About this item
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 engineering -- they are acknowledged as the first men to successfully achieve powered, piloted flight -- their 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.
About the Author
Ben Thompson is the writer and creator of badassoftheweek.com and author of the books Badass Badass: Birth of a Legend, and Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch. He has written articles for Cracked, Fangoria, Penthouse, and The American Mustache Institute, was once selected "Seattle's Sexiest Dungeon Master" by a local newspaper, and can occasionally beat the Star Wars: The Original Trilogy arcade game with one quarter.