McCullough, David. The Wright Brothers. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015.

Not long ago, the Ohio General Assembly discussed a proposal to modify the Great Seal of Ohio by having the image of the Wright Brothers’ first airplane appear in the seal’s background, flying toward the rising sun. To date, this change has not been adopted, but even without their flyer on the state seal, Orville and Wilbur Wright are among the most-celebrated of all Ohioans. In his book, The Wright Brothers, David McCullough presents a smooth-flowing narrative of how the two Dayton natives went from being bicycle builders to world-renowned aviation pioneers.

According to McCullough, a toy helicopter brought home by their father, Bishop Milton Wright, sparked the brothers’ interest in flying during their youth. Further inspiration came later from glider builders such as Otto Lilienthal and Octave Chanute, and author Louis Pierre Mouillard, whose book L’Empire de l’Air Wilbur described as “one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature” ever published. Birds provided another source of inspiration, especially for Wilbur. His observations of birds in flight led him to understand how they achieved equilibrium by moving their wings so as to present the tip of one wing at a raised angle, the other tip at a lowered angle. Wilbur transferred this observation to the gliders he built with Orville. “Wing warping,” as it came to be called, enabled gliders to bank and turn.

For me, the most-interesting chapters of McCullough’s book were those detailing the brothers’ efforts to fly from their first experiments at Kitty Hawk up through their post-Kitty Hawk adventures at Huffman Prairie. The author takes us through the early tests with gliders at Kill Devil Hills. Sometimes, the brothers would send the gliders up like kites and control them from the ground. More often, one of them would climb aboard and control the glider while lying flat on his stomach in the middle of the lower wing. Later trips to Kitty Hawk ultimately led to the famous first flight of a self-propelled heavier-than-air machine on December 17, 1903. Through it all, the brothers dealt with a multitude of challenges. Besides crashes, there were severe storms that damaged their camp and at one point swarms of mosquitoes, which arrived “in the form of a mighty cloud, almost darkening the sun.”

The Huffman Prairie phase of the Wright Brothers’ aeronautical adventures was nearly as important as Kitty Hawk. As McCullough explains, it was there the brothers tested an improved version of their flyer, extending both the length of their flights and the distance covered. Huffman Prairie, located near Dayton, was also the place where Wilbur and Orville developed a reliable device for launching their flights. As explained by McCullough, the brothers used a team of horses and a pulley to haul weights totaling up to 1,600 pounds to the top of a derrick made of four wooden poles. When the weights dropped, a rope attached to them at one end and the flyer at the other would pull the flyer down a track and into the air.

The later chapters were less gripping, though still essential to the overall narrative. They focus on the Wright Brothers’ efforts to prove to a skeptical world that they did, in fact, build the first power-propelled heavier-than-air machine. Those efforts sent Wilbur to France — first to Le Mans and then to Pau — and Orville to Fort Myer just outside Washington. Orville’s task was not so much to dispel skepticism as it was to prove the Wright Flyer III worthy of a War Department contract. Their demonstration flights were largely successful with one notable exception. On the evening of September 17, 1908, Orville flew into the air with Lt. Thomas Selfridge as a passenger. At some point, one of the propellers cracked, causing the plane to vibrate, which in turn caused a stay wire attached to the rear rudders to tear away. This sent the aircraft into a sharp nose dive, which Orville could not stop. The resulting crash left him severely injured and Selfridge dead — the first fatality from a flying accident. But, as McCullough stresses, the accident did not raise any doubt “that the problem of aerial navigation was solved.”

McCullough deserves credit for giving appropriate attention to people who supported the Wright Brothers. At the top the list is their sister Katherine, a high school Latin teacher, who literally dropped everything to care for Orville after his accident at Fort Myer. Thereafter, she often accompanied her brothers on their European tours, serving as their “social manager” and caregiver for Orville, who remained in weak condition for months after the crash.  Katherine also occasionally acted as a buffer between her brothers and overbearing people (especially news reporters) who wanted to meet them. McCullough also acknowledges Charlie Taylor, a master mechanic who played a key role in building and repairing the engines that put the Wright flyers in the air. When the brothers went on the road, he often joined them. As McCullough states, Taylor “worked quite as hard as they (Wilbur and Orville) and with skill rarely to be found.” Among the others who gave encouragement or support to the brothers were A.I. Root, who used his trade journal Gleanings in Bee Culture to provide the first accurate description of the Wright Brothers’ flyer in action; French auto manufacturer Leon Bollee, who helped Wilbur secure the Hunaudieres racetrack in Le Mans for his European test flights; and the Tate family of Kitty Hawk, which did everything from providing the brothers with food and shelter to helping move their gliders around and prepare them for take-off.

McCullough presents the Wright Brothers’ story in well-structured uncomplicated prose. The author blends contemporary newspaper reports, diary entries, passages from letters, and other primary source material into his narrative, which gives it both credibility and drama. The Wright Brothers were not perfect — Wilbur was often aloof and unsociable; Orville could be moody and irritable — but as McCullough makes clear, they deserved the accolades they received during their lives as well as the legendary status they enjoy today.