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Wilbur was a quirky, intelligent and solitary man, who would recall being "interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes." In 1894, while in his 20s, he read an article in McClure's magazine about "the Flying Man," a German engineer named Otto Lilienthal who sailed through the air on artificial wings. His feats reawakened Wilbur's youthful curiosity about flight, which continued to soar even after Lilienthal crashed and died in 1896. By 1899, Wilbur was constantly tinkering with kites and other models, having been "afflicted with the belief that flight is possible." Within a year, Wilbur's letters were speaking not just about "my ideas," "my plan," but "our calculations" and "our reasons" -- Orville now shared his brother's obsession. Orville was more social, more boisterous and more practical than his austere brother. "The thing I like about Orv," Wilbur once said, "is that Orv loves a good scrap." The two were deeply loyal and presented a united front to the outside world. Nevertheless, they appreciated the give-and-take essential to intellectual achievements. "No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses some elements of truth," Wilbur understood. "If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some error with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other's eyes so both can see clearly." The Wright brothers serve as poster children for the American credo that inspiration, determination, perspiration and vigorous argumentation bring success. The Wright brothers did not invent in a vacuum. Their efforts were part of a worldwide competition to be the first to fly. With a keen eye, Tobin pits them against their rivals, especially Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, and Alexander Graham Bell. The Wright brothers succeeded by rejecting the ideas that consumed others -- especially the notion that planes should mimic a bird's flapping wings (a cool but wrong idea) or that it could be achieved by inventing an engine strong enough to defy gravity. Their work with bicycles helped them define the central problem as one of balance. "The inability to balance and steer" in the air, Wilbur wrote, "... when this one feature has been worked out, the age of flying machines will have arrived." Their great breakthrough came from trying to "control the center of pressure by controlling the angles of the wing tips," Tobin writes. After that conceptual insight, the challenge became how to construct a glider with enough play in it to "twist, or warp, with one side presenting itself to the wind at a higher angle than the other." The construction was simply a matter of trying and trying, repeatedly. Tobin beautifully re-creates the Wright brothers' mental universe, showing what they were thinking as they tinkered again and again in their quest to fly. A veteran journalist who wrote about the great World War II reporter in "Ernie Pyle's War," Tobin captures the obsessive nature of the inventors' quest. He also portrays the odd rhythm of the Wright brothers' lives: They designed madly in the winter, spring and summer while running their bicycle shop in Dayton, then spent fall at Kitty Hawk, whose wide open spaces and strong winds facilitated their effort to transcend nature. One can imagine the skepticism the Wright brothers first encountered from the village they would make famous. "We laughed about 'em among ourselves," one of the 60 villagers later admitted. The first thing Wilbur built was a "two-wing kite large enough to carry a man." The wings were "covered in white French sateen, a finer fabric than most Kitty Hawkers had ever seen" -- the Wrights' hostess would eventually cut up the fabric into dresses for her daughters. But the villagers softened. "They were two of the workingest boys I ever saw, and when they worked, they worked," John Daniels, a regular observer, recalled. In addition to helping dramatize the story, Tobin's contrast between Langley and the Wright brothers offers a modern cautionary tale. The Wright brothers were amateurs freelancing, Langley was a professional, beholden to the governmental institutions funding him, scrutinized by reporters, subjected therefore to a "lot of bitter and unfair criticism." Being free to fail in private facilitated the Wrights' success. Langley's powerful "aerodome," which crashed in the Potomac only days before the Wright brothers' first flight, cost $70,000; from 1900 to 1903, the Wrights spent barely $1,000 to be able to stake their claim to mounting what Orville described as "the first flight in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started" -- for all of 59 seconds. They had not yet perfected their sound bite, but the Wright brothers had made that first great leap. In the coming years, they would perfect the sound bite, as Wilbur, who died of typhoid in 1912, focused on how to transform their great achievement into a stable business, and Orville, who lived until 1948, safeguarded their historical claim to fame as the "fathers of flight." Kudos to Tobin for capturing the challenge and thrills of this extraordinary individual and collective achievement in this well-written, enlightening book.
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