Customer Reviews

Pendulum: The story of America's three aviation pioneers--Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright, and Glenn Curtiss, the Henry Ford of aviation

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Pendulum is written for the serious student of early aviation history. Unlike most stories that focus on the Wright brothers' struggles before Dec. 17, 1903, this book delves into what happened AFTER Kitty Hawk.

In 1908 Glenn Curtiss won the Scientific American Magazine trophy for the first public flight in America. It was he, not the Wright brothers, who received instant fame and glory. He built and sold civilian airplanes while they focused on a single sale to the American, British or French Army.

The book explains how early chronicles touted Glenn Curtiss, not the Wrights, as the pioneer of aviation. Thousands of Curtiss JN-4 "Jennys" were used to train WW-I pilots. Today the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Few people know of Curtiss, inventer of the flying boat and father of naval aviation, but everyone has seen the photo of Orville Wright's famous "First Flight" at Kitty Hawk.

In a sometimes dry account, Jack Carpenter meticulously compares step-by-step progress of the three men, with more rare photos than any other book. He tells how they were influenced by Alexander Graham Bell, inventer of the telephone, and Henry Ford, the father of mass produced automobiles.

Having studied the lives of all three men, I think Pendulum is the only book that gives an unbiased account of the bitter patent lawsuit that delayed the growth of American aviation for 10 years.

Anyone who thinks the Wright Brothers are heroes should read this and see what they did to stall aviation in the US. Why hasn't the Navy named a carrier after Glenn Curtiss?

My name is Steven Harvey author of the book IT STARTED WITH A STEAMBOAT which is about the first one hundred years of mechanical transportation revolution. In the process of writing that book I decovered many of the different aviation pioneers spoken of in the PENDULUM.

It is refreshing to find an author that has the guts to state that the Wright Brothers had help from other pioneers that came before them in producing a workable airplane. The fact that the modern airplane was the product of many different men that quite often fought each other just makes the store that much richer and the out come more breath taking!

This is a great book to add to your library that helps to fill in all of those blank spaces that other histories leave us with.

I have read a lot of books about early aviation and especially Glenn Curtiss, and Mr. Carpenter's book is among the best. It has been very helpful to me to put the entire chronology of the Wright brothers and Curtis and the development of flight in perspective because of the way he organizes his information. This book is most helpful when read AFTER a Curtiss biography, such as Roseberry's book on Curtiss.