By Alice Provensen, Martin Provensen
This actually happened: a Frenchman with a workshop, a large family, and no idea what he's doing builds eleven flying machines and finally flies one across the English Channel in 1909.
Papa Blériot sees an airship over Cambrai and decides he will fly. So he builds Blériot I, which does not fly. Then Blériot II, III, IV, all the way up. They flip, they fold, they nose into fields, they break apart on landing, and Papa keeps climbing out of them and starting again while his wife and five children watch from the grass. By Blériot XI he can stay up. On 25 July 1909 he flies it over the Channel to England in thirty-seven minutes, on crutches from the last crash. It won the Caldecott Medal in 1984, and the pictures are the reason - each machine drawn like an engineering plate, so your child can see exactly what he changed each time.
It's the only book on this shelf where flying is dangerous and the danger is the point. Every crash is a real crash that a real man walked away from, and by the time he's out over the Channel your child understands, without being told, that nobody knew this would work. The Provensens draw the machines with enough precision that a plane-mad child reads the pictures as much as the words. It's also the honest answer to 'who made the first planes' - not a genius, a man who broke ten of them first.