Latest / Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People / The Wright Brothers - Pioneering Pilots Who Taught Us To Fly

Transcript

The Wright Brothers - Pioneering Pilots Who Taught Us To Fly · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

0:06
SPEAKER_00: Hi there, loyal listeners of Dirtnap City, and welcome to another episode.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: Alex and I recording today.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: How are you, Alex?
0:14
SPEAKER_00: Hey, buddy.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: How's it going?
0:16
SPEAKER_00: Great, man.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: I am just kind of sitting here chilling, about ready to record with you.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: It's it's uh it's an undisclosed date in 2025, and this episode will come out on some other undisclosed date, but this is one that I think you're gonna really like.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: This is one uh pretty much 20th century kind of story.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, and this is one that I think actually kind of fits in with some of our others that we've done recently.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned in uh a previous recording that you liked it when there was crossover.
0:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I like when our guys uh are usually guys, let's face it, um, get to know each other or cross paths for uh for a second.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: Better for when it's just for a brief time, you know.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, like like they they kind of like maybe have a little bit of influence on each other.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe a lunch, maybe a coffee.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: They stopped at Starbucks.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, so this episode today I want to talk about is uh it's I'm gonna I'm gonna pull a an Alex and I'm gonna do two people.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I've done one with two people yet.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: I don't think you have.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: No, I don't think you have.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: You you've done several where they've been groups or more than one person, but I've stuck to the rules.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: So today I'm throwing the rules out the window, chucking them out, gonna do two people, and uh you know, as I said, they're 20th century people.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know what we say on this show.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: You know what we say on this show.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: No rules, just right.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Just right, yeah.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: And Siskel and Ebert actually broke the broke the mold on that.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: That was the first time.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, the pilgrims as well.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, yeah.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: You did that season one.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: But but um, but yeah, if you like stories about uh, you know, pairs where where this is literally like Siskel and Ebert, these are two people you never think of alone.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: They're they're they're a combination.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna give you one clue that might just might just sell it, might just tell you who it is right away.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: Um they're brothers.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: Oh, brothers.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: Oh, the Wright brothers.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh when you think of brothers.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: Well, I was gonna my next guest was gonna be the Jackson Five.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: So uh well, they're they're not all in Dirt Knap City yet, but uh several of them are.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: But no, uh Wilbur, Orville Wright.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh Wilbur was the older of the two.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: He was born in 1867, and Orville was the younger, born in 1871.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: They were brothers, they were inventors, uh really truly American heroes, I think, in a lot of ways.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: And I'm fascinated by that rate, that space, uh, I mean, space, the the race for flight and how in less than a hundred years we got to the moon.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: I think that's cool.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: It is absolutely amazing.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, their first flight was 1903.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: And but you know what's what is kind of interesting about that?
3:14
SPEAKER_00: People were flying before the Wright brothers.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: There that they weren't the first to fly.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what you know what differentiated them and made them important?
3:22
SPEAKER_01: I didn't actually know that.
3:23
SPEAKER_01: I thought they were the first to fly.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh no, sure, sure.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: There were there were balloons before the Wright.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, you've told us about Zeppelins and balloons.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: I thought you meant in a plane.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, you're right.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: People there were gliders, they were they were unpowered.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: It was definitely something that um, as a matter of fact, there was a guy in Germany named Otto Lillenthal who had been doing glider flight since the mid-1800s and writing articles about it, and he was a big inspiration for the Wright brothers.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: Whenever they show those old black and white movies of people attempting flight, I always like the guy with the giant bird wings that giant wings, and he jumps jumps off the building and falls.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: He's flapping as hard as he can, but those things are so big, there's no way he could possibly get flight.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: You you really kind of um hit the nail on the head.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: The the problem before the rights was everybody focused on the wrong stuff.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: People thought that um in order to fly, you had to have the um, I guess the framework or the the sort of physical side physical um shape of a bird.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: That was what people were going for.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: And the Wrights quickly realized that was not really the case.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Like they took inspiration from birds, but it wasn't something that they um they didn't try to mimic a bird like that guy you just described, you know, all the old pictures.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: But um they were they were also just amazingly um focused and had this incredible work ethic.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: They just made people inspired by them later.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: They became national heroes in the U.S.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: and internationally, actually.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: In France, they were really big.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: In Germany, they were really big.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: But their big thing was they were the first people to make a controlled, sustained flight with an engine in a heavier-than-air aircraft.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: That was in 1903, December 17th.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's where it was different.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: It was controlled, meaning that they could actually steer the thing.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: It was powered, meaning that it had a motor, because people had been doing gliding before.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: The Bright Brothers had been doing gliding before, and it was heavier than air.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a blimp with uh, you know, you could control, you could control airships and blimps.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: Up to that point, nobody had done it with something that weighed more than the air did, you know, which with hydrogen or helium, it's lighter than air.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: So that was really their their big differentiator.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: You know where that took place, right?
5:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, kitty, uh Kitty Hawk.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Kitty Hawk, yeah.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: On the on the outer banks.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: I've been there, man.
5:53
SPEAKER_01: I've been to that that spot of land where they did that, and it is windy out there.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's part of why they picked it.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, but let's let's back up for a minute before we get into that.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: I want to just kind of back up to their their their um youth and how they were raised.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: They were born to uh Milton Wright and Susan Catherine Corner.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Now, Milton was a clergyman, and they were four years apart, as I said.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: Um Wilbur was the older, uh, 1867, he was born, and Orville was 1871, so four years apart.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: And they had actually a couple of brothers, a guy named Roychen and Lauren, and then they had a sister named Catherine.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Now, have you heard of Catherine at all?
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Catherine Wright?
6:39
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Um at the time, she actually became almost as famous as they were because they were bachelors and they lived with their father and their sister for many, many years.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: And so she, you know, she became somebody that people looked up to um when they became famous because she was almost like their PR agent.
7:01
unknown: Really?
7:02
SPEAKER_00: She would go with them and and uh arrange things for them and kind of manage their their stars.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: But together, the the Wrights, the Wright brothers, the two that we're talking about, not the other two that weren't really involved, uh, Orville and and Wilbur, they were called um Will and Orv.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: That was their friend how their friends knew them.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people in Dayton, Ohio called them the Bishops Boys.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: That's where they lived, Dayton?
7:27
SPEAKER_00: Dayton, Ohio, it's where they were from, yeah.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: Now the Bishops Boys, doesn't that sound like an English ska band?
7:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, it definitely sounds like some hoodlums from Manchester or something, yeah.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, but that they were that's what they were called, the Bishops Boys, and and their their father was a um, as I as I said, he was a uh clergyman, and he very much raised them as uh religious, but also progressive, because a lot of religious people back then didn't like to read books, they didn't believe in science, they you know, they thought it was an affront to God.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: Um, their father actually brought them a toy helicopter in 1873.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: And when I say toy helicopter, this was a stick with paper and a rubber band that would twirl and it would fly kind of, you know, like those little sticks that you can twirl and spin and they fly for a few seconds.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: It was like that.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: And Wilbur and Orville played with it just nonstop.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: It was uh something that they really enjoyed.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, they eventually broke it and they ended up fixing it, modifying it, and making it fly even better.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: And they both credit that toy with being their first um sort of fascination with flight.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, these were the kind of things their father would do is he would um he would have them read books, he would teach them about science.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, he also um thought that women should have rights.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: Their father was very progressive for his day, saying, you know, believed in women's rights, uh opposed slavery, and so the rights were a little more tolerant of other people than some white people were back then.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, kind of raised in a way that was perfect for who they would become eventually.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: This is great.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: So this means that there's not gonna be a turn where you tell me that these guys were like pedophiles or anything like that?
9:22
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, no, no.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: They were they were pretty stand-up guys.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: There was a little bit of controversy here and there that we'll get into, but but for the most part, they were pretty stand-up.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: Now, in 1886, Wilbur was playing hockey with a guy named Oliver Crook Haw.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: And first of all, who gives their son a middle name Crook?
9:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's pretty hardcore.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: Well, Wilbur lost his teeth.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh, this incident actually, you know, Wilbur had been a pretty um outgoing, uh, ambitious person.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: He had planned to go to Yale, actually.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: So uh this sidelined him because he lost his teeth.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: He ended up being housebound for a while, took care of his mother at that time because she had tuberculosis.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: But I want to talk a minute before we get on about Wilbur and how he recovered, I want to talk about Oliver Crook Haw.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: So Oliver Crookhaw was a resident of Dayton.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: He was considered the Dayton bully.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: And even though he was three years younger than than um than Wilbur, he was he was in between Wil Wilbur and Orbel's age.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: He was kind of a bully.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: They're not sure if he hit Wilbur on purpose during this hockey game or not, but he did knock his teeth out.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: But he later actually became a doctor, this uh Oliver Cook uh Crook Haw, and he became addicted to cocaine because a lot of medicine back then had cocaine.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: He became obsessed with uh Dr.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: Jekyll and Mr.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: Hyde, the book by Robert Lewis Stevenson, and he started to believe that you could have two beans in one body.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, while this was going on, Oliver Crook Haw from Dayton got married.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: Guess how many times he was married?
11:07
unknown: Um, I don't know.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: Three?
11:09
SPEAKER_00: Nine times.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Well got married nine times.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: At some point, you gotta look in the mirror, right?
11:16
SPEAKER_00: Some of his wives died mysteriously.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, four of them did.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: Which I think is actually one more than Henry VIII killed.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: I think Henry VIII.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say, yeah.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: He also had patients.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: As I said, he was a doctor.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: He had patients that died mysteriously as well.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, so lots of lots of weird stuff going on.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: He eventually um found out Oliver Crookhaw found out that he was cut out of his parents' will, and shortly thereafter, in 1905, their his parents' house caught fire, killing his parents and his brother, and he was eventually put to death um for that crime in 1907.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: He was uh executed by the electric chair.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: Oliver Crookha's.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: But the only thing he has to do with this story is that he knocked out Orville's teeth.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: No, uh Wilbur's teeth.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: Oh, the older brother.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: He he knocked out Wilbur's teeth.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: He altered Wilbur's life so much that it's he's kind of sometimes partially credited with driving Wilbur the direction he went.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: Like Wilbur stayed home and he took care of his mother, and then in 1989, and sorry, in 1889, his mother, uh Wil the family's mother died, Susan, in 1889.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: And at that point, Orville was still in high school.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: Wilbur had dropped out and was, you know, living at home with his teeth knocked out, doing better.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: And Orville actually decided to start a printing press or a printing business.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: And so the brothers built a printing press in on their property, and they started printing a weekly newspaper called the West Side News in Dayton.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: Orville was the publisher, Wilbur was the editor.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: Now, did you know that they were printers before they were bicycle makers?
12:59
SPEAKER_00: No.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, how old were they at this point?
13:02
SPEAKER_00: Well, Orville dropped out of high school to do this.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: So he was, you know, 18, 17, something like that.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: And uh and Wilbur was four years older, so maybe 20.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: They started this paper uh called the West Side News, and then they changed it to a daily paper called The Evening Item.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: And then they actually started publishing or printing for other people who wanted printing.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: So they became like a printer for hire.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: And one of their first clients was a guy named Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who was an African American poet and writer who was actually pretty famous at the time.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, and Dunbar came to work for them publishing another paper that they put out.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: This one was great.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: It was called The Dayton Tattler.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: I like that name for a paper.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I feel like that's that's been done a few times, but you know, the tattler.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, they did their printing from 1889 for only for about three years until 1892.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: And then guess what happened in the 1890s?
14:01
SPEAKER_00: We talked about this in another episode recently.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: The bicycle craze.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, the bicycle craze.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: That was the time.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: And do you know why the bicycle craze happened?
14:14
SPEAKER_00: Was it because rubber got cheap to make?
14:17
SPEAKER_00: No, it was because somebody invented what they call the safety bicycle.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: Have you heard of the safety bicycle?
14:24
SPEAKER_01: No.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: So we've talked, I think, before, and I've threatened before also to do an episode of uh dead end about penny farthing.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: Several times you've threatened.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, we it all comes back to penny farthers.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: Penny farthers were those giant front wheel, small back wheel bikes.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: Right.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: Very dangerous, very easy to tip over.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: If you hit hit the brakes and your weight was forward, you would endo what they call endoing, where you go over the front wheel and smash your face.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, the safety bicycle was a bicycle with two wheels that were the same size, and this was done through gearing.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: You were able to actually pedal because there was a chain and the gears were different sizes, and it would allow you to go faster than just you know if you pedaled the wheel itself.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: The reason the penny farthers had such giant wheels wheels is because pedaling that giant wheel would give you speed um with very little effort.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: You know, you only had to pedal one rotation, but the the circumference of that wheel was so big that as you rolled you went a good distance for each pedal stroke.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, the the safety bicycle came along.
15:29
SPEAKER_01: But the penny farther was perfect for those dresses that had the big butts.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, the hoops.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: Um that's true.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh there's nothing like a woman in a dress on a penny farther, on a penny barth.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: Been waiting for that trend to come back.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it will.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: It will.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, in 1892, the brothers opened a repair shop to take advantage of this craze that was going on in Dayton with bicycles and the safety bicycles.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: And and that it was called the Wright Cycle Company.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: And in 1896, they actually started designing and building their own bicycles.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you've mentioned before in a couple of episodes about uh machinists and electrical engineers and people who can do all kinds of things with uh wood and you know, just people who can build stuff.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: These guys were that.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: The Wright brothers were able to fabricate and build their own bicycles, and it actually became very popular.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: They had two models, the Van Cleve, which is an awesome name for a bicycle, sure.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, was named after the Wright brothers' great-great-grandmother, who was one of Dayton's first settlers, and it was a racing bicycle, and then they had the St.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: Clair, which was the more affordable bicycle, named after um the first governor of the Northwest Territory, which included Ohio, Arthur St.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: Clair.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, while they're doing all these bicycles, there's a whole bunch of people out there that are still trying to figure out flight.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: And this is, you know, the 1890s.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: There's still Otto Lillenthal, who was a German who had been doing all these gliding experiments and publishing articles about it.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: There was a guy named Samuel Langley, who was actually um uh employed by the Smithsonian Institute and using government money to try, he actually tried to create a steam-powered aircraft.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Remember how we talked about steam was impractical for a for a car?
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, imagine trying to put it on an airplane.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: It didn't work very well.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: Um, a guy named Octave Chnut, and he was doing experiments with gliders in Michigan.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: But what really happened um to get them to go into doing all these experiments in in uh aviation was um, first of all, Samuel Langley was able to actually build a steam-powered fixed-wing model aircraft.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Now, it didn't carry a human, but it was a it was a model that would fly on its own power um using steam.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: And then Octave Chanut was doing the all these tests in the U.S.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: And he was one of the first people in the United States to do all these uh tests on gliders uh out on the shores of Lake Michigan.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: And then tragically, um, this was all in 1896, uh, the German guy, Otto Lillenthal, died.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: And the brothers actually took that news kind of hard.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: He was kind of a hero to them because he had been writing, publishing, doing research.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, as a matter of fact, Wilbur said Lillenthal was without question the greatest of the precursors, and the world owes him a great deal of debt.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: So did they consider this stuff to be dangerous before that?
18:42
SPEAKER_00: Or yes.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: Yes, it was.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: Um you know, people died trying to build aircraft, not only not only from falling, but there were cases where, for instance, um, and this happened to the Wrights a couple of times, a propeller would break and it would send uh shards of uh shrapnel flying everywhere, um, or a motor would blow a piston and it would, you know, I mean, this is the early 1900s, cars weren't even that popular or you know, well established at that point.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, as I said, um Otto Lillenthal had made hundreds of flights, and the big thing that he did differently was, and this was a with a non-powered aircraft, a glider, he would um use his weight to steer the glider.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: That was kind of his innovation.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: But what's interesting about it is most of the Americans, the Samuel Langley, who was part of the Smithsonian and Octave Octave Chinook, they were not worried about controlling the aircraft.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: All they wanted to do was get something in the air that was perfectly level, you know, that would not bank or roll, it would just stay level and just fly.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: That's all they were trying to do.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: The Wrights really were some of the first people to understand that in order to control an aircraft, well, first of all, in order to fly, you had to control the aircraft.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: You couldn't just set it in a straight line and hope for the best or use your weight.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: They realized that was impractical.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: They observed birds.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: They were always watching birds.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: They did that in Dayton, they did that in Kitty Hawk.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: They were always watching the birds, and they realized that birds don't stay level and and turn like a ship, you know, just with yaw.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: They roll, right?
20:25
SPEAKER_00: They kind of roll in the wind, they curve, they go sideways.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: And that was a revolutionary idea back then.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: Nobody had thought about that.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, you know where part of their inspiration came from that?
20:35
SPEAKER_00: Not just birds, but their other business.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Bicycles.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:40
unknown: Yeah.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: If you think about a bicycle, you really can't make a a right-hand turn unless you're going very slowly and very deliberately.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: It's very hard to turn without banking.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Right.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: And motorcycles as well, you know, but at the time it was bicycles.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, so this was this was like a big aha moment from them.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: Everybody had been thinking about yaw, and yaw is the left and right, um, and everybody had kind of been thinking about pitch because that's what a a dirgeable or a blimp would do or a or a um uh Zeppelin.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: They would pitch straight up, they would go up, they would level out, and if they wanted to turn, they would just yaw like a boat.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: You know, they wouldn't roll at all.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: That was that was not what they did.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: So this was a new thing for a um combination of pitch, yaw, and roll.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Nobody had thought of that before.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: I was on a flight one time, and there's a thing on modern planes called a yaw damper, and that's what keeps it from like fishtailing back and forth, you know, it just keeps it in line.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: And the pilot came on and he said, uh, folks, uh uh in that calming voice.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he said, our yaw damper is broken, and he said that.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: It's completely safe, but this is going to be unpleasant for everybody for the next hour.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: And we definitely just were like going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, the back of the plane.
22:13
SPEAKER_01: The yaw was just going it, there was nothing to keep it in place.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: We were basically like a salmon going upriver, just back and forth.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: The tail was just whipping.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: Oh my God.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: And it was just the wind that was taking us, I guess, back and forth.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it was so unpleasant.
22:30
SPEAKER_01: But it he was very reassuring, and he was like, you know, I just I'm just telling you that this is how small planes are.
22:37
SPEAKER_01: It's not a big deal.
22:38
SPEAKER_01: It's actually kind of fun to fly this way, but I'm really sorry it's so uncomfortable.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: It was a beautiful day, and he was very reassuring, but yeah, um I'll never forget that term, yaw damper.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yaw damper.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: That'd be a that'd be a good name for a band.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: For sure.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: At least a song.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, well, no, you you are absolutely right.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: That was the problem people were having was as they would try to turn the the aircraft, um, it was very difficult to turn the aircraft just using a rudder, right?
23:08
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a ship.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: And so one of the first things that the Wrights did was they came up with this idea of wing warping.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: And what happened is uh Wilbur Wright was opening a box that had come to the bicycle shop.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: And you know how if you have a square box, particularly kind of a long, almost tube, uh, but it's not round, it's square, but it's kind of long and and thin, you can kind of warp it, you can grab the two sides and kind of like twist it and it'll flip back to its original shape.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: That's what he was doing, and he realized he could do that with the wings, and that by doing that with the wings, if they were elastic enough, they would flip back to their original shape.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: But that's what birds do.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: If you watch slow motion of a bird flying, it will warp its wings in such a way that the wind passes over it, it rolls, and then it uses its tail as a rudder to kind of um keep it level and yaw dampen.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: And if you're always thinking about flight, just the smallest thing, like you know, messing with a box is gonna put that in your head.
24:10
SPEAKER_01: Like you have to be obsessed like that.
24:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: They were they were so obsessed with flight.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: So in 1900, they had written a letter to um Octave Chanuute, the guy who had been doing the flying in in Michigan, and asked him, like, you know, why did you pick that location?
24:27
SPEAKER_00: What is what's ideal for testing for testing flights?
24:31
SPEAKER_00: And Octave Chanuute wrote back and said, Um, well, you need steady wind and you need a soft place to land, like sand.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: Sand is ideal.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: So Octave Chanut suggested several places in the U.S.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: that he thought would work, Florida, California.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it turned out after do some investigation with the Weather Bureau Bureau that Kitty Hawk, North Carolina was also very um conducive to these flight tests, and it was a lot closer than Florida or California or Michigan.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: So they decided in 1900 to go to Kitty Hawk.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: They brought a glider with them, and the first um couple of things they did weren't even, they didn't even have a person on them.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: They were just like a kite, and they tested their wing warping.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: So they would tie um ropes down, and they were very secretive about it, by the way.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: They did not let a lot of people know that this was going on.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: They didn't want anybody to steal their ideas, and they also weren't they weren't fame seekers, they really didn't care about being famous, they just wanted to figure out how to fly.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: So they go out in 1900 to Kitty Hawk, um, and they started to do these tests with this um biplane.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: And you know what I mean by biplane?
25:46
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Two wings.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh two wings stacked on top of each other.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it was a kite, and they learned how to make the wings warp and how to control the roll of it, and that was their first step.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: What kind of material was was that made out of?
26:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh it was made of spruce and muslin.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: No, I mean the the kite part.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: Uh spruce and muslin.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: That's muslin, yeah.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: Muslin was kind of the cloth that was um, I guess, rigid enough to um, you know, have some air uh push the air over it, but but also supple enough or stretchy enough that you could stretch it over a uh spruce frame.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: So on October 20th, after they had been out at Kitty Hawk for a while, they actually discovered Kill Devil Hills.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: Like they had not been at that exact point, but they realized these were sand dunes that were a hundred feet high.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: So you said you've been there.
26:42
SPEAKER_00: Have you been there?
26:43
SPEAKER_00: No, no, but I'm curious, are the sand dunes still a hundred feet high?
26:48
SPEAKER_01: Not probably not a hundred feet high, no, they've probably been eroded, but just it's just so windy.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: Everything there, like you can't talk to the person next to you, it's just wind.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: Probably I'm my guess is it's always like that.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: Sand blowing up in your face, too.
27:03
SPEAKER_01: Kind of, yeah, yeah.
27:04
SPEAKER_01: But it's right on the water.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: It's really cool.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: They certainly had a lot of setbacks with weather, with wind, and even getting out there was kind of difficult because at the time there wasn't a bridge.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: I think they had to take a boat out because it's it's these are outer banks, right?
27:20
SPEAKER_00: So these are all little islands, little barrier islands on the coast.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's an island.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: It was right on the coast.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: It's right on the beach.
27:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's you know, it's is you know, just a very windy coastal place.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: But I don't remember like doing any kind of tour or anything like that.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: I just remember going out there and see, I'm sure there was something, but I don't think we did a marker or something.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: How many years ago did you go?
27:46
SPEAKER_01: Maybe like probably 30 years ago.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: Oh wow.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, I would love to check it out, especially after having read all these stories.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, so this was their first time out there.
27:57
SPEAKER_00: After they had done their tests with the kite, they actually um Wilbur got into a glider, and he did about 20 free glides uh on the Kill Devil Hills, and you know how they they didn't sit in these things, right?
28:14
SPEAKER_00: It was a little different back then.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: Do you know do you ever seen how they were positioned?
28:19
SPEAKER_00: Not close up, no.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: So they would lay, it was a biplane, this this uh this glider he was trying, and they would lay on their stomach, and at that time they were just using their weight to shift, and the weight, when they shifted, would allow the wings to warp to do the turning.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: Um and they originally thought they could then like kind of their legs were kind of dangling off the back of the back of the wing.
28:43
SPEAKER_00: They thought they could kind of bend their legs and stand up to land, but they realized with some skids on the bottom of these gliders they could actually land by just sliding on the sand.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: And so so they had they had um they basically came up with that idea, and for five years that was how they flew.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: They so this was 1900.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: Um, they learned a lot after being out there.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: They went back in 1901, and this time they brought a lot more materials.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: They built a workshop and a hangar.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, they were living in tents, but they had to kind of um have all the tools and all the materials and all the wood and all the rope and all the metal and everything out there that they needed to fix these planes.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: And in um 1901, they had a glider that would go uh 400 feet.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: So I wonder what they considered flying, like what their definition was.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: It couldn't be it couldn't be gravity or the wind or their own like momentum that was carrying, right?
29:46
SPEAKER_01: It had to be powered by the thing that they were like what's their definition of flying?
29:50
SPEAKER_00: These are still gliders, so they're still doing tests in 1901.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: So flying at this point, I think, was to leave the ground, to be able to control it, and to I mean, I think you know, the moment you leave the ground and the wind is lifting the wings into the air, you're flying.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: So flying was actually not the hard part.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: They could get up in the air.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: They just um, it was the control, right?
30:15
SPEAKER_00: It was the ability to control, it was the ability to not go too high, not to crash into the ground.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: And this second year, um, they had some long flights, like I said, 400 feet.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: So imagine, you know, a football field and a third.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: That's a pretty, pretty long distance.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: Um, but they were having a lot of problems because the sometimes the thing would kind of whip around the wrong way.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: It didn't have at this part, at this point, it didn't have a uh rudder.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have a rudder on it.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: It was like, imagine two big wings in the front and one small wing in the back, but no vertical stabilizer, like no, no, uh, no vertical um rudder sticking up.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: And even though they had some good flights, um Wilbur was pretty dejected.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: He felt like um he felt like they were not making the progress he hoped they would, and he commented to Orville that he didn't think man would fly for a thousand years during this trip.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: Wow they noted that.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: But guess what they did when they got back?
31:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, this was something nobody had ever done before.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: They built a wind tunnel in their bicycle shop.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: Now you've seen these um, you know, tests of vehicles, cars in a wind tunnel where you see the smoke going over it.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: This was a very crude version of that.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: Have you have you, you know, what do you think of when you think of wind tunnel?
31:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like aerodynamics, uh right?
31:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, trying to figure out aerodynamics and jet stream and all that kind of stuff, yeah.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: Well, guess what they used to power the wind tunnel?
31:47
SPEAKER_00: Horses.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: A bicycle.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: They they hooked a bicycle wheel up and one of them would pedal and it would it would turn a fan, and that fan would create the wind that would um flow.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: And then they were using uh pieces of hacksaws.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: They had these metal hacksaws that they were using to actually test the the the pitch.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: It was mostly about the pitch.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Now, one other thing that that a lot of people don't realize is how the lift of a wing works.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: Do you do you have any thoughts on how a a wing works to lift?
32:22
SPEAKER_00: Is there something called the Bernoulli effect?
32:24
SPEAKER_00: Is that a thing?
32:26
SPEAKER_00: I think that's with water.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Uh is it?
32:29
SPEAKER_01: May maybe it's wind, but but what what would that mean?
32:32
SPEAKER_01: It's about lift, right?
32:34
SPEAKER_01: That there's yeah, there's there's lift under the wing.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: The the the the the wind kind of lifts it goes under the wing.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Um actually the opposite.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: So the way a a good wing is designed, it's flatter on the bottom and curved on the top, and so the wind goes faster on the bottom and slower on the top, and by going slower, it creates a tiny little vacuum.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Like, like basically because the wind is moving slower, somehow that creates a vacuum.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: And you know, the way a vacuum works, it tries to suck in whatever is there.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's so it isn't actually the wind pushing up from the bottom of the wing, it's pulling up from the top of the wing.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: It's that slower air moving over the top of the wing that causes lift.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: And they figure that out in the with the wind tunnel.
33:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: They I mean, people had had sort of known this before, but most wings at that time were flat.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have that curve to it.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: They also realized that um, you remember I was talking about Otto Lillenthaw, the glider guy from Germany?
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, he had written a whole bunch of formulas and calculations.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: Turns out they were wrong.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say physicists must have been learning all this stuff simultaneously, but you're not getting that down to the that stuff down to the bike makers, and the physicists weren't making planes.
33:53
SPEAKER_01: So like they could have talked to each other and maybe save 30 years on this stuff.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the thing about the Wright brothers, is they were both.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: They were they were they could do the math, they could do the engineering, they could actually physically build the stuff, and then they had doers.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: They were they had the guts to go out and actually try it, right?
34:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: And put their risks at life or their lives at risk.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: It's cool that they were brothers because you figure one person doing this might not be able to do this all himself.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, it just like probably takes two to do something.
34:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like like a podcast.
34:29
SPEAKER_00: Equally committed, yeah.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: I mean, imagine listening to just me for an hour.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: That would be that would be tragic.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: But with Alex jumping in, it's entertaining.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: We could release versions where you just cut the other person out.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: Just mute one audio track and and uh it could be like a DIY podcast where you where the listener gets to insert their own things.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: They get to say their own.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: For the Patreon, for the Patreon people, we'll offer that.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: So so in 1902, uh they went out and they had learned so much from this um you know, this wind tunnel that they had built, and they went out and they immediately um started flying.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: They were at this point flying 600 feet, so you know, almost double what they had done the year before.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: They flew over a thousand flights with their glider in 1902.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: Now still no power.
35:25
SPEAKER_00: Um, but this is the point at which they demonstrated lift, control, stability, um, all those things.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: They kind of had that down.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Now it was time to turn to power.
35:35
SPEAKER_01: And so were they ever given other people rides on this?
35:39
SPEAKER_01: Or was it just the two of them?
35:40
SPEAKER_01: Not yet.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: It was the two of them.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: They did have, they did have well, even Catherine wasn't really involved at this point.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: She never came out to uh Kitty Hawk.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: She was a teacher and she was teaching back in Dayton, kind of holding down the house and taking care of their father since their mother was dead.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: But they wrote very often.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: And you know, you just mentioned too about it being brothers, how great that was.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: They were famous for having disagreements and then, but having civil disagreements, having disagreements where they might yell at each other for a minute, but then they would sometimes they're they're said to have actually um each of them would change their mind and take the other's opinion and then argue again.
36:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I feel like if I had a brother, that's how we would be.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, well, you you you got a brother here.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: So they're still disagreeing.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just they've taken the other points, yeah.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: And and to the point where it everything gets better, they're disagreeing with a purpose.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: They're not disagreeing because of ego, they're disagreeing to try and make the best product possible or you know, solve the problem.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's awesome.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: So in 1903, um, on in March, before they went back out to Kitty Hawk while they were in Dayton, they actually applied for a patent for a flying machine based on their 1902 glider.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people say that this was this um at this point, they were further along than anybody had ever been, despite the fact that they didn't have power.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: They were still just gliding.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: Um it was it was a very significant thing because again, they they had discovered the ability to control the aircraft, which people hadn't been able to do up to this point.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: So in 1903, they built the right flyer.
37:18
SPEAKER_00: It was made of spruce and muslin to cover it.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: They carved their own propellers, which I mean, imagine, and these were big propellers.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean, these were you know the size of a man.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: These things were were pretty huge, you know, four, five, six feet.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: Um they those big ass fans, those big ceiling fans.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, the big ass fans, yeah.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, but but um they were made of wood, you know, so these were they had to be carved, they had to be machined, they had to be smooth.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: And the propellers, even though they seem very simple, propellers are actually pretty complicated.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Like they're pretty hard to get just the right pitch and the right curve so that they have maximum efficiency.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, as a matter of fact, some people in modern time had taken some of the Wright brothers' designs for propellers, recreated them, and did efficiency tests, and their efficiency was like 78% or something, which was unheard of at that time.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: So they ended up building the Wright Flyer.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: It was um a machine that was 40 feet with wingspan, had a 40-foot wingspan.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: It weighed 605 pounds, it had a aluminum uh based engine, which was unusual back then.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: The engine block was aluminum for a lightweight.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: And let's guess how many horsepower it was.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: Any guesses?
38:36
SPEAKER_00: Ooh, ooh, okay.
38:38
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm gonna say maybe 12 horsepower.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: Dude, that's exactly right.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: Really?
38:48
SPEAKER_00: Well done, yeah.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: Did you look that up?
38:50
SPEAKER_00: No.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: 12 horsepower.
38:52
SPEAKER_01: I was just going by what we were talking about in the Henry Ford episode.
38:57
SPEAKER_02: You got it, you got it.
38:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: So so the flyer cost about$1,000 to create back then, um, which was in 1903,$1,000 is the equivalent of about$35,000 today.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, there's also this guy I mentioned him earlier, and he was associated with the Smithsonian named Samuel Langley.
39:18
SPEAKER_00: He had spent fifty thousand dollars in government money up to this point to to uh build a you know an airplane and was not nearly as successful.
39:29
SPEAKER_00: So the Wrights did it with a thousand dollars and Samuel Langley of their own money, and Samuel Langley spent fifty thousand dollars in government money and he didn't have a brother.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I guess there was no doge department back then to look into these things.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, um, so they they went back to Kitty Hawk in 1903, and again, very secretive.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: There were only actually about five people out there with them.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: So they had the two brothers and five other guys that they trusted to go out there, and they went to Kill Devil Hills, and uh first day they broke a propeller, and so that took them a few days to get fixed, and then it happened that the day they fixed it was late on a Saturday.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, guess what?
40:11
SPEAKER_00: They're religious, they don't they don't work on Sundays, so they took Sunday off, even though it was like a perfect day to fly.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: And then on December 17th, they finally did their first flight.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: Now, what's really cool about it is um the brothers had the foresight to bring a camera out there, and and there is a picture of that first flight, the very first flight.
40:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's a real picture, it's not a recreation or anything, which blows my mind.
40:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, the guy who took it had no idea, never never operated a camera before.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: And they just said when when when um when Wilbur gets to here, uh squeeze the bulb.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: It was one of those squeeze things.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: You squeezed a uh uh you know a little rubber thing that would trigger the camera, and and he got it perfectly, and so it's a really famous picture.
40:58
SPEAKER_00: Um so they they were able to have several powered flights, but the longest of which that day was 820, no, 852 feet, which is what almost three football fields?
41:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it lasted 59 seconds, and it was um, you know, that was considered the first powered, controlled, heavier than air flight by by a human.
41:23
SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, on the landing, they broke the rudder.
41:27
SPEAKER_00: The rest of the uh plane was okay, but they ended up having to they basically gave up at that point.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: This was December.
41:33
SPEAKER_00: It was very cold, it was very windy.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: What year was this?
41:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh 1903.
41:39
SPEAKER_00: And how high did they go?
41:42
SPEAKER_00: Um I think on that first flight, maybe 10, 20 feet.
41:47
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: They were very cautious about not wanting to go too high.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: They they were trying to keep it low enough so that if there was a catastrophe, it wouldn't kill them.
41:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
41:56
SPEAKER_00: Um, so they ended up breaking the right flyer and they shipped it home, and unfortunately, it actually never flew again.
42:02
SPEAKER_00: They didn't they didn't bother to repair it.
42:04
SPEAKER_00: They had so many ideas on how to make it better, they just built a new one.
42:07
SPEAKER_00: And but that uh plane was repaired by Orville in 1948.
42:13
SPEAKER_00: Uh no, it was repaired by Orville years later, and in 1948, it was put in the Smithsonian Institute.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I've seen that.
42:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's like hanging over everything, right?
42:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's the original one rebuilt uh after the crash.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: Well, after this flight, they were pretty ecstatic.
42:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, they kind of thought we did it, we did it.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: They telegraphed their father back in Dayton, said informed the press, and they left a bunch of, you know, they sent a bunch of information.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: Well, guess what?
42:40
SPEAKER_00: First of all, the press in Dayton and uh most of the press said, nah, it's not far enough.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: You didn't fly far enough to be impressive.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, and they ended up running the story in like the third page next to the farm news or something.
42:56
SPEAKER_00: And then um another newspaper picked up the story, and this is one of those cases of like telephone where you know one person tells a story to another, to another, and the story got published in Virginia, and then eventually again in Dayton, you know, the same story got published, and it was all wrong.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: You know, they said that the rights had flown 10 miles and that they had gone way up in the sky and all this other stuff that wasn't right, so literally not right, and so it kind of um it was kind of a wah wah moment, if you know what I mean.
43:29
SPEAKER_00: Comedy horn, wah wah wah.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: Um so, but that's okay.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, they built the Wright Flyer 2 in 1904, and they decided now that now that they could control it a little bit better, they had a little more confidence that they were going to stay closer to home.
43:46
SPEAKER_00: They actually rented a uh uh field from a guy named Torrance Huffman.
43:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh well, Torrance Huffman was a banker, bank president.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: He owned uh some land, and he basically told them they could fly there for free as long as they didn't hit the cows.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: And so they ended up um doing several uh flights out at Huffman Prairie is what it was called in the Flyer 2, and they were pretty careful.
44:15
SPEAKER_00: Again, they didn't want too many people to see it and to steal their idea, so they really tried to keep it low.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: But unfortunately, the the Huffman Prairie was close to a train station, and so people would be going by in the train and seeing uh seeing this airplane up in the air, and so word got out and people started coming out to see to see this flight, to see this thing.
44:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about it.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: Nobody had seen a man do this before, any person, right?
44:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:43
SPEAKER_00: So at this point, um, this is 1904, uh, they're starting to do things like circles.
44:52
SPEAKER_00: And I know that doesn't sound that impressive, but doing a circle in an airplane, whoa, you know, it would circle the field.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: And uh at one point in 1904 on September 20th, um, Wilbur did a complete circle and covered 4,000 feet, almost a mile in a minute and a half.
45:11
SPEAKER_00: So he's he's cruising along.
45:13
SPEAKER_00: Um they started doing more and more flights, but even at this point, they didn't have a lot of they didn't have a lot of time in the air because these flights were very short.
45:23
SPEAKER_00: Um, they started giving demos, reporters would show up and they would start to do these flights for reporters, so people started to write things up.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: They started um publicizing and printing things in Scientific America and other articles like that.
45:40
SPEAKER_00: And pretty soon they got this idea that, you know, this is pre-World War I, but they started to think about could we sell this to the government?
45:51
SPEAKER_00: You know, would this be something that the government would want to use?
45:54
SPEAKER_00: So they had um several people from the um US military, uh Department of War, and some British officers came out, and also some French officers came out in 1905, saw the observation, and basically the Americans said, you know what, this is not going to work until you can do all these things.
46:18
SPEAKER_00: They set up all these barriers and said, We don't, we don't, we're not interested until you can prove it can do this, you know, it can stay in the air for an hour, it can fly for more than X number of miles, uh, it can carry two people.
46:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, Wilbur and Orville weren't ready for that.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: You know, they they hadn't accomplished all those things yet.
46:37
SPEAKER_00: But the French were very interested, and they ended up going to France, and they were there.
46:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh Wilbur actually went over to France and did a ton of different uh flights for the French over the course of about a nine-month period.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: He stayed in Paris, he traveled around in France, and he gave these um demo flights to Parisians.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: Now, at this time, they actually had built a second seat, they could sit up instead of lying on their stomachs, and they were able to um take passengers up.
47:11
SPEAKER_00: And so they were doing these flights in France.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: The French military paid money for these planes, and they founded the uh their their aircraft company that in in uh yeah, this was something that um became a European company before it was a US company?
47:30
SPEAKER_00: No, they founded it in the US and they and they um and they exported these uh their their planes, the right flyer, they exported them to France initially.
47:40
SPEAKER_00: I just find it interesting that the US didn't jump on this, you know, and kind of made them jump through all these hoops to um to try and sell it to them.
47:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
47:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean this was all still experimental.
47:55
SPEAKER_01: But were they looking at it were we looking at it as a war machine potentially, or for transportation for the public?
48:05
SPEAKER_01: How were they how were they building it?
48:07
SPEAKER_00: It was gonna be more of a um uh war machine, but not really.
48:13
SPEAKER_00: I think initially it was thought of as more of a reconnaissance thing, you know, kind of like the the um Zeppelins were back then.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: They were looking at this as a way that people could go observe the enemy and see what was going on.
48:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, to be fair, if you're only 10 feet off the ground, you do have some work to do.
48:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, no, by this time they're going hundreds of feet.
48:33
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
48:34
SPEAKER_00: By this time they're flying hundreds of feet in the air.
48:36
SPEAKER_00: Um they were able to um basically convince the French government first that it was a useful thing.
48:45
SPEAKER_00: And by that time, they came back, and uh when they came back from France, a lot of people had heard about this.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: This was all taking place in Le Mans, which I think is a famous racing place now, right?
48:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's where they have the 24-hour race, yeah.
48:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
48:59
SPEAKER_00: Well, this was outside of uh outside of Paris in Le Mans.
49:03
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people saw it, a lot of people heard about it, pictures were taken, although they tried to discourage that.
49:08
SPEAKER_00: They often would go into the audience and break cameras of people who weren't authorized to take pictures, it was said, or take them away.
49:15
SPEAKER_00: They they they were gentlemen up to a point.
49:18
SPEAKER_00: Um and while this was going on, uh their sister eventually quit her job as a teacher, and Wilbur had been in France first.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: Catherine and Orville came over to France and were they were all treated like heroes.
49:32
SPEAKER_00: So they did this entire tour.
49:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, Catherine had never been out of the country before, and I don't think Orville had either.
49:38
SPEAKER_00: And so this was like this big moment for them where there are these Americans, and a lot of people were just impressed by their humility, impressed by the fact that they weren't um they weren't fancy, they were very um just down to earth, they didn't seem to be uh, you know, rich or or snooty or anything like that.
49:58
SPEAKER_00: They were just people that everyone could relate to, and the French loved that at that time.
50:04
SPEAKER_00: So a couple of things happened.
50:05
SPEAKER_00: Um they came back to the United States and they applied for a couple of uh patents.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: They had more trouble getting the patents in the United States than they did in France.
50:17
SPEAKER_00: Again, they were able to publish um or or file patents in France more easily than in the U.S.
50:23
SPEAKER_00: They also um went on a tour around the U.S.
50:27
SPEAKER_00: doing more of these flights.
50:29
SPEAKER_00: And at this time, um, there was a guy named Glenn Curtis.
50:34
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever heard that name, Glenn Curtis?
50:36
SPEAKER_00: So Glenn Curtis was another aviator who had worked with some other companies and um had worked with several other uh inventors.
50:46
SPEAKER_00: He glenn Curtis had actually, I think, worked with uh that guy Langley, who was trying to create the plane for Smithsonian.
50:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, they were going to have a race.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: So Glenn Curtis and um Wilbur Wright were going to race planes down the Hudson River in New York as an exhib exhibition.
51:06
SPEAKER_00: And this was all to celebrate um, I guess it was like the hundredth year anniversary of the steamship or something like that.
51:15
SPEAKER_00: I forget what it was.
51:16
SPEAKER_00: It was some big celebration that was happening in in uh New York City.
51:20
SPEAKER_00: They invited the Wright brothers to come out, they invited Glenn Curtis to come out, and they were gonna do this flight down the um down the Potomac River.
51:31
SPEAKER_00: Or no, the Hudson.
51:32
SPEAKER_00: Hudson River.
51:33
SPEAKER_00: Hudson River.
51:34
SPEAKER_00: So um the day they were supposed to fly, the weather was really bad, and they didn't fly.
51:40
SPEAKER_00: And that was one thing also that the Wright brothers were kind of sticklers for.
51:44
SPEAKER_00: They would not fly if the conditions weren't right.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: They didn't care how many kings or presidents or uh, you know, movie starlets or whatever were sitting in the audience, they would shut it down.
51:53
SPEAKER_00: And people would come out to watch them fly and be disappointed because they wouldn't fly because of the weather.
51:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
51:59
SPEAKER_00: Safety first.
52:00
SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
52:01
SPEAKER_00: Would you, if you knew that there were thousands of people waiting to see you do something and the conditions were iffy, would you still do it?
52:09
SPEAKER_00: No, man.
52:10
SPEAKER_00: Safety first.
52:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
52:12
SPEAKER_00: I I don't know.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I would I I feel like I might throw caution to the wind, so to speak, in those situations.
52:18
SPEAKER_01: I think even the Willendas preached that ironically.
52:23
SPEAKER_01: Safety first.
52:25
SPEAKER_00: Until they didn't, right?
52:26
SPEAKER_00: Well, we're not gonna use a net, but safety first.
52:30
SPEAKER_00: Um so they as part of this celebration, they had Glenn Curtis and Wilbur Wright.
52:37
SPEAKER_00: They were gonna do this flight, kind of a race down the Hudson River.
52:41
SPEAKER_00: The weather was bad.
52:43
SPEAKER_00: Glenn Curtis actually had another obligation somewhere else, and so he ended up going, uh leaving, and the next day, without any announcement, um, Wilbur Wright got into his airplane and flew um from Governor Island around the Statue of Liberty and back.
53:04
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's awesome.
53:05
SPEAKER_00: Supposedly, this was the largest number of people that had ever seen a flight because millions of people came out onto the rooftops, and he was up in the air for like 50 minutes or something like that.
53:17
SPEAKER_00: And it was kind of windy, it was a little bit risky for him, not something he would have originally done, but he did it, and it was uh kind of one of those moments, and there's actually a picture, you can Google it and find it, it's amazing, of uh Wilbur Wright circling the Statue of Liberty in the Wright Flyer.
53:34
SPEAKER_00: Cool, pretty awesome stuff.
53:37
SPEAKER_00: At this point, they have a uh flying school that they've created where they're teaching pilots how to fly.
53:44
SPEAKER_00: They have their aircraft company um that they're selling airplanes to different uh people.
53:51
SPEAKER_00: They actually um they actually kind of took maybe a a plan from Henry Ford and and called one of their uh flights the right flyer model E.
54:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, they started naming them after letters, sure.
54:04
SPEAKER_00: Um and they are just big time celebrities, as is Catherine.
54:09
SPEAKER_00: And this is allowing them to first of all live a little bit better life.
54:15
SPEAKER_00: They had been in their same house as bachelors with their sister and their father, um, and they ended up um buying a piece of land, they were gonna build a bigger house outside of Dayton, a little further out of town.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, while this was all going on, a couple things were happening.
54:33
SPEAKER_00: First of all, there were all kinds of legal flight fights going on.
54:37
SPEAKER_00: People were fighting them about their patents, and they were fighting people about patent infringement.
54:43
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine what a wild west it was back then as far as building airplanes?
54:48
SPEAKER_01: Seriously, yeah.
54:48
SPEAKER_01: Every little part was probably patented.
54:52
SPEAKER_00: Once everybody had seen their airplane and it was kind of public knowledge, um, people started building airplanes.
55:00
SPEAKER_00: Like companies were popping up all over, and they were they were actually um infringing on their copyrights or their um patents.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: And so what happened is Wilbur got very involved in these patent uh infringement suits.
55:14
SPEAKER_00: They were suing people, and this was all stuff they didn't really want to be doing.
55:18
SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, they got it into it with um Chanuute, you know, the guy who had originally been one of their fans and friends who had uh who had told them about flying in um in the wind and sandy areas.
55:31
SPEAKER_00: They got into a a scuffle with him, they got into a scuffle with Glenn Curtis, they got into a scuffle with a bunch of people because they were actually in the right in in most cases.
55:43
SPEAKER_00: The rights were actually just defending what was theirs, but they realized that this was um, you know, it's just gonna be a uphill battle.
55:52
SPEAKER_00: Kind of, you know, this is one of those things where everybody wants to build an airplane and now you've got to fight all these people.
55:58
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
55:59
SPEAKER_00: They they actually got into it with the Smithsonian, even.
56:02
SPEAKER_00: Um Smithsonian was still using their technology to try and build airplanes.
56:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, this took a big toll on Wilbur, and Wilbur unfortunately um got sick in 1912.
56:18
SPEAKER_00: He returned to Dayton uh after he had been on a trip to Boston, and then um he got sick again, and guess what he got?
56:29
SPEAKER_00: Typhoid?
56:30
SPEAKER_00: Yep, he got typhoid fever, and it was something that he kind of would get better and then he would get worse.
56:38
SPEAKER_00: And on May 30th, uh 1912, he died.
56:42
SPEAKER_00: Wilbur did.
56:43
SPEAKER_00: Now think about it, just nine years before that, less than nine years before that, is when he had taken the first flight, you know, first powered flight, and all the stress of it just kind of killed him.
56:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was a young guy too, huh?
56:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
57:00
SPEAKER_00: Um, I guess he was uh forty-five years old at that point and had just kind of you know become what he had hoped to be.
57:10
SPEAKER_00: Now, upon his death, Orville took over the Wright Company, and he was awarded all kinds of um medals and honors.
57:22
SPEAKER_00: He was able to um continue to fly.
57:25
SPEAKER_00: And that's you know what, there's actually another kind of ironic thing.
57:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, Orville had been in both of the brothers had been in some crashes, particularly at Huffman, uh the Huffman Prairie flights.
57:37
SPEAKER_00: They had they had had some pretty bad crashes.
57:39
SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, one resulted in a passenger's death.
57:42
SPEAKER_00: They had a uh military guy flying with them, and I think it was Orville that crashed, and the other guy died.
57:48
SPEAKER_00: So there was a period of time where neither of them flew for a while, um, and then Wilbur died, and then Orville did go back to flying.
57:58
SPEAKER_00: So Orville was able to see what happened with aviation through World War I and World War II, and he died in 1948.
58:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so you know, he had a much longer life than his brother, um, you know, I guess into his 70s, but he um got kind of withdrawn during his last years and actually got into a scrap with his sister, Catherine, who had been so kind to Ken.
58:30
SPEAKER_00: His his sister had been like kind of like a surrogate mother to both the brothers, and when his sister at a later age, like close to close to um 50 years old, decided to get married and move out of Orville's house, Orville got really defensive about it and um kind of you know didn't have a great relationship with her uh up until the end.
58:54
SPEAKER_00: That's his dirty secret.
58:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, really kind of the only the only apparent blight.
59:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, after all of this, um there is a little bit of uh rivalry between two states.
59:08
SPEAKER_00: One of them is Ohio, because that's where the Wrights were from, and one of them is um, of course, North Carolina, because that's where they first flew.
59:17
SPEAKER_00: And both of those states have a quarter.
59:20
SPEAKER_00: You know how a few years ago the United States did a state quarter, and you know what's on both those on the both of those uh quarters?
59:28
SPEAKER_00: The Wright brothers?
59:29
SPEAKER_00: The Wright Flyer, yep.
59:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's cool.
59:31
SPEAKER_01: I know give it to them both.
59:34
SPEAKER_00: Um Ohio's has the 1905 Wright Flyer 3, and North Carolina's has the original Wright Flyer flying in uh Kitty Hawk.
59:45
SPEAKER_00: Now, also interesting, Ohio's also has um Neil Armstrong on the quarter because he was from Ohio and he was first man on the moon.
59:56
SPEAKER_00: And Neil Armstrong, when he went to the moon, took with him a piece of muslin from the original Wright Flyer and left it on the moon.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_01: Is that what you mean by people crossing paths?
1:00:11
SPEAKER_00: They crossed paths with uh several presidents, um, including uh Teddy Roosevelt, you know, during the early 1900s, um, who was who is a former person on the show.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, and and uh Neil Armstrong.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if they ever met Henry Ford.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: They must have.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_00: Um I think they have.
1:00:31
SPEAKER_00: I think they did, yeah.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_00: That was another one that they met.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_00: Um and yeah, it was just kind of amazing that these two brothers had been so single-minded for so many years, and that they were able to kind of crack the code on something that so many other bigger organizations with more funding weren't able to do.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_01: I think what's interesting is that you if you didn't know anybody, you'd think that the bicycle was around for a couple hundred years, and then the car was around for a hundred years, and then airplanes, but these were all within a couple of decades that bicycles, cars, and airplanes were all kind of taken off at the same time.
1:01:15
SPEAKER_01: And like in 1880, they didn't have any, there was none of those like really prevalent.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_01: And then by 1930, there was all three everywhere.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_00: All three very well developed.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_00: You know, they were they weren't they weren't the original um sort of they weren't the original models that were barely that would barely fly.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_00: They were, you know, they were popular and people were doing it.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it's amazing.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_00: And it's also amazing that from 1903 to 1969, um we you know, in 66 years of development, we went from uh lying on the belly of the bottom wing, flying in the sand, to landing on the moon.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_01: I agree, that's mind-blowing.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_01: But what's also kind of crazy is that in the 60 years since then, we haven't really advanced much farther than that at all.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I guess there's been different versions of spaceflight, but um not in the same at the same rate for sure.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, definitely the rate of the rate of innovation has slowed down.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_01: And we were flying at the speed of sound in the 70s and don't even do that anymore.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, no, we were flying in the speed of sound in the 50s.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_00: Like uh Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the in the 1950s.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, as recently as like the 1990s, we were doing that for travel and we don't do it.
1:02:39
SPEAKER_01: With the Concorde, and so we kind of went backwards with that, yeah.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_00: Well, it is it is very exciting, I think, these days that there is the possibility of another uh moon landing.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_00: There is a possibility, you know, it seems like right now federal funding for different programs is all kind of up in the air, so who knows?
1:02:57
SPEAKER_00: But it does seem like we are on track with the Artemis program to uh, I believe in 2025 or 2026 orbit the moon and then in the following year land back on the moon, which would be Yeah, and I'm sure SpaceX isn't gonna get cut, so we're we'll probably find that they'll they'll they'll fly up there and they'll have a Tesla in the belly of the thing and get it out and drive around on the moon with it.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's uh Orville and Wilbur Wright, true American heroes who, you know, for were were truly the epitome of ingenuity, hard work, humility, and all the things that we've always valued in the United States.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_03: Welcome right, brothers built playing from sticks and drums and kites.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_03: That's how I like to match me, let's leave it.