For a change of pace from the constant drum beat of
politics by Twitter and the soul-searching fiction I usually read, I needed a
non-fiction reminder of what made this country so unique and special.
Toward that end, I turned to David McCullough
and his biography,
The Wright Brothers.
McCullough has the ability to present
history as a living entity, a time machine into the past.
Once you read something by him, you feel
connected to that era.
I read his
award-winning
1776 and
John Adams before I started writing this
blog and later returned to his
The Great
Bridge which he wrote early in his career.
It is the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and as Brooklyn
is near and dear to my heart,
I marveled at his tale.
He is a natural born writer and honed his craft as an
English major at Yale University. He is
not an historian by education, but historical literature is nothing more than great
story telling using facts where possible and filling in the blanks. I’ve always found that the line between
fiction and non-fiction is very malleable. Being a good writer brings history to life.
In The Wright
Brothers he captures the persona of two distinctly American men, Wilbur and
Orville Wright, problem solvers and entrepreneurs who after establishing a
successful bicycle manufacturing business in Dayton, Ohio around the turn of
the century became fascinated by flight, studying birds for their beginning
education in aerodynamics. Against the
then current belief that human flight (other than by balloon) is impossible,
and without funding, they methodically and pragmatically tinkered with glider
design, picking the Outer Banks -- Kitty Hawk, NC -- as their testing site, not
exactly around the corner from Toledo, Ohio, because of the unrelenting winds
there. It was completely desolated
during those times and at first they lived in tents, graduating to a little
shop they set up. Not many people
followed them, thinking they were just eccentric.
Having access to the extensive Wright Family papers
allowed McCullough to tap into primary source documentation, quoting sometimes from
these to tell the story. Imagine Wilbur
setting up camp, awaiting the arrival of Orville, writing a letter to his
father which so clearly sets out the methodical thinking behind their
experiments with flight:
I have my machine
nearly finished. It is not to have a motor and is not expected to fly in any
true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a
view to solving the problem of equilibrium. I have plans which I hope to find
much in advance of the methods tried by previous experimenters. When once a
machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will be
quickly solved. A failure of a motor will then mean simply a slow descent and
safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.
This was the genius behind the Wright Brothers
experiments, start with the obvious, recognizing that like a bicycle, lack of
control will defeat this mode of transportation. Well funded experiments such as those
conducted by Samuel Langley, with a machine called “The Great Aerodrome” which
had the backing of $50,000 in public money from the U.S. War Department and
another $20,000 in private backing, including an investment by Alexander Graham
Bell, was doomed to crash. Contrast that
to the total of $1,000 the Wright Brothers invested in their successful
experiment and you have yet another example of private pragmatism triumphing
over public profligacy.
Much of their work was done almost secretly, which is the
way Wilbur and Orville wanted it, eschewing publicity and crowds until, well,
their experiments resulted in a real flying machine. In fact they had to take it to Europe to make
their mark publicly. That is an
interesting story onto itself, particularly given the fact that the European
chapter in their lives involved not only them, but their sister Katherine as
well. She became increasingly involved
with their work after Orville was seriously hurt (but fully recuperated with
her help) after their one serious accident.
They knew the work was dangerous and for that reason they had a cardinal
rule never to fly together (their next generation of the “Wright Flyer” was
outfitted for two people), a practice they dutifully followed until later in
Wilbur’s life when flying was more commonplace.
While inspiration and perspiration were in large part the
necessary ingredients in their ultimate success, so was fortuity. The unsung hero which McCullough cites in his
story is Charlie Parker, an itinerant mechanic who the brothers occasionally
used for making parts for their bicycles, who was finally hired full time. As he later recalled: They
offered me $18 a week…..that was pretty good money…Besides, I liked the
Wrights….So far as I can figure out, Will and Orv hired me to worry about the
bicycle business so they could concentrate on their flying studies and
experiments…And I must have satisfied them for they didn’t hire anyone else for
eight years.
Indeed, Parker ran the business while the brothers were
working on their experiments, but that was just a small part of Parker’s
contribution to solving the riddle of powered flights. When the brothers finally felt they licked the
problem of controlled glider flight, they were ready to add an engine for
powered flight. Accordingly, they asked
various automobile manufactures to submit specifications for a light engine
with sufficient power but received only one reply and that engine was too
heavy. They themselves had insufficient
knowledge to build such an engine but happenstance there was Charlie Parker, a
brilliant mechanic. As he later recalled
and recounted by McCullough: While the boys were handy with tools, they
had never done much machine-work and anyway they were busy on the air frame. It was up to me….We didn’t make any
drawings. One of us would sketch out the
part we were talking about on a piece of scratch paper and I’d spike the sketch
over my bench.
Does it get any more seat of the pants than that? He later finished a four cylinder engine, “with
a 4-inch bore and a 4-inch stroke. It
was intended to deliver 8 horsepower and weigh no more than 200 pounds, to
carry a total of 675 pounds, the estimated combined weight of the flying
machine and an operator. As it turned
out, the motor Charlie built weighed only 152 pounds, for the reason that the
engine block was of cast aluminum provided by the up-and-coming Aluminum
Company of America based in Pittsburgh. Other materials came from Dayton manufacturers
and suppliers, but the work of boring out the cast iron for the independent
cylinders and making the cast iron piston rings was all done by one man with a
drooping walrus mustache working in the back room at the bicycle shop.”
The brothers led a monastic life, totally dedicated to
their work. They were bachelors and
except for strict observance of the Sunday Sabbath, it was work 24 x 7. All that sacrifice and McCullough movingly recounts
the moment in time when they alternatively flew the first four successful
times, the last by Wilbur, 852 feet in 59 seconds. “It had taken four years. They had endured
violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public
indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes. To get to and from
their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from
Dayton (counting Orville's return home to see about stronger propeller shafts),
a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than half a
mile. No matter. They had done it.”
After that their life changed, becoming celebrities of
sorts, but still focusing on their work for the next several years, better
known in Europe than here in many ways as they went to France to demonstrate
their work to the government who had more interest at the time than their own. Wilbur was the first to go abroad. His time there was unlike any he’d known back
in Dayton, beginning with his first transatlantic voyage on the Cunard Line’s Campania which was advertised as “a
flying palace of the ocean,” a phrase which of course appealed to Wilbur. We made
466 miles the first day he wrote back home and he took a tour of the engine
room, amazed at those engines delivering 28,000 horsepower vs. the 25 of the
new engine for the Flyer III he was about to demonstrate across Europe. He took
copious notes during the crossing and walked its decks to the tune of 5 to 10
miles a day. Wilbur was a person of contemplation and action.
One would think this methodical, technical man might not
appreciate all that Paris could offer but he became a regular visitor to the Louvre
and spent countless hours among its masterpieces. Ultimately Orville and Katherine joined him
and they became the toast of France, Wilbur at first. “As said by the Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, it was not just his
feats in the air that aroused such interest but his strong ‘individuality.’ He
was seen as a personification of ‘the Plymouth Rock spirit,’ to which French
students of the United States, from the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, had
attributed ‘the grit and indomitable perseverance that characterize American
efforts in every department of activity.’”
I think that observation is the essence of McCullough’s
biography about the two brothers, their pragmatic approach to problem solving
and faith in doing what no one thought possible. They were finally recognized back home at the
White House, President Taft himself presenting medals and acknowledging the
tardiness of their recognition at home and the accomplishment which given their
lack of support is uniquely American, diligence prevailing above all:
I esteem it a great
honor and an opportunity to present these medals to you as an evidence of what
you have done. I am so glad-perhaps at a delayed hour-to show that in America
it is not true that "a prophet is not without honor save in his own
country." It is especially gratifying thus to note a great step in human
discovery by paying honor to men who bear it so modestly. You made this
discovery by a course that we of America like to feel is distinctly American-by
keeping your noses right at the job until you had accomplished what you had
determined to do.
This recognition was finally followed by the largest
celebration ever staged in their home town of Dayton, Ohio. It is mind boggling to think that the
invention of flight was only little more than 100 years ago. It demonstrates the rapidity of change today.
Reading this masterful biography was the perfect antidote
to a disheartening election and now post election season, with its invective
rhetoric, a display of American unexceptionalism and gullibility. One can only hope this too shall pass and we
will revert to the mean that made this nation so special, as typified by the
Wright Brothers and so brilliantly portrayed by David McCullough.
While I was writing this, the report came in that the
Wright brothers’ fellow Ohioan, John Glenn, died at the age of 95, the last surviving
member of the Mercury Seven. I remember watching
Glenn’s launch on a small B&W TV with my college classmates in our
dormitory. We were in awe of his bravery
and felt particularly proud to be an American on that day in 1962. He and his fellow Mercury 7 astronauts were
immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Right
Stuff. The Wright brothers had the
right stuff too and Glenn had already flown as a WW II combat pilot while
Orville was still alive. The Wright
Brothers and John Glenn: Ohioans, pioneers,
pilots, uniquely American.
I was not able to
attend the ticket tape parade for Glenn and the Mercury 7 astronauts as I was
in class on that March day in 1962. But
Tom Wolfe captured its mood; the Wright Brothers were certainly there in spirit:
“They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff
commanded….Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was…right! The way it should be! The unutterable aura of the right stuff had
been brought onto the terrain where things were happening! Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to
celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the
right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel
the sizzle and to blink in the light…Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing! Only pilots truly had it, but the entire
world responded, and no one knew its name!”
