The Story of The Wright Brothers

“00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habeeb and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On a winter day in nineteen oh three, in the outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, changed history. You’re to tell the story from his best selling biography, The Right Brothers is David McCullough. Let’s take a listen to the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

00:00:45
Speaker 2: One of the most powerful lessons, it seems to me, from my work on The Right Brothers, was the importance of how they were brought up, the learning that it was imposed, and the values that were stressed in their home. Yes, education is all important, grade school, high school, college and beyond. But how we’re brought up at home by the people who are shaping us in childhood is an area that needs far more understanding. So you have to pay attention to the parents, even if the parents are long gone or deceased. It’s worth thinking about that. These two brothers, these two amazing Americans who solved the most difficult technical problem, the most commonly believed to have been impossible problem. Had no scientific or technical training whatever. They never finished high school, let alone never went to college. But they grew up in an atmosphere where curiosity was stimulated. From the time they are old enough to talk. They lived in a little house in Dayton, Ohio, which is now at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, a little house with no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, but full of books. And the books that we were there were selected for them by themselves, to be sure, but mainly by their father, Bishop Milton Wright, who was an itinerant minister, and who believed fervently that they must learn to use the English language, not just correctly but effectively, and that they must read and read all the time, and read above their level. So in that little house, along with a few very spare furnishings, were the works of Virgil and Plutarch’s lives and Thucydides and the Bible, and Mark Twain and Hawthorne and Sir Walter Scott, and ornithology and natural history and history, French history, American history, theology, you name it. It was all there. Their father was a great believer in the importance of toys in educating children, and he brought home what the boys came to call the bat. And it was a simple little helicopter propellers and powered by rubber bands which you would twist and it would take off into the air. And as each of the brothers would later recount, that’s when it began. And they were not in any way ambivalent about that. And some years later, but not very long, Orville was in the first grade and he was whittling a waves with some wood, and his teacher came over and asked him what he was doing, and he said, I’m working on the kind of flying machine my brother and I are going to build and fly. This was only the beginning, in many ways, of the many examples of their home environment that were absolutely decisive. Years later, Orbell was asked by one of his friends, would he agree that he and his brother were perfect examples of Americans who grew up with no advantages. And they had no advantages, as we would think of them, no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone in the house. That even with no advantages, we can rise to extraordinary achievements and heights because we’re Americans. And Orwell was very Adam, and he said, no, that’s not true, because we grew up with the best advantage, the greatest advantage anybody could ever have. We grew up in a home that couraged intellectual curiosity. And that’s exactly what happened. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Dayton, which was not one of the larger cities even in Ohio, was in its way the Silicon Valley of the time. In Dayton, Ohio, more patents were issued on new inventions, new products, and so forth than based on population equivalents in any other city in the country. There was something being developed, built, a new almost everywhere you would turn, and they were in the midst of that. And that’s extremely important. And also, of course it’s an age of innovation and invention. With Alexander Graham, Bell and Edison and the invention of the elevator and the mouse trap, and the advent of the skyscraper. It just goes on and on. And so that was a spirit in the country which they understandably to a very large extent, rightly felt was purely American their letters have survived. And when you read the quality of their language, the use of the English language, it’s humbling. The vocabulary. Again, two young men who never finished high school because they were too interested in other ideas and other things. They didn’t have time for that. Imagine now this again, I said, most people from the ten minutes the subject was given in high school, most of us. We know there were bicycle mechanics from somewhere in Ohio, and they invented the airplane. All true, but there’s ever so much more to it when you find out what they were like as people. They were raised to be honest, They were raised to work hard. They were raised to be good neighbors. They were raised to do their best at whatever they did. They were raised to have purpose in life, high purpose, a mission, as the father did as an itinerant minister. But they were to choose their own purpose. And they were raised to be modest. Remember modesty, Remember when that was thought to be a virtue.

00:07:18
Speaker 1: When we come back, more of the remarkable story, the remarkable American story of the Wright brothers. Here on our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to our American Stories dot com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with our American stories, and with the story of the Wright brothers as told by David McCullough. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:08:19
Speaker 2: They never changed. They became the most famous two people in the world and were amply rewarded financially, not just the limelight, and they never changed whatsoever. Now, yes, they invented the airplane, but they also invented flight flying the airplane. This is a very important point that most people don’t understand. They developed a machine that would fly, but they had to know how to learn how to fly it. So they were the first ever test violence. And please keep in mind that every time they went up on a test flight, they were risking their lives. They could be killed, and they were very conscious of this. They weren’t daredevils. They weren’t show off stuntsmen. They wanted to make sure that they got it right so that when they went up nothing would go wrong and they would get killed. And they refused ever to go up together when they developed a plane that would carry two passengers, because if one got if only one of them got killed, then the other would still be there to carry on with the mission. They never married, they never went on vacations, they never got interested in material possessions. All they wanted to do was accomplish this purpose, and they were confident that if they didn’t get killed, they could do it. They also had no money behind them, no foundation, no university, no Smithsonian institution, no Andrew Kernegie picking up all the bills. All that they expended their work they paid for out of what were rather modest earnings. In their bicycle shop. They built bicycles. They built magnificent bicycles, beautiful bicycles. First flight was not very impressive, lasted twelve seconds, and he went one hundred and twenty feet. However, and keep in mind, please that this is in the midst of bitter winter on the outer banks, with stiff wind, cold and desolate in the extreme. It was all sand virtually then virtually no one lived there. There were no roads, there were no contact with the world except the telegraph office and the life saving the station. And they had a few people there, local people helping them. And then they took turns. They always took turns flying. And then it was Wilbur’s turn that it was orrible to all that same day, before the day was over, Wilbur had flown them more than half a mile. They had done it, no question about it. And they knew that they had done it, and that nobody in all history had ever done anything like it. And they knew that what they had done could change the world, which of course it has. And they did all that work at night or on weekends, after hours. So they were customarily working not eight hours a day, twelve hours a day, eight hours in the shop, another four hours or sometimes more on working on their gliders or their airplanes that they were building in the shop themselves. And everybody in town thought they were wacko. It was common knowledge. They were awfully nice fellows, very polite, very gentlemanly, but weird. The United States government took no interest in what they were doing whatsoever. When they had volunteered to bring their plane to Washington to show them what they could do, they had the door slammed in their face again and again. The newspapers right in Dayton had no interest in what they were doing. They wouldn’t even send a reporter out to watch them, flying often write eight miles out of town. And when one of the managing editors was asked years later, how in the world could this be happening right under your noses? But what was the matter? He said, I guess we were just plain stupid. And it wasn’t until a French delegation showed up in Dayton in late in nineteen five, having heard, having gotten the word that this was happening and these brothers had done it that they said, you come on over to France and show us, demonstrate what you can do, and that’s what happened. They didn’t like to do that, the right brothers, because they were profound patriots, but they just were sick of having being snubbed and ignored. So Wilbert went to France in nineteen eight, and on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year of the New Century, Wilbur Wright flew at Lehman, the great racetrack town south east of Paris, for about in front of an audience in the little racetrack bleachers there about one hundred people. Within days, thousands were coming to watch the miracle, coming from all over France and coming from all over Europe. And that’s when the world knew men had achieved flight. Now, before that happened, there were two very important Americans who were trying to achieve flight. The first was Octave Chanout, who was one of the most important bridge engineers of the day, brilliant bridge engineer, French born but an American citizen, who built the great first bridge over the Missouri River at Kansas City, still there. The other was Samuel Langley, who was an astronomer who became the secretary of the Smithsonian who developed what he called his aerodrome, and it looked like a giant insect, and it was to be launched from the roof of a huge houseboat just downstream from Washington on the Potomac River. Neither Langley, neither Chanoute, who worked on gliders, or Langley, who was working on him on a powered air machine, ever went up in their inventions. Oh No, they left that to some other young fellow who was willing to risk his life, so neither of them ever learned to glide or to fly. Furthermore, Langley was using public money to develop his invention, his aerodrome, and while it doesn’t seem like very much to us, it was a fortune then in public money, Smithsonian Institution money, Smithsonian Institution, a staff working for him, and wasn’t even counted in what the cost was of fifty thousand dollars, and another twenty five for thousand or so was contributed by a number of his wealthy friends, so well over seventy thousand dollars the total. And Langley’s plane was launched about two weeks before the right plane at Kittyhawk in nineteen three in the winter, very cold Potomac was full of of sheets of ice, and the plane shot up into the air, launched off the top of the houseboat, shot up into the air about sixty feet, fell over backwards slightly, and then turned a nose dive right into the water only twenty five feet or so from where took off. Total fiasco, total failure, and which crushed mister Langley in spirit, and he never recovered from it, and it became the laughing stock and taken to be absolute proof that men cannot fly.

00:16:20
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to the late David McCullough telling the story of the Ripe Brothers. It’s one of his many best selling biographies. And my goodness, these guys had no money behind them. They didn’t just make the plane, he said, they flew it. So there were none of these problems between engineers and the actual people running the plane. They were learning from each other, and this was dangerous. They never flew together because these planes, these iterations of the plane, when they fell to the ground, well they were injuries. In fact, their sister was seriously injured in one of these flights. And when they did it, by the way, they knew they had changed the world. Regrettably, the world didn’t know what they’d done. The local newspapers ignored them, Washington, d c. Ignored them, and it was only a French delegation that invited them, the French government to come to Paris and show the world what they’d done. It started out with hundreds watching and soon it was thousands, and the world would know by the way. All the while, Americans back when they were trying to get to flight. Americans like Langley, with lots of government money, were taking their planes up and back down into the Potomac. Government investment sunk right along with the plane. When we come back more of this remarkable story of American ingenuity and innovation and character. The story of the Wright brothers continues here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and the story of the Right Brothers with the late David McCullough. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:19
Speaker 2: When Wilbur was asked about this approach that he and his brother had taken, he gave it a wonderful analogy. He said, there are two ways to train a wild horse. One is to sit on a fence with a notepad and watch the horse, and if you collected enough notes on your pad, retire to a comfortable chair and a good lamp and write a thesis on how to train a wild horse. The other is to get on the horse and ride it, which is exactly what the Right brothers did. They not only invented the machine, they mastered the art of flight. Now how did they do that? They did it by watching soaring birds. And it all goes back to what they were reading at home in that little house in the back streets of Dayton, Ohio, and the importance of reading, of research, of the inspiration that comes from books. And the book that had the most influence on them by far was a book written by a French theorist who was also an extraordinary writer, very poetic, and Wilbur, who was the older of the two brothers. Wilbur should be clear, Wilbur was a genius, no question about it. Orville, the younger brother, was very clever, ingenious mechanically, but he didn’t have the reach of mind that Wilbur had. And this book, which was called called The Empire of the Air, which had been translated into English, was published in Paris in eighteen eighty one. Nothing Wilbur had ever read so affected him. He would long consider it quote one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature ever published, and the operative word there was literature. For Wilbur. Flight had become a cause, and Mullard, the author, Pierre Mullard, and Millard one of the greatest missionaries of the cause, like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight unquote. At the start of the Empire of the Air, Milliard gave fair warning that one could be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of flight could be solved by man. When once this idea has invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively. Exactly what happened to the Wright brothers, Oh blind humanity. Millard wrote, open thine eyes, and thou shalt see millions of birds and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. All these creatures are whirling through the air without the slightest support. Many of them are gliding therein without losing height, hour after hour on pulseless wings, without fatigue. And after beholding this demonstration given by the source of all knowledge, thou wilt acknowledge that aviation is the path to be followed. He was writing about one of his favorite soaring birds of vulture that he liked to observe in North Africa. Millard was and he said to Rode, he knows how to rise, how to float, how to sail upon the wind without effort. He sails and spends no force. He uses the wind instead of his muscles. Now, from that and from their own observation of soaring birds, particularly at Kittihowk once they got there, and particularly the giant gannets, which I have wingspans of five to six feet, who can stay up there, just as myard writes, for hours without clapping their wings, just by riding the wind. It became apparent to Wilbur and to Orville that the wind was the answer the ways of the winds. Now. I have a lot of Irish ancestry, and I love the old Irish saying, may the wind always be at your back. But that’s exactly what they saw, not to be the process or the route to the success in this endeavor and in life, and one of the most powerful of all the observations written in Wilbur writes notebooks on his observations on bird for soaring birds, which he wrote at Kittihok. He writes, no bird ever soared in a calm. If you want to get up there, you can’t do it in a calm. You have to have the wind, which is why they went to Kitti Hook, because they needed the wind, and also they loved the idea of all that soft sand, of the sand dunes on which to land, and the fact that there were very few people living there and they wouldn’t be bothered much by the curious and the questioning of constantly commitsers. When the people who lived on Kittyhock, and there were relatively few, as I say, mostly fishermen and their families, saw these two brothers who arrived there in wearing their business suits that we would wear on the streets of Dayton, and hats and starch white collars and neckties out on the beach, imitating the soaring birds and twisting their hands and wrists the way the birds twisted at the end of their wings. They thought these two are absolutely crackpots. And it only was when they saw how hard they could work that they began to think they’re all right. As one of them said, they’re the workinness boys we ever saw. And to work to survive on that the outer banks of North Carolina, they could remember, no bridges, no roads to survive. It was the meagerest kind of living took all the work that anybody could give, all through their lives from childhood on the first written account of real flight achieved back at the Huffman Prairie Cow pasture in Dayton in nineteen five, was written by a man who produced beak keeping equipment in Ohio, a little fellow about five foot four, Amos Roots. He had made a fortune with his beekeeping, and who was interested in everything. And he got wind of what the Wright brothers were up to, and he went down to watch and see for himself, with their permission. He asked rode ahead and ask if could he come, and he wrote this marvelous piece, which he then published in his beekeeper’s journal. And it was not only long and detailed, but totally accurate. And it was the first published account of this miracle ever to appear in a beekeeper’s journal, The New York Times, Scientific American, Chicago Tribune, you name it. None of them bothered even come and watch. When Amos Root offered this piece that he’d written to Scientific Americans for free to publish, they didn’t even bother to answer his letter. So blind were they all to what had been done, and what a miracle it was done by these two men, And how narrow viewed of us to take no interest in it. It changed the world in a matter of no time. We get on airplanes today, we fly through thirty five forty thousand feet at six hundred miles an hour or not and think nothing of it. How did it happen? Who were those guys? How’d they do it?

00:26:21
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to David McCullough tell the story of the Right Brothers. Who were those guys? And how did they do it? Well, you’re learning the answers to both, and they’ll be more fascinating storytelling to come. I love what he said about learning how to ride a wild horse. You could get on that fence and study it and take notes, or you could get on the horse. Now, it didn’t mean the Right Brothers didn’t study. Boy did they read, and boy did they study flight, and particularly birds. And that one French piece of aeronautic literature changed so much, particularly for Wilbur. The genius of the two whend was the answer. No, Wilbur said, ever sword in a calm, And that’s why they loved Kittihawk. And if you’ve ever been in that part of the country, you know the winds, you know the dunes, and you know that soft sand in case of a crash, A boy that beats landing on concrete or a hard red Clay surface. When we come back more of this remarkable story, the story of the Right Brothers. Here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories, and the story of the Right Brothers is told by the late David McCullough. And go to Amazon or the usual Suspects and pick up this book. You will not put it down. Let’s pick up with the Story of the Right Brothers.

00:27:54
Speaker 2: When he was about eighteen years old, Wilbur was hitting the teeth with a hockey stick and him pick up game with some of his neighborhood friends on a frozen pond in the area, and it knocked out all of his upper teeth. Now, this was a time when dentistry was pathetic, primitive, when anesthetics were virtually unknown. The pain was excruciating and it took a long time just to recover. But it was also humiliating for him in the extreme. He was a handsome young man, and he was popular, and he was a good athlete, and suddenly he’s this disfigured boy whose face was hard to look at given what had happened to it, and he retreated into a self imposed isolation at home. He was going to go to Yale University. His father thought that was a fine idea, and he was ambitious to pursue an academic career. Instead, he stayed at home in the house looked after much of the time his mother, who was dying type of tuberculosis. And it was then that he began to read for three years in this self imposed isolation, and it caused a terrific swerve in his whole life direction. The talk of Yale ended. He was off on this pursuit of knowledge, writing to the Smithsonian asking for information. All of that, and it’s a consequence let him down a path that led to the invention of the airplane. This beneficial change that could have happened, but it was adverse. No bird sores in a calm. He had a headwind the likes of which nobody ever imagined, nobody in the family well. In Bishopwright’s diary entry that followed Wilbur’s death in nineteen twelve, he died when he was still in his forties, tragically died of typhoid fever. His father had warned about the perils of impure water all their lives. Was like a Greek tragedy. They’d been warned and warned and worn, and that’s what killed him. But the question was who hit him in the teeth with a hockey stick and was it intentional or not. In the Bishop’s diary he writes to explain who the boy was to hit him and what happened to him. His name was Oliver Hay h au g h and Oliver Hay lived right around the corner in the same neighborhood, and he became the most notorious murderer in the history of Ohio. He killed his father, his mother, his brother, and an estimated twelve others or more. Now isn’t it fascinating that one of the ultimate geniuses of our story as a people grew up in the same neighborhood with the ultimate expression of evil in a human being. I keep coming back to the brothers themselves and what they wrote, and to Catherine and what she wrote. One of the most horrific experiences of all was when Orville had a crash when he finally was invited to demonstrate what they had developed at Fort Meyer, across the Potomac River from Washington, and thousands came over from the government, from the White House, from the Cabinet, from the Congress, to watch this miracle. And Orville went up and was breaking all kinds of world records almost by the day, at the same time that Wilbur was over at Lehman demonstrating there in front of it. It was like a two ring circuit, with one brother in each location. And then one day Orville took a young Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, Army lieutenant up with him as a passenger. He’d been taking many others, and something went wrong with the plane and it crashed seventy five feet straight down into the ground, and young Selfridge was killed, the first fatality in aviation history. And Orville was very nearly killed, had many bones broken, and he was badly scarred and bruised. And again his confidence was shaken. He was horrified by the death of Selfridge. And when Catherine back in Dayton, got word that this has happened on an afternoon after she’d returned from teaching at the high school, she called the principal of the school and said she was taking an indefinite leave of absence. She was packed and on a train bound for Washington before the day was over. She then spent the next six five and a half six weeks with Oriville at the base hospital at Fort Meyer, making sure he got the best care possible and making sure that she could do did everything she could to keep his spirits up. It was thought that he would never walk again, then they would certainly never fly again. And she saw him through it, and he later set himself and others did too. If it weren’t for her, he probably wouldn’t have made it. And she got him back to Dayton and kept working with him, kept encouraging, and he not only walked again, but he flew again. And at his insistence, much against the advice of both Wilbur and Catherine and the father, that he shouldn’t go back to Fort Meyer. It was too traumatic for him, too many memories, too many feelings of regret or guilt over the death of young Selfridge. But he insisted he had to go back where it happened, and he went back, and he flew again, and he continued to break more records. It’s one of the most remarkable comebacks I’ve ever known in what I’ve written about, and one of the lessons that you get from this story is they would not give up, and they always learned from their mistakes. They always learned from their failures. Where there was a technical failure with an aluminum motor block that they pioneered split when it was first tested, they built another one and it worked, or whether it was finding that all the details, the data, the tables of technical mathematics used by people like Chinout and Langley were wrong, they were worthless, as Orwell said. They then said, well, we’ll have to do that ourselves. So they created their own wind tunnel. They created little models of wing shapes out of axaw blades, and they created their own tables which were correct, all way ahead of anybody at MIT or Renseleer or the Smithsonian Institution, all on their own by learning from their mistakes. Their point was that if you’re knocked down, you don’t lie there and whimper and wine and lapse into self pity. You get back up on your feet, figure out what you did wrong, do it right, and go at it again. And what a lesson for young people to learn today, and what a lesson to learn about use of the English language. Almost half of all the business schools in our country today require incoming freshmen, who are all college graduates, to take a basic writing lesson because they are incapable of writing a presentable letter or report or proposal. Pathetic. And here they are, these two examples of the boys that young men that never even finished high school because of the way they were brought up. Wilbur was asked once, if you had to give advice to somebody young people today about how to succeed, what would you say? He said, I would tell him to pick out a good mother and father and grow up in Ohio.

00:36:34
Speaker 1: And a great job on the editing of that piece by our own Greg Hengler. And you’ve been listening to the late David McCullough his book The Right Brothers go to Amazon or the usual suspects pick it up, you will not put it down. That accident, or maybe it wasn’t with a hockey stick. When Wilbur was eighteen, my goodness had changed his life. He was disfigured, in great pain. There were no dentists around back in the day to give you implants or any of the current technologies that can help fix such a thing. He was disfigured, and he retreated into his self imposed isolation, and instead of going to Yale, stayed put in his family home and just cleared out and cleared through and went through the entire family library. And it was three years that would ultimately change the direction of his life. The adversity that would change the direction of his life. The same adversity would happen to Orville in a crash that would almost kill him, and most people would have never tried it again. And there he was not long later, in the same place, back up on that plane. That’s the way they were brought up, to never give up and to try again, and to learn from their mistakes. And we ended where we began with those parents and the advantage of having parents who drive you to think for yourself, work hard, and take responsibility for your life. The story of the Wright Brothers a quintessentially American story. Here on our American stories.”