First to Fly: How Wilbur and Orville Wright Invented the Airplane [Hardcover]

Peter Busby (Illustrator), David Craig (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 8 and up | Grade Level: 3 and up

It started with a toy. As boys, Wilbur and Orville Wright loved making their helicopter fly. As adults, the brothers made their living taking things apart and putting them together again: printing presses, bicycles, planes. . . . Through trial and error, these two boys from Dayton, Ohio, built the plane that would change the world forever.
With an inspiring text, original paintings, period photographs, and detailed diagrams, First to Fly recreates the story of the Wright Brothers, from their earliest challenges to their final triumph.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 4-8-This oversized volume captures the Wright brothers' monumental achievement 100 years ago. The pages are filled with large, sumptuous paintings that add a flavor of realism and an almost nostalgic feel. In addition, well-chosen images and reproductions help to inform the text. Archival photos from the Wright brothers' own collection and diagrams created by a mechanical engineer/aeronautics expert do much to help readers understand the concepts of flight. The story of these inventive siblings has been told before and often. This book engages readers quickly and maintains interest throughout. On the morning of December 17, 1903, Orville flew 852 feet and for 59 seconds in the first ever manned and powered flight. While some accounts stop with this achievement, Busby goes on to describe other flights and the company the Wrights founded supplying licensing designs for airplane manufacturers. The stress of watching those patents, the author speculates, may have contributed to Wilbur's ill health and early death at age 45. Orville, working alone, went on to research and experiment, lending insights into developing the automatic pilot and wing flaps for bombers and the space shuttle. This well-researched and exceptionally appealing title joins Wendie Old's To Fly (Clarion, 2002) and Mary Collins's Airborne (National Geographic, 2003) to kick off the centennial celebration. Take flight!-Harriett Fargnoli, Great Neck Library, NY
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Gr. 3-5. From playing with a whirligig as children to running a bicycle shop and later becoming the fathers of manned, powered flight, the story of the Wright brothers has been told before and will be told again during this centennial year of their achievement. Informative and well illustrated, this large-format book provides a solid introduction to the brothers' lives and accomplishments, and, more than in some biographies for young readers, clearly explains the challenges they faced at different stages of the Flyer's development. The volume's effective layout and colorful presentation will attract young readers. Its oversize format (11 inches tall and 11 1/2 inches wide) offers plenty of space for the colorful paintings that dramatize events as well as the many period photographs that accompany the text. One useful feature is a large, well-labeled picture clearly showing the structure of the Wrights' 1903 Flyer. This effective presentation ends with a chronology, a glossary, and a list of books and Web sites. Carolyn Phelan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 8 and up
  
• Hardcover: 32 pages
• Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers (March 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375812873
• ISBN-13: 978-0375812873
• Product Dimensions: 11.8 x 11.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,218,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Informative, Ambitious, and Not for Children Only, August 1, 2003

By 

jeffergray (Reisterstown, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: First to Fly: How Wilbur and Orville Wright Invented the Airplane (Hardcover)

This book is a marvelous summary of the story of the Wright Brothers, and both children and their parents are likely to learn from it. My 6-year-old enjoyed it, in part because of the interesting mix of illustrations - there are nine handsome and painstakingly accurate full-page paintings, as well as a further mix of vintage and color photographs, diagrams and sketch plans - but this book seems intended for somewhat older children in the 8-12 age range. The book not only succeeds as biography and history, but it also tries to explain some of the mechanics and science of flying. Thus, there are insets on such topics as "How Does Wing-Warping Work?", "The Wright Wind Tunnel," and diagrams explaining concepts such as pitch, roll, and yaw. There are other insets focusing on aspects of late nineteenth-century social history ("The Bicycle Craze") and other aerial pioneers who paved the way for the Wright Brothers ("Otto Lilienthal: The Flying Man"). The book includes all of the key historical artifacts (the first picture of the first flight, Orville's elated but still understated telegram home to his father announcing "Success . . . inform Press . . . . home Christmas "). It goes beyond the first flight itself, detailing the world's surprisingly muted reaction to the Wrights' great achievement, the difficulties they had protecting their patent rights in subsequent years, and the 1908 air crash that resulted in the first fatality in an airplane and serious injuries to Orville Wright. It also tells the striking story of the brothers' father, Bishop Milton Wright, whose gift of a toy helicopter to his two young sons ultimately led to one of the most important scientific accomplishments of all time. One of the happiest aspects of the Wrights' story is that the old bishop lived to fly through the skies with his son Orville.

This book is thus a wonderful retelling for younger readers of the remarkably focused and disciplined five year-campaign in which two self-taught mechanic-scientists, neither of them a college graduate, with no corporate backing or financial resources aside from those supplied by their own successful small business, realized man's oldest dream and conquered the sky. Beyond that, it is a moving reminder for parents of the astonishing results that can sometimes grow from a gift to a child, and the willingness to foster and facilitate a child's curiosity about their world.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read!, August 2, 2004

By 

G. Romo - See all my reviews

This review is from: First to Fly: How Wilbur and Orville Wright Invented the Airplane (Hardcover)

This book is wonderful for children to read or have it read to them. It contains marvelous illustrations and actual photographs of important events in the lives of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

5.0 out of 5 stars Aviation book, September 7, 2011

By 

Reading Enthusiast (Dayton, Ohio) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: First to Fly: How Wilbur and Orville Wright Invented the Airplane (Hardcover)

This book is a gift for a child in a foreign country. We like to share the early aviation history of Dayton, Ohio where we live.
The book has many pictures of the Wright Brothers, their inventions and early flights. It does not require a lot of reading to understand the concept. A beautiful book.