Wind and Sand; The Story of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk

Fort Washington, PA: Eastern Acorn Press, 1983. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Trade paperback. Good. [2], 189, [1] pages. Illustrations. Foreword by Oliver Jensen. Cover has scuff, wear, soiling, and sticker residue. Format is approximately 8 inches by 11.50 inches. The story of the Wright Brothers discovering the principles of manned flight and inventing the first practical flying machines told in their own words and pictures. As the Wrights began to delve into a scientific study of flight in 1900, they also began to keep a record of their observations and activities. Their diaries and notebooks, together with letters to family members and to flight researchers of their day, like Chanute, provide a wealth of original source materials about these two men of genius. Along with these written accounts, the Wright brothers left a remarkable pictorial record of their work. Photography was a deliberate part of their scientific research, and the carefully noted the subject, date, place, camera setting, type of negative, and other details for each photography of their flight experiments. Through selections from these written and visual records, the Wright brothers tell their own story of the birth of aviation. This book focuses on the years 1900 through 1911 and the visits the Wrights made to Kill Devil Hills, where their belief that man could fly became a reality. Few great inventors have left behind them so complete and enthralling a record of their work and their thoughts, or seen their triumph ignored for so long as did the Wright brothers, the unassuming, persistent bicycle mechanics of Dayton, Ohio. The sharp clear photographs alone would be a great achievement, especially since they made them with their own hands, employing the bulky equipment of the period, on glass plates. The collection in this absorbing book, together with its extracts from the Wright diaries and letters, deals mainly with the four crucial years, from 1900 through 1903, in which they developed the world's first successful airplane. They called it a "flying machine" without comic intent, since in the usage of the day an "aeroplane" was merely a wing, a fragile, cambered, cloth-covered wooden frame. The setting is the remote, thinly-settled, windswept Outer Banks of North Carolina.