Unlocking The Sky : Glenn Hammond Curtiss and the Race to Invent the Airplane

Part 1. Rewriting aviation history : Intrigue at Hammondsport -- Wrights and wrongs -- America or bust -- Part 2. Reaching for the sky : Captains of the air -- Sky dancing -- Flight of the June Bug -- Sky king -- Part 3. Warped wings : Grounded -- Flight of a hero -- New beginnings -- Epilogue : All but the legacy. Unlocking the Sky tells the extraordinary tale of the race to design, refine, and manufacture a manned flying machine, a race that took place in the air, on the ground, and in the courtrooms of America. While the Wright brothers threw a veil of secrecy over their flying machine, Glenn Hammond Curtiss -- perhaps the greatest aviator and aeronautical inventor of all time -- freely exchanged information with engineers in America and abroad, resulting in his famous airplane, the June Bug, which made the first ever public flight in America. Fiercely jealous, the Wright brothers took to the courts to keep Curtiss and his airplane out of the sky and off the market. Ultimately, however, it was Curtiss's innovations and designs, not the Wright brothers', that served as the model for the modern airplane. By midafternoon on December 8, 1903, dozens of spectators have gathered on the sunny banks of the Potomac River south of Washington D.C. They have come to glimpse the future.