Grand Eccentrics: Turning the Century : Dayton and the Inventing of America

As the nineteenth century turned, the small-town America in which Huck Finn fished was yielding to an age of industry, of a remarkable new form of energy, electricity; of a remarkable new toy, the automobile. It was a plastic age, as uncertain as our own, a time when the future was ready to be shaped. Grand Eccentrics is a group biography of a half dozen individuals - Orville and Wilbur Wright; Charles Kettering; John H. Patterson; Arthur Morgan, and James Cox -- who explored those new possibilities. Their lives crossed and recrossed. They collaborated, bankrolled each other's undertakings, founded and joined the same clubs, tried to run each other out of town. And in all of this -- in flight, the automobile, salesmanship and more -- they did much to create the American 20th century, the America that is now yielding to the rise of the electronic technologies and a global marketplace, creating an uncertainty like that to which a century ago, these men gave form.