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by Noah Adams Crown, 2003
by James Tobin Free Press, 2003 |
The wind is a physical presence on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It is a shaping force, bending trees into gentle yet permanent curves, inexorably moving sand dunes into ever-greater heaps, and bringing the surf closer each year to both summer mini-mansions and trailer parks. Above the great sand-dune optimistically called Kill Devil Hill, a vast truncated Art Deco obelisk resists that steady wind—a power so formidable that when construction began on the obelisk in 1927, the hill had already moved a third of a mile since the Wright Brothers began to experiment with gliders on its slopes in the autumn of 1901.
In 1900, Wilbur Wright, with the intimidating meticulousness that he and his brother Orville brought to every task that confronted them, found in a chart of wind tables that the weather station at Kill Devil Hill had the steadiest continual winds of any station in the eastern United States. He and Orville decided that this remote section of the North Carolina coast was the perfect spot to perform the glider experiments which they confidently believed would lead to the first powered flight in human history.
The result is, on all levels, one of the great American stories. It combines populism, entrepreneurship, sports, Christianity, the march of progress, mechanical tinkering, France, moralizing, technology, and lawsuits. As a bonus, the story concludes with the complete reshaping of the world, both physically and mentally.
Of the many books being released in this centennial year to mark the Wright Brothers' achievement, the one that best captures this wonderful all-American chili of a story is James Tobin's To Conquer the Air. T.A. Heppenheimer is an experienced aviation writer who tells the technical side of the story with meticulous care, but his account lacks Tobin's historical perspective and literary verve. On the far end of the spectrum is Noah Adams' The Flyers, subtitled "In Search of Wilbur and Orville Wright," a gooey, self-indulgent search for contemporary meaning that leaves the reader in the dark about what the Wright Brothers actually achieved and how they did it.
For it should be surprising that they achieved anything at all. You can easily play the story of the Wrights as a movie in which nothing particular happens. Counterfactual history typically works to make things more interesting; what would happen if, say, the Germans had successfully invaded Britain in 1940, or if Napoleon had not sold Louisiana to the United States. But it would be just as helpful to postulate interesting things not happening, in order to appreciate more fully the strangeness of what actually happened.
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by T.A. Heppenheimer Wiley, 2003
by Walt Burton and Owen Findsen Abrams, 2003 |
Thus if we imagine the Wright Brothers without the airplane, we get a rather stodgy story, hardly the stuff of a Hollywood screenplay, save in some alternate universe where the lives of unassuming people are assiduously chronicled. A happy childhood in the American Midwest is followed by a peaceful adolescence. Wilbur, following an injury while playing a particularly insane variant of ice hockey on an Ohio pond, decides not to go to Yale for a theological education that would lead him to follow his father Milton into the ministry. He remains at home and nurses his mother in the illness that ends in her death. Orville, the youngest brother of the family, tinkers with printing presses and anything else mechanical. Both brothers remain unwed, as does their sister Katharine. Both Wilbur and Orville take up the new hobby of bicycling, the craze of the 1890s. They are not only enthusiasts but also entrepreneurs, who open a bicycle shop; and they are clever mechanics, who are soon designing and manufacturing their own bicycle models. Schwinn eventually buys out the Wrights early in the 1910s; they live happily and quietly on the proceeds, fiddling with bike models in a very long early retirement. They die the grand old men of Dayton, Ohio, their early bicycle models proudly displayed in the museum of the Dayton Historical Society. No one other than three or four local history buffs knows much of anything about them.
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