WHEN OTTO LILIENTHAL, THE GERMAN WOULD-BE inventor of the airplane, died in a glider crash in 1896, the 24-year-old Orville Wright was incubating typhoid fever and about to enter a six-week delirium that would bring him near death. While Orville lay sick, his older brother, Wilbur, thought about the fatal accident. The brothers had followed Lilienthal’s work at a distance through newspaper accounts. When Orville at last began a slow recovery, he and Wilbur discussed the problem of flight.

The Wrights were the stuff of Sinclair Lewis, seasoned with dashes of Thornton Wilder and the Brontë sisters: solidly Midwestern products rooted in mainstream, small-town, agrarian-oriented WASP culture. Their father, Milton Wright, an unbending and contentious bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, came from old Puritan English and Dutch stock. He had married a shy, studious woman, Susan Koerner, of German-Swiss roots; from this union came seven children, five of whom, four brothers and a sister, survived into adulthood. Wilbur, born in 1867, Orville, born in 1871, and Katharine, born in 1874, formed a natural and mutually supportive team.

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