"This is a book of dreams and dreamers; it is chock full of failures, because until December 17, 1903, all of the many attempts to achieve powered flight were failures. But don't let that put you off, for the story has a happy ending, one as dramatic as any epic tale in the literature of fact or fiction. You can almost hear the fellow who had been watching the Wright brothers on the dunes that day in 1903 come bursting into the little post office at Kitty Hawk shouting, "They have done it! Damned it they ain't flew."" Thomas H. Flaherty, Jr., Series Editor, The Epic of Flight
