American History Hit - The Wright Brothers

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Approximately 100 thousand flights take off and land each and every day. A months long journey on a boat is condensed to just a few hours with the help of aircraft, and the birth of planes introduced an entirely new form of warfare.Orville and Wilbur Wright, the Wright brothers, are household names. But how did they create the first successful heavier than air flying machine?In this episode, Don speaks to Tom Crouch, Curator Emeritus at the National Air and Space Museum. They delve into the lives and personalities of these two men, and the long process that took them into the air above Kitty Hawk.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is a chilly morning on the rolling dunes of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina's outer banks. A stiff, blustering breeze blows, somewhat dampening the clamor of the gasoline-powered engine

attached to an elegant, if rudimentary aircraft. The Wright Flyer won. Three days ago, Orville and Wilbur Wright, the Wright brothers, flipped a coin to decide who would get first go at flying their newest design. Wilbur won the toss, but his attempt proved, unsuccessful and they've spent precious days on repairs and adding extra fabric stiffening to the wings. Now it's Orville's turn at the controls. 1023 a.m. December 17th 1903. The flyer is checked once more then moves down its launch rail. It catches air and lifts off. For the first time in history a piloted engine-powered airplane is

in flight for 12 seconds and 12 feat. However brief, it is the fateful moment when the skies are open to mankind and future development of aerial commerce and warfare is made possible, changing human civilization forever. Oh, and welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Nice to have you. Most people in the world today are able to name those aviation pioneers who developed the first successful, heavier-than-air motorized flying machine, Orville and Wilbur Wright. The Wright brothers, their first flight at King's, Hill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in the winter of 1903, marked the beginning of a new era in transportation that would fundamentally change human civilization forever. To this day, still an evolving element in our world.

But that common knowledge skips over so much, the years of research and experimentation, the failures and breakthroughs, and the many broken wings and bones involved. The Wright brothers are plenty celebrated in American history, but few people could really tell you why. We're going to do our best to change that today, doing right by the Wright brothers. Tom Crouch is an esteemed aeronautics historian, author of some 15 books on the subject and a guiding curatorial force in the creation of some of the great exhibitions of American aviation history. One, of course, the National Air and Space Museum in D.C. But his career in museums, et cetera, spans far and wide. Tom Crouch, it is an honor to have you. Hello, sir.

Hi, it's great to be here. The Bright Brothers. This is foundational American history. As I've said, we don't often discuss the nuts and bolts of the achievement. I imagine this is frustrating to you sometimes. Well, I sometimes get a little frustrated because, you know, when people think about the Wright brothers, they tend to think about these two bicycle mechanics who sort of got lucky and did it.

And there's so much more to the story than that. These guys are two engineering geniuses. Yes, exactly. If another lucky bicycle maker had been going to do it, it would have happened a long time before December 17th, 1903. First a few biographical notes. Wilbur is the elder brother born April 16th, 1867, Orville, four years later, 1871, raised in a strict religious household. Dad's, his name Milton, was a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. They traveled a lot as a result and finally settled in

Dayton, Ohio in 1884. Will and Orv Wright. What was it about this household that would shape them as boys and then men? It was an extraordinarily close household. Bishop Wright was quite a guy. He really held his family close to him. He had begun life as an itinerant minister. And over a period of 10 years, he climbed to the rank of bishop in that church. It was an elected office. And 10 years after that, he became involved in a dispute with members of the church. Most people thought it was a matter of small moment. It had to do with members of secret societies being able to be members of the church. And the bishop, being the bishop, created a schism in the church.

He walked away with about 10% of the total church membership, turned around and sued the other 90% in suits for possession of church property. In suits that went on for almost a decade, he lost every single suit, but won. He won the suit in the Michigan. And that's the kind of litigious guy Bishop Wright was when he thought he was right. As Davy Crockett says, he went ahead. He believed that the path of virtue in life was narrow and that evil was waiting to lure you off that path. And that's the way he raised his children. And as I said, it was an extraordinarily close-knit family.

Lawsuits would become a bit of a family tradition in this crew, isn't it, down the road? Well, Wilbur and Orville, again, learn the lessons of life at their father's knee. And that was one of those lessons. When you think you're right and the other guy's wrong, do something about it. They're mechanically inclined kids, needless to say, I suppose, fascinated by the new age of machines that's happening around them. They end up with only high school educations, and in one case not even, end up working in a print shop, launching a newspaper in 1889, 90. That lasts just a couple months, but they become printers. Meanwhile, there's this new craze in America, the bicycle.

Yeah, Orville was the one who was nuts about the printing business. And so they do launch into a couple of small newspapers, actually, one following the other. And when you look at them, they amount to what we would think of as neighborhood shopping newspapers today. It's no big deal. But again, the bicycle craze was sweeping America. And these two guys were fascinated by it. Orville was quite a speed guy. He was a bike racer and so on and so forth. But again, what fascinated them about them was the mechanics of the thing. They developed a new self-oiling bicycle

wheel hub. And they began by repairing bikes and then selling bikes. And finally, they launched into cycle manufacturing themselves on a really small scale, one off, one at a time. But they did sell their bikes, right? They did. The Wright Bicycle Company. Yeah. Very few of them, we think probably five still exist today. There's one in the National Air and Space Museum and one in Dayton and a couple of other places. Greenfield Village, I think, has one. It's interesting to think of them, these future icons of technology, really, working on bicycles. But then bicycles are very flexible machines. They can be worked in different ways and you can make adjustments in the gears. I can imagine these guys being fascinated by how. versatile this invention really was, and that would become applied to what they do later on. Oh, it would. I mean, people today, you think of bicycles is something people go out and

ride for their health and so on and so forth. Kids ride. People like me ride bikes long distance, but they were far more than that in terms of American history. The good road movement, which paved the road literally for the coming of the automobile, began with cyclists, lobbying for better roads for cycling and that kind of thing. It was the mechanics of the thing, certainly, that appeal to them. In the long run, though, sort of the recognizing at a deeper level, the fundamentals of riding a bicycle was going to have a huge impact on the way they looked at aeronautical technology. When you think of how you ride a bicycle, you know, when you turn a corner, you don't just turn the handlebars, you have to lean into it. In fact, if I

I were to explain riding a bicycle to a Martian or someone who'd never seen one, it would be what, you want me to roll down hill on these two thin little things, and I'm going to be peddling this thing. And, oh, yeah, there are these handlebars. But when you think about how you ride a bike, it really does become internalized. And what you realize when you think about it is the complex motions that you go through when you're riding a bike. You have to lean into the thing. You have to, you know, it's all part of learning to write a bike.

When I was six, if you go fast enough and you stick your arms out, you can take off. At least that was my theory. So what draws them to flight? How would they even have known about this? Were people discussing it in those days? I mean, balloonists were part of the fantasies of the world, weren't they? They were. But of course, ballooning has nothing to do with heavier than air flight.

Ballooning had been developed in the 1780s. And the technology of the balloon is really so simple that in terms of gas ballooning, not much has changed since 1784. We still fly gas balloons today pretty much the same way they did over 200 years ago. But heavier than air flight, I mean, you're going to build this thing with a person on it. When you think about flight, it's really pretty extraordinary. You go to an airport and you see this thing many tons, you know, it's aluminum. and iron and steel and rubber and glass. And it's got maybe 200 souls on board.

And this thing is going to roll down a runway and take off into the sky. Yeah. I mean, what's that all about? It's magic. And it was a problem that had fascinated engineers, especially since the beginning of the 19th century. The very beginning of the 19th century, Sir George Cayley, who was an English baronet, really laid down some of the basic principles of flight.

And during the 19th century, other people one after another, again, almost all, people who called themselves engineers, not scientists, but engineers, would pick up the problem and carried a little farther forward. The rites had been fascinated, really, since they were boys, and became especially fascinated when they began to read about a fellow named Otto Lillianthal in Germany, who began in the last quarter of the 19th century conducting experiments, ground-based experiments, trying to tease out the secrets of light, and then turned what he had learned into actual gliders. And between 1890 and 1896, he'd made a couple of thousand flights in gliders.

And this was the age of photography, and people could see photographs of him and line drawings, Based on the photographs and newspapers and magazines, and you couldn't look at those and not think to yourself, my gosh, that guy is flying through the air. The age of powered flight has to be pretty close. I mean, even Leonardo da Vinci makes his sketches in his books of the idea of flying. I mean, it goes way back. Going back to the 15th, 16th century, you bet. But the specific notions of principles of lift and so forth had not been developed yet. And that's what's still to come.

Yeah, physicists had teased things out in the 17th and 18th century. But it's really, again, not until in the 19th century, when engineers, guys who aren't in the business of understanding the world, they're in the business of building a machine that'll work. When they picked up the problem, progress began to be made. Sure. And any one of these big technological movements always has this sort of center anchor issue. And in the issue of this, it was control, wasn't it? It was the ability for someone who was in one of these gliders to actually be able to steer this thing.

That became the kind of sexy hot button thing. Not everybody recognized that, in fact. Most people, in fact, thought that when you're in the air, it's going to be like being balanced on the head of a pin, move any direction at any moment. And nobody is going to be able to master all of that. So what we better do is build an inherently stable machine, a machine that once you get it in the air, will keep going same direction, same altitude and all that until you want to make a change of direction. And almost everybody took that point of view, the rights, being cyclists, and knowing, as we said, once you learn to ride a bike, fairly complex, but it's internalized. And as people say, once you've done it, you never forget it. They recognize that once, if you can develop a control system for airplanes,

that would put you in command of that machine every moment, the way you were in command of a bicycle every moment, that was the way to go. That was the way to build a safe machine. Not something that was automatically stable, but something that you could control every second. So there were the ones who focused on control. They have their sort of role models, I guess.

Taif Shunut, Otto Lillenthal, Samuel Langley. This was surprising to me, flies a steam-powered fixed-wing aircraft. He doesn't get credit for the first powered flight? Well, yeah, he gets credit for the first powered heavier than air flight, but it's a model airplane. Okay. Not something that will carry a human being. When you think about Samuel Langley,

and I've written a lot about Samuel Langley, He did, by the spring and again in the fall of 1896, he had flown these fairly large 14-foot wingspan, steam-powered model airplanes. They'd stay in the air, half a mile, three-quarters of a mile. He launched them from the roof of the houseboat in the Bankrupt and the Potomac. The problem with that is the fact that it is a model airplane. And by definition, unless it's a radio control model airplane, which you couldn't do in 1896, this thing is by definition, uncontrolled. It's a model.

If it's not inherently stable, it'll fall. And the problem is, there are a couple of problems with Langley. One of them had to do with scale. He thought that he could take these small models, blow them up four times the size, and they'd operate the way the little model had. But of course, any engineer will tell you that as you expand something, you also have to expand the strength and so on and so forth of it, or it's going to break. And the other thing is, again, he had no notion of control.

So in October once and December once in 1903, when he tries to launch one of his aer drones, he called them, into the air, you know, the guy who's on that thing, Charles Matthews Manley, is essentially riding on the world's biggest model airplane. There's nothing manly can do to effectively control this thing. He's just along for the ride. And that is a real problem. The Wright brothers are the ones who discover and teach the world how to build a flying machine you can control.

What was the big objective here? I mean, was there applied science in their mind? Were they thinking about how they're going to create a business out of this? Science, really, I mean, in the... beginning, these guys, engineers, learn things from 17th and 18th century physicists they could apply. But essentially, all of these guys from Sir George Cayley through Aldo Lillian and Thalda Wright brothers, these guys are engineers. They don't want to understand necessarily why this thing is working. They've conducted tests. They've gathered data, and they've used

that data to build these machines, so thereafter a machine that'll work. It really isn't until in Germany during the First World War and after the First World War that somebody could walk up to a blackboard and literally with equations tell you why this thing was going to work. These earlier guys, again, were engineers and they knew it was going to work because they crunched numbers. They gathered data using wind tunnels in the Wright brothers case that they could apply designed, and so they knew it would work on that basis. But did they see a pot of gold at the end of this thing? Was there military contracts and so forth that they were looking forward to?

At the time, between 1905 and 1908, when the rates were trying to sell their machine, they recognized that, yeah, there'd be a tiny little market, say, for sportsmen who wanted to buy this thing and learn to fly. But, in fact, the military market was going to be really the only profitable market. There was going to be, and around the world, other experimenters realized pretty much the same thing. In fact, what happened was that in the very beginning, the Wright brothers and others, too, their rival, Glenn Curtis, from Hammond's Port, New York, realized that, okay, we're selling a few to the military, but if we really want to make money, we're going to have to do this essentially buy these machines themselves, teach people to fly them, and send flying machines.

teams out across the nation, charged admission, and put on shows for people. So both the rights and Glenn Curtis, for example, have exhibition teams. So making money was tough. When the rights had a difficult time imagining what was actually going to happen with the airplane, in the beginning when people asked them what they thought their future was going to be like, they would always be very careful and guarded. You know, it's going to be many. years before it'll be able to carry any weight and all of that kind of thing. They had a tough time seeing what would happen and how quickly it would happen. We'll be back after this short break with more from Tom Crouch. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and on my podcast, not just the Tudors

from History Hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dung hill up against your neighbor's wall, you're going to cause rising damp. Would Henry the 8th ever consider executing his wife, the Queen of England, and Berlin? I'm not even sure if the Billins took it seriously because why would they have any reason to suspect Henry the 8th would really get rid of his queen?

And why do men grow beards? During puberty, the male body heats up and a smoke rises in the body pushes out the hair in the face. So the beard is actually a form of excrement. In other words, not just the Tudor, but most definitely also the Tudors. Twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The flying machines they design and flu look so simple to our eyes today, elegantly simple, but it belies the fact that these were the result of intensive and smart engineering research into the fundamentals of flight. How were their advances in wing design achieved and how do they make their flights work where others had failed? Most generally, I'm asking, what were they trying to achieve that others? hadn't. Well, the core of their success was, as we said, the whole business of flight control. Now, beyond that, central success. In fact, when the Wright brothers patented their flying machine,

they didn't even patent a powered machine. They essentially patented a glider that demonstrated how their control system was going to work because they and their patent attorney too, recognize that the one thing bottleneck, they were going to be able to patent was how do you control this thing once you're in the air. And they were able to write a patent that was so good and so sort of comprehensive that nobody else is going to be able to fly without using those essential ideas they'd come up with. But of course, you have to have a machine that gets into the air before you can control it. So they had done everything else that had to be done too. They began with Otto Lillianthal's data, the data that he had developed to build his gliders,

and they had a little problem with it. So eventually they dumped it and built their first wind tunnel, not the world's first wind tunnel, but their first wind tunnel. And they used that in the fall and the winter of 1901, 1902, really, to run just dozens of airfoils, you know, little model airplanes. plane wings to measure exactly how much lift, how much drag, and other essential short wings or long wings, that kind of thing. They gathered all of that data with the wind tunnel. And in fact, they were able to apply it to propeller design, too. When people think about powered flight,

they think about the engine. But in fact, the propeller was the real breakthrough that the rates came up with. And other people were sort of building these windmill things, you know, that would give you some thrust. The Wright brothers said, well, wait a minute. A propeller is going to be nothing other than a wing, only instead of moving forward through the air, it's going to be revolving and developing lift that way. And it's very complicated to think about how you go along the length of that propeller

blade, picking the right airfoils, and how you calculate how much thrust you're going to hit. But that's what they did. And so, well, the rest of the world, was essentially trying to fly with windmill blades. They had real propellers. They could calculate exactly how much thrust they were going to get out of that propeller, just as they could calculate how much thrust and drag they were dealing with in their airplane. So when they flew on December 17, 1903, it may have been a surprise to some people,

but the rights themselves had crunched the numbers, and then they knew that once they could get everything working together, they were going to fly. No surprise to them. Yeah, but it's surprising to me. I just want to be clear, these are high school graduates, one of them didn't graduate from high school, who are writing equations out about this, right? There's coefficients. There's all kinds of that math going on here. And when we're talking about the basics of Lyft principle, are they inventing that or are they adapting already existing math? They're picking up what other people have done and adopting it to their situation. You have to understand that in the 19th century, engineers, these people who were literally going to change the world, I mean, they were building canals and railroads and telegraphs and

telephones and they were changing the world. Very few of them actually had college educations. Octave Shanoot, for example, their friend in Chicago, was probably the most accomplished civil engineer in the nation in the late 19th century, 1896, 1900. Not a day in college. He had begun working on a railroad chain measuring crew and worked his way up, learning the math, learning everything as he went. Samuel Langley, the third secretary of the Smithsonian who was trying to fly. And this was the guy who had helped to invent astrophysics. He was an astronomer. Again, not a day in college. These are guys who had learned what they had to know as they moved through the process. And the rights were that way. They were always pretty good at math and school, for example. And their father had a good

library. Dayton Public Library was pretty good. So they had enough math so that they could access the engineering, published engineering literature of the time. And that's what they needed. Tell me about their relationship. Were they pushing each other or were they good at collaborating? Oh, they were great at collaborating. These were two guys. you know, the sum is greater than the parts in this case. They knew one another. They had grown up in this close family, and so they knew one another's strengths and weaknesses.

They were able to argue a problem out with one another. They were so close. There was never any danger of really hurting this other guy's feelings in a fundamental way or something. They talked about being able just to go at a tooth and nail so that at the end of the argument, one guy would be where the other guy had started and the other guy would be where this guy had started. They were completely changed sides in the argument.

It was critical. And something like the propeller, for example, Orville said, gosh, everything's moving and it's moving at different speeds along the length of the propeller blade. And you had to calculate what speed it's moving at and what airfoils, from our data is going to be good. These are two guys. People sometimes wonder fundamentally why they did it. And these were not two guys who had their hair on fire ready to go out and bore holes in the sky. Orville made his last flight as pilot in command in 1918.

And he lived until 1948. So there's something else going on here other than just the desire to get out there and fly. Although they enjoyed that. And what it is is the problem. problems that you get to solve. Orville wrote to a friend at the beginning of 1903, the year they finally succeeded. And what he said was, isn't it wonderful, that all these problems have been preserved all these years just so we could unravel them. And that's what got them up in the morning. The dream of flight was fine. But for them, it was a series of these really tough technical challenges, like solving puzzles every day. And literally, as I said, that's what got them up in the morning. So for years and years, the bicycle business serves to keep them alive and pay their bills while they're inventing this crazy stuff. At some point, they switch over.

And one of the places they go where this is Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Outer Banks. Why there? That's a long way from home and they start flying in the middle of winter. Tell me about Kitty Hawk and why there. When they first, again, began to crunch those numbers and figure out using Lovianthal's data, how big a winged. they would have to have to get off the ground in a glider because they had decided to go in his direction. They were going to learn to fly with gliders. He'd been killed in a glider in 1896. And that, in fact, is when they said to themselves, well, first thing we do is figure out how to control it, then we'll build it

and try to fly it. So when they were crimping those numbers, they discovered that they were either going to have to build a humongous airplane wing, or they were going to have to find a pretty good, steady headwind they could fly into. Because, of course, when you're flying into a wind, your total air speed is your forward speed combined with the wind speed coming towards you. Dayton, I'm from Dayton. It's not a very windy place. And so they wrote literally to the Weather Bureau. And the Weather Bureau sent them a couple of issues of the monthly weather review, it was called, which had average winds from the hundred and some odd weather stations across the nation. And the windiest places, it turned out, as you might suspect, really were cities on lakes,

Buffalo, Chicago, so on. And they didn't want to fly where there were people. They really wanted to do this by themselves without many people knowing about it. And so down the list, really the first sort of very small place on the list, was this place called Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, which was an isolated little fishing village on the outer banks of North Carolina. They wrote a letter to Joe Dosher, the guy who ran the weather station at Kitty Hawk, and he sent them a little thing back.

But he passed Wilbur's letter onto William Tate, who was sort of the political figure as to the extent that there was in Kitty Hawk at that point. Bill Tate wrote on this wonderful level. butterback talking about, yeah, we've got the wind and we've got these sand dunes you can fly from. But he wound it up by saying, and, you know, if you choose to come down and do your type flying with us, we can guarantee you that you're going to find friendly people who will give you all the help they can. And that struck a chord with Will. These guys, you're right, it never traveled much.

They'd gone to the World's Fair in Chicago in the 1890s, and that was about it. They were taking prefabbed planes, I guess, there, right? They'd built them in Ohio. Not completely that first trip. It was mostly prefab, but Wilbur figured that he could buy the wings bars and the long pieces of lumber someplace along the way. And he did buy it, in fact, at a lumber yard in Elizabeth City. So once he got out, he assembled the plane and put the fabric on. So when it came to the engine, they had actually written to people who built engines for a little bit. And they couldn't find anybody who would give them sort of the horsepower for weight that they wanted for a reasonable price. And so they thought, all right, we'll build it ourselves. So they designed it and Charlie built it pretty simple, made sense. It had elegant aspects to it.

But when it was finished, it developed about 12 and a half horsepower when it was up and running. The first one had actually exploded. So it was the second one. They were taking time. the kitty hawk. Again, 12 and a half horsepower. No cooling. When you look at the 19-03 airplane, you see this thing that looks like a radiator. It's actually just a standpipe. Once you start the engine, it's going to drive any moisture out into the standpipe. So you're running dry and, I mean, it gets cherry red. The only thing the standpipe does is cool the engine down a little bit quicker once you turn it off for heaven's sake. Langley, for example, on the other hand, was trying to fly at the very same time, had put so much time and energy into an engine. He had

a radial engine that developed 52 horsepower. The rights get 12 and a half from theirs. Langley gets 52 from his. Now, the difference is that the rights stopped at 12 and a half horsepower because they'd done the math. They knew what the propeller was going to turn out. They had figured out what RPM the props were going to be turning at and how much thrust they were going to get for that RPM. And so they knew that, okay, that engine, long as it doesn't blow up, it's enough to get us off the ground. Langley, I think, had really no idea how much power he was going to need. He had much more primitive propellers, no control system. In other words, he had the world's best aeronautical engine mounted in an airplane that was never going to fly. The Wright brothers had

a much more reasonable engine that they had built themselves, that they were sure was going to be able to get them off the ground. So, I mean, that's the difference sort of between the two of them. How aware was the American public of these experiments and the flights of the potential of aviation at the time? Was it just a glamorous science or did people see the point of this? And how about the government? Were they paying them money? The government was paying Samuel Langley money, for example. He had about $50,000 in U.S. government dollars plus money that he had taken out of Smithsonian coffers to build his machine, the Wright brothers figured they had spent about $1,000 from the beginning to December 17, 193 on

their experiments. And that counted their living expenses at Kitty Hawk, for heaven's sake. So they used to kind of giggle that the amount of money Langley was spending for what he was getting compared to what they were spending. Langley was catapulting his machines from the little 1896 models to the 1903 great aerodrome with a person, Charles Manley, on board. He used streetcar springs to get them into the air and a big boat that it was mounted on and the rights used to laugh about how much money he had spent as opposed to the money they had spent for what they called their junction railroad. They were flying at Kitty Hawk. so they couldn't have wheels.

They'd sink in the sand. So they had come up with a notion of building a little monorail track, wood, you know, with metal caps, and they would run the airplane down that monorail track and into the air. So December 1903, the experimentation, the research, the engineering, all brought to bear on a series of test flights at Kill Devil Hills. This would be the first powered flight, December 14th. They try and fail, resulting in a damaged propeller.

Then repairs are made. and four days later, December 17, 1903, they make four flights each progressively longer. Wilbur at the controls, then Orville, all decided by coin tosses. There was a small invited group to witness and even the famous photograph is taken of the first flight. Describe how that is done in detail. And what was the public reaction to this? That day, I mean, they were two guys, okay? They needed help.

In those years, every 10 miles or so down the outer banks of the United States, The government had built a Coast Guard station. It was then the U.S. life-saving service. In the winter season, you know, November to into the spring, in the hurricane season, that's how the kiddie hawkers, a lot of them, made their living. They outwork the government. In the summer, they had little farms and they fished and so on. So the rights, when they got ready to fly,

they would put this kind of blanket on the side of the shed. and the guys mile or so down at the beach at the Kitty Hawk or the Kill Devil Hills Life Saving Station would see it and they trot up the beach to help. And when they got up that morning, December 17th, Orville, who was a real camera bug, I mean, he was really fascinated by photography. He had set up and they had a really good camera. He had set the camera up on its tripod and a guy named John Daniels, one of the lifesavers, came up. And Orville liked him a lot. And he gave Daniels the bulb to the camera. And essentially he said, you know, Jack, if anything interesting happened, squeeze the bulb.

And of course, in the wind and the sand and the salt on the outer banks, they didn't develop their photographs. They brought them back to Dayton. And Orville had a little dark room in a shed in the back of the house on Hawthorne Street. And I've often thought that as they were in the dark room, that when, winter when they got back. They saw what John Daniels had taken coming up on the plate. There must have been as much yelling and screaming in that shed as there had been on the beach at Kitty Hawk. John Daniels used to dine out in later years. At the end of that fourth flight, I'd better say, the longest flight that Wilbur had made almost a minute long flying down the beach. They had brought the airplane

back, carry it back, and it was really cold that day. So most of them went into the shed. They had a carbide-can stove that they'd made to warm their hands up. But they left John Daniels outside to kind of hold onto the airplane. And the gust of wind came up and flipped it over backwards. And he went with it. He held onto it and that dusted himself off. But in later years, he would dine out saying he had not only witnessed the world's first airplane flight. He had taken the first photograph of an airplane in flight, and he'd been the victim of the first airplane accident, all in one morning. There you go, and lived to tell about it. He was quite a guy. The brothers had a plan to let the news out. They were going to send a telegram back to Dayton as they did, and their father or their

sister, Kate, was going to take it down to the Dayton Daily News office and inform the world that they had made these reasonable short flights and they were going to be home for Christmas. But they had to use the government telegraph at Kitty Hawk and the weather station. And that guy, the line went directly to the government office in Elizabeth City. And then he would put it on the Western Union line

to go on to Dayton. But the telegrapher in Elizabeth City had told a friend. And so the news got out that way. And really, within a very short time, the Wright brothers were front-page news, and the newspapers got it all wrong. I mean, there were these wild drawings of the right airplane with propellers underneath to lift it into the air, and they were flying out over the ocean, and it was a sad situation. But the Wright brothers knew that Langley had just tried and failed to fly, and people were used to stories about spectacular

flying machines that turned out to be hoaxes. The Wright brothers knew that if they just told the truth and shut up, it would go away. People would forget about them. And so they had two more years, 1904 and 1905, when they flew at Huffman Prairie outside Dayton in relative isolation. And they could use those two years to develop what had become a marginal 1903. airplane into the world's first practical airplane by 1905. Interesting. So they just weren't publicity hounds at all. They were really working on the stuff. To that point, the next year, 1904, they move back to Ohio. They create the

right flyer, too. And this is really where they start to achieve the real advances, the substantial changes in the technology. They're able to pilot the first full circle flights a year later in November and December 1904. They're flying circles now. Which is to say they are controlling the flight, just as they've sought to do. And in 1905, it becomes Miles. But people still doubted their claims. People were still skeptical. It's a very interesting time.

I mean, partly it's just hard to get the news out in those days, I guess. Yeah. One of the reasons they were very fond of Octave Cheneut and all that. And they had a falling out. But one of the reasons that they had continued to deal with Cheneut was because he was internationally known as a flying machine figure. He'd written a book and he lectured in Europe. And he was Franco-American.

actually been born in France. And so they knew that Chinute would get honest news about what they were doing out to the other flying machine experimenters in Europe. And that's what they counted on. This takes a while. 1908 things really get big time. They start to convince the world. They go all around the world with these exhibitions. And they demonstrated in France, the first woman in the world lies, which is in France, the wife of their business contact there. I mean, this was a big deal for the whole world, but 1909 is really the breakout year. They're all over the world. I love the flight they make in up the Hudson, taking off from Governor's Island, flying up Manhattan via the river to Grant's tomb and then turning back the whole time with a canoe attached just in case they go down. That's a really

charming thing. But they're also starting flying schools. They're teaching people how to fly. No, absolutely. They're doing the best they can to trigger it into a lot. a business, make money out of their patent. They found the right company with factories in Dayton, but offices in New York. And I mean, this is a Wall Street company. They have the financial leaders of America on the board of the right company and so on. So it's a tough time for them. These Ohio guys who grew up with a father who kind of taught them to be wary of the world and suddenly here they are world figures and having kind of of a tough time navigating these waters, protecting themselves from people they think are infringing

on their patent and trying to get a company going and make money. It all happens so quickly, really. I mean, relatively speaking. Unfortunately, Wilbur dies early. He dies at a young age. I guess he's a 47 or so. Typhus in 1912. That's a tragedy.

But because they're a well-built family, Orville soldiers onward, and he continues to spread the word and train people to fly and so over. But he stops flying pretty quickly, as you say. It's incredible to me to reflect on the fact that inside of Orville's life, he sees both World War I and World War II take place utilizing air power to destructive ends. It's amazing. This is a man who lives to see the V2, the atomic bomb, you know, intercontinental bombers. Yeah. They train Hap Arnold. General Hap Arnold, the first. First head of the U.S. Air Force commanded Army forces in World War II at a right flying school.

It's amazing to me how condensed this history really is. People used to ask Orville, especially during the war, during World War II, if he wasn't sorry, at the use to which his invention was being put. And his answer was always, well, you know, fire has created enormous damage over the course of human history, but all things considered. were better off than we have it than if we didn't. And that was his view of the airplane. I just wonder how much he expected to see where it went. You know, I would have loved to known that. Whether his original vision had any of this involved, you know,

the dog fights over Europe, et cetera, et cetera, let alone the in all a gang, right? Well, certainly when people interviewed them in the beginning before 1914, they didn't indicate that they saw very much of that coming. And after all, when World War I begins in 1914, the airplane's 10 years old, 11 years old at that point. But it really isn't that much more of all than it had been in 1903. What usually happens in the history of the 20th century is that you enter a war with this simple kind of machine and it explodes during the course of the war. government investment in engines and airframes and armament and so on. The technology just explodes

really quickly. April 19th, 1944, Lockheed Constellation, that epic plane design that basically creates commercial air travel. It is flown cross-country in seven hours by none other than Howard Hughes. On the way back from D.C., he lands in Dayton at the right field and gives Orville Wright his last plane flight, 40 years after the first one at Kitty Hawk. And Orville comments that the wingspan of the constellation is longer than the distance of his first flight, which is a remarkable fact. And he dies eight months later on January 30th, 1948, having changed the world completely and forever. Amazing. Not bad, huh? Not bad. Incredible story. I have a friend who wrote a book about the space age in which he said that really when human beings entered space, it was,

assaultation, you know, the biological term when evolutionary change takes place. When the lungfish crawls up on the beach, it's a saltation. And he claimed that the space age represented that human beings leaving their home planet for the first time. And I always argued with them, you know, I do think it is a moment of evolutionary change. But the change actually doesn't take place in 1957 with the space age. It takes place in 1903 when we make the first heavier-than-air flight because that's when that explosive impact of flight actually begins. The space age is really just an extension. The same people who built airplanes built spacecraft. I mean, it's just an extension. It was all liberated by that development. Tom Crouch, thank you so much

for meeting us today and explaining this. I look forward to reading your books. There's a long list of them, and I invite my listeners to do so as well. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it.

Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.