By William Hazelgrove
ST. CHARLES – A new book has turned aviation upside down with amazing reviews and a full write-up in the Smithsonian with the assertion that Wilbur Wright was the man responsible for inventing the first plane capable of powered flight.
Bestselling author William Hazelgrove’s new book, Wright Brothers, Wrong Story, has set the assumed belief that the brothers worked in tandem on its head by delving into the papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright and emerging with a very different story than the standard team story of two men who banded together to produce the world’s first airplane. As pointed out in the Daily Mail, the book explores the family life of the brothers as well and the strange proclivities of the insular Wright children who never left home.
“I wanted to demythologize the Wright Brothers and find out who these two men were who dropped out of high school, never married and never left home,” Hazelgrove said in a recent interview.
The book has been making waves in the aviation community that has stuck to the view that both brothers equally created the world’s first plane.
“What people don’t understand is, this was Wilbur’s dream and that he solved the head-cracking physics of flight and he went down to Kitty Hawk alone initially,” Hazelgrove said. “It was his plane first and last.”
Orville, who died in 1948, claimed to have come up with wing warping – Wilbur’s big breakthrough – and was also photographed in the famous flying photo.
Wilbur’s letters to his friend and fellow inventor Octave Chanute show Orville was not involved in any of his plans.
The boys’ father, Milton, sent Orville to help Wilbur in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to test his flight in 1900.
Orville and Wilbur showed no interest in the opposite sex and were raised to stay at home and believe only “family could be trusted.”
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Posted on December 6, 2018