First to Fly: How Wilbur and Orville Wright Invented the Airplane

by Peter Busby

Book Overview

It started with a toy. As boys, Wilbur and Orville Wright loved making their helicopter fly. As adults, the brothers made their living taking things apart and putting them together again: printing... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375812873
• ISBN13: 9780375812873
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 32 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 11.8" x 11.2"
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

Big book, nice pictures

This is a nice hardcover book that is bigger and better than I expected. The pictures are great, I like the vintage look. I'm teaching a homeschool class about flight and am reading it to my group. I myself have learned quite a bit about the Wright Brothers and flight in general.

Fascinating Story!

A hard working pair of brothers pulled their resources together to invent the airplane. It's amazing story and it's amazing that they did it. The fact that people died during the process makes it more amazing. Now a days they would be hit with lawsuits a plenty and everything might have been shut down. I found this story one I would want to share with my students in 8th grade. They are studying inventions currently in class. This book is a wonderful resource for them.

A wonderful resource

This large and attractive book tells the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the two industries young Americans who were the first to fly a mechanically-powered aircraft. The book starts with the two Wrights as boys, and tells the story of their interest in flying, the theoretical and practical advances they made in making powered flight possible, what happened at Kittyhawk, and what came later. Now, while this book is written with the young reader in mind, it is an excellent read for readers of any age. The book does an excellent job of explaining how the Wrights conquered the air, and uses many colorful pictures and graphs to bring the story to life. Overall, I found this to be a fascinating book and a wonderful resource. I highly recommend this book!

Great Read!

This book is wonderful for children to read or have it read to them. It contains marvelous illustrations and actual photographs of important events in the lives of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Informative, Ambitious, and Not for Children Only

This book is a marvelous summary of the story of the Wright Brothers, and both children and their parents are likely to learn from it. My 6-year-old enjoyed it, in part because of the interesting mix of illustrations - there are nine handsome and painstakingly accurate full-page paintings, as well as a further mix of vintage and color photographs, diagrams and sketch plans - but this book seems intended for somewhat older children in the 8-12 age range. The book not only succeeds as biography and history, but it also tries to explain some of the mechanics and science of flying. Thus, there are insets on such topics as "How Does Wing-Warping Work?", "The Wright Wind Tunnel," and diagrams explaining concepts such as pitch, roll, and yaw. There are other insets focusing on aspects of late nineteenth-century social history ("The Bicycle Craze") and other aerial pioneers who paved the way for the Wright Brothers ("Otto Lilienthal: The Flying Man"). The book includes all of the key historical artifacts (the first picture of the first flight, Orville's elated but still understated telegram home to his father announcing "Success . . . inform Press . . . . home Christmas "). It goes beyond the first flight itself, detailing the world's surprisingly muted reaction to the Wrights' great achievement, the difficulties they had protecting their patent rights in subsequent years, and the 1908 air crash that resulted in the first fatality in an airplane and serious injuries to Orville Wright. It also tells the striking story of the brothers' father, Bishop Milton Wright, whose gift of a toy helicopter to his two young sons ultimately led to one of the most important scientific accomplishments of all time. One of the happiest aspects of the Wrights' story is that the old bishop lived to fly through the skies with his son Orville. This book is thus a wonderful retelling for younger readers of the remarkably focused and disciplined five year-campaign in which two self-taught mechanic-scientists, neither of them a college graduate, with no corporate backing or financial resources aside from those supplied by their own successful small business, realized man's oldest dream and conquered the sky. Beyond that, it is a moving reminder for parents of the astonishing results that can sometimes grow from a gift to a child, and the willingness to foster and facilitate a child's curiosity about their world.