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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 350-357



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What the Wrights Wrought

The Centennial of Flight in Recent Literature


On 17 December 2003, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, resonated with a celebration of the centennial of the first controlled human flight, the culmination of months filled with news of activities designed to commemorate the achievements of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Museum curators vied with marketeers—and with writers and publishers, several dozen volumes about the Wright brothers and aviation history appearing in 2003 alone. Twelve books are noted here as indicative of the current historiography, and by way of suggesting how it has changed since publication of a review essay similar to this one in T&C fifteen years ago.

When he wrote "Aviation History in Wider View" (Technology and Culture 30 [July 1989]: 643-56), James Hansen depicted aviation historiography as largely trapped in technical litanies and tales of heroism, in mythologizing and mystification. To balance the tension between enthusiast literature and scholarship, he invoked William F. Ogburn's The Social Effects of Aviation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946) as something of a model and called for a new literature that would put aeronautics in social and cultural context. Now, in the wake of the Wright brothers' centennial, we may again ask how the literature looks "in wider view." The books noted here fall into three categories. Several are focused on the life and work of the Wright brothers themselves. Others are surveys. Still others, edited sets of essays, aim to address a range of significant topics in aviation history. All discuss the social construction of heroism in one way or another; all affirm, at least in passing, the significant changes wrought by the invention of the airplane.

In the realm of Wright brothers literature, there are already two classics. The premier biography is Tom D. Crouch's The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright, originally published by W. W. Norton in 1989 and [End Page 350] rereleased for the centennial in 2003. Peter L. Jakab's Visions of a Flying Machine: The Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention, published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1990, remains the most thorough address to the technical history of the Flyer. Now joining Crouch and Jakab are James Tobin's To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight (New York: Free Press, 2003) and T. A. Heppenheimer's First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2003). Tobin uses primary sources to craft his account of how the brothers spent years working on becoming airborne, then struggled to stay aloft as the media and the general public, crackpots and serious competitors, all vied for a piece of the aerial pie. Chief among the competitors was Glenn Curtiss, who became a particular thorn in their side. In 1910 Curtiss outmatched the Wright brothers and won a ten-thousand-dollar prize offered by a New York publisher for completing a flight from Albany to Manhattan.

In explaining the nature of the Wrights' inventive process, Tobin shows how they acquired and exploited technological knowledge that others at first lacked. Invention is also the main theme of Heppenheimer's First Flight. Based mostly on secondary sources, it opens directly onto the life of the Wrights before taking a step back to acknowledge other pioneers. Heppenheimer is a fine stylist, but his volume is flawed by an outdated notion of Yankee Ingenuity that is especially glaring in the last chapter, "Inventiveness and Invention." There the narrative jumps from one "breakthrough" to another, providing a facile, deterministic chronology while at the same time assuming a readership familiar with arcane distinctions among types of aircraft. Heppenheimer's leap from the era of the Wright brothers into that of the turbojet, not unusual in the current American literature, reflects a hubris perceived with mixed feelings around the globe in the political climate fostered by the war in Iraq.

Because of all the publicity focused on 17 December...

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