Award-winning author James Tobin has at last penned the definitive account of the inspiring and impassioned race 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 U.S. 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.

James Tobin, a journalist twice nominated for a Pulitzer, is also a historian, and it's criminal a writer should be so good in two fields. In this book, the most critically acclaimed of all the books to celebrate the Wright Brothers' 100-year anniversary, Tobin jumps smoothly between the Wrights and their competition—Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Pierpont Langley, Alexander Graham Bell in Canada, a collection of assorted Frenchmen—and back to the Wrights. He explains the technology of flying without losing the reader, dramatizes but does not overdramatize, and breathes life into the dead. Tobin has written a history of flight that ought to become the standard for his generation.