extended way back on the lot, with white clapboards and green shutters. At the front was the parlor, with a slant-top writing desk; a cherrywood rocking chair with horsehair upholstery; a chaise longue and a settee. In back of the parlor was the sitting room, dominated by a tall cherry bookcase, its contents suggesting a family of enthusiastic readers with broad interests, from Charles Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper to a six-volume History of France and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Next came a spacious dining room, with a long sideboard, a drop-leaf table, and six walnut chairs. At the rear of the house was the kitchen. Upstairs there were four small bedrooms. Out in back was a "summer kitchen" -- a detached shed -- and an outhouse. Along the front and left side of the house there was a long porch. The young man and his brother had built it in 1892. They kept it simple, leaving off the usual gingerbread trim.

The young man continued his letter:

Birds are the most perfectly trained gymnasts in the world and are specially well fitted for their work, and it may be that man will never equal them, but no one who has watched a bird chasing an insect or another bird can doubt that feats are performed which require three or four times the effort required in ordinary flight. I believe that simple flight at least is possible to man and that the experiments and investigations of a large number of independent workers will result in the accumulation of information and knowledge and skill which will finally lead to accomplished flight.

He once remarked that for a person endowed with greater gifts than others, but lacking in the push needed for conventional success, there was "always the danger" that he would "retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life."

This is what had happened to him, and the letter was part of his effort to get out of his corner. He possessed extraordinary gifts. Yet he had lived more than half the average span of an American man of his time without doing or making anything he could call his own. He lived in his father's house. The woman in his life was his sister. The children he loved belonged to his older brothers. He gave most of his time to a storefront business without caring for business or money. His only advanced education had come from his father's books. He had put his powerful mind to work in only one cause -- an obscure church controversy, also his father's. But he did not even have his father's faith.

He was "an enthusiast," he wrote:

...but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine...I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language...I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success. I do not know the terms on which you send out your publications but if you will inform me of the cost I will remit the price.

Yours truly,

Wilbur Wright

By June 1, traveling by rail, the letter arrived in Washington, where it was carried to the turreted, red-sandstone headquarters of the Smithsonian Institution, on the southern edge of the long green known then as Smithsonian Park. There the letter was opened, sorted with others of its type, and taken through echoing halls to the office of Richard Rathbun, second in command at the Smithsonian, whose duties included the oversight of the Institution's correspondence with scholars, scientists, and the merely curious in every part of the world.

Rathbun, an expert on marine invertebrates, handled many such inquiries each week. Like Wilbur Wright, people everywhere regarded the Smithsonian as a fountainhead of scientific and cultural information, much of it published in the Institution's own periodicals. A man once wrote to ask for all Smithsonian publications on geology, biology, botany, the National Museum, the Bureau of American Ethnology, Indians, International Exchanges, the National Zoological Park, the Astrophysical Observatory, "and any other interesting subjects." He was told that compliance with his request would require the shipment of several thousand volumes. With the financial support of the U.S. Congress and a host of private benefactors, the Smithsonian was the best-endowed, most prestigious institution of science, culture, and learning in the entire nation. Its exhibits, repositories, storehouses, laboratories, and libraries were known throughout the world, and all of these existed to fulfill the terms of the 1846 will of the Institution's founding benefactor, the Englishman James Smithson, who had called for an American institution to foster "the increase & diffusion of knowledge." Every legitimate question was to receive a careful answer. So people wrote by the hundreds every year.

The letter from Dayton would have occasioned no special notice in Rathbun's office but for one salient characteristic. It raised the question of mechanical flight. This was a topic of consuming interest to the fourth secretary of the Smithsonian himself, Samuel Pierpont Langley.

In public stature and prestige, Langley was the most prominent scientist in the United States. His best friend was Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Langley was a frequent guest at the White House. He dined regularly with the historian Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents; and John Hay, who had been personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln and was now secretary of state. Langley corresponded with the likes of Rudyard Kipling and the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce; as a young man he had listened for hours to the philosophical discourses of the great British historian Thomas Carlyle.

In the entire world only a handful of men with any standing in science had suggested that human flight was possible. Langley not only had said so, but had done more than anyone else to bring the possibility within reach. He was now the leading flight experimenter in the world, and the pursuit of human flight had become the passion of his life.

Wilbur Wright would have to contend with the doubts of his neighbors in Dayton. Secretary Langley, far more grandly and self-consciously, was assailing the arguments of Sir Isaac Newton and several of the leading mathematicians and physicists of the day, who said basic laws of logic and physics rendered human flight highly unlikely if not utterly impossible. Wright hoped to "add my mite" in the search for a solution. Langley aspired to join the pantheon of history's greatest scientists.

To build his case, Langley had undertaken a long series of experiments in aerodynamics that culminated in 1896 with the flights of two substantial flying machines -- unmanned -- over the Potomac River. He called them "aerodromes," his own coinage from the Greek, meaning "air runner."

Among the handful who saw the first unmanned flight of a Langley aerodrome was Alexander Graham Bell, who captured the only photographs of the event. That evening he jotted a note to Langley -- "I shall count this day as one of... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

James Tobin has written an outstanding account of the passions that drove Orville and Wilbur Wright from the bike shop to the air and helped them earn a place in history for first flight. Boyd Gaines reads the work in an appropriate scholarly voice yet manages to capture the excitement that drove the brothers. Gaines reads quotes from each brother with a fitting Midwestern sound. Other characters speak with accents and voices that place them where they belong. Tobin's impeccably researched work reads like a novel, and Gaines's performance takes the work one step farther, turning the piece into a story more exhilarating than most fiction. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.