“To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight”, by James Tobin

 

 

448 pages, Free Press, ISBN-13: 978-0684856889

 

Who hasn’t heard of the Wright Brothers? As a former Presenter at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, I can attest to the indisputable fact that Orville and Wilber hold pride of place in the Village (second only to Thomas Edison), what with their workshop and family home now residing in suburban Detroit, after Henry Ford transported them both from Dayton, Ohio. When I found James Tobin’s To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight at 2^nd & Charles (after having turned in a bunch a DVDs), I picked it up for free and, jeez, am I ever glad that I did. Throughout, the Wrights are portrayed much as I was taught that they were: austere, persistent with a kind of mule-like stubbornness and blessed with episodes of inspired brilliance. And it’s all true. 

 

The Wrights – they are discussed as a tandem throughout much of the book, except for those rare instances where they were separated – invented the three-axis control system for their flyers after absorbing damn-near everything ever written on the subject of powered human flight, by meeting with everyone they could who actually attempted what they were now exploring, by observing the world around them – especially birds and the way they flew and, just as importantly, hovered in the air, and especially through lots and lots and LOTS of trial and error. While their development of wing-warping (discovered by twisting a thin box) ultimately proved to be less than ideal and didn’t seem to understand adverse yaw, for all that their powered Flyer flew first, making them the rightly-celebrated inventors we know today.

 

But for all that, To Conquer the Air is more than just the tale of the Wright brothers and their world-changing achievement, as Tobin manages to interweave the stories of other pioneers of the air into his work: such as Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution and his assistant, Charles Manly; the Wright’s friend and patron Octave Chanute; the mostly unknown Wright father, other brother and their sister Kate; and even Alexander Graham Bell and Glenn Curtiss, founders of the Aerial Experiment Society and the Wright’s principal rivals. Tobin has managed to wright a book that tells the complete story of how Man conquered the air in less than 500 pages, bringing together all of the technical details without talking down or past the reader.