Peter L. Jakab

This acclaimed book on the Wright Brothers takes the reader straight to the heart of their remarkable achievement, focusing on the technology and offering a clear, concise chronicle of precisely what they accomplished and how they did it. This book deals with the process of the invention of the airplane and how the brothers identified and resolved a range of technical puzzles that others had attempted to solve for a century.

Step by step, the book details the path of invention (including the important wind tunnel experiments of 1901) which culminated in the momentous flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the first major milestone in aviation history. Enhanced by original photos, designs, drawings, notebooks, letters and diaries of the Wright Brothers, Visions of a Flying Machine is a fascinating book that will be of interest to engineers, historians, enthusiasts, or anyone interested in the process of invention.… (more)

To honor the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' history-making flight at Kitty Hawk, National Geographic Books and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (SNASM) present this official companion volume to this October's SNASM exhibition of the same name.
illustrated look at the lives of the brothers and their world-changing invention…it was invention, engineering, and the new possibilities of manned flight that obsessed them…explain the Wrights’ achievements and the moments of their great successes, and they paint a masterful personal portrait of the two sometimes erratic, genius personalities (never married, the brothers lived together all their lives), and, most important, the world of pioneering aviation in which they operated.… (more)