Human Flight: The Powerball of 1896
This article was written for my youth aviation program Learning 2 Fly: A STEM Jumpstart to Master Your Destiny. My motto for L2Fly is…
“Curiosity Solves Everything.”
Kevin Cook
March 30, 2023
While you read, I invite you to listen to some “deep time” music like Hans Zimmer’s “Time” from Inception. Here’s a loop that is 13 minutes long, but might have ads… https://youtu.be/L9jKC2sxsGs
Did you ever wish to fly a jet like Tom Cruise in TopGun?
It’s not easy, as you can easily see when their planes climb, dive, and go “inverted Mav” at supersonic speeds and their bodies consequently experience massive gravitational forces of over 8Gs.
My brain hurts just thinking about it because my dad used to take me upside down in his Piper Cub when I was a boy and I experienced a few of those Gs.
While I started flying a few years before Cruise and then left it behind, he went on to take significant training between his first TopGun film in the 1980s and the newest “Maverick” version in order to replicate the fighter pilot experience.
And he’s actually certified to fly many sophisticated small aircraft, including his own P-51 Mustang, a WW-II fighter-bomber that Americans originally built for the British in 1940 before we entered the war. It’s one of the ultimate historical toys for anyone hooked on aviation and the purrfect roar of its 12-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was featured in the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.
I have much respect for all good aviators who display their mettle for the good of their country — especially if they also inspire youth to take wings. Sadly, as I publish this, we are learning of the crash last night of two Army Black Hawk helicopters that took the lives of 9 service members near Fort Campbell in Kentucky. Their sacrifice will not go without honor among aviation hearts everywhere.
From Chuck Yeager surviving a crash in enemy territory in WWII to the first astronauts who put us on the moon in 1969, I’m always at the edge of my heart where theoretical science and aviation adventure meet.
And ever since I got my private pilot license at age 17, I’ve been massively curious about how we achieve success and progress in any endeavor, from science and art to sports and business.
Learning to fly taught me so much about life at a young age. In fact, it paved the way for my later success in financial markets because of the training that focused on systems, risk management, and contingency-based thinking and decision making. And I owe huge gratitude to my foster dad Eugene Olson, who started giving me formal flight training lessons at age 15. You can learn more about our journey in this piece I wrote to honor him after he passed in 2021…
Flight Plan for Trading: Market Lessons from My Pilot Dad
Big Skies & Wings Ahead: Giving It Back to Kids Who May Never Have the Chance
I’ve always felt lucky in this regard. And I’ve always wanted to pay it forward. So I’m starting a Mission-Vision-Purpose (MVP) for Youth Aviation called Learning 2 Fly: A STEM Jumpstart to Master Your Destiny. I don’t need every kid to become a pilot. I just want more of them to have the chance to fall in love with science and math like I did.
Well, science anyway, since I was “allergic to algebra” as a teen and it held me back for years. I loved to listen to Carl Sagan, but had little use for equations in text books until I turned 30 years old. Then I taught myself probability and statistics to get a job in the world of trading commodities and currencies in Chicago. And I did it first with stories. More on that soon.
Now, I can’t get enough. My motto is “Curiosity Solves Everything.” And aviation, next to a walk in the woods studying nature, is one of the most tangible and exciting stepping stones I can imagine.
As I prepare to teach an aviation “ground school” for youth across Wisconsin — and hopefully nudge them toward taking their first small aircraft flight with the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) YoungEagles program — I have spent the early months of 2023 diving into the history of the Wright Brothers and why they get primary credit for powered flight 120 years ago in 1903. Their detailed stories are more fascinating than any of the legends that get floated about.
I’ve read several books and online historical guides to grasp what the Wrights wrought, including the excellent biography by David McCullough from 2015. If you can, get the Audible version too because America’s favorite historian, who we lost in 2022, reads it himself at the grand young age of 81 and there are few literary experiences more profound than hearing that wise, seasoned voice read his own careful research of Wright family notebooks, scrapbooks, and thousands of letters and other documents.
After this research, I can only conclude…
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.
Here I will attempt to connect the dots about why the year 1896 was so pivotal.
The Accidental Aviators
“It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird. It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight.” — Otto Lilienthal
Memoirs tell of the brothers receiving a toy helicopter gift from their preacher father Milton Wright in the late 1870s that delighted and intrigued the boys.
But after many failed attempts to build bigger and much heavier-than-air versions of their own, the mechanically fascinated young men went on to pursue printing presses and bicycle building as more practical endeavors in their young adulthood in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
Surprisingly, even the invention of the automobile didn’t impress the elder Wilbur very much in the late 1890s. He scoffed at it as useless and essentially said he couldn’t imagine how this noisy contraption that is in need of endless repairs can ever have a future. This all-too-common failure of vision about future technologies would, in the end, lead to one of the greatest commitments of focus on a parallel achievement of science, technology, and transportation that also changed the world dramatically.
We should all be grateful that Wilbur scoffed at the horseless carriage.
While some Wright fans know the story of Wilbur getting his front teeth knocked out in a hockey game on a frozen lake at age 18 — which crumbled his confidence and plans to attend Yale as a stellar student and athlete — fewer may recall 25-year old Orville contracting a vicious water-borne illness in 1896 that left him with 105-degree fevers and bedridden for weeks.
Their doctor said little could be done for the diagnosis of typhoid (now commonly known as salmonella bacteria) in an era of persistent water and waste sanitation challenges and no antibiotics yet.
It was during that August at Orville’s bedside that Wilbur, then 29, saw the news of a recent accidental death.
The victim was a German engineer who had spent many years experimenting with hang gliders in his quest to copy the flight of birds. He’d made nearly 2,000 flights off of hills in his native country and even survived one injurious crash. Then in August of 1896, a 50-foot fall from flight broke his spine and he died the next day in a Berlin hospital.
The exciting stories, documentation, and photographs of Otto Lilienthal’s work fascinated the older brother as he lay watch with sister Katharine over their deathly ill middle brother. Wilbur, a voracious reader of books, found as much as he could about the curiosities of flight and read them to Orville while he lay for weeks incapacitated.
According to McCullough, news of Lilienthal’s death inspired Wilbur to later write that it aroused in him “as nothing had, an interest that had remained passive from childhood.”
Curiosity, Chance and Discovery
Because their father believed strongly in learning, the Wright house had more books than anything else. As McCullough wrote…
“The house they lived in had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but there were books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father, and they never stopped reading.”
One that Wilbur had already read was an English translation of a famous illustrated volume, Animal Mechanism written by a French physician, Etienne-Jules Marey, over 3 decades prior. McCullough writes “Birds were also an interest of Bishop Wright, hence the book’s presence in the house.” His interest now rekindled after reading about Lilienthal, Wilbur dove into the book again with renewed curiosity and passion, which Marey opened thus…
Aerial locomotion has always excited the strongest curiosity among mankind. How frequently has the question been raised whether man must always continue to envy the bird and the insect their wings? Whether he too may not one day travel through the air, as he now sails across the ocean.
Imagine having a childhood dream that you forgot about, or pushed aside as too hard or absurd. And then everything gets reignited by a chance combination of three events in the summer of 1896:
- your brother’s grave illness
- the death of a German aviator
- an old book on your father’s shelves that you had read once before and ignored since.
But the aviation catalysts of 1896 don’t end there.
Wilbur then found another treatise on bird flight by a Scot named Pettigrew. According to Wikipedia…
James Bell Pettigrew (26 May 1834–30 January 1908) was a Scottish anatomist and noted naturalist, aviation pioneer and museum curator. He was a distinguished naturalist in Britain, and Professor of Anatomy at St Andrews University from 1875 until his death.
Pettigrew was an internationally acknowledged authority on animal locomotion and bird flight, which informed his invention of an early flying machine. The Wright Brothers studied his most popular work, Animal Locomotion: or Walking, Swimming and Flying with a Dissertation on Aeronautics which was published in 1873. The professor wrote…
“The way of an eagle in the air must of necessity remain a mystery, until the structures and uses of wings were understood. Of all the animal movements, flight is indisputably the finest. The fact that a creature as heavy bulk-for-bulk as many solid substances can by the unaided movements of its wings urge itself through the air with a speed little short of a cannonball fills the mind with wonder.”
From McCullough…
“Wilbur was to draw upon and quote Pettigrew for years. Like the inspiring lectures of a great professor, the book had opened his eyes and started him thinking in ways he never had. Once fully recovered from his illness, Orville proceeded with the same reading list. They read up on aeronautics ‘as a physician would read his books,’ Bishop Wright would attest proudly.”
And this voracious quest led Wilbur and Orville to become more aware of the only American to be actively experimenting with powered flight, Samuel Pierpont Langley (August 22, 1834 — February 27, 1906) an astronomer and director of the Allegheny Observatory. Langley had achieved some success with his powered, unmanned aviation experiments in the late 1890s that earned him Army and Smithsonian contracts in excess of $70,000, a sum worth over $2.5 million in today’s dollars.
McCullough…
“Langley was one of the most respected scientists in the nation. His efforts in recent years backed by substantial Smithsonian funding had resulted in a strange looking steam powered pilot-less aerodrome, as he called it, with V-shaped wings in front and back that gave it the look of a monstrous dragonfly. Launched by catapult from the roof of a houseboat on the Potomac River in 1896, the year of Lilienthal’s death, it flew more than half a mile before plunging into the water.”
From Wikipedia…
Langley’s first success came on May 6, 1896 when his Number 5 unpiloted model weighing 25 pounds (11 kg) made two flights of 2,300 ft (700 m) and 3,300 ft (1,000 m) after a catapult launch from a boat on the Potomac River. The distance was ten times longer than any previous experiment with a heavier-than-air flying machine, demonstrating that stability and sufficient lift could be achieved in such craft.
On some level we might imagine that the Wright brothers must have felt they were far behind and “missing the boat” of what was happening in aviation discovery and invention. They reached for and sought the best knowledge they could, but never believing they were part of the true scientific chase.
Intellectual isolation was common in the 19th century before the telephone, especially if one was not on a university campus where the exchange and debate of ideas flourished. I remember the same feelings of being isolated when I spent countless hours in libraries 95 years later in my 20s (pre-Internet) as I tried to sort out which economic system — socialism or capitalism — was best. Confusion and doubt were my constant companions. I can certainly imagine how the Wrights felt in the 1890s.
The Massive Power of Convergence
The history of scientific discovery is littered with chance encounters that led to breakthroughs. Read any biographies of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein and those stories will leap from the pages. This is no less true for technology inventions that changed the world by colliding into each other and performing their own form of “organic” cross-pollination, from steam engines, railroads, and automobiles to electricity, the telephone and airplanes.
The innovation-focused investment company ARK Invest, led by the unflappable “disruption” ambassador Cathie Wood, sums up the remarkable economic convergence this way…
“In the late nineteenth century, three innovation platforms evolved at the same time and changed the way the world worked. Thanks to the introduction of the telephone, automobile, and electricity, the world’s productivity exploded as costs dropped, unleashing demand across sectors.”
In their 2020 book The Future is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler explain how successive waves of exponential transformation have occurred repeatedly in the past century.
This dynamic duo of disruption forecast that the leaps in progress are about to only accelerate in this decade with the “convergence” of technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, virtual and augmented reality, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, and biotechnologies like CRISPR gene editing.
This is one of the reasons I started my STEM education project for teens, Learning 2 Fly, because I want more kids prepared for a world where the number one skill will be learning how to learn and adapt to rapid change.
While fully 50% of the jobs we see around us today could be eliminated by advanced technologies and automation, 75% of the nation’s high school seniors are still graduating below proficiency in mathematics.
I was in that majority and considered myself “allergic to algebra” until I was 30 years old. So, I want to help more teens be ready to learn and adapt in the hyper-change world of technological innovation.
Shoot me an email at Kevin@CavernousEDU.com if you want to learn more about upcoming L2Fly events.
With that, let’s get back to the “convergence” of 1896 that I liken to a Powerball ticket purchased in Dayton, Ohio…
French-born engineer Octave Chanute caught the flying bug as early as 1856 and took to researching flight full-time upon his retirement in 1883. He was 51 and left behind an important legacy, from building famous bridges like the Hannibal Bridge across the Missouri River at Kansas City to designing railroad systems like the Chicago Stockyards. After several publications on aeronautics in the early 1890s, Chanute built and found test pilots for his first glider craft based on the work of Lilienthal in 1896.
Ironically, the Wrights likely walked the same ground as Chanute at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago where he organized the highly successful International Conference on Aerial Navigation.
But the brothers would not become aware of him until 6 years later in 1899 when Wilbur wrote the most important letter of his life, indeed, of aviation. More on that soon.
Flight testing of Chanute’s gliders was done on the dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan near the town of Miller Beach, Indiana, just east of what became the city of Gary. According to Wikipedia…
These experiments convinced Chanute that the best way to achieve extra lift without a prohibitive increase in weight was to stack several wings, an idea proposed by the British engineer Francis Herbert Wenham in 1866 and realized in flight by Lilienthal in the 1890s. Chanute introduced the “strut-wire” braced wing structure that was used in powered biplanes of the future.
The Big Question After 1896
So now that we understand the significance of events that all occurred around the epicenter of 1896, what took the brothers so long to finally begin building their own aircraft? Mostly it was their livelihood responsibilities to run their bustling bicycle shop business. With new smaller designs called “safety bikes” — as opposed to the monstrous tricycles with giant front wheels — a craze was sweeping the nation.
In fact, riding a bike was so exciting and controversial that many critics saw it as a corrupting element of society, threatening education and the reading of books. Sounds like bikes were the TV of the 1890s.
Next time, we’ll explore that most important of letters written by Wilbur in 1899 to the Smithsonian Institution requesting information on flight knowledge, equipment, data, and experiments, where he wrote…
“I wish to avail myself of all that is already known.”
When we see what the Wrights accomplished after 1899, those three lost years after 1896 might seem like precious and priceless time wasted. But it’s actually a testament to their commitment and curiosity, the two qualities that carried them onward to become such pivotal pioneers in aviation.
In hindsight, it was exactly the right price to prepare them for the resolve and perseverance they would need to carry them forward on their emerging mission-vision-purpose.
They bought a “lottery ticket” of curiosity and faith that they didn’t realize was a winner for another 7 years until they stood tired and frustrated on the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903.
The Meaning of 1896 as a “Powerball” Year of Convergence
I chose the famous lottery game as an analogy for the events of 1896 for three very specific reasons.
First, to illustrate that an exponential innovation fuse was lit that year that may not have happened at any other time with the right combination of people, events, and serendipitous encounters.
Second, to make these events highly memorable for students, teachers, and any other aviation/STEM fans who find their curiosity further sparked.
Third, to highlight that while lottery tickets may offer the instant gratification of exponential wealth, the odds of succeeding at the crossroads of technology and business are actually exponentially more favorable.
A Powerball ticket has a 1 in 300 million chance of making you super rich, but to bet on yourself in technology and business might pay off massively after just 5 or 10 years of focused work with 1 in 1,000 odds.
Plus it’s a whole lot more interesting and fun to chase science and technology dreams than those of instant riches you didn’t work for and can’t control any of the chance outcomes for.
To illustrate this further, consider that in the trials of Wilbur and Orville on the dunes of Kitty Hawk before eventual but-as-yet-unseen success in October of 1903…
The elder brother considered, in a moment of defeat, that at their current rate of progress and failure, it could take another 1,000 years to achieve mastery of powered flight.
66 years later, we put a man on the moon.
Now you have another way to make the Wrights more memorable. Just as every school child had to memorize the significance of the year 1066, when Norman invaders captured England, just add Wilbur’s “1,000-year doubts” to the span from 1903 to 1969 — 66 years — and there you have a magical number to remember the power of exponential innovation that is far more interesting than winning Powerball tickets.
Again, feel free to send me an email at Kevin@CavernousEDU.com if you want to learn more about upcoming Learning 2 Fly STEM events and resources for youth aviation.
