August 7, 2025 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, before they made history, the Wright brothers were just two mechanics with a theory. Their shop in Dayton kept the lights on, but it was their time on the beaches of North Carolina that changed the world. While others with more resources failed to get off the ground, Wilbur and Orville studied what moved through the air—and why. In 1903, after years of testing and quiet work, they lifted off the sand and became the first men to take flight, with a takeoff that lasted just 12 seconds. Our own Lee Habeeb shares the story.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
And we continue here with our American stories, and up
next the story of the Wright brothers and their battle
to be the first in space. It was the early
twentieth century and world leaders everywhere were in a race
to create what we now call the airplane, and not
(00:30):
just for the sheer wonder of it, till the winner
would go the spoils of commerce and war. The stakes
were high, and our government feared that the British, Germans
or French might win the first race to space. What
was the American response. We chose to invest in a person,
Samuel Langley and his team of experts. Langley, at the
(00:50):
turn of the twentieth century was a big name. He
was the head of the Smithsonian, our nation's pre eminent
source of government research, and an acclaimed scientist, having taught
mathematics at the US Naval Academy and physics and astronomy
at the University of Pittsburgh. He also wrote a lot
about aviation. The prevailing wisdom was simple, give the nation's
(01:12):
top government scientist a pile of cash and see if
his band of scientific appointees could crack the man powered
flight code. That's precisely what happened when the War Department
handed Langley a princely sum and set his team to work.
What did the American people get for their government investment
in flight? Langley and his team called it the Great Herriodrome.
(01:34):
There was nothing great about it. In front of a
crowd of onlookers and reporters, Langley's machine launched from a
catapult on a houseboat and the Potomac River, and after
a short time an air quickly plunged into the river.
It fell like a ton of mortar. One journalist wrote.
A few months and tweaks later, Langley tried again and
(01:55):
got the same result. The press had a field dead.
The Boston Marld suggested Langley ought to give up airplanes
and try submarines. You tell Langley that the only thing
he ever made fly was government money, a skeptical member
of Congress told a Brooklyn Herald reporter. Rather than criticize Langley,
(02:16):
government officials covered their guy and pleded for more money
and more time. Here's the official War Department memo. We
are still far from the ultimate goal, and it would
seem as if years of constant work and study by experts,
together with the expenditure of thousands of dollars would still
(02:38):
be necessary before we can hope to produce an apparatus
of practical utility on these line. Two inventors from Dayton,
Ohio didn't get the War Department's message. Only nine days
after Langley's failed experiment, with a mere two thousand dollars
(02:59):
of their own money and no reporters or fans around
to watch, Horville and Wilbur Wright became the first men
in history to launch a sustained power and pilot driven
air machine into flight, flying for fifty nine seconds and
covering eight hundred and fifty two feet of ground, a
few miles from Kittyhawk, North Carolina. Who were these two
(03:24):
brothers and why did they succeed when others failed? Author
David McCulloch, who wrote a terrific book about the Right brothers,
said this. They didn't have any money, they didn't have
any political contacts, and they didn't have a great university
or foundation behind them. But they thought they could figure
(03:44):
out how it is that birds soar. They had been
making bicycles, by the way, and selling bicycles in their
little shop in Dayton, Ohio. And of course bicycling is
about balance and equilibrium. Langley had failed. It turns out
because he and his team were working on the wrong problem.
(04:06):
They were focused on power. The Right Brothers focused their
efforts on the problem of balance. Their practical and applied
experience as world class bicycle makers and engineers gave the
two guys from Dayton advantages no amount of government money
or scientific pedigree could match. That wasn't the only reason
(04:28):
the Right Brothers succeeded where Langley fell. Here's McCullough again.
What they realize is that it isn't enough just to
invent theoretically or invent in fact a machine that might
fly on its own power, but to know how to
do it, to know how to fly. Just as if
you made a bicycle, you can't just say here's the bicycle,
(04:50):
but you don't know how to ride it. And the
only way to learn to ride a bicycle is to
ride a bicycle. So they didn't just invent the airplane.
They learned, as no one ever knew before, how to
fly the airplane. And that means riding with the wind
and having wings that will do the necessary adjustments that
will make it possible to stay in the air. It
(05:15):
was dangerous work every time they went up. They would
go up fifty or one hundred times a year. They
had a good chance of being killed. For that reason,
they never flew together. If one got killed, the other
would be alive to carry on with the mission. The
Right brothers succeeded because they not only knew how to
build the machines, but how to use them. There was
(05:37):
no disconnect between the engineer and the pilot. Indeed, these
two became the first test pilots in world history. What
really propelled the Wright brothers into the air and the
record books was their pioneering work on what's known in
aviation as three axis control, which allows the pilot to
steer the aircraft and maintain the machine's balance. It would
(06:00):
become an industry standard and remained standard on all fixed
wing aircraft. The Right brothers had another advantage. Freed from
the perils of government subsidy, they had to think of
ways to innovate with less, explained author James Tobin in
his book To Conquer the Air. Because they couldn't afford
(06:21):
the costs of too many failed flight tests, the Right
brothers designed their own wind tunnels to test various designs
for aerodynamic effectiveness. From those simulations, they amassed real life,
practical data sets that they used to hone their aircraft designs.
As with so many great innovations in our time, powered
(06:43):
flight in America was propelled by amateurs with less funding
and expertise than their private and public competitors. The Wright brothers,
neither of whom had a college degree, found themselves in
the flying business, wrote author James Tobin in The Sheer
Spirit of Play, as mere hobbyists. This was a distinctly
(07:07):
American attribute. This is what overall Right had to say
about it. If we had been interested in invention with the
idea of profit, we most assuredly would have tried something
in which the chances for success were brighter. You see,
we did not expect in the beginning to go beyond gliding.
Even later, we didn't suppose the aeroplane could ever be
(07:30):
practical outside the Wilmos support. It was the sport of
the thing that appealed to Will and me in the
first place. The question was not of money from flying,
but how we could get money enough to keep on
entertaining ourselves with flying. Though the Wright brothers beat Langley
and the Smithsonian to the man powered flight race, the
(07:53):
race for a patent and credit was just getting started.
With Smithsonian approval, and aviation expert made some slight modifications
to Langley's aerodrome and made some short flights in nineteen fourteen,
all to bypass the Wright brother's patent application and vindicate
(08:13):
the Smithsonian's leader. In nineteen fourteen, America's most esteemed historical
museum displayed the Smithsonian funded Langley Aerodrome in its own
museum as the first manned aircraft heavier than air and
capable of flight. Orville Wright, who outlived his brother Will,
(08:35):
was so angry that he sent the nineteen o three
Kitty Hawk Flyer, the plane that actually made aviation history,
to a science museum in of all places, London. The
truth is a stubborn thing. After considerable embarrassment and pressure,
the Smithsonian recanted its false claims about the aerodrome in
(08:57):
nineteen forty two that British musse s'sam while they returned
the right brother's historic flyer to America, and the Smithsonian
put it on display in their Arts and Industries building
on December seventeenth, nineteen forty eight, forty five years to
the day after the aircraft's only flights, a grand government deception,
(09:20):
at last foiled by facts and by fate. Samuel Langley
died in obscurity, a broken and disappointed man. Friends often
claimed he could have beaten the Right Brothers if only
he had more government funding and more time. As for
the Right Brothers, the memory of the two men live on,
their legacy, emblematic of all that is possible in America
(09:43):
and improbable too. The story of the Right Brothers and
how they beat the fancy, well paid scientists to space.
Here on our American story.
And we continue here with our American stories, and up
next the story of the Wright brothers and their battle
to be the first in space. It was the early
twentieth century and world leaders everywhere were in a race
to create what we now call the airplane, and not
(00:30):
just for the sheer wonder of it, till the winner
would go the spoils of commerce and war. The stakes
were high, and our government feared that the British, Germans
or French might win the first race to space. What
was the American response. We chose to invest in a person,
Samuel Langley and his team of experts. Langley, at the
(00:50):
turn of the twentieth century was a big name. He
was the head of the Smithsonian, our nation's pre eminent
source of government research, and an acclaimed scientist, having taught
mathematics at the US Naval Academy and physics and astronomy
at the University of Pittsburgh. He also wrote a lot
about aviation. The prevailing wisdom was simple, give the nation's
(01:12):
top government scientist a pile of cash and see if
his band of scientific appointees could crack the man powered
flight code. That's precisely what happened when the War Department
handed Langley a princely sum and set his team to work.
What did the American people get for their government investment
in flight? Langley and his team called it the Great Herriodrome.
(01:34):
There was nothing great about it. In front of a
crowd of onlookers and reporters, Langley's machine launched from a
catapult on a houseboat and the Potomac River, and after
a short time an air quickly plunged into the river.
It fell like a ton of mortar. One journalist wrote.
A few months and tweaks later, Langley tried again and
(01:55):
got the same result. The press had a field dead.
The Boston Marld suggested Langley ought to give up airplanes
and try submarines. You tell Langley that the only thing
he ever made fly was government money, a skeptical member
of Congress told a Brooklyn Herald reporter. Rather than criticize Langley,
(02:16):
government officials covered their guy and pleded for more money
and more time. Here's the official War Department memo. We
are still far from the ultimate goal, and it would
seem as if years of constant work and study by experts,
together with the expenditure of thousands of dollars would still
(02:38):
be necessary before we can hope to produce an apparatus
of practical utility on these line. Two inventors from Dayton,
Ohio didn't get the War Department's message. Only nine days
after Langley's failed experiment, with a mere two thousand dollars
(02:59):
of their own money and no reporters or fans around
to watch, Horville and Wilbur Wright became the first men
in history to launch a sustained power and pilot driven
air machine into flight, flying for fifty nine seconds and
covering eight hundred and fifty two feet of ground, a
few miles from Kittyhawk, North Carolina. Who were these two
(03:24):
brothers and why did they succeed when others failed? Author
David McCulloch, who wrote a terrific book about the Right brothers,
said this. They didn't have any money, they didn't have
any political contacts, and they didn't have a great university
or foundation behind them. But they thought they could figure
(03:44):
out how it is that birds soar. They had been
making bicycles, by the way, and selling bicycles in their
little shop in Dayton, Ohio. And of course bicycling is
about balance and equilibrium. Langley had failed. It turns out
because he and his team were working on the wrong problem.
(04:06):
They were focused on power. The Right Brothers focused their
efforts on the problem of balance. Their practical and applied
experience as world class bicycle makers and engineers gave the
two guys from Dayton advantages no amount of government money
or scientific pedigree could match. That wasn't the only reason
(04:28):
the Right Brothers succeeded where Langley fell. Here's McCullough again.
What they realize is that it isn't enough just to
invent theoretically or invent in fact a machine that might
fly on its own power, but to know how to
do it, to know how to fly. Just as if
you made a bicycle, you can't just say here's the bicycle,
(04:50):
but you don't know how to ride it. And the
only way to learn to ride a bicycle is to
ride a bicycle. So they didn't just invent the airplane.
They learned, as no one ever knew before, how to
fly the airplane. And that means riding with the wind
and having wings that will do the necessary adjustments that
will make it possible to stay in the air. It
(05:15):
was dangerous work every time they went up. They would
go up fifty or one hundred times a year. They
had a good chance of being killed. For that reason,
they never flew together. If one got killed, the other
would be alive to carry on with the mission. The
Right brothers succeeded because they not only knew how to
build the machines, but how to use them. There was
(05:37):
no disconnect between the engineer and the pilot. Indeed, these
two became the first test pilots in world history. What
really propelled the Wright brothers into the air and the
record books was their pioneering work on what's known in
aviation as three axis control, which allows the pilot to
steer the aircraft and maintain the machine's balance. It would
(06:00):
become an industry standard and remained standard on all fixed
wing aircraft. The Right brothers had another advantage. Freed from
the perils of government subsidy, they had to think of
ways to innovate with less, explained author James Tobin in
his book To Conquer the Air. Because they couldn't afford
(06:21):
the costs of too many failed flight tests, the Right
brothers designed their own wind tunnels to test various designs
for aerodynamic effectiveness. From those simulations, they amassed real life,
practical data sets that they used to hone their aircraft designs.
As with so many great innovations in our time, powered
(06:43):
flight in America was propelled by amateurs with less funding
and expertise than their private and public competitors. The Wright brothers,
neither of whom had a college degree, found themselves in
the flying business, wrote author James Tobin in The Sheer
Spirit of Play, as mere hobbyists. This was a distinctly
(07:07):
American attribute. This is what overall Right had to say
about it. If we had been interested in invention with the
idea of profit, we most assuredly would have tried something
in which the chances for success were brighter. You see,
we did not expect in the beginning to go beyond gliding.
Even later, we didn't suppose the aeroplane could ever be
(07:30):
practical outside the Wilmos support. It was the sport of
the thing that appealed to Will and me in the
first place. The question was not of money from flying,
but how we could get money enough to keep on
entertaining ourselves with flying. Though the Wright brothers beat Langley
and the Smithsonian to the man powered flight race, the
(07:53):
race for a patent and credit was just getting started.
With Smithsonian approval, and aviation expert made some slight modifications
to Langley's aerodrome and made some short flights in nineteen fourteen,
all to bypass the Wright brother's patent application and vindicate
(08:13):
the Smithsonian's leader. In nineteen fourteen, America's most esteemed historical
museum displayed the Smithsonian funded Langley Aerodrome in its own
museum as the first manned aircraft heavier than air and
capable of flight. Orville Wright, who outlived his brother Will,
(08:35):
was so angry that he sent the nineteen o three
Kitty Hawk Flyer, the plane that actually made aviation history,
to a science museum in of all places, London. The
truth is a stubborn thing. After considerable embarrassment and pressure,
the Smithsonian recanted its false claims about the aerodrome in
(08:57):
nineteen forty two that British musse s'sam while they returned
the right brother's historic flyer to America, and the Smithsonian
put it on display in their Arts and Industries building
on December seventeenth, nineteen forty eight, forty five years to
the day after the aircraft's only flights, a grand government deception,
(09:20):
at last foiled by facts and by fate. Samuel Langley
died in obscurity, a broken and disappointed man. Friends often
claimed he could have beaten the Right Brothers if only
he had more government funding and more time. As for
the Right Brothers, the memory of the two men live on,
their legacy, emblematic of all that is possible in America
(09:43):
and improbable too. The story of the Right Brothers and
how they beat the fancy, well paid scientists to space.
Here on our American story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.