First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the invention of the airplane by T. A. Heppenheimer, John Wiley, £19.99/$30, ISBN 0471401242
Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the invention of flight by Paul Hoffman, Hyperion, £24.95, ISBN 0786866594
OF ALL the inventions that transformed the 20th century, none is more visible than the airplane. It dominates long-distance transportation. If you look up into the skies above any city, you will see planes and their contrails. The inventors of the airplane were Orville and Wilbur Wright, the “bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio”, and T. A. Heppenheimer has written a new biography of the brothers and of flight itself.
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Heppenheimer is well suited to this task, with a degree in aerospace engineering and a half-dozen books on aviation and space flight under his belt. He shows us just how much the Wright brothers brought to this challenge: intelligence, persistence and courage. Though neither went to college, they read everything available on kites, gliders and flying, and corresponded with the leading experts of the day. They discovered that no one understood how to design an effective airfoil, and that the accepted constants and coefficients used to calculate lift and drag were wrong. So the brothers built a wind tunnel and created gauges that could measure lift and drag directly. The result, Heppenheimer says, was work “that vaulted them into the vanguard in aeronautical experimentation”.
The Wrights’ final triumph, on 17 December, 1903, came after hundreds of flights in gliders, more ground-breaking work on propeller design, and countless crashes and minor injuries.
The rest of First Flight makes for rather sad reading. The brothers had carefully patented many aspects of their design, and they now sat back to wait for the US government to buy their plane, while remaining alert to any other aviators who might steal their ideas. The government proved a reluctant customer, and the Wrights ended up fighting endless legal battles with Glenn Curtis and other pioneers. All the major innovations of this period – ailerons, enclosed cockpits and so on – came from these rivals. The Wrights did become millionaires, but after Wilbur died in 1912, Orville lived on in isolation in his mansion outside Dayton. He died in 1948, having flown a Lockheed Constellation and seen the first jets.
At the same time the Wrights were secretly flying gliders at Kitty Hawk, Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian who began life as a millionaire, was piloting small dirigibles over the streets of Paris. While the Wrights supped on canned food and biscuits after dragging their Flyer back to its hangar, Santos-Dumont dined at Maxim’s after his jaunts. Outside Brazil, he is considered a footnote to aviation history. Paul Hoffman, a successful science writer and editor, admits he had never heard of him before embarking upon research for Wings of Madness.
He seems to have read all the documentation available on Santos-Dumont, his many flights with powered hydrogen balloons, and short experimentation with an airplane. But back files of the Paris Herald provided most of the descriptions that bulk out the book. The result is a competent description of Santos-Dumont’s flights, peppered with anecdotes about countesses and Rothschilds. But the Brazilian truly was just a footnote: his work went nowhere. Wings of Madness ends on a low note, too. Santos-Dumont, appalled by the military use of aviation during the First World War, retreated into sanatoria and eventually committed suicide.
Both these books suffer from padding. Heppenheimer closes with a section on the development of aviation technology, ending with the turbofan engine, but it seems to come from another book. Hoffman sticks in several pages about the Gatling gun and dynamite – weapons that were supposed to end all war – that do not advance his story. Perhaps neither was satisfied with his subject.