To Conquer the Air

To be honest, I found this book a bit boring. James Tobin certainly deserves credit for his utter thoroughness in documenting the race to flight. While certainly concentrating the most attention on Wilbur and Orville Wright, he examines the earliest attempts at flight in Europe (which, to a man, ended with the death of the would-be pilot/inventor in his craft), the attempts of lesser known Americans to achieve flight (Samuel Langley, anyone? Octave Chanute?), as well as one of the country's best known and most beloved inventor's efforts: Alexander Graham Bell. And yet, by and large the book simply didn't hold a candle to Jim Rasenberger's America, 1908. (Even Thomas Selfridge's death as Orville's passenger is better told in the latter book, with Rasenberger foreshadowing the man's demise  - and Orville's later feelings of guilt - by quoting from correspondence between the brothers in which they lament how it would be better if Selfridge were out of the way.)

I did come away with a deep admiration and greater understand of what the Wright Brothers accomplished (beyond the end result of flying, that is). Tobin devotes great chunks of text to the many, many iterations of the "aeroplane," as the brothers called it, as well as the rather horrendous conditions at Kitty Hawk, where they frequently battled either sweltering or freezing temperatures and swarms of biting and stinging insects in addition to the obvious hardships of life in rural America 100+ years ago: the need to find, shoot, and skin your dinner before eating it, the necessity of building every structure by hand, and the lack of showers, toilets, and other conveniences. Clearly no one smelled fresh as a daisy or sweet as a rose. I was also struck by the clear-sighted view they had of their invention and it's capabilities. Tobin quotes relatively early correspondence from Wilbur in which he writes, "We stand ready to furnish a practical machine for use in war at once." Similarly, when witnesses of early flights asked what the machine would be good for, they received a single word response: war. Indeed.

Several times I considered abandoning the book as too dry, too slow or, as when Tobin were veer off to explore the efforts of some other unknown would-be inventor, too choppy. Yet, had I done so, I would have missed the descriptions of the flights over New York, the first time the masses saw an airplane fly. The following paragraph especially struck me, capturing the awe of a people and an age:

"On the Jersey shore, people saw the machine bank and sweep into a tight half-circle, then head away, back over the harbor. Now every skipper in the harbor opened his steam whistle. ... Just ahead lay a far greater hulk in the harbor. It was the Cunard liner Lusitania, outbound for Liverpool. ... The flying machine came on and flew just overhead, and the liner let loose with a volcanic blast of steam. A hundred feet up, the roar and the heat enveloped Will."

It seems fitting that it was the Lusitania in the harbor, saluting one new weapon of war and soon to be sunk by another.