I’m reading The Wright Brothers: A Biography, by Fred Kelly. It’s the only authorized biography of the Wright Brothers. I’ve read two books on the Wrights before this, but this one really gets into the technical aspects.

It’s really surprising how little scientific, technical, and engineering work was done on flight before the Wrights, and how much of what was done was simply wrong.

Here are a couple of bicycle mechanics who never graduated from high school, and they are inventing the field of aeronautical engineering.

Anyhow, I’m up to the part where they flew. The reaction of most newspaper editors at the time was (a) it didn’t happen or (b) if it did it wasn’t important.