My highlights from the book:

1. Orville’s first teacher in grade school, would remember him at his desk tinkering with bits of wood. Asked what he was up to, he told her he was making a machine of a kind that he and his brother were going to fly someday.

2. What is most uncharacteristic about the pose is that they sit doing nothing, something they almost never succumbed to.

3. The two were remarkably self-contained, ever industrious, and virtually inseparable.

4. The brothers had tremendous energy, and working hard every day but Sunday was a way of life. Hard work was a conviction, and they were at their best and happiest working together on their own projects.

5. They could be highly demanding and critical of each other.

6. Such were Wilbur’s powers of concentration that to some he seemed a little strange. 

7. He could cut himself off from everyone. “The strongest impression one gets of Wilbur Wright,” an old schoolmate said, “is of a man who lives largely in a world of his own.” 

8. What the two had in common above all was unity of purpose and unyielding determination. 

9. They had set themselves on a “mission.”

10. Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.

11. Wilbur was smashed in the face with a stick, knocking out most of his upper front teeth. The man who threw the bat that struck Wilbur became one of the most notorious murderers in the history of Ohio, Oliver Crook Haugh, who, in 1906, was executed for the murders of his mother, father, and brother, and was believed to have killed as many as a dozen others.

12. Wilbur remained a recluse, more or less homebound, for fully three years — three years when he began reading as never before.

13. The brothers were well into their twenties before there was running water or plumbing in the house. There was no electricity.

14. Their father was a lifelong lover of books, heartily championed the limitless value of reading.

15. He was never overly concerned about his children’s attendance at school. If one or the other of them chose to miss a day or two for some project or interest he thought worthy, it was all right. And certainly, he ranked reading as worthy.

16. Everyone in the house read all the time.

17. Every mind should be true to itself — should think, investigate, and conclude for itself.

18. “But it isn’t true,” Orville responded emphatically, “to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

19. Bicycles had become the sensation of the time, a craze everywhere.

20. Wilbur and Orville opened their own small bicycle business, the Wright Cycle Exchange, selling and repairing bicycles.

21. They were ever enterprising, incapable of remaining idle.

22. Wilbur turned conspicuously restless, uncertain of what to make of his life.

23. Wilbur had begun reading about the German glider enthusiast Otto Lilienthal who had recently been killed in an accident. Much that he read he read aloud to Orville.

24. “It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird,” Lilienthal had written. “It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight.”

25. News of Lilienthal’s death, Wilbur later wrote, aroused in him as nothing had an interest that had remained passive from childhood. His reading on the flight of birds became intense.

26. Like the inspiring lectures of a great professor, the book had opened his eyes and started him thinking in ways he never had. 

27. They “read up on aeronautics as a physician would read his books.”

28. Wilbur seated himself at a desk to write what would be one of the most important letters of his life. Indeed, given all it set in motion, it was one of the most important letters in history.

29. Addressed to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington: “I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since I was a boy. My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable. I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject... .I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.”

30. Numbers of others among the most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the nineteenth century had been working on the problem of controlled flight, including Sir George Cayley, Sir Hiram Maxim, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison. None had succeeded. 

31. “It is a fact,” the Post later categorically declared, “that man can’t fly.”

32. In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Otto Lilienthal, they could be killed.

33. There was the ever-present atmosphere of a city in which inventing and making things were central to the way of life.

34. Among the material the Smithsonian provided him was an English translation of a book titled L’Empire de l’Air, published in Paris in 1881. It had been written by a French farmer, poet, and student of flight, Louis Pierre Mouillard. Nothing Wilbur had yet read so affected him. He would long consider it “one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature” ever published.

35. For Wilbur, flight had become a “cause,” and Mouillard, one of the great “missionaries” of the cause, “like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight.”

36. Mouillard gave fair warning that one could be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of flight could be solved by man. “When once this idea has invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively.” 

37. Mouillard wrote with unabashed evangelical fervor.

38. For Wilbur and Orville, the dream had taken hold. The works of Lilienthal and Mouillard, the brothers would attest, had “infected us with their own unquenchable enthusiasm and transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers.”

39. In answer to an inquiry Wilbur sent to the United States Weather Bureau in Washington about prevailing winds around the country, they were provided extensive records of monthly wind velocities at more than a hundred Weather Bureau stations. That decided the matter. Kitty Hawk it would be.

40. The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.

41. As time would show, caution and close attention to all advance preparations were to be the rule for the brothers. 

42. They would take risks when necessary, but they were no daredevils out to perform stunts and they never would be.

43. Wilbur was at such a low point he declared that “not in a thousand years would man ever fly.”

44. Far from home, on their own in a way they had never been, the brothers seemed to sense as they never had the adventure of life. Orville would later say that even with all the adversities they had to face, it was the happiest time they had ever known.

45. No bird soars in a calm.

46. We couldn’t help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts. They’d stand on the beach for hours at a time just looking at the gulls flying, soaring, dipping. 

47. “When we crawl out of the tent to fix things, the sand fairly blinds us,” Orville wrote. But they could not complain. “We came down here for wind and sand and we have got them.”

48. Hard workers were greatly admired and in the words of John T. Daniels, the Wrights were “two of the workingest boys ever seen,  and when they worked, they worked.”

49. They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing. 

50. It was October 19, and after nearly four years of concentrated study and effort by the brothers, it proved a day of days. Wilbur made one manned flight after another.

51. Data the brothers had taken as gospel — had proven to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly those esteemed authorities had been guessing.

52. We had to go ahead and discover everything ourselves.

53. The brothers set out to crack the code of aeronautics themselves. It was a brave decision and a crucial turning point.

54. This was the kind of horse, he said, that men had to learn to manage in order to fly, and there were two ways: One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders.

55. The work was unlike anything the brothers had ever undertaken and the most demanding of their time and powers of concentration. They were often at it past midnight. 

56. Never in the history of the world had men studied the problem with such scientific skill nor with such undaunted courage. 

57. They had done it together on their own, paying their own way, as they did everything , and they intended to keep going on their own.

58. Wilbur was completely unnerved. When he gets a thing on his mind, he thinks of it continually. 

59. Little if any of what the brothers did went unnoticed by the local residents, who by now, as John T. Daniels said, had “learned to love ’em,” and in no small part because they “could do anything they put their hands to. They built their own camp; they took an old carbide can and made a stove of it; they took a bicycle and geared the thing up so that they could ride it on the sand. They did their own cooking and washing and they were good cooks too.

60. Once more they were left no choice but to solve the problem themselves. “Our minds,” said Orville, “became so obsessed with it that we could do little other work.”

61. Asked during a brief discussion period what he thought of experiments being conducted by Alexander Graham Bell to hoist a man into the air with a giant kite, Wilbur replied, “It is very bad policy to ask one flying machine man about the experiments of another because every flying machine man thinks that his method is the only correct one.”

62. The Flyer would be launched on a single wooden track, to serve like a railroad track 60 feet in length on which it would slide. The total cost for materials for this innovation was all of $4.

63. It had taken four years. They had endured violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes. To get to and from their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from Dayton, a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than half a mile. No matter. They had done it.

64. But it would never have happened, Daniels also stressed, had it not been for the two “workingest boys” he ever knew. It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and all their energy into an idea and they had the faith.

65. They were always thinking of the next thing to do; they didn’t waste much time worrying about the past.

66. “The best dividends on the labor invested,” they said, “have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.”

67. Orville said that he and his brother never liked to pass criticisms on the work of others.

68. People think I am foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important work on the machine. They say I crawl under the machine when the men could do the thing well enough. I do it partly because it gives me opportunity to see if anything in the neighborhood is out of order.

69. “A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool,” Wilbur said.

70. Only Bishop Wright [their father] had yet to fly. He had been with the brothers from the start, helping in every way he could, never losing faith in them or their aspirations. Now, at eighty-two, he walked out to the starting point, where Orville, without hesitation, asked him to climb aboard. They took off, soaring over Huffman Prairie at about 350 feet for a good six minutes, during which the Bishop’s only words were, “Higher, Orville, higher!”

71. Wilbur took ill, running a high fever day after day. It proved once again to be the dreaded typhoid fever. Wilbur Wright died in his room at home. He was forty-five years old.

72. A short life, full of consequences [the Bishop wrote]. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance, and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died.