Merely by choosing them, Mr. McCullough makes his subjects extra-estimable. And in the case of the Wrights that may be fitting. If Wilbur, the older, bossier and more rigorous brother, ever had an impassioned relationship with any human being who was not a blood relative or fellow aviation enthusiast, this isn’t the book to exhume it. Mr. McCullough appreciates Wilbur’s aloofness, intelligence and austerity, even after he became a celebrity. During the Wrights’ grand, two-day welcome home whoop-de-do in Dayton, a New York Times reporter caught them sneaking off to work in their shop three times on the first day.

The brothers, five years apart, grew up to do everything together. Though Wilbur was much more dominant — he wrote better and seemed a natural leader — he and Orville were careful to share whatever opportunities came their way. After the 18-year-old Wilbur was hit with a hockey stick (by a 15-year-old future murderer, whose victims would include his parents and brother) and suffered debilitating facial injuries, he gave up on the idea of leaving Dayton for a higher education. Instead, he lived out his teens as a recluse and reader. Then he and Orville developed a love of bicycles, learned to make them and started their own business. In the plus ça change department, it’s interesting to read how Dayton’s alarmists of the 1890s saw the bicycle as something that could corrupt innocent youth, cause children to stray far from home, keep them from reading books, encourage sexual freedom and so on.

This concise, exciting and fact-packed book sees the easy segue between bicycling and aerial locomotion, which at that point was mostly a topic for bird fanciers and dreamers. But there were automobiles in Dayton’s streets, so who knew what might happen in its skies? The Wrights read everything they could about flight and wrote to anyone who might reply, from the first experimenters to the Smithsonian Institution. Relying on their imaginations, inexpensive materials, bicycle-related ideas about steering and modest sums they earned at the shop, they would ultimately embarrass the Smithsonian and its grandiose, government-funded flying experiments that were conducted on (and generally flopped right back into) the Potomac.

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The setting for their own experiments had been carefully chosen. Without having seen Kitty Hawk, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the Wrights learned that its steady, moderate winds and its expansive soft beach were ideal for testing gliders and then modified versions with motors. The beauty of that first Kitty Hawk flight in 1903 was the solitude on a windswept beach in which Orville, flying against the wind and staying aloft in spite of it, changed the course of history.