Presented in partnership with the National WWI Museum and Memorial
For most Americans, the story of early flight begins and ends with the Wright Brothers taking to the air on December 17, 1903, over Kill Devil Hills, about four miles from their camp at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. So much had Wilbur and Orville Wright satisfied an obsession that had existed since the Roman Empire—when patricians had their slaves jump off buildings strapped onto makeshift wings—that the brothers were soon extolled as American legends, a perception that persists to this very day.
But the real story of the quest for flight is far more complex, and far more controversial, than the storybook version that dominates popular history. There is no denying the magnitude of their achievement, but Wrights themselves were hardly altruistic—their first act after returning home from North Carolina was to hire a patent attorney to ensure that every other person who ever succeeded in controlled flight, whether using their technology or not, would have to pay them hefty royalties. Nor were they even the first to employ that technology. A physics instructor at Yale had done it before them.
The real story of early flight goes far beyond the Wrights and includes a number of brilliant innovators, such as Glenn Curtiss and Alberto Santos-Dumont, and incredibly brave exhibition flyers, including arguably the greatest aviator who ever lived, Lincoln Beachey. It was these “birdmen” who pushed forward the boundaries of flight, test pilots without safety equipment who flew ever higher, faster, and with more daring, oblivious to the incredible risks. During the first five years of competitive flying, one of these pioneers died on the average of every ten days. But as they persisted, aviation technology leapt forward at an astounding pace until, less than a decade later, airplanes were sufficiently sophisticated to become a weapon of war.
Here is that rare occasion when real history far outstrips mythology.
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Lawrence Goldstone is the author or co-author of more than two-dozen books of both fiction and non-fiction. He has written three critically acclaimed works about the history of innovation, Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies; Drive! Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age; and Going Deep: John Philip Holland and the Invention of the Attack Submarine. The young adult version of Birdmen, Higher, Steeper, Faster, was one of Kirkus Review’s best books of 2017. His other principal focus is Constitutional Law—his book, On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights, won the 2021 Lillian Smith Book Award, and Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment won the 2023 Carter G. Woodson Book Award.
