The Wright Brothers

David McCullough, a historian who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, recounts how two Ohio brothers became the first people to fly a powered, heavier-than-air machine with a pilot aboard. The feat took place in 1903 on the isolated Outer Banks of North Carolina, where the pair were still little known beyond their hometown.

Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, and the book stresses that they were more than skilled tradesmen. Their intelligence, stubborn persistence and wide-ranging curiosity shaped their work, and McCullough links much of this to a childhood with little electricity or plumbing but plenty of books, many supplied by their minister father. The brothers kept learning throughout their lives, and their sister Katharine, whose contribution has often been overlooked, also appears as a lively and loyal presence in their story.

Working as a team, the brothers approached each obstacle with confidence. Wilbur is portrayed as a man of rare genius and Orville as a mechanic of extraordinary skill. Through repeated failures, public mockery and the constant danger of each experimental flight, they pressed on with their goal.

Drawing on the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks and more than a thousand letters from family correspondence, McCullough focuses on the brothers as people, presenting their achievement as a deeply American story.