September 4, 2024 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, much was at stake in this first race to space. Nations and top scientists across the globe pursued the elusive goal of powered flight, but two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio - brothers with their own scant resources - made it happen. This is their story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
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
just for the sheer wonder of it, till the winner
(00:32):
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
turn of the twentieth century was a big name. He
(00:54):
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
top government scientist a pile of cash and see if
(01:15):
his band of scientific appointees could crack the man powered
flight code. That's precisely what happened when the War Department
ended 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 Ariodrome.
There was nothing great about it. In front of a
(01:37):
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
got the same result.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
The press had a field day.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
The Boston Herald 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,
government officials covered their guy and pled for more money
(02:21):
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 be.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Necessary before we can hope to produce.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
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 of their own money and no reporters or
(03:01):
fans around to watch, Orville 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 Kittiehawk, North Carolina.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Who were these two.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Brothers and why did they succeed where others failed? Author
David McCullough, 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.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Foundation behind them.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
But they thought they could figure 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
(04:04):
were working on the wrong problem.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
They were focused on power.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
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 the Right Brothers succeeded where Langley felled.
(04:31):
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, but you don't know how to
(04:51):
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, and 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
(05:11):
stay in the air.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
It was dangerous work.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
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 no disconnect between the
(05:38):
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
(05:58):
the machine's balance. It would become an industry standard and
remain 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.
(06:20):
Because they couldn't afford 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
(06:41):
innovations in our time, powered 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.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Of Play, as mere hobbyists.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
This was a distinctly American attribute. This is what oval
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
(07:29):
the aeroplane could ever be practical outside the realm of support.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
It was the.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Ourselves with flying.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Though the Wright brothers beat Langley and the Smithsonian to
the man powered flight race, the 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
(08:09):
the Wright brother's patent application and vindicate 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.
(08:32):
Orville Wright, who outlived his brother Will, was so angry
that he sent the nineteen oh three Kitty Hawk Flyer,
the plane that actually made aviation history, to a science
museum in of all places, London.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
The truth is a stubborn thing.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
After considerable embarrassment and pressure, the Smithsonian recanted its false
claims about the aerodrome in nineteen forty two that British
musse zim 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,
(09:12):
forty five years to the day after the aircraft's only flights,
a grand government deception, 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
(09:34):
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 and improbable too. The story
of the Right Brothers and how they beat the fancy,
well paid scientists to space.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
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
just for the sheer wonder of it, till the winner
(00:32):
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
turn of the twentieth century was a big name. He
(00:54):
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
top government scientist a pile of cash and see if
(01:15):
his band of scientific appointees could crack the man powered
flight code. That's precisely what happened when the War Department
ended 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 Ariodrome.
There was nothing great about it. In front of a
(01:37):
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
got the same result.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
The press had a field day.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
The Boston Herald 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,
government officials covered their guy and pled for more money
(02:21):
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 be.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Necessary before we can hope to produce.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
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 of their own money and no reporters or
(03:01):
fans around to watch, Orville 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 Kittiehawk, North Carolina.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Who were these two.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Brothers and why did they succeed where others failed? Author
David McCullough, 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.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Foundation behind them.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
But they thought they could figure 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
(04:04):
were working on the wrong problem.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
They were focused on power.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
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 the Right Brothers succeeded where Langley felled.
(04:31):
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, but you don't know how to
(04:51):
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, and 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
(05:11):
stay in the air.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
It was dangerous work.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
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 no disconnect between the
(05:38):
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
(05:58):
the machine's balance. It would become an industry standard and
remain 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.
(06:20):
Because they couldn't afford 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
(06:41):
innovations in our time, powered 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.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Of Play, as mere hobbyists.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
This was a distinctly American attribute. This is what oval
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
(07:29):
the aeroplane could ever be practical outside the realm of support.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
It was the.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Ourselves with flying.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Though the Wright brothers beat Langley and the Smithsonian to
the man powered flight race, the 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
(08:09):
the Wright brother's patent application and vindicate 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.
(08:32):
Orville Wright, who outlived his brother Will, was so angry
that he sent the nineteen oh three Kitty Hawk Flyer,
the plane that actually made aviation history, to a science
museum in of all places, London.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
The truth is a stubborn thing.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
After considerable embarrassment and pressure, the Smithsonian recanted its false
claims about the aerodrome in nineteen forty two that British
musse zim 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,
(09:12):
forty five years to the day after the aircraft's only flights,
a grand government deception, 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
(09:34):
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 and improbable too. The story
of the Right Brothers and how they beat the fancy,
well paid scientists to space.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Here on our American story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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