The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Tom D. Crouch

Book Overview

"Crouch (A Dream of Wings) interweaves family drama with the history of aviation in a riveting saga of ingenuity, competing claims, public adulation and technical innovation".--Publishers Weekly. Photographs.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393026604
• ISBN13: 9780393026603
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 606 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Story

absolutely fabulous book! I would recommend it to anyone!

The Bishop's Boys

This is an outstanding historical review. Aside from grammatical and punctuation errors, the book is excellent!

I couldn't put it down

An absolutely fascinating story of how two boys from Ohio without college educations, through sheer will, determination and confidence in their own abilities, invented a machine that literally changed the world. It is almost laughable the way they kept plodding along, ignoring the fact that many eminent scientific minds of the period (One can almost hear them dead-panning, "What's that have to do with us.") had repeatedly failed, often catastrophically, to fly a heavier-than-air machine.

The Bishop's Boys is FABULOUS

Hi. I've read this book from cover - to - cover so many times that it's actually falling apart. This book is fabulous and I would reccomend it to anyone iterested in flight!

How was the Airplane "Really" invented?

In this book, Tom Crouch culminates his exhaustive research on the history of manned flight. All the players (and would-be players) are included from the Wright Brothers viewpoint. Crouch carefully examines the involvement/viewpoints of Chanute, Beloit, Langley, Curtiss and a host of contemporaries from Kings to children with intricate details of the Wright family itself. It sets one back so well in time that one feels you are sitting in the same room with Wilbur, Orville and Milton, their father. One can even sense that Wilbur and Orville might differ on their view of important events (i.e. The Wrights might never have flown if Wilbur had not been knocked cold playing ice hockey near the Soldier's Home).Milton's religious influence and the Wright family tradition is shown to have played a key role in shaping Wilbur's decision to do something meaningful with his life after giving up a likely education at Yale and career in the ministry in his Dad's footsteps as a result of the hockey accident.To me the book has a happy and sad part:The happy part (the first half) deals with Wright family, history, ideas, experiments, inventions and basically seeing how the brothers (particularly Wilbur) came up with all their ideas and diligently and painstakingly pursued them.The sad part (the last half) deals with the agony felt by Wilbur (before his death) and Orville for the rest of his life fighting a multitude of court cases over what they viewed as clear patent infringements. Orville is viewed as extreme and difficult to get along with (according quotes from to Charles Lindberg).Only after Orville's death and World War 2 did the Wrights force the Smithsonian to back down and recant many of their publications related Samuel P. Langley, Orville insisted were untrue. Finally, their 1903 "First Flight" aircraft was returned to the Smithsonian from the British Museum where Orville insisted it remain as a protest until the Smithsonian retracted their views. Such stong uncompromising right/wrong views of Orville and Wilbur are traced to the Bishop (father) in trying to uphold conservative values while their church was split do to relaxing traditional values. The Wright family tradition of honesty and integrity is evident from cover to cover.This is an excellent read, and you'll be anxious to pursue reading numerous other Wright books and artifacts in museums cited at the end.

The Wright Biography!

For anyone really interested in the story of human flight, Tom Crouch's "The Bishop's Boys" is the book for you. Crouch has done a masterful job of telling the Wright's story, and what a story it is! Most legendary figures of history crumble when their lives are examined-- Wilbur and Orivlle Wright are more amazing the more you learn about them. Thanks to Crouch and "The Bishop's Boys", the entire story, warts and all, is finally put before the public in a well written, definitive, biography. I have studied and written about the Wright Brothers for years, and I always tell anyone who wants to learn more about these amazing brothers to read this book.