It's hard, in our age of budget flights and short hops, to appreciate the glamour of early aviation. Yet for fifteen years or so - from the late 1890s until the opening months of the Great War - powered flight was one of modernity's greatest romances.

Wilbur and Orville Wright, bicycle makers from Ohio, became famous as the Wright Brothers, but at first it was only Wilbur who had what he called the 'disease', the 'belief that flight is possible to man'. He spent much of 1899, when he was 32, steeping himself in the literature of aeronautics; he scrutinised the flight patterns of hawks, buzzards and pigeons; he assembled and flew kites. And, on a drawing board in the spare room of the family shop, he tackled the three large-scale problems that impeded him: how to build wings of sufficient lift, how to build an engine which reconciled lightness and power, and how to balance and steer the aircraft once it was in motion.

LRB 5 February 2004 | PDF Download