Summary/Annotation ->  "For years Wilbur Wright and his younger brother, Orville, experimented in utter obscurity, supported only by their exceptional family. Meanwhile, the world watched as the imperious Samuel Langley, armed with a rich contract from the U.S. War Department and all the resources of the Smithsonian Institution, sought to scale up his unmanned models to create the first manned flying machine. But while Langley became obsessed with flight as a problem of power, the Wrights grappled with it as a problem of balance. Thus their machines took two very different paths - his toward oblivion, theirs toward the heavens." "As Tobin relates, the Wrights' 1903 triumph at Kitty Hawk, however hallowed in American lore, was ill-reported and disbelieved. So, while the two brothers struggled to transform their delicate contraption into a practical airplane, others moved to overtake them as the leading pioneers of flight. In France, rivals scoffed at the Wrights even as they rushed to imitate them. At home, the great inventor Alexander Graham Bell seized the fallen banner of his friend Langley and thrust it into the hands of a circle of young daredevils, urging them "to get into the air." From this group emerged the motorcyclist Glenn Curtiss, "fastest man in the world," whose aerial challenge to Wilbur Wright culminated in an unforgettable showdown over New York harbor."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved