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The Wright Brothers: A Biography (Dover Transportation) |  |
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The Wright Brothers: A Biography (Dover Transportation) | |
网友对The Wright Brothers: A Biography (Dover Transportation)的评论
This story of two curious and amazing boys is just right. There's enough detail to feel we know them and plain enough to be read by young teens as well as adults. The boys were fascinated by anything that "worked" and often saw a chance to make an improvement, always curious about how it worked and how it could work better.
This is not a studious biography with footnotes and scientific language, it's a visit with a friend of the Wright family and lets us feel that we also watched them grow and discover.
This is one of those books that anyone interested in the Wright Bros. must read. Kelly was a friend of Orville's and had direct info to work from. Easy to read. Book arrived quickly and in excellent condition. Would recommend this purchase from this group again.
No depth of description of the characters. It completely glosses over the extent to which aviation development was held back, as many have claimed, by the Wright bros.
This, now 70 + year old, biography of the Wright brothers is valuable because the author, newspaperman Fred Kelly, was a friend who covered the brothers for years, and was even instrumental in ending the quarrel between Orville and the Smithsonian. As a result, this work is Orville making his case to posterity, through a friend.
It is written in the style of the journalism of the time period, but because it is the only authorized biography of the brothers, it brings a freshness and closeness that other books, like the recent David McCollough book, do not.
Because Wilbur died at a relatively young age, and this book was written towards the end of Orville's life, it does tend to focus a bit more on Orville. But the great value of this book is the vivid, almost first hand accounts of the brothers early years, and later their fight for recognition of their flight achievements.
Fred Kelly has written the definitive biography of the Wright Brothers, with special emphasis on the 10 years after the first flight. During this time, the brothers worked diligently to explain the benefits of aviation to an unbelieving public and uninterested leaders of military and commercial concerns.
Kelly starts at the beginning, with tales of the brothers as young children and schoolboys, ultimately moving into the world of commerce as circus impressarios, printers, and bicycle builders and repairmen.
By the late 1890's they had selected aviation as a hobby, and started their annual pilgrimages to Kitty Hawk for several months each year to perform experiments. Only after 4 or 5 years of gliding and kite flying, was manned flight considered. By working long hours in the bicycle shop and minimizing all expenses, they were able to pursue this unusual hobby for several weeks each fall.
The obstacles were legendary, but the brothers persevered, usually by arguing (in a friendly way) between themselves, then reading every book on the subject in the Dayton public library, and then, developing new theories and experimental methods. In this way, they broke new ground in fluid dynamics, control and stability, motor construction, and propeller design. For example, they discovered that published tables of data on wind dynamics were wrong, so they built a wind tunnel to generate better data. The brothers had a unique ability to solve problems by applying a sound scientific approach and by going about it in an honest midwestern approach.
Those of us who were at the centennial did not hear the story of how little publicity the 1903 flight received. The press and public were either unbelieving, or unable to distinguish between flying dirigibles and heavier than air self propelled planes. Only after several public demonstrations with flights exceeding one hour did the popular press come to understand the importance of this development.
Kelly's book is unique in its access to Orville Wright, as they were old friends and Kelly consulted extensively with him, writing this book in the 1940's. After Wilbur died, Orville focused on building the various Wright companies around the world, fighting patent infringement suits (including Curtis), and endless battles with the Smithsonian Institute.
The Smithsonian story is told here in great detail, as Orville still sought for the historical record to reflect his view, now universally accepted. The Langely plane (Langely was the director of the Smithsonian) never flew; in fact, it crashed several times in the Potomac in 1902-03, and had obvious design flaws.
Amazingly, Glen Curtis was allowed to attempt experiments years later with the Langely plane, while he had litigation pending over the Wright patents. Curtis made major modifications to the plane, and got it to briefly fly, thus attempting to weaken the Wright patent claims. For years, the Smithsonian stubbornly insisted that the Langely plane was historically significant, and snubbed the Wright brothers, who retaliated by displaying their planes in other museums.
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