Last year, on our way home from our annual trip to the Outer Banks, we stopped at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, where you can see a replica of the Flyer that made the first ever powered flight on December 3rd, 1902--and walk along the paths of its first flights. I really enjoyed the museum there, which made the achievement seem somehow even more impressive: did you know, for instance, that after arriving at Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur discovered that all the data they were using, which had been collected by German aeronautist Otto Lilienthal, was basically garbage, and they had to start from scratch all on their own, using wind tunnels of their own design? So when we went back down this year, I took along historian David McCullough's The Wright Brothers, a biography of the two men and their achievement.
What I enjoyed most about The Wright Brothers is probably the historical sense it gives of Kitty Hawk in the early 1900's. The Outer Banks were barely inhabited at the time, save for "life-saving stations" that were stationed every six miles to save stranded or sinking boats. People lived with their families in the meagerest conditions, growing what they could in small garden plots of mostly sand. Wilbur and Orville stayed with a time with Kitty Hawk's postmaster, and the local life-saving crew provided critical support for the brothers during their stay on the remote beach, and were among the first people outside of the brothers themselves to witness human flight. Kitty Hawk today is all yogurt shops and escape rooms, but you really get a sense of that remoteness passing over some of the bridges further to the south; though many flight enthusiasts of the time were thought of as obsessives or cranks, you have to marvel at the commitment the brothers had toward the goal of flight. On his very first trip over, McCullough describes rough waters that nearly drowned poor Wilbur, who even had to reverse course and camp out for the night in a sheltered part of the sound.
Part of me wanted my experience reading The Wright Brothers to be more like my experience in the museum: to explain (or remind) the various technical achievements that made the Wrights the first to achieve human flight, while so many were making the same attempt. What was so genius about the wing-warping system the Wrights used? How did they perfect the propeller? But McCullough is a historian, not an engineer, and the book is written with an eye toward the human rather than the scientific.
What I really didn't know was what happened after the successful trials at Kitty Hawk. First, no one seems to have believed they'd done it. The first eyewitness account was written in a magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture. The Wrights attempted over and over again to contact the U.S. government to sell them the Flyer, but the U.S gave them the cold shoulder every time, even after the Wrights had returned to Dayton and begun making regular flights at Huffman Prairie. But not every country was so dismissive--it was actually the French government that first expressed interest in the Wright's invention. France, as I did not know, seems to have been the real epicenter of research into human flight. It wasn't until Wilbur demonstrated the Flyer at Le Mans in 1908--five years after Kitty Hawk--that the momentousness of the achievement had really become clear. And it was the beginning of a period in which the brothers became European celebrities, which seems to have been bemusing and a bit troubling to them both, being rather American in the simplicity of their tastes and habits.
Though I liked the first part of the book best--the wind-swept dunes, the tireless tinkerers, all that stuff of legend was what I wanted to hear about again--but it was this second part, which told the part of the story I'd never heard, that was probably the most valuable.
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