How long does it take to read The Wright Brothers?
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough takes about 7 hours 55 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 55 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2015. 432 pages, about 118,800 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 12 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 55 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 57 minutes |
The page count is the median across 16 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story of the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly. On a winter day in 1903, on the remote Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, changed history. The age of flight had begun with the first heavier-than-air powered machine carrying a pilot. Far more than a couple of Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, the Wright brothers were men of exceptional ability, unyielding determination, and far-ranging intellectual interest and curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. They grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing, but with books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father. And they never stopped learning. Nor did their high-spirited, devoted sister, Katharine, who played a far more important role in their endeavors than has been generally understood. When the brothers worked together, no problem seemed insurmountable. Wilbur, the older of the two, was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few people had ever seen. Nothing stopped them in their "mission," not failures, not ridicule, not even the reality that every time they took off in one of their experimental contrivances, they risked being killed. In this thrilling book master historian David McCullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence, to tell the human side of a profoundly American story. - Jacket flap.
Subjects: Aeronautics, Biography, History, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING, Science & Technology, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
