The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - Simon & Schuster (2015)
David McCullough’s long list of achievements and accolades is a biographer’s wet dream. Having won two Pulitzer Prizes—for Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001) respectively—McCullough is one of the foremost scholars of American history, and arguably the most successful of presidential biographers. His ambitions as a historian and a preservationist are not limited to the written word. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries by Ken Burns—including Emmy Award winner The Civil War and Academy Award nominee Brooklyn Bridge—along with the 2003 film Seabiscuit. Part of McCullough’s well-deserved success is owed to his ability to capture that hardened kernel of American determination. More than any other author I’ve encountered, McCullough knows the countenance of the ideal American Man. Hardworking, ambitious, unrelenting, mechanically innovative—the American Man never backs away from ‘impossible’ problems. This obstinate belief in one’s own capabilities and inevitable success is what has allowed America to advance from a wilderness to a democratic superpower in less than four-hundred years. It is also the fuel that saturates The Wright Brothers with an irresistible, patriotic energy.
Wilbur and Orville Wright were raised in Dayton, Ohio and remained devoted to their family and their hometown for the duration of their lives. Their father, Bishop Milton Wright, encouraged all his children to better themselves through reading and exploring new hobbies. When he brought home a toy helicopter from one of his many missionary trips, he unknowingly sparked a lifelong obsession in his two younger sons. Both Wilbur and Orville were self-taught engineers and supported their dreams of flight by running a successful bicycle shop in Dayton. In the back room of their small store, they experimented with original bicycle designs, tinkered with faulty machinery, and, when the itch to fly could no longer be suppressed, built their own homemade wind tunnel to test out various wing designs. In their early days of airborne experimentation, the Wright brothers worked amidst a discouraging cloud of pessimism and disbelief. Writes McCullough,
Along with the cost of experiments in flight, the risks of humiliating failure, injury, and, of course, death, there was the inevitable prospect of being mocked as a crank, a crackpot, and in many cases with good reason…For more than fifty years, or long before the Wright brothers took up their part, would-be ‘conquerers of the air’ and their strange or childish flying machines, as described in the press, had served as a continuous source of popular comic relief.
In fact, it can be difficult for modern readers (myself included) to understand just how much was accomplished by the Wright Brothers and their contemporaries. Their contribution to the field of aviation allowed human flight to move from the realm of science fiction to the realm of tangible reality. This incredible rate of progress is clarified by McCullough in his concluding chapter,
Advances in aviation all the while had been accelerating faster than Orville or anyone of his generation had thought possible, and starting with World War I to a form of weaponry like nothing before in human experience…[Orville] lived to see aviation transformed by jet propulsion, the introduction of the rocket, the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947.
When the brothers first began testing their gliders on the rolling dunes of Kitty Hawk in 1900, they were ecstatic to record flights of 300-400 feet, and a trip lasting more than two minutes was considered a huge success. Over the next several decades they broke every record imaginable—distance flown, number of passengers, distance from the ground, and time spent aloft—and their final flights were several hours in length. The photograph of Wilbur circling the Statue of Liberty in his patented craft is one of the most iconic images in the American archive. It combines unabashed patriotism, mechanical ingenuity, and shrewd business acumen in one perfect compilation. For the Wright brothers, the desire to take flight was always about exploring new frontiers and pushing the boundaries of science. It was about solving impossible problems and feeling the rush of adrenaline that accompanies any dangerous activity. Perhaps Wilbur was fortunate to die when he did—at the age of forty-five—before he had to face his own contribution to warfare and destruction. Orville was not so lucky. In a late interview he tried to make sense of his conflicting feelings,
We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong…No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses.
By providing excerpts from the Wrights’ own letters and notes, McCullough is able to grant his readers access to the intimate thoughts and feelings of his subjects in a way most biographers can only dream of. Through their own words, the Wright brothers displayed a remarkable ability to remain grounded and calm even as they were immersed in fashionable society. Once the brothers could prove beyond a doubt that they had invented a relatively reliable flying machine—once they emerged from behind their paranoid curtain of secrecy—they became international celebrities. Aviation was, in its early days, a thoroughly aristocratic venture. The cost of renting open land and building large machines that would likely be reduced to a pile of splinters in less than five minutes prevented all but the rich and restless from making flight a serious hobby. Almost as impressive as the Wrights’ scientific achievements was their frugality and ability to construct their own materials. Even as they were introduced to princes, and invited to dine at the estates of the fabulously wealthy, the Wright brothers never lost their knack for saving money and keeping focused. With glittering jewels and bubbling champagne threatening distraction at every juncture, the Wright brothers could think only of how to fly further and spend more time in the air. They would not be seduced or softened by the cloying scent of luxury. Describing Wilbur’s success at Le Mans, McCullough writes,
Not since Benjamin Franklin had any American been so overwhelmingly popular in France. As said by the Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, it was not just his feats in the air that aroused such interest but his strong ‘individuality.’ He was seen as a personification of ‘the Plymouth Rock spirit,’ to which French students of the United States, from the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, had attributed ‘the grit and indomitable perseverance that characterize American efforts in every department of activity.’
The newspapermen of France, England, and the United States scrambled for information and photos of the handsome, reticent brothers. There was something attractive—yet elusive—about the way they spoke little and were unfazed by extravagance. They provided, perhaps, a refreshing break from the exhausting claustrophobia of high society and the transience of material wealth. The Wright brothers were also making headlines during a fast-paced age of invention and exploration, when boundaries were routinely crossed both geographically and in the realm of knowledge. The fervor and excitement of the times—fueled by the widespread dissemination of newspapers—can best be gleaned from McCullough’s account,
…the times were alive with invention, technical innovations, new ideas of every kind. George Eastman had introduced the ‘Kodak’ box camera; Isaac Merritt Singer, the first electric sewing machine; the Otis Company had installed the world’s first elevator in a New York office building; the first safety razor, the first mousetrap, the first motor cars built in America—all in the dozen years since Orville started his print shop and Wilbur emerged from his spell of self-imposed isolation…Then, too, there was the ever-present atmosphere of a city in which inventing and making things was central to the way of life.
There is a peculiar sense of nostalgia one feels when reading such descriptions. Now, when many of the most important discoveries are being made at the microscopic level—with nanotechnology and wafer-thin microchips—I find myself yearning for the days when balloons and flying machines were the talk-about-town. Granted, many of the smaller inventions are more efficient—I am happy to type this review on a laptop rather than a massive, groaning desktop the size of a filing cabinet—but a part of me wishes I had been alive when scientific experiments were spectacular and unpredictable. The Wright brothers were not always successful, and many of their flights ended in crashes and injuries, but they were never afraid to push the limits. David McCullough, in his phenomenal book The Wright Brothers, reminds us that some things really are worth risking life and reputation for.
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