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The National Park Service announces publication of First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, a handbook for Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, in Dayton, Ohio and Wright Brothers National Memorial, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
At Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, the Wrights spent hundreds of hours perfecting their gliders and learning to fly them before mounting an engine. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright made the world’s first controlled flight in a powered heavier-than-air machine, one of humankind’s greatest technological achievements and a defining event of the 20th century. In Dayton, between flying seasons, the brothers worked out their theories, collected data, and fabricated the flying machines that would be assembled on the Outer Banks. In 1904 and 1905 they developed in Dayton a practical airplane they could show the world.
First Flight, released on December 17, 2002, to help kick off the year-long centennial celebration culminating in ceremonies at both parks, is part of the award-winning National Park Handbook series. The series, winner of one of the first Presidential Design Awards, was selected for an international exhibition in Paris and has been featured in several international graphic arts magazines.
The 116-page handbook contains more than 140 historical and color photographs, five maps, and diagrams and illustrations. New to this series is a special fold-out page with a large photo of the first flight and color illustrations, commissioned for the handbook, depicting the 1905 Wright Flyer III and the problems of flight the Wrights overcame.
Astronaut John Glenn has written the foreword, providing a fellow pioneer’s perspective on the Wrights’ achievement. Glenn notes: "The Wrights were the first astronauts. Their initial short flight opened our quest to reach beyond the world we know."
Tom D. Crouch, noted Wright biographer, aeronautical historian, and senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, is the book’s author. His compelling story emphasizes the importance of the Wrights’ family, not only in shaping Wilbur and Orville’s character, but in their support of the brothers’ early aeronautical experiments at a time when most people were convinced that human flight was impossible.
Crouch follows the trajectory of the Wrights’ lives from small businessmen (printers and bicycle shop owners), to self-made engineers and courageous experimenters, to world-famous inventors and aviators. They once again became businessmen: manufacturing airplanes (and spending much of their time protecting their patents), running a flight school, and fielding an exhibition team.
The book also contains a series of illustrated features, tracing the Wrights’ progress year by year in Dayton and on the Outer Banks, focusing on technological aspects of the great problem of human flight, and providing context for the work of the Wrights and their fellow experimenters. Peter L. Jakab, curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum, provides deft and illuminating texts for a number of these features.
Sections on Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park and Wright Brothers National Memorial, written by National Park Service historian Ann Honious and former National Park Service historian Jill Hanson, provide a brief guide to the historical sites.
First Flight is available for purchase at the bookstore at Huffman Prairie Flying Field Interpretive Center, Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. The price is $6.00 per copy. The interpretive center is located across from the Wright Memorial and it is open from 8:30 to 5:00 pm daily. For further directions please call (937) 425-0008.
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