New Book on Wright Brothers Tells Another Side

CHICAGO, November 7, 2018 (Newswire.com) - A new book due out Dec. 4, 2018, paints a very different picture than the latest biography on the Wright brothers by David McCullough. William Hazelgrove’s book Wright Brothers, Wrong Story (Prometheus) tells of two brothers who lived at home their entire lives, dropped out of high school, were taken care of by their sister Katherine and viewed the outside world as evil. Hazelgrove’s book deconstructs the Wright Brothers myth by pointing first to the real inventor of the airplane in 1903, Wilbur Wright.

“I wanted to get beyond the two stick figure history has handed us. I read David McCullough’s book and it left me wanting more. History has painted these two men as sawdust characters and I wanted to tell the real story,” author William Hazelgrove said in a recent interview. The already highly reviewed book has among the revelations that Wilbur had a three-year depression and emerged as the heavy hitter in cracking the problem of powered flight. Using the papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the author found early on that it was Wilbur with areronautical scientist Octave Chanute who did the physics responsible for building a stable airplane. 

History has painted these two men as sawdust characters and I wanted to tell the real story.

William Hazelgrove, Author

Wilbur Wright died in 1912, leaving his brother Orville to shape history. “I found that the original biographer Fred Kelly, whose work every biography since has been based on, was a good friend of Orville’s and he had to approve every page,” Hazelgrove explains. The result was the Wright Myth that painted the brothers as identical and gave Orville equal credit for the invention of the 1903 Flyer. “It’s a nice story,” Hazelgrove adds. “But it's the wrong story.”