Let's all go to Mars - London Review of Books (subscription)

The headline news about the Wright brothers’ invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the... Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who first flew their invention at Kitty Hawk, then became world-famous. Wilbur was born in 1867 and Orville in 1871. They were an unusually close pair who all their lives lived together, worked together, ate together and shared a joint bank account. ) One of the only things they didn’t do together was fly: that would have been too much of a risk to the irreplaceable knowledge they’d jointly accumulated. Katherine, a teacher, was the only family member to go to university, and the only sibling to have consummated a relationship, marrying at the age of 52. ‘It isn’t true,’ Wilbur later wrote, ‘to say we had no special advantages … the greatest... ’ Wilbur’s interest in flight began in childhood. Other pioneers of flight were focused on the question of power. The Wrights were fascinated by birds, and learned a lot from their. Source: www.lrb.co.uk