Penard and the other pioneers of flight face two problems.  One is finding the power to fly.  It’s easy when you deal with rubber bands and bamboo, but how can you carry the weight of a man?  Great 19^th Century figures like Thomas Edison put their minds to it, and fail.  Sir Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun, succeeds in putting a huge steam engine on a winged frame, but it reaches the end of the runway, and crashes.

Which leads to the other problem.  How to control this machine once it’s in the air?  The sky is a turbulent sea, and the closer you get to shore — the earth — the more the air becomes a choppy, pounding surf.  Just observe the treachery and vindictiveness of the wind on any stormy night.

  Who are the voyagers on this turbulent sea?  Most are people you’ve never heard of.  German Otto Lilienthal flies the same way Icarus did.  He sows goose feathers on willow frames and flaps his arms.  The neighborhood boys make fun of him, so he flies by moonlight.

Then he becomes more scientific.  He builds curved wing gliders and flies them from a 50-foot man-made mountain.  Just look at him.  He maneuvers with his body.  It’s as if we’re all in an airplane and the pilot says, “Now lean to the left.”  Maxim insultingly calls him “the flying squirrel.”

  If he is a flying squirrel, he’s a good one.  Lilienthal flies 5,000 times.  After each one, he makes log notes on wind pressure, center of gravity and length of flight.  Lilienthal believes the only way to learn to fly is to fly.

But in 1896 his luck runs out.  Lilienthal is 50 feet above the ground when a freak gust of wind strikes his glider.  The glider stands still; the one thing you cannot do in the air.  He tries to point it nose downward and put it into a glide, but he’s not fast enough.  

The glider goes over backwards, and he crashes, fracturing his spine.  Lying on the ground with a broken back, he gasps out the final entry for his logbook.  “Sacrifices must be made!”  

A young Scottish engineer at the University of Glasgow named Percy Pilcher takes up the cause.  He knows what happened to Lilienthal.  But Pilcher thinks he’s learned enough to avoid the mistakes.  

He says: “We cannot hope that a single flight will lead us to the sky.  But each trial will show at least one fatal error, into which others might fall.  So, by recording the wreckage of the first, we buoy out a channel that leads us to the heavens.  

“We must not each work for our own selfish interests, but all have at heart the common cause.  And, even if each of us does only a little, then soon will come the day when we no longer grope in utter blindness, and the path to true flight is marked out.”

So where are we at the start of the last century?  Many deaths, many sacrifices, but is there really a road into the heavens?  The answer is “yes,” and the cast of characters, who will take it and make history, is assembling.

And Orville and Wilbur Wright, a pair of laconic brothers who run a bicycle shop, and are so close that they finish each other’s sentences.   “As inseparable as twins,” their father says, “they are indispensable to each other.”  

  Young Wilbur is playing on the floor in his Dayton, Ohio, home when his father walks in and throws down a toy.  Except it doesn’t fall.  It flies across the room, hits the ceiling, and flutters about.  It’s Penard’s helicopter.  Instantly, it becomes Wilbur’s favorite toy.

  Growing up, Wilbur has bad luck.  He loses most of his teeth when hit with a hockey stick, then develops heart problems.  Disfigured and a semi-invalid, he roams the hills above Dayton watching the birds.  There he realizes the problem in flight is control.  How do you sail through that turbulent sea?  And how do you fly and not die?  

Wilbur and Orville send for everything about flying.  When they seek help from Octave Chanute, who’s been flying gliders on Lake Michigan, Wilbur tells Chanute, “I make no secret of my plans for the reason that I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine, and that only those who are willing to give as well as receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery.“  Chanute tells them to read about Otto Lilienthal.  

Santos-Dumont joins the Aéro Club, a group of gentlemen who take ice cream and chartreuse up in the air with them on leisurely afternoon jaunts in the sky.  At only five-feet-one-inch tall, dark and wiry, ballooning is the perfect sport for him because the smaller and more agile you are, the better.

But ultimately ballooning isn’t enough for Santos-Dumont.  Balloons won’t fly where you want to go.  So he designs a new style of aerodynamic balloon, a dirigible, which means “directable” in French.  Not the first to think of this, he has an obvious advantage.  Until now, no one else has an engine light enough to be taken aloft.  Electricity is too heavy because of batteries and steam is too heavy because of the boilers.

But Santos-Dumont sees the gasoline engine now used in cars.  While lightweight and powerful, it’s also dangerous.  It stalls, and its primitive method of ignition sets off fires that can be fatal when you’re underneath a balloon full of hydrogen.