By James Buckley Jr.
The real lives of two high-school dropouts from a bicycle shop in Ohio who worked out how to fly when nobody on earth knew how.
Wilbur and Orville Wright, from birth to the end, in short chapters with a drawing on almost every page. Neither finished high school. They fixed and built bicycles in Dayton, Ohio, and taught themselves aerodynamics out of stubbornness and homemade wind-tunnel tests. Then Kitty Hawk, December 1903, twelve seconds off the ground. The book keeps going past the famous bit into the years afterward - the demonstrations, the fame, the long patent fights, and how each brother's life ended. Side-boxes fill in the world around them, and there's a timeline at the back.
A child who has been obsessed with aircraft since they were three eventually asks who made the first one, and this is the readable answer at the exact moment they can hold it. It's a real biography with real research behind it, but the chapters are short and the pictures never stop, so an eight-year-old moving into chapter books can carry it alone. The Who Was shelf runs to hundreds of titles, so if this one works you have somewhere to go next.