Download To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight AudioBook Free
"For some years I have been afflicted with the fact that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it'll soon cost me an increased sum of money if not my life."So wrote a quiet young Ohioan in 1900, one in an ancient type of men who had wanted to fly -- men who wanted it passionately, fecklessly, hopelessly. However now, at the turn of the twentieth century, Wilbur Wright and a scattered couple of other adventurers conceived a conviction that the dream lay finally within reach, and in a headlong race across a decade and two continents, they competed to conquer the air. James Tobin, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, has finally given this inspiring story its definitive telling.For a long time Wright and his younger brother, Orville, experimented in utter obscurity, supported only by their exceptional family. Meanwhile, the planet watched as the imperious Samuel Langley, armed with a rich contract from the U.S. War Department and everything the sources of the Smithsonian Institution, sought to scale up his unmanned models to make the first manned flying machine. But while Langley became enthusiastic about flight as a issue of power, the Wrights grappled with it as a issue of balance. Thus their machines took two very different paths -- his toward oblivion, theirs toward the heavens.As Tobin relates, the Wrights' 1903 triumph at Kitty Hawk, however hallowed in American lore, was ill-reported and disbelieved. So, as the two brothers struggled to transform their delicate contraption into a practical airplane, others moved to overtake them as the main pioneers of flight. In France, rivals scoffed at the Wrightseven as they rushed to imitate them. At home, the great inventor Alexander Graham Bell seized the fallen banner of his friend Langley and thrust it in to the hands of a circle of young daredevils, urging them to find yourself in the air. From this group emerged the motorcyclist Glenn Curtiss, speediest man on the planet, whose aerial challenge to Wilbur Wright culminated in an unforgettable showdown over New York harbor."To Conquer the Air" is a hero's tale of overcoming obstacles within and without that plumbs the depths of creativeness and character. Having a historian's accuracy and a novelist's eye, Tobin has captured the interplay of amazing personalities at an extraordinary moment inside our history. Inside the centennial year of human flight, "To Conquer the Air" is itself a heroic achievement.
