In a new era of global commerce, revolutionary technologies, and world war, the sheer exhileration of flight captured the imagination. Tom Crouch weaves the people, machines, and ideas of the air age into a compelling narrative. Yet the documentation of amateur enthusiasm in the face of practical reality and consequences does not simply offer a narrative of unalloyed progress. Moments of exhaltation are tempered by bitter disappointment and stark terror. Blind alleys are the price of technical progress. In the end, there is no more fascinating cast of characters than those who wrote the history in the sky. Theirs is an engaging story of realizing an extraordinary dream and riding it. TOM CROUCH is the author of the "sensitive and intelligent" (The Sunday Telegraph), "most readable, authoritative and balanced" (New Scientist), The Bishop's Boys (Norton). "Tom Crouch tells [the story] in huge detail and remarkably well" (The Guardian).

The story of a handful of talented American engineers and adventurers who labored to conquer gravity in a flying machine.

When Orville and Wilbur Wright soared over Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina's outer banks and solved the problem of aerial navigation, they wrote the last chapter in a long story. For decades prior, a small community of engineers, scientists, and dreamers—men named Chanute and Langley and Herring—had tried to make the ascent in every conceivable craft, from kites and gliders to an assortment of powered flying models.

This fascinating assortment of characters and contraptions comes to life in Tom Crouch's classic A Dream of Wings. In the quest for flight, aeronautical societies were formed and broke apart, successes were celebrated, hopes rose and fell, and lessons were learned and built upon. The dreamers who blazed the path to a flying machine are bravely realized in these delightful pages. 55 b/w illustrations.

First Flight This compact National Parks Service Handbook describes the lives of America's first pilots, the Wright brothers, and their invention of the first successful heavier-than-air-machine--the airplane. In addition to their personal history, the book describes sites where the brothers conducted their experiments, such as Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. It also describes their development of the first "practical" airplane-the 1905 Wright Flyer III, preserved today at the Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, Huffman Prairie Flying Field in Dayton, Ohio. Illustrations tracing the Wrights' progress, maps, and a fold-out chart depicting the 1903 Wright Flyer and the principles of flight make this publication an indispensable guide to the Wright brothers' story.