Curiosity Solves Everything: How the Wright Brothers Changed History

Part 2 of “Human Flight” by Kevin Cook

April 16, 2023
156th Anniversary of Wilbur Wright’s Birth

In Part 1 of this series, The Powerball of 1896, I described the confluence of events that led Wilbur and Orville Wright to reengage a fascination of their youth that had lay dormant for over a decade, as business pursuits in printing and bicycles took most of their efforts.

And I marveled at how it took nearly three more years before Wilbur would write a fateful letter to the Smithsonian Institution to gain access to documents which accelerated the next leg of their aviation adventure. I’m going to share most of that letter here, but first something else wonderful I discovered on Good Friday of this past Easter weekend.

If it was not entirely clear from the “Powerball” essay, I was astounded by the collision of circumstances which put the tenacious brothers at the epicenter of potential world-changing discoveries. I say “potential” because none of it was close at hand, let alone certain. What I wrote is worth repeating to set the context for what I stumbled across from a much more important voice…

The unraveling of the discovery, invention, and exponential explosion of powered flight is literally jaw-dropping when you see what happened. It was against most odds that anyone would succeed, let alone the recluse, bicycle shop boys, Wilbur and Orville Wright. As newspapers of the day poked fun at those who tried to invent flying machines, and claimed it would take a million years or more to get it right, you could say there was a winning “powerball” ticket purchased in Dayton, Ohio in 1896.

This sentiment has an extension which applies today to our lives, especially that of every entrepreneur, scientist, and inventor. Because as you dive further into what the Wrights overcame to give birth to aviation, you will become engaged with a remarkable story of perseverance and faith against most (if not all) reasonable odds.

Any builder or creator who is struggling, disheartened, and considering throwing in the towel could draw inspiration from what they faced. A separate book could be written just focused on their trials, errors, defeats, and relentless commitment to their own curiosity. Then again, that’s what David McCullough has already given us with his history, The Wright Brothers.

With this perspective, I sat down on the evening of Good Friday to see what else YouTube might hold in its treasure chambers about the boys from Dayton. And I found a gem. In May of 2015, after David McCullough’s history was published, he sat on a stage in New York City with a fellow chronicler of Americana, Ken Burns. The two entertained the audience with stories and questions about the Wrights, aeronautics, and the work of history in general.

And then about 21 minutes into the hour-long conversation (with subsequent Q&A), David really took pause to make a point you could tell he believed was extremely important…

“I could have known Orville Wright. Many of you here tonight could have known Orville Wright… he didn’t die until 1948. So as history goes, this was just the other day… and the idea that most people know nothing about them — I knew nothing about them when I first started on this project — is to me a mistake. And it’s too bad. And I think that with all the emphasis we’re putting today on innovation, all these young people who want to get into startup ventures of this and that kind, and the importance of innovation to our future, to our economy… I think that everybody in that field ought to read the story of Orville and Wilbur Wright, and to see how much more there is to it than just being smart, or brilliant, or advantaged with some position in a place where you can rub elbows with other people who were involved with innovation.”

This is a theme that comes constantly through McCullough’s book: that the brothers had little money, unfinished high school educations and no college, no connections, and little support for their ideas, outside of immediate family. And throughout the remainder of the interview with Ken Burns, he reiterates over and again the sentiment “They would not give up. They would not quit.” I encourage you to watch the recording on the YouTube channel of “The 92nd Street Y” at your soonest leisure. It’s an hour spent better than anything on Netflix…

David McCullough with Ken Burns on The Wright Brothers

Wilbur Writes Washington

McCullough on a small event of May 30, 1899 that would change history…

Wilbur, home alone and likely able to focus his thoughts, sat down to “write what would be one of the most important letters of his life. Indeed, given all that was set in motion, it would be one of the most important letters in history.”

Here is the first of the infamous 2-page handwritten letter, courtesy of the Smithsonian archives…

Wright Cycle Company
1127 West Third St.,
Dayton, Ohio. May 30, 1899
The Smithsonian Institution,

Washington:
Dear Sirs:

I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes after the style of Cayley’s and Penaud’s machines. My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable. It is only a question of knowledge and skill just as in all acrobatic feats. Birds are the most perfectly trained gymnasts in the world and are specially well fitted for their work, and it may be that man will never equal them, but no one who has watched a bird chasing an insect or another bird can doubt that feats are preformed which require three or four times the effort required in ordinary flight. I believe that simple flight at least is possible to man and that the experiments and investigations of a large number of independent workers will result in the accumulation of information and knowledge and skill which will finally lead to accomplished flight.

(end of excerpt from Wilbur’s letter)

Note: “bats” is the name given to the early toy helicopters, made with rubber bands and propellers, like the Penaud model Bishop Wright brought home for the boys in the 1870s.

Wilbur’s humility in the letter is almost as strong as his curiosity. He wrote as a potential contributor to the quest, not an expert nor a theorist — although it’s quite possible he’d already read more and thought more about the flight of birds than anyone in Washington. And on the second page he wrote in part…

“I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language. I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add my mite to help on the future workers who will attain final success.”

By “not a crank” he meant to assure the officials of the Smithsonian that he was not an aviation “crackpot” like the newspapers made fun of at every chance. He did not intend to bring his own narrow and rigid ideas about how human flight should happen to force upon others.

The Floodgates Open

The response to Wilbur’s letter came very quickly on June 2 from the Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Richard Rathbun. In a June 14 reply, Wilbur offered gratitude for “a list of selected books treating on aerial navigation.”

And he included $1 to pay for an additional report on Samuel Pierpont Langley’s research titled “Experiments in Aerodynamics.” Recall from Part 1 that Langley achieved his first successful powered (but unmanned) flights with his “aerodrome” in 1896 on the Potomac river, marking new record distances of 2,300 feet and 3,300 feet. It’s possible that if Langley, as Secretary of the Smithsonian, had been in charge of providing documents to Wilbur, it may not have happened as quickly and faithfully as it was executed by Rathbun. We will learn later why.

What’s interesting about Rathbun is that he may have been one of the most unsung catalysts in the entire adventure of flight. From the Smithsonian archives…

Born in Buffalo, New York in 1852, Rathbun began work in his family’s quarry at age 15. Intrigued by fossils often uncovered by workmen, he began collecting samples and soon realized he wanted a career in science, not business.

Rathbun became a curator at the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, enrolled at Cornell University in 1871 for courses in geology and paleontology, and became an assistant in zoology at the Boston Society of Natural History in 1873.

It should not escape our imaginations here that Rathbun was possibly delighted to help Wilbur Wright, and his scientific mind worked fast to get the best materials on flight research into the Ohioan’s industrious hands.

Within the pamphlets and document lists received, two names stood out in the early history of American aviation: Octave Chanute and, of course, Langley. I introduced Langley and Chanute as 19th century aviation pioneers in Part 1 of this series and the history of their contributions deserves many more pages than I can provide here. But the bottom line is that their work did not accomplish manned, powered, controlled flight. Those 3 conditions are essential when discussing the achievement of flight with an airplane.

Yet this does not discount their contributions. Instead, their work — the achievements, failures, models, commitments and limitations — was intellectual and research fuel for what Wilbur and Orville were about to conceive and attempt, beginning in the summer of 1899. In fact, Chanute became an ardent supporter by 1901 and visited the brothers at Kitty Hawk on three different occasions right up to their historic flights of 1903. More on this in Part 3.

Gifts of the Birds

There are countless resources online to learn about what Chanute and Langley accomplished, especially from original documents at the Library of Congress. In this essay, I want to focus on a much more obscure — but possibly more powerful — factor that inspired Wilbur and Orville in 1899. A third research source which they were introduced to from the Smithsonian was the work of Louis Pierre Mouillard (September 30, 1834 — September 20, 1897), a French artist and innovator who worked on human mechanical flight in the second half of the 19th century.

Mouillard based much of his work on the investigation of birds in Algeria and Cairo where he spent countless hours observing vultures soaring on air currents and made detailed studies of their wing movements, lift, and turning capabilities. In some circles around the early 1900s, he was considered the father of aviation. According to Wikipedia…

“Mouillard’s most famous work, L’Empire de l’Air, in which he proposed fixed-wing gliders, was published in France in 1881 and soon became a widely recognized classic. It was translated into English by the Smithsonian Institution in their annual report of 1892 and reprinted in 1893 as The Empire Of The Air [an English translation].”

The translation was fortuitous because as much as Wilbur was a voracious reader, he had not taken the time to learn French. David McCullough wrote in his 2015 history on the Wrights…

“Nothing Wilbur had yet read so affected him. He would long consider it one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature ever published. For Wilbur, flight had become a cause, and Mouillard one of the great missionaries of the cause.”

Remember, this is three years after Wilbur had become infected by the magic of bird locomotion and aeronautics in 1896 and knew in his deepest convictions that he wanted to replicate what “aves” could do. Mouillard only ignited the bonfire in Wilbur’s imagination about what must be possible if one would study in detail the flight of birds and then translate their mechanics into designs that could be fabricated to propel men.

In his book, McCullough shares passages from Mouillard that heighten the intensity of the bonfire. The Frenchman was an evangelist about the possibility of human flight from the clear facts of bird flight. And this fired Wilbur’s faith like nothing else, since he was an easy and willing convert. He knew that instead of strapping an engine to untested wings and flight controls, he would first conduct experiments on the best ways to emulate the gliding and turning of birds.

He was inspired to ride his bicycle down to the bluffs of the Miami River south of Dayton and observe the flights of buzzards in the same way that Mouillard had done in Egypt, with whatever telescopes and field glasses he could employ. Wilbur took detailed notes of the soaring birds and shared them with Orville.

And I was inspired last week to search online for any original sources about the Frenchman who inspired Wilbur. Wonderfully, I found a webpage with an article reproduced from 1912 titled “What Mouillard Did.” It was written by Wilbur Wright.

What better source I cannot imagine. And I believe McCullough must have also found inspiration in this original article too (available at the Library of Congress archives) because Wilbur truly set out to honor a pioneer who studied birds so intently for clues about human flight that even Octave Chanute would give him credit.

Wilbur wrote for a magazine called Aero Club of America Bulletin, on the inauguration of a monument to Mouillard at Heliopolis, Egypt, February 25, 1912. Here is how he opened his piece…

THE erection at Cario, Egypt, of a monument to L. P. Mouillard recalls attention to one of the greatest missionaries of the flying cause which the 19th century produced. Mouilard was a Frenchman who passed a large part of his life in Algeria and Egypt, where his attention was attracted by the wonderful soaring of vultures on fixed wings. His imagination was greatly excited by what he saw, and during the remainder of his life he was like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight. In 1881 he published a book called “The Empire of the Air,” which is one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature that has ever been published. In his introduction he says:

“If there be a domineering, tyrant thought it is the conception that the problem of flight may be solved by man. When once this idea has invaded the brain it possesses it exclusively. It is then a haunting thought, a walking nightmare, impossible to cast off. If now we consider the pitying contempt with which such a line of research is appreciated, we may somewhat conceive the unhappy lot of the poor investigator whose soul is thus possessed.”

As McCullough notes from his extensive reading of Wright letters and other original documents, Wilbur considered the insights and imagination of Mouillard to be foundational inspiration for his own belief and studies that man should be able to follow the birds in some way.

Imagine if Wilbur had not been so infected by this “haunting thought, a walking nightmare, impossible to cast off.” The world might be a very different place as it entered World War I. And then, given the vagaries of chance and circumstance, who knows where the allies would have been two decades later before the second World War.

Wilbur continues his soliloquy for Mouillard’s work and his Empires of the Air…

Throughout the book are to be found passages of high literary quality, and the charm is so great that more than one cold-blooded reader has been incited to emulate the example of the birds. There is no doubt that the reading of this book was one of the main factors in inducing Mr. Chanute to undertake his experiments, and I know that it was one of the inspiring causes of the efforts of the Wright brothers. Compared with this book, which is devoted almost entirely to observations relating to birds, the ordinary books on ornithology are childish. With the possible exception of Lilienthal, none of the men who wrote on aviation in the 19th century possessed such power to draw recruits to a belief in the possibility of motorless human flight.

As a missionary, Mouillard stood at the very top along with Lilienthal and Chanute. As a scientific student of the laws and principles of aerodynamics he is not to be mentioned in the same class with such men as Cayley, Whenham, Penaud, Langley, Lilienthal, Chanute and Maxim. He was a careful observer of birds, and possessed a genius for expressing his thoughts and feelings in words, but beyond that he was mediocre. He made a few feeble attempts to construct soaring machines, but their design and construction were so crude that he failed to surpass the futile attempts at gliding made by Cayley and Wenham who long antedated him. It remained for Lilienthal to definitely employ this mode of experiment, and thereby win for himself a glory which the world will never forget.

Pitch, Roll, and Yaw: The Mechanics of Sailing and Flying

From McCullough’s The Wright Brothers, Chapter 2: “The Dream Takes Hold” (pgs. 37–38, paperback edition)…

For Wilbur and Orville the dream had taken hold. The works of Lillienthal and Mouillard, the brothers would attest, had “infected us with their own unquenchable enthusiasm and transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers.”

They would design and build their own experimental glider-kite, drawing on much they had read, much they had observed about birds in flight, and, importantly, from considerable time thinking. They had made themselves familiar with the language of aeronautics, the terms used in explaining the numerous factors involved in attaining “equilibrium” or balance in flight, where balance was quite as crucial as in riding a bicycle.

After all their studies of Lilienthal, Langley, Chanute, and Mouillard the brothers saw that equilibrium was everything. They concluded that Lilienthall had spent considerable effort trying to achieve balance and control by shifting his weight underneath his gliders. Based on what they understood about the lift of wings and the 3 dimensions of movement for a bird that were controlled by those wings, that effort seemed insufficient, even futile, for what was required.

It was known for a century that lift was created by the single-side curvature or camber of wings (rounded on top, flatish on the bottom) meeting the wind, such that air had to pass more quickly over the top to equalize the pressure. In essence, air moves faster across a curved surface, and with sufficient speed, this causes lower pressure on top and lifted birds even without wings flapping or being pushed by upward air currents.

Lift had been understood in theory for some time since, in 1799, Sir George Cayley became the first person to identify the four opposing aerodynamic forces of flight: weight, lift, drag, and thrust. He was standing on the aerodynamic shoulders of Newton and Bernoulli who both made significant mathematical insights about air and fluid dynamics.

While this knowledge was vital for achieving heavier-than-air flight, not much progress had been made a century later because of the control and equilibrium challenges that had still not been overcome. It was one thing to know how something might glide or soar, and quite another to replicate how birds actually got the job done of climbing, turning, and staying aloft.

But Wilbur and Orvile, after reading Marey and Pettigrew (see Part 1) and now Mouillard on the majesty of aerial locomotion, were convinced that birds held the key to the mystery. They just needed to understand how the three dimensions of movement for a bird in flight were designed and generated around three axes of control similar to what was already commonplace knowledge about seafaring vessels.

In order to review the ancient concepts from sailing — since it’s important going forward to understand the specific meanings of terms like pitch, roll and yaw — here is a basic description that illustrates the three primary types of movements that physical bodies, obedient to gravity, have to navigate through any three-dimensional space…

The lateral or pitch axis is an imaginary line running horizontally across the width of a ship and through the center of mass. A pitch motion is an up-or-down movement of the bow (front) and stern (rear) of the ship. The pitch up and down of a ship on the waves is often what causes many to become seasick.

The longitudinal or roll axis is an imaginary line running horizontally through the length of the ship (bow to stern), also through its center of mass, and parallel to the waterline. A roll motion is a side-to-side or port-starboard tilting motion of the ship around this axis, what we think of as the boat “rocking.”

The vertical or yaw axis is an imaginary line running vertically through the ship and its center of mass. A yaw motion is a side-to-side movement of the bow and stern of the ship, critical for turning and navigating to a destination.

Translating these ancient concepts for flight — and one might be curious where the rudder is going to show up in a big way eventually — here we have the three axes of control for winged creatures and vessels…

1. Pitch: Head up or down. A bird could obviously climb or dive as it tilted or “pitched” its body around an imaginary center line that stretched from one wing tip to the other. Pitch had become common terminology to describe this angle of forward attack into the air. The wings did not remain static, of course, as they were the bone, muscle, and feather apparatus constantly maneuvering to cause the pitch up or down on its lateral body axis, thus exposing more or less of the wings in different degrees to the oncoming air. The Wrights would soon begin experimenting with “elevator” controls that could directly change the pitch of their aircraft, but they called them horizontal rudders.
2. Roll: Body rotation left or right. A bird seemed to turn by rolling its body along a longitudinal axis so that one wing would tilt higher as the other tilted lower. The roll, or bank as it was sometimes called, could create a turn, or just a loss in altitude. How birds did this was a big part of the mystery. In straight and level flight, the lateral and longitudinal axes can be pictured as parallel to the ground, and thus to gravity. Any change of these angles, it was learned much later, could result in excess gravitational forces.
3. Yaw: Nose pivot left or right. A mightily important movement because it determined the direction through space one might pursue, as if the body in motion pivoted upon a vertical axis. It was the last third of the puzzle; important but not immediately intuitive to the Wright brothers, nor few before them. Which is ironic considering that the one control that was already proven for over a thousand years was the rudder of a ship for pivoting the stern and thus turning the bow.

These three axes — lateral-pitch, longitudinal-roll, and vertical-yaw — are each perpendicular to the others and intersect at the center of gravity for an object in motion. While the path to convert this knowledge from sailing to flying seemed a huge stretch, and the Wrights knew little of sailing, they were convinced they could pursue that venture because they had become as intoxicated with the dream as Mouillard.

I will have to research further to find who may have considered a rudder vital for controlling flight in the “fluid of air” — as it’s not apparently obvious how birds use their tails for directional control or balance, while it was plainly clear how sailors controlled ships with rudders in the fluid of water. For now, in the evolution of the Wright discoveries, yaw essentially took third-place in terms of solution-seeking because it was such a derivative of the first two solutions.

What the wings were doing seemed to have the most impact on flight. Precisely what bird wings were doing, in constant twisting-reaction motions, would likely be impossible to duplicate. But understanding how they achieved control could lead to powerful new insights for any aspiring human aviator. Whoever advanced past the first and biggest challenge, control of the wings, would be the kings of aviation, as we shall see.

All the while, journalists and scientific “experts” of the day continued to ridicule anyone who experimented with flight. It was deemed an impossible feat, a fool’s errand pursued only by the most eccentric “cranks and crackpots,” as McCullough described the language used in newspapers at the time.

From Wheels to Wings

What was lost on many observers of Wilbur and Orville is how their natural ingenuity with bicycles energized their study of the physics of flight. Bicycles have only two axes of movement to maintain balance. These are performed by steering the handlebars left or right (yaw) and by leaning the body left or right (roll). There was little worry about up or down (pitch) since they weren’t doing BMX tricks off of big-air ramps in those days.

But the key insight here is that the Wright brothers knew intuitively from their bicycle experience that yaw and roll were best achieved in unison, often simultaneously, just like a ship sailed the water. You turned your bike by pivoting handlebars that steered a wheel both (1) around a vertical yaw axis and (2) around a lateral roll axis as you leaned into the turn. The stuff we learn intuitively as a grade-schooler when our parents push us off without training wheels is a fluid, gymnastic art that relies on innate body intelligence… a multidimensional dance like any aspiring athlete, especially birds.

While gathering information on what the boys knew and didn’t know, I found an article titled “The Bicycle That Flew at Kitty Hawk” by Dr. Richard Stimson, who grew up near Dayton in the 1930s and would often see Orville in the suburb of Oakwood before the younger Wright died in 1948. Dr. Stimson created an extensive series of articles on his site WrightStories.com starting in 2001. Here is an excerpt which sums up what we are learning about now…

The Wrights also saw that an airplane had to be more complicated than a bicycle because there were three axes of movement to maintain balance. The pilot must control (1) roll, (2) yaw (nose left and right) and (3) pitch (nose up and down). The axes of movement must be performed in synchronization just like riding a bicycle.

Their insight led them to search for a built-in mechanical means to enable the pilot to execute the necessary aerodynamic changes to maintain balance in the three dimensions with a minimum of physical effort. This led them to the critical breakthrough concept of wing warping as a means to control the roll dimension by the torsion of the wing tips.

We’ll get to this new concept of “wing warping” coming up.

Dr. Stimson passed in 2018 at the age of 86 and I encourage you to visit his wonderful site, Wright Stories. If only David McCullough had met Richard Stimson, the stories of the boy growing up in the shadow of Orville that might have ended up in the historian’s book.

From McCullough, page 38…

Wilbur’s observations of birds in flight had convinced him that birds use more “positive and energetic methods of regaining equilibrium” than that of a pilot trying to shift the center of gravity with his own body. It had occurred to him that a bird adjusts the tips of his wings, so as to present the tip of one wing at a raised angle, the other at a lowered angle. Thus his balance was controlled by “utilizing dynamic reactions of the air instead of shifting weight.”

The chief need was skill rather than machinery. It was impossible to fly without both knowledge and skill — of this Wilbur was already certain. And skill came only from experience — experience in the air. He calculated that in the five years Lilienthal had devoted to gliders and gliding, he spent a total of only five hours in actual flight. It was hardly enough and not how he and Orville would proceed.

(end of McCullough excerpt)

An Elegant Solution

This passionate focus that the brothers shared led to an August 1899 “startup” — absent venture capital — that would change the world. In the 2nd floor machine room of their bicycle shop they began to build their first experimental “flyer” in a kite form with a 5-foot wingspan. But something curious happened a few weeks earlier that may have been the final spark to build something that had never been conceived before.

The boys knew that the one factor that none of their predecessors could master was balance and control, in the midst of wind and air forces that were out of their control. And the one thing that the Wrights understood about balance from their bicycle expertise is that riding and controlling a bike was best achieved by a gradual “bank and turn” and back-and-forth that had to be slowly learned through experience.

So they already knew intuitively what a moving turn, against gravity, involved. They just needed to improve on what Lilienthal had started with his 2,000 glides by figuring out how turning could be mastered against the wind instead of the ground.

From The Henry Ford Museum of Innovation website in their article What If Bicycles Held the Secret to Human Flight?…

The Wright brothers studied birds and recognized that when turning or performing the roll motion, a bird simultaneously raised the tip of one wing while lowering the tip of the other. However, observing birds in flight never produced the “aha!” moment the brothers expected. Instead, the bicycle business clarified the problem of controlling roll, and ultimately, flight.

One day in the shop in July 1899, Wilbur was talking to a customer and holding the rectangular cardboard box for an innertube he had likely just sold or replaced. And he became conscious of an unconscious act of twisting the box between his two hands, holding diagonal corner edges of each end and rotating them in opposite directions. It was then that it dawned on him that this could be a way for a bi-wing plane to twist its wings and achieve some of the aerial control that a bird must have in the wind.

With the fresh idea of “wing warping” it was truly all set in motion now. If they had known then that this insight would lead to several more years of frustration, confusion, and hardship, with no end in sight, they might have given up right then. But I doubt it. The project consumed them and they would get plenty of chances to be disappointed and disheartened by failures, injuries, and dead-ends. But, again, “they never quit.”

From the Wright-Brothers.org site…

Wilbur had hit upon what engineers call the “elegant solution” to his and Orville’s control problem. It was not the most important discovery the Wright brothers made, but it was the first and possibly the most thrilling. The elation of having stumbled upon an effective solution to a problem that had eluded men for centuries was the hook that drew the brothers on to seven years of painstaking, dangerous work. This was the first of a long series of thorny aeronautical problems the brothers had to solve one by one until they at last arrived at one of the most elegant machines of all time — the world’s first practical airplane.

Their first aircraft was something like a glider kite made with bamboo and paper. Its 5-foot wingspan used double wings, as Octave Chanute had done. To test their idea of wing warping, they created a system of cords attached to sticks to manipulate and twist the wings in opposite directions from the ground. One wonders if this was the first such design that inspired later kiting enthusiasts to build similar rigging for complex, ground-controlled aerobatics. In August, Wilbur tested the kite by himself in a field. From historical documents, McCullough wasn’t able to determine why Orville wasn’t present, but he included this excerpt from their later description…

According to Wilbur’s account of the tests [Orville later wrote], the model… responded promptly to the warping of the surfaces… when he shifted the upper surface backward by the manipulation of the sticks attached to flying chords, the nose of the machine turned downward as was intended; but in diving downward it created a slack in the flying chords, so that he was not able to control further. The model made such a rapid dive to the ground that the small boys present fell on their faces to avoid being hit.

Despite this mixed result, McCullough wrote “the brothers felt the test had plainly demonstrated the efficiency of their system of control, and that the time had come to begin work on a man-carrying glider.”

As McCullough relates so well, the dream had indeed taken hold in a matter of less than two months, from that May 30 letter to the Smithsonian into the early summer of 1899. And you could say that after their glider-kite test in August, the dream now had visible wings.

The Legacy of Wilbur Wright: April 16, 1867 — May 30, 1912

“A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadfastly, he lived and died.” — Milton Wright on his son

In this essay, I have tried to describe the intense curiosity and conviction which led the brothers to accomplish what they did over the next four years. This is important context because of all the trials, errors, failures, and disappointments they were going to experience from 1900 to 1903. As I wrote earlier, none of their success was yet visible, much less certain. And they did it mostly alone. Then no one believed them for years until they flew in France in 1908. Some even tried to steal their crown as “first in flight.”

Inseparable in life, Wilbur Wright did not accompany his younger brother to see another three decades. As fate would have it, he died on May 30, 1912 at the age of 45, a full life but maybe only half done with what was to become of his efforts over the next half century. Increasingly after 1908, Wilbur’s time was occupied by extensive traveling for business matters between Europe, New York, Washington, and home in Dayton. This duty, filled with patent disputes and lawsuits, likely contributed to some degree of physical and emotional stress.

McCullough describes the impact on pages 255–56…

Upon dealing with the patent lawsuits, which had put great strain on both brothers, Wilbur had written in a letter to a French friend:

When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments, we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.

All of the stresses were taking a toll on Wilbur physically. Orville would remark that he would “come home white.”

According to Wikipedia, with source references from Maurer, McCullough, the NYT, and Crouch…

He became ill on a business trip to Boston in April 1912.[129] The illness is sometimes attributed to eating bad shellfish at a banquet. After returning to Dayton in early May 1912, worn down in mind and body, he fell ill again and was diagnosed with typhoid fever.[130] He lingered on, his symptoms relapsing and remitting for many days. Wilbur died, at age 45, at the Wright family home on May 30.[2] His father wrote about Wilbur in his diary: “A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadfastly, he lived and died.”[13]: 449

The history of aviation after Wilbur’s death is like many other revolutions in scientific and technological innovations where hundreds and thousands of contributors made their mark in a giant cross-fertilization of ideas, research, and invention. The collective of enthusiasts, in this sense, turns the ideas of one man or woman into an exponential acceleration of convergence and advance.

Next time in Part 3, we’ll enter the 20th century and the first venture to Kitty Hawk, on the outer banks of the North Carolina coast. This location was chosen for their first experimental flights after discussions with Octave Chanute about the best wind conditions in the country. Wilbur had the foresight to write Chanute for the first time in May of 1900, one year after his first letter to the Smithsonian — possibly Wilbur’s second most important letter as it sparked a rich friendship and intellectual collaboration that further ignited their achievements for the next decade, though not without one hiccup.