Wind and sand - The story of the Wright brothers (Flight History).pdf

Pdf / English / H.N. Abrams / 1983 / 189 pages / ISBN10 0810909189 / 29.3 MB

Few great inventors have left behind them so complete and enthralling a record of their work and their thoughts, or seen their triumph ignored for so long as did the Wright brothers, the unassuming, persistent bicycle mechanics of Dayton, Ohio. The sharp clear photographs alone would be a great achievement, especially since they made them with their own hands, employing the bulky equipment of the period, on glass plates. The collection in this absorbing book, together with its extracts from the Wright diaries and letters, deals mainly with the four crucial years, from 1900 through 1903, in which they developed the world's first successful airplane. They called it a "flying machine" without comic intent, since in the usage of the day an "aeroplane" was merely a wing, a fragile, cambered, cloth-covered wooden frame. The setting is the remote, thinly-settled, windswept Outer Banks of North Carolina, near the village of Kitty Hawk and a large sand dune called "Kill Devil Hill"