David McCullough's 'Wright Brothers': Refreshing, but skirts the dark side

The Wright Brothers

By David McCullough

Simon & Schuster. 262 pp. $30 nolead ends

nolead begins

Reviewed by Bob Hoover

David McCullough's popular biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Adams succeed with readers because they aren't about politics or history from a particular viewpoint, but, rather, dwell with real people who happened to be politicians and history-makers.

He brought out the humanity in these iconic figures. He de-emphasized Roosevelt's bloodlust, Truman's suspect background, and Adams' snobbery. Instead, he emphasized their strengths, above all their "American" qualities.

The Wright Brothers is McCullough's sincere effort, using the same techniques, to elevate these hardworking brothers to a lofty place in the American pantheon. It's a well-trod story, but the book refreshes it in McCullough's famous upbeat, minutely researched manner. Still, the book can't hide this fact: Orville and Wilbur Wright don't belong in such select company.

Something's lacking - interesting characters such as Adams, Roosevelt, or Truman. Orville and Wilbur did accomplish their goal of powered flight, but they missed out on the things that make life interesting: relationships, children, hobbies, fun, and most of all, self-reflection.

The family member who got those things was their sister, Katharine, an Oberlin College graduate and high school teacher. She found time, while she managed the household in Dayton, Ohio, and supported her brothers' airplane projects, to achieve a more rounded life. She even married, albeit at 58.

Orville took the marriage hard, McCullough writes, and refused to speak to his sister for three years, indeed only when she was on her deathbed. McCullough barely touches on this behavior. Instead, he leaves the Wright brothers in 1910, just seven years after their Flyer achieved flight with Wilbur at the controls in Kitty Hawk, N.C. Such a cutoff allows McCullough not to detail the death of Wilbur at 44 of typhoid fever.

By focusing on their shared triumphs, McCullough skirts the negatives of the Wrights' remarkable achievement. These included a fight with the Smithsonian Institution, which insisted, at first, that its director, Samuel Langley, invented the first airplane. There was an ugly patent lawsuit against Glenn Curtiss and his sponsor, Alexander Graham Bell. And there is the sour story of how the competition quickly rendered the brothers' machine obsolete.

Wilbur and Orville grew up in a family of five siblings, mostly in Dayton, where their father was a minister of the United Brethren Church. After Wilbur had spent several years at home tending to her, their mother, Susan, died in 1889, when they were 22 and 18, respectively. Wilbur stayed at home because he had become reclusive and ill after he was smashed in the face with a hockey stick and abandoned plans to attend Yale University.

McCullough argues that Wilbur's three years as an invalid gave him time to lay the groundwork for a study of manned flight. Orville, meanwhile, was hard at work as a printer, having built his own press and cranking out a neighborhood newspaper.

Wilbur joined his brother in the business, and the pair soon became a team of craftsmen, eventually tapping into the bicycle boom of the 1890s by designing and building bikes at their machine shop. Wilbur continued to follow his interest in flying in 1899 by seeking help, ironically, from the Smithsonian, which provided him with a list of sources about the subject.

Thus began the brothers' trial-and-error pursuit of flight. It started with large kites, and trips to the Outer Banks, then a sparsely populated island difficult to reach. There they tested their theories, first on manned gliders, and then, in 1903, on a glider equipped with an engine and propellers. Much of the plane was built from bicycle parts, cloth, wire, and wood. They even built their own crude gasoline motor. They first flew on Dec. 17, 1903.

McCullough's account of this well-known history is refreshingly told, with a wealth of details pulled from the Wrights' letters home and the writings of the few witnesses in their remote proving grounds. Once they were confident in their machine, the brothers tested versions back home in Dayton, where their success was soon widely noticed.

The Wrights' efforts to sell their plane in Europe, though not as well-known, made them successful as well as celebrities. McCullough lavishes his full attention on those years, spent largely in France. Orville often stayed in the United States, seeking U.S. Army funding for the plane, until a 1908 demonstration crash killed an Army officer and seriously injured the younger Wright.

Wilbur continued to work strenuously to market the plane and fight legal battles, but he enjoyed a moment of triumph when he flew around Manhattan along the Hudson River and over the Statue of Liberty in 1909. Watched by thousands, the flight thrilled the viewers, as it does McCullough, inspired to write a rapturous description.

For McCullough, the Wright brothers seem the model of Americanism, with their small-town upbringing, unflagging work ethic, independence, modesty, and self-taught knowledge. He seldom questions their behavior or motives or speculates on their singular natures. These were clearly reticent and difficult, if not strange, people, traits that McCullough seems unwilling to explore in his search for the virtues and strengths he values so much in American life.