Writing About Wright
Our son Knox will soon become a Wright brother. And Wright will join Knox in the Starrett Secret Silent Letter Society - though, if we have a third son, I am not sure we will continue the trend with “Ptolemy.” We also figure a boy named Wright is less likely to grow up to become a leftist.
Figure 1. Knox, apparently inspired, has already been making certain objects fly across the room.
I am delighted to have another child, not just because we as a family are approaching the necessary 2.1 replacement level, but also because when conducting experiments, it’s nice to have a control (though twins would have really made this easier - maybe still to come!).
Wright’s name is a tribute to his two grandfathers. His full name will be Peter Wright Starrett, Peter after my dad. Wright means “craftsman,” which my father-in-law, Curt Hoff, certainly was in his career as a master welder with John Deere.
And, of course, this name is a tribute to the Wright Brothers, a classic American story about a pair of high school dropout bicycle builders who beat a project generously financed by the U.S. government run by the most credentialed specialist in the world to one of the greatest inventions of all time (at less than 1.5% of the cost). Today we’ll be reviewing their life mostly with the help of David McCullough.
Wilbur would later advise “If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.”
Their father, Milton Wright, was an Evangelical itinerant preacher who traveled the nation fighting for women’s suffrage and against slavery, alcohol, and secret societies; within his church, he led a conservative faction that would eventually break off. Milton named his sons after preachers he admired and they would eventually aid him in his disputes. There were more Wright brothers than the famous ones - the oldest was even born in a log cabin - but our featured duo were born in 1867 (Wilbur) and 1871 (Orville). “An important part of the family’s education in geography, not to say a continuing stimulant for their curiosity, was supplied by the Bishop in long letters written during his travels, often while on board a train.”
Unusually, their mother Susan had attended college and was well-versed and well-read in math and science. Her own father had been a wagon maker and she had a practical grasp for his workshop that she passed along to her children. As a homemaker, she and her husband insisted that family was the most reliable port in a stormy world.
Orville would remember that his family had "special advantages… we were lucky enough to grow up in a home environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused their curiosity." The dominant feature of the house was its diverse and extensive book collection, including even books on agnosticism:
“Bishop Wright, a lifelong lover of books, heartily championed the limitless value of reading. Between formal education at school and informal education at home, it would seem he put more value on the latter. He was never overly concerned about his children’s attendance at school. If one or the other of them chose to miss a day or two for some project or interest he thought worthy, it was all right. And certainly he ranked reading as worthy.”
The Bishop indeed “talked very freely to his children on all subjects… except money making, a matter to which he gave little consideration.” Milton advised his sons: “All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.” Of course the family net worth would eventually top a million dollars at a time when that really meant something. But as children, if the boys were to indulge themselves, they had to make their own money. Appropriately, Orville built and sold kites to friends. But the event to which the brothers traced their original interest to flight occurred In 1878, when the Bishop brought home a toy helicopter, “little more than a stick with twin propellers and twisted rubber bands [that] probably cost 50 cents.”
Figure 2. Time to give your kids a toy nuclear reactor and maybe one day they’ll miniaturize nuclear power!
Tragedy struck in older brother Wilbur’s senior year in high school. “His grades were in the 90s in everything—algebra, botany, chemistry, English composition, geology, geometry, and Latin. There was talk of his going to Yale.” But then, amidst a hockey game, “Wilbur was smashed in the face with a stick, knocking out most of his upper front teeth,” by a man who would become “one of the most notorious murderers in the history of Ohio.” The college dream was done. “For weeks he suffered excruciating pain in his face and jaw, then had to be fitted with false teeth. Serious digestive complications followed, then heart palpitations and spells of depression that seemed only to lengthen.” Worse, his mother was dying and he had to help care for her as well. Wilbur became “a recluse, more or less homebound, for fully three years—three years when he began reading as never before.” Who needed Yale when you had Milton Wright’s library?
Figure 3. The 1978 film Boys from Brazil features a plot in which *spoiler alert* Nazis have cloned Hitler but aren’t sure if nurture or nature molded him into what he became so they place a bunch such boys with similar families around the globe and then dispatch assassins to kill the fathers in accidents to mimic the death of Hitler’s father. All of which is to say, I hope we don’t have to dispatch malicious hockey players against the nation’s prospective valedictorians to jumpstart inventions.
The younger Orville would drop out of high school himself to start a commercial printing press, initially publishing his own newspaper but then turning to others’ print needs. Wilbur quickly joined the business and before too long they added an element that overtook the initial idea: building bicycles. Amidst a national bicycle craze, the Wright Cycle Company would provide a pretty good living.
Importantly, the Wrights were inseparable. “They lived in the same house, worked together six days a week [all but Sunday, naturally], ate their meals together, kept their money in a joint bank account, even ‘thought together,’ Wilbur said.” But thinking together often meant arguing. Wilbur, as one contemporary observed, was “always ready to oppose an idea expressed by anybody,” ready to “jump into an argument with both sleeves rolled up.” Wilbur insisted that argument “brought out ‘new ways of looking at things, helped ‘round off the corners’.” And his favorite counterpart was his brother: “I love to scrap with Orv; he’s such a good scrapper.” McCullough observes that “They could be highly demanding and critical of each other, disagree to the point of shouting ‘something terrible.’ At times, after an hour or more of heated argument, they would find themselves as far from agreement as when they started, except that each had changed to the other’s original position.” The Wright brothers threw out ideas to each other, argued about them, retreated to think about them some more, and then would take up the argument again and again until they got it right.
“They neither drank hard liquor nor smoked or gambled, and both remained, as their father liked to say, ‘independently’ Republican.” The man who took the first photograph of human flight described the Wrights as the “workingest boys” he ever knew, “and when they worked, they worked… They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing….It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and all their energy into an idea and they had the faith.” Their life would soon be taken over by a particular obsession.
The trigger was another danger: in “1896, twenty-five-year-old Orville was struck by the dreaded typhoid.” With Orville bedridden for a month and a half, Wilbur passed the time by - what else? - reading to him. And what they read about was flight. This revived all their interest from their boyhood and they dug deep, especially into the flight of birds. They were especially intrigued by the work (and recent death) of Otto Lilienthal, a German who had built and flown gliders (planes without engines). As the Wrights would discover, the attempts to figure out powered human flight were divided: some focused first on how a human pilot could control a glider in the air, others focused first on how an engine could power a pilotless kite. The Wrights would take the position of the gliders, partially because they saw a connection between that work and the balance needed to ride a bicycle.
Figure 4. Of course, ironically, ever since the Wrights innovated manned powered flight, engineers have been attempting to reduce the role of the pilot as much as possible. With the Mercury missions, Allan Shepherd and others had to fight to be more than passengers to space. Today, the engineers approach total victory with drones.
Soon, Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution, noting that he had been interested in flight since receiving (and reconstructing) toys as a child and that “ “My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable… I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business.” Could he please get any Smithsonian publications on flight and “if possible a list of other works in print in the English language”?
Notably, this was perhaps the era of invention and some big names you’d recognize had tried (and failed) to crack the problem of human flight themselves: Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone), Hiram Maxim (machine gun), Thomas Edison (too much to briefly recount). The two leaders in the field were Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpoint Langley. Chanute was “a celebrated French-born American civil engineer, builder of bridges and railroads, who had made gliders a specialty” and was something of an evangelical for the near-term prospect of powered human flight. Langley “was one of the most respected scientists in the nation” - a graduate of Boston Latin who became an assistant at Harvard’s observatory and raised money from railroad barons for giving out the precise time based on astronomical observation, a professor of math at the U.S. Naval Academy, and essentially the CEO of the Smithsonian Institution. At the time, Langley, with generous U.S. government support, was building unmanned gliders that flew with a steam engine. The routine failures of both the eminent and cranks “had served as a continuous source of popular comic relief” in newspapers around the world. But
“In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Otto Lilienthal, they could be killed.”
One might even say that the Wrights lacked privilege and yet made the most of it.
Before hardly anyone knew they existed, the Wrights were already trailblazing. Intensely studying the flight of birds (both in books and personal observation), Wilbur discerned how they subtly adjusted the tips of their wings to navigate and maintain balance during flight. Why not make an aircraft lean or 'bank' into a turn, much like how a cyclist leans into a curve? Crucially, this concept went beyond mere steering; it was about ensuring stability, especially when confronted with unpredictable gusts of wind. This perspective set them apart from many contemporaries who envisioned aircraft maintaining a stable, level flight, steered primarily with a rudder, akin to a ship. But how could this trait of birds be replicated artificially? The breakthrough came when Wilbur was chatting with a bicycle customer and absentmindedly twisted a long rectangular box from both ends, suddenly visualizing the potential of such a movement in manufactured wings. The brothers built a kite to test the idea and wing-warping was born - initially achieved through pulleys, eventually through the flaps (ailerons) you see on airplane wings today. Control was substantially closer.
After extensive autodidactic reading and much experimenting with kite and glider construction, Wilbur wrote his first letter to the giant of the field Chanute in 1900, asking for advice on the ideal location for testing, “somewhere without rain or inclement weather and… where sufficient winds could be counted on, winds, say, of 15 miles per hour.” Chanute graciously replied that California and Florida fit the bill for temperate conditions but that they ought to consider the mid-Atlantic for sand hills that allowed soft landings for inevitable crashes. So Wilbur then wrote the U.S. Weather Bureau for all their wind data, the analysis of which caused the brothers to select “a remote spot on the Outer Banks of North Carolina called Kitty Hawk.” The furthest the brothers had ever been from home was a trip to Chicago, a third of the distance. But off they went to investigate, leaving their bicycle shop in the offseason in the capable hands of their sister.
The local resident who would eventually take the picture of the first flight remembered, “We couldn’t help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts. They’d stand on the beach for hours at a time just looking at the gulls flying, soaring, dipping.” It didn’t help locals’ perceptions of their sanity that they carefully imitated the gulls with their bodies. But after four years of study they were finally able to see their glider in action. “Wilbur made one manned flight after another. How many is unknown, no count was kept. He did record, however, flights of 300 to 400 feet in length and speeds on landing of nearly 30 miles an hour.” They returned to Dayton thrilled and ready to improve their design so as to give the pilot even better control.
But upon their return to Kitty Hawk in 1901, they discovered that all of the “improvements” they had meticulously worked on for the past year… worsened their glider performance. They went home incredibly frustrated.
“It was not just that their machine had performed so poorly, or that so much still remained to be solved, but that so many of the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations and tables prepared by the likes of Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute—data the brothers had taken as gospel—had proven to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly those esteemed authorities had been guessing, ‘groping in the dark.’ The accepted tables were, in a word, ‘worthless.’”
Constructing the right curve of a wing - pivotal to an aircraft’s aerodynamics - relied on accurate air pressure tables. With their poor lift at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers started to question whether the reigning, unquestioned equation - the Smeaton Coefficient from 1759 - was in fact true. (It wasn’t). So when they went home, they created their own primitive wind tunnel, partially out of bicycle parts and powered by bicycle pedaling, testing hundreds of scale-models and recording their own (accurate) data.
Realizing their potential, Chanute had excitedly kept up with the brothers, visiting them in both Dayton and Kitty Hawk, even inviting Wilbur to give a public address on “some aeronautical experiments,” which would be published in scientific journals and later be identified as “the Book of Genesis of the twentieth-century Bible of Aeronautics.” Chanute begged the brothers to abandon their bicycle shop to concentrate, even suggesting that he might get Andrew Carnegie to give them $10,000 a year - but the brothers refused to give up a good business from whose profits they made a living (and might still need to if they failed).
When they returned to Kitty Hawk in 1902, the Wrights became the first to achieve true control over a glider, arguably an achievement equal to powered human flight. Three-axis control remains the bedrock of aviation today: rolling from side to side, then through wing-warping cables attached to the pilot’s hips; pitching up and down, then by moving a lever that adjusted the nose of the glider; yawing left and right, then with a rear rudder, initially connected to the wing-warping mechanism. Their original wing-warping insight was now combined with improved versions of others’ innovations, the combination of which was spectacular. But that still left the problem of power free from the whims of the wind.
Figure 5. This esteemed publication of the American Aviation Historical Society published, alongside articles by a PhD and brigadier general, “One Hell of a Copter,” a brilliantly titled essay by a pair of Stanford students fulfilling the college’s engineering requirement. The class was the Science and Technology of World War II which I immediately discovered gave 100% of the grade not on attendance but a final paper. I skipped out but eventually took out of the library all the books on helicopters, wrote something up, and then informed my partner that the engineering parts would definitely need to be double checked. Hopefully the preceding technical paragraph is correct!
The Wright Brothers promptly wrote to a variety of engine manufacturers to solicit possible bids and discovered that none could fit their request of a low enough weight to provide enough power. Without any experience building engines, they decided to build their own, from scratch, alongside their bicycle mechanic Charles Taylor. Within six weeks, they produced a 12 horsepower engine made, unusual for the time, out of lightweight aluminum that would eventually power their first flight.
Of course, simultaneously, Smithsonian CEO Samuel Langley had been hard at work on his own design. Aware that the Wright brothers were making significant progress, Langley invited the world’s press to witness his first attempt at manned, powered flight. Langley was too old to be the pilot but his contraption would make two attempts: first, in the fall of 1903 and the second in December. On both occasions, “The Great Aerodrome,” costing over $50,000 to American taxpayers (>$1.5 million today) and even more from investors, was catapulted from a houseboat in the Potomac River… and promptly sank. A related New York Times headline was “AIRSHIP AS A SUBMARINE” and its science editor predicted that if flight was possible it would take one to ten million years to achieve. Earlier, the chief engineer of the U.S. Navy published a piece asking: “A calm survey of certain natural phenomena leads the engineer to pronounce all confident prophecies for future success as wholly unwarranted, if not absurd. Where, even to this hour, are we to look for the germ of the successful flying machine? Where is the preparation today?”
Just over a week after Langley’s second attempt, the Wrights had their chance at Kitty Hawk. The brothers flipped a coin. Wilbur won, embraced his brother just in case it was the last time, got into their Wright Flyer, took off… and crashed. With some repairs and after taking Sunday off, on December 17, 1903, Orville got in next and flew 120 feet for 12 seconds. And then they alternated to go up again and again, until eventually they traveled 852 feet over 59 seconds, against the wind, at a mighty altitude of about 10 feet. McCullough sums up: “Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started.” Or as Charles Murray puts it in his survey of Human Accomplishment, “The Wright brothers’ airplane achieves the first successful powered flight by a heavier-than-air machine.” The Wrights were 32 and 36 years old; it had only been seven years since they started really thinking about it and they had spent a grand total of less than $1,000, “a sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.”
Figure 6. Pics or it didn’t happen: the actual image of the first flight.
The Wrights cabled home “SUCCESS” and a third brother excitedly took the news to the Dayton representative for the Associated Press who replied: “Fifty-seven seconds, hey? If it had been fifty-seven minutes, then it might have been a news item.” One of the most amazing achievements in the history of mankind was mostly ignored. So they went home for Christmas, tinkered some more, and started using a local farm to fly around (by this time they had mastered the air such that they could fly even in the less ideal conditions of Ohio). The managing editor of the local newspaper remembered “I used to chat with them in a friendly way and was always polite to them because I sort of felt sorry for them. They seemed like well-meaning, decent enough young men. Yet there they were, neglecting their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous flying machine.” Even as rumors started, the publisher of another local newspaper admitted, "Frankly, none of us believed it." Ultimately, “It was not the Dayton papers that finally broke the story—or the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times or Scientific American—but Amos Root’s own Gleanings in Bee Culture,” Amos being an Ohioan who had been eyewitness to flights in 1904, publishing in his own little journal because the Scientific American rejected the item.
Figure 7. If you have a world-altering story that the mainstream media refuses to cover, consider breaking it on the GrantReadsBooks substack.
When rumors spread beyond Ohio, there was widespread skepticism. In France, where there was growing excitement at local progress toward human flight, the Paris Herald editorialized that the Wrights were either “fliers or liars,” commenting “it is difficult to fly, it is easy to say, ‘we have flown.’” The Wrights, being patriotic Americans, tried to get the U.S. government interested but, having just spent $50,000 on a failed experiment with one of the country’s best scientists, the bureaucrats and politicians were not enthused about a couple of bicycle builders and insisted, as a standard reply to flyboy aspirants, that the Wrights first hand over all their designs. The Wrights rather reasonably refused before a patent protecting their work or a contract for compensation. In fact, the British government dispatched an observer to Ohio before D.C. did. Not until 1908, half a decade after their first flight, did they convince governments to give them the opportunity to demonstrate their work for the appropriate compensation; the brothers split, with Wilbur headed to France and Orville to Virginia.
In France, Wilbur was quickly solicited for a bribe to guarantee a contract, but refused to even discuss it, some combination of his ethics and knowing that the demonstration would make it impossible for the government not to make a contract. The press, the government, crowds all showed up for the demonstration of what local critics insisted had not been achieved - but soon Wilbur was up in the air, in control of a motorized plane, doing circles around the crowd. The demand was intense to keep going the next day, “but Wilbur would have no part of it. As was explained in the French press, ‘Today, because it is Sunday, M. Wright, a good American, would not think of breaking the Sabbath.’” Air had been conquered, the critics quieted, and the Wrights were now perhaps the most famous people in the world, with royals and notables all showing up to see (and occasionally participate) in the flying experiments. But Wilbur let the flying do the talking: “Well, if I talked a lot I should be like a parrot, which is the bird that speaks most and flies least.”
Meanwhile, Orville demonstrated their Flyer in the United States, first to a small group which he circled “57 times, remaining in the air not quite an hour.” As word spread to nearby Washington, whole offices closed as everyone came out to see the miracle. The exuberant Octave Chanute, seeing the dream finally come true, rushed to Orville after one of the first successful demonstrations and “asked him how it felt to be making history. ‘Pretty good,’ Orville said, ‘but I’m more interested in making speed.’”
At this point flight mania was really taking off and there was some prospect that President Theodore Roosevelt would jump in the plane with Orville - but on the very day that it might have happened, Orville instead took up a young army officer and crashed, causing the first fatal airplane casualty. Orville himself was in tough shape and later said without his sister’s care he might not have survived. Asked if he was afraid to go up again, Orville replied “The only thing I'm afraid of is that I can't get well soon enough to finish those tests next year." Even after this, they did take up a special passenger: their father, whose only words were “Higher, Orville, higher!” The brothers would have their contracts and the pace of innovation building on their achievement quickened considerably.
But that caused its own problems. The Wrights spent the next several years in patent litigation, eventually winning every single lawsuit in American courts but not before consuming enormous time and stress that contributed to a worn out Wilbur’s death from typhoid fever in 1912 at 45 years old. Wilbur had observed, “When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments, we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men.” His father eulogized Wilbur in his diary: "A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadfastly, he lived and died."
One patent-infringing rival aviation pioneer, Glenn Curtiss, even went so far as to retrieve Langley’s old Great Aerodrome out of storage. Trying to undermine the Wrights’ reputation, Curtiss secretly and extensively modified it, then set up a test where it actually did fly. The Smithsonian, with full knowledge of the chicanery, endorsed a statement that “Professor Samuel P. Langley had actually designed and built the first man-carrying flying machine capable of sustained flight” and put the aerodrome on display as such (Orville was so bitter about this that he donated the original Flyer to the London Science Museum, where it remained for decades until the Smithsonian was pressured to correct the record, including publicly admitting the modifications). Curtiss dragged the Wright brothers into the mud, arguing that if someone flapped their arms, the Wrights would sue. Even Octave Chanute, ever the booster for air innovation, criticized the Wrights for asserting their patents (even though the Wrights were perfectly willing to license!), basically destroying a relationship already on skids after Chanute over-ascribed his role in their achievement.
Whether because Orville was more tinkerer than executive, he couldn’t go on without his brother, or some other reason, Orville handed off control of the business that grew out of their invention, retaining an ownership stake and (at least initially) a royalty on each airplane sold. The company would go on not only to provide engines for pioneers like Charles Lindbergh, but also build more than 140,000 engines and 29,000 planes for the U.S. armed forces during World War II. Orville had hoped to continue doing his own research but, as far as I can tell, didn’t do much of it. He gave up piloting in 1918 due to lingering pain from his crash but he did take a trip with Howard Hughes in 1944 - and may even have taken the controls - on a Lockheed Constellation powered by a Wright engine (and of course using the principles he and his brother discovered). Orville remarked that the wingspan of the Constellation was longer than the distance of his first 1903 flight. The company is still around but is awkwardly known as Curtiss-Wright since a merger in 1929, perhaps partially due to earlier U.S. government attempts to get them to cooperate for national security.
Sadly, neither Wright ever married. “Orville liked to say it was up to Wilbur to marry first, he being the older.” Wilbur had commented in his lifetime that he did not have time for both an airplane and a wife. Worse, Orville had grown so dependent on his sister Katharine, especially in the wake of Wilbur’s death, that when she finally married to a college classmate (she was only Wright child to attend) at age 52, Orville broke off contact with her until she was literally dying (only a couple of years later.) Orville himself died at age 76 in 1948, having lived to “see aviation transformed by jet propulsion, the introduction of the rocket, the breaking of the sound barrier.” When Neil Armstrong took one small step for a man in 1969, he carried with him a small piece of cloth from the Wright Flyer of 1903.
You can still visit the Wright brothers bicycle shop, now featured at the Henry Ford outdoor museum in Michigan; or Kill Devil Hill, near where they first flew in Kitty Hawk; or the plane itself, finally in the Smithsonian; or the farm in Dayton where they conducted their later flights. But I hope the Wright experience isn’t simply history. I hope that we can revive America’s tinkering culture where committed amateurs can figure out through intense reading and being the “workingest” folks around how to improve the lot of humanity.
Figure 8. A book for adults and a book for kids, both well-done. The children’s book opens with this poem by Beverly McLoughland, which hangs in our son’s nursery:
Watching buzzards,
Flying kites,
Lazy, crazy boys
The Wrights. They
Tried to fly
Just like a bird
Foolish dreamers
Strange. Absurd. We
Scoffed and scorned
Their dreams of flight
But we were wrong
And they were Wright
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, forward it to a friend: Know anybody who would be interested in this birth announcement? How about anyone interested in the history of invention? Or do you know anybody who has ever flown on a plane before?
If you'd like to read about another one of my heroes, check out this profile of Margaret Thatcher.
If you’ve received this email from a friend and would like more, sign up at www.grantreadsbooks.com or shoot me an email at grant@grantstarrett.com with the subject “Subscribe.” I read over 100 non-fiction books a year (history, business, self-management) and share a review (and terrible cartoons) every couple weeks with my friends. Really, it’s all about how to be a better American and how America can be better. Look forward to having you on board!