The Wright Brothers: Nose-Diving into History(Epic Fails#1)

A hilarious nonfiction look at two of history's most epic "failures" the Wright brothers, whose countless crashes ultimately led to groundbreaking success. Although Orville and Wilbur Wright are celebrated today as heroes for their revolutionary contributions to science and engineeringthey are acknowledged as the first men to successfully achieve powered, piloted flighttheir success was hard-earned. (Spoiler alert there were a lot of nosedives involved.) In fact, it took the self-taught engineers years of work and dozens of crashes before they managed a single twelve-second flight!

In this first installment of the brand new Epic Fails series, Ben Thompson and Erik Slader take readers through the Wright brothers' many mishaps and misadventures as they paved the way for modern aviation. The Epic Fails series takes a humorous and unexpected view of history, exploring the surprising stories behind a variety of groundbreaking discoveries, voyages, experiments, and innovations, illustrating how many of mankind's biggest successes are in fact the result of some pretty epic failures. This title has Common Core connections.

Thompson is the author of a dozen books on various awesome historical subjects including the Guts & Glory series, and has appeared on television programs for the History Channel, Discovery, and the American Heroes Channel. He has written for Cracked, Fangoria, Soldier of Fortune, and The American Mustache Institute, currently owns four swords (if you count a letter opener shaped like Glamdring the Foe-Hammer), and can occasionally beat the Star Wars Trilogy arcade game with a single quarter. Erik Slader is the creator of "Epik Fails of History" a blog (and podcast) about the most epic fails of history.

With Ben Thompson, Erik is the coauthor of the Epic Fails book series, including The Wright Brothers Nose-Diving Into History and Race to Space Countdown to Liftoff.