Customer Reviews

The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane (Newbery Honor Book)

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When I began working on a documentary about the WRight Brothers, this book was recommended to me by a descendant of the Wright Family as the best short version of the Wright Brothers story. I heartily agree. Great pictures accompany a text that manages to tell the whole story without ever getting bogged down. Good for kids and adults who are curious to know the whole story.

I loved reading this book and lent it to a friend and never got it back. I wish I had never lent it out. It was fun to visit Kitty Hawk, NC after reading this book and see a lot of the historical artifacts associated with the history of flight.

This book is written with precision and detail. Yet, since it is aimed at young readers, it is clear and easy to read. The author explains in simple, easily understood language, the seminal inventions of the Wright Brothers. It is an excellent book for any adult who wants to truly understand how the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. I would reccommend it to any person over the age of 12.

Wilbur Wright, the brother with visions, invented the airplane along with Orville Wright, the brother who loved to tinker. Wilbur once said, " My brother Orville and myself lived together, played together and, in fact thought together." Wilbur and Orville persevered in their struggle against Mother Nature, the public opinion, and failed flights and experiments to fulfill their dream of making a flying machine.
This biography tells the story of the lives of the Wright brothers, from the time they were little boys tinkering with toys, to when they finally sold their marvelous invention to the United States government. This book shows how the airplane started out as a glider, then evolved into a plane that stayed in the air for 5 seconds, and finally into a plane that stayed in the air for an hour and 13 minutes. It also explains how getting the government to buy their plane was a difficult task because it had already spent $70,000 on another person who tried to invent the airplane. Luckily, the government said yes after the Wright brothers had built a better plane. This book also contains miraculous pictures of Wilbur and Orville's flights and failures.
I recommend this book to anybody who enjoys biographies or who wants to sit back and relax with a good book. This book is an all around good read but what especially sticks out is that it shows that if you put your mind to something you can always accomplish it, no matter how difficult the task.

Another literary coup for Freedman, who has made the "photobiography" for middle school readers his specialty. Using numerous images produced by the brothers themselves along with primary sources such as letters and articles, he explores the lives of the aviation pioneers. The brothers are usually spoken of together; this book helps us see them individuals: the taciturn, older Wilbur and the clothes-conscious, impulsive Orville. They were a confirmed bachelor pair who, according to Orville himself, "lived together, played together, worked together, and, in fact, thought together." Neither smoked, drank, or ever married. Tinkerers from a young age, they ran a printing press before they discovered a vocation as bicycle mechanics and manufacturers. But they always looked for new technology to conquer. After mastering photography, the brothers began thinking about flight science. Others were working on it already, namely a German named Otto Lilienthal, who died in an 1896 glider flight experiment. The US Army and the Smithsonian both sponsored research, but only the Wright Brothers decided to make their flying machines mimic birds in flight, especially the wing movement.

As with any successful technology, the airplane took many years and countless iterations to perfect. But within ten years of the first successful flight, the Wright brothers were world-famous, and flying machines were everywhere. Wilbur did not live to see his invention change the world, however; he died in 1912, at age 45. Orville lived until 1948.

The Kitty Hawk dunes, the part of the North Carolina Outer Banks where the first motorized flight happened in December 1903, still look much as they did 100 years ago. The pictures capture the windblown sandy expanse well, and readers of this book will recognize this National Historic Site if they have seen it. Future engineers and mechanics will perhaps be more engrossed in the technical details provided here than I was, but the book is an excellent contribution to the history of technology, because of the images and the emphasis on contemporary documents.

Appendices discuss the photographs, places to visit connected with Wrights, and further reading.

I read The Wright Brothers by Russel Freedman. This book describes the lives of our countries aeronautical pioneers,
Wilbur and Orville Wright,and how they invented the first true airplane. From the time they were children, Wilbur and Orville lived together, played together, worked together ,and even thought together. From their tiny bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. to the Kitty Hawk Island sand dunes. These two men defied known ideas about flight and built their own self-propelled craft that soared them to fame. Even today, a little over a hundred years after their first self-propelled manned flight, these two men are remembered for their courage. I would recomend this book to anyone interested in either the Wright Brothers or the history of flight in general. If it were not for these two, man would not have gotten of the ground!

This biography on the Wright Brothers gets a big plus with the pictures it contains, many of which, thanks to the Wrights' interest in photography, were taken by the brothers themselves. The centerpiece of all the photos, of course, is the famous lift-off of the world's first manned, controlled, sustained, successful powered flight in a heavier-than-air craft on December 17, 1903.

The accompanying text is clear and interspersed with generous quotes from journals and letters, written by the brothers, acquaintances, and family. Relating in excellent detail the Wrights' lives from childhood to the height of their success in 1909 (as well as giving a basic account of airplane history up to 1903), Freedman goes over the Wrights' later years in just one chapter, which is its biggest drawback. Still, considering the focus of the book, this brief overview is understandable. Bonus features include information on the Wrights' use of photography during their work, descriptions of places connected to the brothers and flight, and a list of books for further reading.

The material used by Freedman is heavily based on the three most recent standards of Wright biography: Tom D. Crouch's "The bishop's boys: a life of Wilbur and Orville Wright" (1989), Fred Howard's "Wilbur and Orville: a biography of the Wright Brothers" (1987), and Peter L. Jakab's "Visions of a flying machine: the Wright Brothers and the process of invention" (1990).

With its readability and accuracy, this book would be an excellent addition to public and school libraries, and despite being classified as juvenile literature, adults could also enjoy this biography of the Wright Brothers. A Newbery Honor book.

Freedman's short biography of the Wright Brothers is a fascinating glimpse into the lives of two brothers who changed the word. The book is full of amazing pictures that help to document the story of the development of the flying machine, with all its trials and triumphs. Written for a younger audience, it is blessedly short on technical explanations on the physics of flight. Instead it concentrates on the brothers themselves and the impact their invention had on the world of their time. This is what I was looking for in a biography, so I was happily pleased.

The Wright Brothers methods for controlling an airplane were well executed and are still used today in modern airplanes.
There story is simple yet has had such an important impact on us all.
A good read if you have any interest at all in aviation.

Freedman's interesting narrative of the Wright brothers portrays them as proper gentlemen who wore suits with bowties even while repairing bicycles in their shop, mechanical geniuses despite being high school dropouts, and totally dedicated to their dream of creating an aeroplane. The photographs in this book were taken by Wilbur and Orville Wright themselves. In addition to being aviators, they had a fascination with photography and converted a backyard shed for processing film. They knew that documenting their progress would be important for future generations.

In this fast-paced book, Freedman makes the long ago brothers seem real. He describes their quirky behaviors and intersperses excerpts from journals and letters written by the Wrights. Freedman demonstrates their tireless perseverance by detailing how trial runs failed again and again. The Wright brothers are truly heroes, worthy subjects for one of Freedman's books. Any student interested in mechanics, inventors, or aviation would enjoy this book.