James Tobin, award-winning author of Ernie Pyle's War and The Man
He Became, has penned the definitive account of the inspiring and
impassioned race between the Wright brothers and their primary rival
Samuel Langley across ten years and two continents to conquer the air.
For years, Wilbur Wright and his younger brother, Orville, experimented
in obscurity, supported only by their exceptional family. Meanwhile, the
world watched as Samuel Langley, armed with a contract from the US War
Department and all the resources of the Smithsonian Institution, sought
to create the first manned flying machine. But while Langley saw flight
as a problem of power, the Wrights saw a problem of balance. Thus their
machines took two very different paths--Langley's toward oblivion, the
Wrights' toward the heavens--though not before facing countless other
obstacles. With a historian's accuracy and a novelist's eye, Tobin has
captured an extraordinary moment in history. To Conquer the Air is
itself a heroic achievement.