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.

Mark Bernstein is an author and magazine writer with particular interests in American biography, and social and technological history. Born in Chicago, he lived for 30 years near Dayton, Ohio, and moved to Silver Spring, Md., in 2004.

His most recent work is "McCulloch of Ohio: For the Republic" [2014], a full-length biography of the Republican congressman who led bipartisan efforts to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1968 Open Housing Act.

His previous work includes "John J. Gilligan: The Politics of Principle" [Kent State University Press, 2013], the first full-length biography of the Ohio's transformative governor and the state's most significant post-World War Two Democrat; "World War II on the Air" [with Alex Lubertozzi and Dan Rather; Sourcebooks, 2003], an account of Edward R. Murrow and the CBS radio coverage of the European Theater, complete with a 55-minute audio CD of classic broadcasts; and "Grand Eccentrics" [Orange Frazer Press, 1996], a group biography of such turn-of-the-century inventors and entrepreneurs as the Wright Brothers, Charles Kettering and others.

Two of his works, "Grand Eccentrics" and "Wright Brothers' Home Day Celebration, 1909" are among the 70 books listed in the bibliography of David McCullough's New York Times #1 best-seller, "The Wright Brothers" [2015]. 

He appeared on camera on PBS' FRONTLINE, "Left Behind Cities" [2018] and "Million Dollar Idea" [2015], a Smithsonian Institution television documentary series on American inventors. He has given 75 book talks and 120 radio interviews.

His 100 magazine articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Smithsonian Air & Space and American Heritage of Invention and Technology and he has been contributing editor to both OHIO magazine [thrice named the nation's best regional magazine] and of World Trade Magazine.