The most recommended books about the Wright brothers

I used this in class the last semester I taught at Duke; had I continued to teach I would have used it again. The students and I found it was two things—as it tells the Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery it also spotlights creative strategies and entrepreneurial behaviors in the stories it shares. It’s an entertaining history and narrative of creative and entrepreneurial successes; both teach us, guide us, maybe even inspire us. I’m the father of three daughters and appreciated the stories he’s uncovered of many life-changing innovations that women led but men claimed. 

This non-fiction book about Emma Lilian Todd by Kirsten Williams Larson and illustrated by Tracy Subisak offers an inspiring story about a woman engineer inventing an airplane. The story and illustrations do a fantastic job of showing the real-world process of design thinking, with research and failures along the way. I love the themes of perseverance and the important message that great inventions build upon one another.

Every schoolchild learns the story of Orville and Wilbur Wright and the famous first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk.

But how many know of the brilliant, irrepressible, and extroverted woman who supported them throughout and is a key reason for their success? The woman who travelled to France and met with presidents, kings, and queens to sell the idea of aviation, when the American people weren’t yet believers?

In keeping with my desire to learn the rest of the story, especially the women in the background who made the grand events possible, I am studying the story of Katharine Wright Haskell.

Both heartwarming and tragic at times, it is a story of the American dream at a time when it seemed anything was possible.

This book focuses on Octave Chanute's work in aeronautics.

He is best known for his scientific and collaborative support of the Wright Brothers. But as the author clearly demonstrates, this engineer's contributions to the field of aviation have often been underestimated, even though almost every famous and not-so-famous aviation enthusiast contacted him and used the readily available drawings of his glider to build and then learn to fly their own design.

Chanute's biplane glider design, developed and first flown in 1896 in the Indiana Dunes along Lake Michigan, proved to be a key step in the evolution of the flying machine.

By freely sharing not only drawings of the general design of this aircraft, but also the lessons learned, the biplane became the starting point or prototype for many experimenters and can be considered the foundation of the modern airplane.

I loved reading about these very early pioneers who today are largely forgotten or never known, notably Frank McLean, who met the Wright brothers, and went on to cut an irresistibly romantic, dare-devil figure. 

He became an overnight celebrity when he flew a flimsy seaplane between the towers of Tower Bridge in London in 1912. After the First World War, he was one of the first pilots flying to Africa and down the Nile in what would become one of the early air routes for Imperial Airways in the 1930s.  

Also, Charles Rolls, of Rolls-Royce fame, who was tragically killed in a freak incident at the Bournemouth air display in 1910, the first Brit to be killed in a flying accident. 

Barely a decade after The Wright brothers’ first tentative take-off, flying machines were thrown into the scorching crucible of war in Europe. The men who flew them were pioneers, members of what many saw as a military flying club. But the flying club soon developed into a bear-pit of mortal combat, fought behind synchronised machine guns without the solace of a parachute. Levine paints his pictures with the personal accounts and anecdotes of the pilots that fought these battles, seeking to understand the feelings and motivations of the young men who volunteered to risk all in the frightening new theatre of aerial warfare. These truths, are in many instances, stranger than fiction, forged, as they were, on the cutting edge of the new aviation technology.

I have always been a David McCullough fan, so I put this book on my list. And yet, I kept putting off reading it, as I didn’t think I would like it. But I finally did, and I thought it was great.

Most of us know a little of the story of how these two bicycle merchants from Dayton, Ohio turned their knowledge of two-wheelers into arguably the greatest technological achievement in human history. I bet you also didn‘t know the important role their sister played. Read it and find this out. And a lot more.