GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE GETS THE SCOOP ON THE WRIGHT BROTHERS.

GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE GETS THE SCOOP ON THE WRIGHT BROTHERS. I posted here on James Salter’s review of David McCullough’s book THE WRIGHT BROTHERS. John Lanchester has a review of the book in the London Review of Books (September 10). Lanchester writes: “What is less well known, though, is the freshest and strangest thing McCullough has to tell us. It is that the initial reaction to the Wrights was a non-reaction.” The Wright brothers conducted a series of experimental and demonstration flights in Dayton but, says Lanchester, “Not a single reporter ever went to look.” The first report on the flights was by Amos Root in the journal Gleanings in Bee Culture. Root sent a copy of his article to the editor of the Scientific American, who replied a year later that it was not publishing on the flights because the Wrights could not have made the flights since no other reporter had ever published on the flights.