The Wright Brothers. By David McCullough. Simon & Schuster; 320 pages; $30.
THE journey from nutter to genius can be short. For Wilbur and Orville Wright, inventors of the aeroplane, it took just 12 seconds. In 1903 their 605-pound (274-kilo) contraption, dubbed the “Flyer”, lifted off the sand dunes of North Carolina and stayed aloft just long enough to make history. Elated, the brothers quickly learned to go farther, higher and faster.
The Wrights broke through against great odds, as David McCullough recounts in this enjoyable, fast-paced tale. Neither had any formal engineering training. They ran a bicycle shop in Ohio and decided to build an aeroplane after reading up on gliders. Having studied books and birds, they constructed first a glider, then a motor-powered craft, to test in the windy Carolina dunes. They worked with deliberation, taking time to master the basics of flying (such as how the wind works) and spurning pointless risk. Proceeds from the bike shop funded their efforts.
Scepticism was intense. Plenty of people dismissed...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1PoJXob
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