The tale of the Wright brothers is the quintessential American success story, but is also curious in that it almost wasn’t. Through nothing other than the best of intentions, the American government not only delayed the invention of flight in the States, it nearly abdicated the invention of powered flight to Europe.

In The Wright Brothers, David McCullough does not simply retell the well-known story of the Wrights, he illuminates the why and the how of the brother’s motivations and methodologies. What becomes clear is that like other great innovative leaps, multiple inventors were close to a breakthrough in flight. Entrepreneurial inventors from all over the world were pursuing flight, sharing their discoveries in public journals and writings. Without the Wrights, we would still have flight, it just would have happened differently.

What makes the Wright brothers unique is their recipe for invention — mixing one part scientific method with two parts entrepreneurial scrappiness — that allowed them to mold common knowledge into an uncommon breakthrough. For instance, a curved wing surface was known to provide lift, but “wing-warping,” whereby the wing itself bends in the process of turning, was discovered by the brothers and is crucial to maintain lift while banking. Yet even this insight would have been moot had the two brothers from Dayton not endured some of the harshest conditions of any laboratory of invention: the wintery, windswept shores of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. While others sought the absence of wind, the brothers sought out the wind. As Wilbur observed, “No bird soars in a calm.”

The Wright brothers’ success was tied to their perseverance in this unforgiving laboratory. What drove them to endure such harsh conditions and ridicule? After all, no one asked them to invent their flying machine. There was no promise of reward. By all reasonable measures, they had nothing going for them; hardly anyone outside of their circle even knew they were attempting to create a flying machine. To the contrary, the eyes of the world were on another inventor, Samuel Langley, who had been awarded the largest federal grant in the quest for flight. And this is where our story takes a curious turn.

Counter intuitively, the American government probably delayed the invention of flight not by reducing interest in solving the problem, but by increasing it through the promise of direct federal grants. In fact, the promise of expenditure created such an absurd level of interest that the War Department received thousands of letters each month requesting decisions on grant applications.

Famously, upon the successful completion of their manned flight on December 17, 1903, the Wrights were encouraged by their friends and family to send proof and documentation of their successful flight to the department. When they did, the department responded with a form letter requesting proof and documentation of flight. The bureaucrats wouldn’t have realized the Wright’s accomplishment had they dropped their letter from a plane! By making itself the gatekeeper of funding, the government became the roadblock to innovation.

Did this Mr. Magoo-like government prevent the Wrights from inventing? Of course not. But it introduced unnatural incentives into the naturally occurring phenomenon of human invention. Thus, instead of empowering the inventor class of the new century, the government created incentives for these inventors to pursue funding in order to pursue invention, rather than to simply pursue invention itself.

These directed grants enabled a select few individuals, with direct ties to Washington, to secure government funding for their flying machine theories.

Chief benefactor of these grants was Langley, and the result of his work is almost comical in historical context. In the three years from the beginning of their experimentation to the day they first made their successful flight, the Wright brothers spent a total of $1,000 on their flying machine, including the cost of travel to and from Kitty Hawk. During this same timeframe, Langley spent $70,000 mainly in government grants to build his flying machine, which ended in the bottom of the Potomac.

In contrast, Europe was far more advanced in both their public enthusiasm and awards system for flight. Instead of direct grants, various European governments created prize grants to incentivize invention. Largely because of this, the first public demonstration of the Wright brother’s aeroplane did not occur on American soil, but in Le Mans, France, causing a sensation.

In modern context, this type of funding is akin to the privately funded Ansari X Prize, inspired by the Orteig Prize that awarded $25,000 to Charles Lindberg for the first transatlantic flight in 1927. The X Prize sparked a new wave of entrepreneurial activity in commercial space flight during the last decade, and the winning design of Spaceship One by Burt Rutan is now the foundational technology of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

Perhaps most astonishing aspect of prize grants is the built-in multiplier effect generated from the promise of reward. While the payout for the X Prize was only $10M, it is estimated that over $100M was spent pursuing the prize itself — a 10X multiplier! (Approximately $400,000 was spent pursuing the original Orteig Prize — a 16X multiplier!) Moreover, the X Prize spawned not only an exit for the winner, but multiple companies pursuing commercial flight once it was proven to be practical.

If government is to play a role in innovation, it should not direct money to pursue risk, but to pursue reward. This is intuitive: reward always follows risk, not the other way around. Why would we assume that first rewarding someone to take risk would produce anything other than perverse incentives? Instead, government should reward the successful outcome of risk taken, following the natural pattern.

Unnatural = Reward → Risk = Grant