Stuff You Should Know - The Wright Brothers
Episode Date: January 7, 2021Orville and Wilbur Wright were not trained professionals, but they were rigorous experimenters who ended up changing the world. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.co...mSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's not here again.
And she's kind of checked out, frankly, and this is Stuff You Should Know,
the Wright Brothers edition, which frankly, I've been using frankly a lot in the last few seconds.
Frankly is, I think, grew out of our wind tunnel episode. Am I correct in presuming that?
I don't know. I don't remember. I know. I think this is just on a list.
Oh, okay. Whatever. Sorry.
I will say, though, that this, and I know I say this for a lot of episodes,
like why haven't they made a movie? But it is astounding to me that there has not been a
big, sweeping, three-hour biopic about the Wright Brothers. It's really weird.
Are we still saying biopic?
That's what I say.
That's fine.
You say biopic, right?
Yeah, it just makes sense to me. But so I agree wholeheartedly. And one of the things that
struck me, as I was reading some research on this, is that at one point, these guys like
in a test flight got up like 600 feet in the air. And I was thinking, I want to see what that looked
like because these are the first people, some of the first people flying, and they're suddenly
600 feet up in the air. And this was in a glider. This was before it was powered flight.
So they were really at the mercy of the wind right then. And I'll bet it was one of the most
terrifying things that's ever happened to them. And I thought that would be really something to
see. And that's just one of many amazing things that the Wright Brothers did. They were amazing
human beings.
Yeah. I mean, the story has thrills. It has...
Chills?
It has thrills and chills. It's obviously something that changed the course of humanity.
There are these very movie-like aha moments that happen along the way.
It's two guys that were not trained engineers. They were self-taught brilliant men who figured
this out, but they didn't go to school to learn it. So it's just... I don't know. It's got all
the right elements, I think. I did find a 29-minute short film from 2012 that's featured Tony Hale.
Oh.
Oh, yeah. The great, you know, Buster Bluth.
Yeah.
He was also the dude who rocks out to Mr. Roboto in that classic Volkswagen ad from years back.
Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. But he plays one of them. I can't remember which one.
And I saw a little clip from it. It looked like it was okay. Like it had a decent production value,
but...
It sounds like a drunk history episode.
I know. It totally does, but it wasn't...
Was he playing it straight or was it supposed to be tongue-in-cheek?
No. He seemed really drunk, which was weird.
Oh, okay.
No, no, no. It was totally straight. I mean, it's hard to imagine him.
Like the scene that it showed was a very serious scene of him acting, and it was very hard to not
laugh a little bit, because I think Tony Hale's a brilliant comedic actor. So it was kind of tough.
I was like, oh man, it seems funny to me still.
Yeah. I'll have to check it out.
But yeah, there needs to be a big, big movie. I want to see this on the big screen.
Yeah. Because so again, I mean, you kind of hit on some stuff, but it's really important to point
out that the guys who were the first human beings to undertake a powered flight
were the same ones who invented that flying machine that allowed for powered flight.
And they were a couple of self-taught amateur bike shop owners who decided that they wanted to
be a part of figuring out how to get humans to fly, which was super duper in the zeitgeist at
the time. It was like the thing, especially if you were an engineer that you were probably
thinking about. There was a lot of technological razzmatazz going on with things like the telegraph,
which has been around for a while, I guess, but locomotion was a big one.
Trains, figuring out how to move humans beyond just foot power, bicycle power.
Horse power.
Or horsepower, yeah. That was a big deal. And to get people into the air flying,
there were a lot of people working on that. So on one hand, it was also kind of audacious
that the Wright brothers would be like, we'll toss our hat into the ring and see if we can
be the ones to figure this out. Just because they were self-taught and they were outsiders,
as far as the scientific community was concerned.
Yeah. Dave Rus helped us put this together and Dave is very keen to point out that
they were outsiders. They weren't trained engineers, but they were far more than guys
that just hinkered in a bike shop. They did do that, but they very much,
they didn't stumble upon this thing. They very much were very data driven, very rigorous in
their experimentation. And it's no surprise that they were the first. They may be unlikely,
but not surprising if that makes sense.
So even at the time, the idea was that it would probably be the French who were the ones that
figured out human flight. And even the Wright brothers apparently thought this, but it was still
open enough that they decided that they could give it a shot. And they also saw a lot of parallels.
You know, they're very famous, as we've said, for owning a bike shop. That was what their
trade was in Dayton, Ohio. But they saw a lot of parallels between bicycling and flight. Like,
for example, bicycling requires a lot of balance and you have to figure the same thing out when
you're flying. You have to build a machine in the most lightweight way possible that can also
convey a human being aerodynamics factor into it. So they had a bit of a head start. They weren't
coming. It's not like there's nothing in the bicycling world that has anything to do with this,
especially if you're an engineer and thinking about things like aerodynamics, as far as bicycling
is concerned, you can translate that to flight. And that's what the Wright brothers did.
Yeah. I mean, a plane is just a bike with wings, right?
Basically.
Or at least the early ones kind of work.
Those were like a kite and a bike. My dad's always said that.
Oh, yeah?
He's a junior. Does anyone ever ask you what the difference between a bike and a plane is?
You tell them nothing.
They need pop some ginseng and go along this way.
That's right.
All right. So the Wright brothers, of course, Wilbur and Orville, they were born to parents,
Milton and Susan. They were the third and fourth sons. There were seven kids total to
a pair of twins, just two people. I kept wanting to make it four people.
A pair of twins.
One set of single set of twins died in infancy. So there were five kids that grew into adulthood.
We're going to pepper in some facts about their sister Catherine here and there throughout the
episode because Catherine, I feel like, does not get much credit. While she was not inventing the
aircraft, she was very, very key to their operation and management of these guys throughout their
life. She was a schoolteacher and then later on a suffragette in Ohio.
Yeah. Well, there, I believe, their grandfather and probably their father, too, was big on
abolition. The whole family had this real defined moral compass that they adhered to rigidly.
They also were taught as a family to be maybe a little wary and suspicious of outsiders and that
you found your strength and your trust and your basis in the family. That actually helps explain
Wilbur and Orville's relationship. Neither one of them ever married and they planned on spending
their lives together. That's what they were going to do. That's what they did until Wilbur died
prematurely at age 45. Up until that point, they did spend their lives together. But
what I'm saying is they were going to grow old and die together. From the outside, it seems really
weird. But when you start to read about them and who they were and how they connected, it's awfully
sweet, actually. They had a great love in their life and it just happened to be their brother,
not in any kind of weird sexual way, not in any incestuous way. I think the Greeks had...
It sucks that you even got to say that. It does. It does. But we're in 2020, man. Don't forget.
But I think the Greeks had four different kinds of love and one of them was like a love between
two men. Bromance. Sure. But this was brother mance and there was no mance to it. It was just
they were brothers that fit together in a way that you rarely see siblings do and they happened to
change the world from that interconnection between them. Yeah. Their mom had a college degree and
she was great at fixing things because her father was a mechanic and so they got some of the tinkering
from her. Their dad was a minister and also ran, I think, the church newspaper from when I could
gather. Sure. And like you said, the brothers were tight. There were four years apart, but
Wilbur wrote this on paper. I don't know if it was a memoir or was he just writing?
Like a journal. I don't know. I'm guessing journal. I think they kept journals.
All right. Well, he said this, from the time we were little children, my brother Oval and I
lived together, played together, worked together and in fact thought together. That's thought,
not thought. Although they did apparently go at it in a spirited debate kind of way and they
really loved doing that. It wasn't all just like wine and roses. We usually owned all of our toys
in common, talked over our thoughts and aspirations so that nearly everything that was done in our
lives has been the result of conversation, suggestions and discussions between us.
That was a great Catherine Hepburn. Oh, I could do it as Catherine Hepburn if you want.
Okay. Yeah. Start over please. No. I think there's another quote. I'll do that one later.
Okay. So that just kind of goes to show you like just how connected these guys were just
from a very, very young age and they were four years apart. I mean, siblings that are four years
apart usually don't keep in touch after a certain age, let alone spend their lives together, you
know. So it was pretty cool that they had like that kind of connection and the fact that the,
if you put the two of them together, they were greater than the sum of their parts basically.
Apparently Orville was, once you got to know him, he was a lot of fun to be around. He was,
if you had to pick between the two as to who was maybe the more brilliant engineering mind,
you'd probably go with Orville, but that's not to say that Wilbur was any kind of slouch. And of
the two, Wilbur was the more outgoing person. Orville was very, very shy. And Wilbur even
experienced a pretty big dip in his outgoingness. He had a years long depression that derailed his
college career. He was going to go to Yale, study to become a minister and do who knows what else.
And he was playing hockey one day and I guess took a stick to the face. And I think a couple
of other things, because he had a long standing digestion and heart problem after that. But after
his face healed, something changed in him. And he went into a years long funk. And rather than go
to college, he directed his energy toward nursing his ailing mom who was dying of tuberculosis
around that time and spend a few years rather than going to Yale, staying home and just kind of
being pretty down in the dumps about things. And luckily he had Orville around. Orville was also
an indefatigable optimist who helped the brothers through some really dark times. And this was
one of them. Yeah, Wilbur didn't even graduate high school because of that, which is remarkable.
And also didn't know they had street hockey way back then. So that's something I learned too. But
yeah, at Orville was like even from when he was a kid, he would go door to door,
collecting bones and selling them as fertilizer to the local fertilizer place.
He built a printing press. And then when he graduated high school, he launched a newspaper,
the West Side News. And that's when he got Wilbur sort of out of his depression. He was like,
come on, brother, you get on over here. You can be the editor, I'll be the publisher.
It was the same year their mother finally did pass away in 1889 of TB. And it seems like that
really did kind of save his brother and put them on a on a renewed shared path together, I think.
Yeah. So the shortly after that, I'm not quite sure what year it was, but the bicycle was a big
deal. I guess it was 1892. I'm sorry. The bicycle craze was in full swing. And they decided that
they would pool their their common talents together and open a bike shop and Dayton.
And that's what they did. They had a bike shop for a while for many, many years, even after they
were steadily experimenting with human flight. Catherine managed that bike shop, by the way.
So, you know, she was the only one in the entire family to, aside from her parents,
to graduate from college. She was the only right child. Yeah, I couldn't get a lot. I tried to
find out, you know, it's kind of one of those things where when there are five kids that live
into adulthood and two of them are the right brothers, you're like, well, what did the other ones do?
And there was a lot of good stuff on Catherine and how she assisted them through the years.
But I couldn't really find out anything else about the other, the other ones.
The other two were older brothers and both of them weirdly became book keep bookkeepers.
I don't know why I said it odd the first time. But the first one became a strange from the family,
moved to Kansas City. The other one moved to Kansas City, got homesick and came back to Ohio,
and then became a bookkeeper. That was it. They led, no, they led rather unremarkable,
you know, solid lives. I mean, they didn't renovate the airplane, but there's no shame for keeping.
No, they didn't. But Catherine, you know, the fact that she was the only right child to graduate
from a full four-year college with a degree, she also did that while she was taking care of the
family after her mother died. Like the whole family was like, well, you're the only woman here,
so you got to take care of the family. And then she also came back from college. I think she went
to Oberlin and became a teacher while she was also taking care of the family too. So she does
deserve a lot more credit and kudos than she gets for sure. Yes, the C and the K. So let's take a
break. Yeah. Yeah. And let's talk a little bit about what's going on there at that bike shop
right after this.
Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing
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All right. So the brothers have a bike shop. Catherine's running the thing.
They're tinkering around in there. The world previous to this bike shop opening in 1892.
Like you said, there were electric trolleys going around and Carl Benz had built the first
like real good automobile. And these guys were, they liked their bike shop. It was doing great.
But Wilbur was like, you know what? I see what's going on in France. And I think that we can do
this, brother. Like who cares that we're not college educated? Who cares that I didn't even finish
high school? And who cares that we're just bike shop owners and Dayton? I think we can
invent a powered airplane. They even call them airplanes at the time, a powered flyer.
And so he wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in D.C. and said, should I read his Catherine
Hepburn? Yes, please. Said, I believe that simple flight is at least as possible to man.
I am an enthusiast, but not a crank. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known
and then if possible, add my bit, you old poop. That was a great Truman Capote.
It was. And I think that'll probably never happen again. I think there's one more quote,
but that should be Sammy Davis, Jr. Do the third quote as Truman Capote, then just keep
building on it like that. All right. So the long and short of it is the secretary of the Smithsonian,
a man named Samuel Langley, got this letter. He was a man who was receiving a lot of government
grants to work on powered flight. Yeah, it was huge. Everybody was working on it at the time.
Everyone was. And he was failing at it. He had something called the aerodome,
which by the time the Wright brothers got cranking up had already failed.
Yeah. Luckily, he wasn't one of those egotistical guys who controls the purse strings. He said,
all right, well, you know, if you need some information, here's a bunch of information.
And he sent them everything that they had. Yeah. He sent them like basically a reading list and
a bunch of journals that they should subscribe to and start investigating and really kind of
help them get along their way. This was also a time when some early flyers were approaching
this scientifically and publishing their data, not the least of which was a guy named Otto
Lillenthal. And we must have talked about him in the wind tunnel episode too, because he definitely
was an inspiration who actually died during one of his test flights. Yeah. And on his tombstone,
it says sacrifices must be made, which has purported last words, which is controversially,
probably actually didn't say that, but that's what is on his tombstone. But he left a bunch
of tables. So they started studying like Otto Lillenthal's like flight test data. They were
subscribing to journals, reading books. Just they were reading everything they could about
the mechanics of flight and birds and just trying to figure this out. And they basically
through this approach, through just basically absorbing the data and the theories that were
already out there, they figured out, okay, we seem to understand how to get this stuff in the air
and keep it up in the air. We've got like lift and drag figured out. We have power sources
generally figured out. What seems to be the big challenge is controlling the plane when it's in
the air. Because that's what got Otto Lillenthal, this thing where you actually, where you start to
turn and then all of a sudden the flying craft turns back the original direction and it causes
it to stall. So you no longer have any lift and you just fall out of the air like a sack of potatoes.
That had to do with controlling the plane. So the Wright brothers identified very quickly and
early on that that was a good thing to concentrate on. And that's what they started with was figuring
out how to control the plane in the air. Yeah, because as we'll see later on when we get to
France, they could fly straight. They could fly in a circle, but they couldn't control
straight and circle at the same time and fly where they wanted to fly, which is a big key
in an airplane is you want to actually go someplace, not just whatever straight ahead of you.
So they said, well, here's, you know, the big challenge was the fact that, and we've talked
about this on a few of our different episodes over the year about plane flight. But there's
three things you got to do when you're up there is you got to control your pitch, which is your
nose up and your nose down, your roll, which is your wing tips going, you know, up or down and
turning you. And then what? And then you got that yaw, yaw control, one of the best Simpsons jokes
ever. Look at that yaw control. And that is nose right or nose left. And it's those three things,
those three different axes, controlling them all at the same time stumped everybody.
Yes. Because the flying contraptions that were being built were basically gliders,
they were basically hang gliders. Yeah, exactly. That people were building, which was a big first
step that we needed to figure out because with a hang glider, you can figure out the shape,
the size, the curvature, the angle of the wing. And when the Wright brothers came into this field,
when they decided to cast their lot and to figure out how to fly, basically people had
thought they had already figured out the wing. But that one thing about seeing like controlling
the wing and moving from one side to the other without stalling out, like I said, they kind of
studied the mechanics of birds. And one of them noticed, I guess it was Wilbur, noticed that
when a bird banks, the actual shape of its wing changes so that when the wing twists a certain
way, it causes air to go above it, to build up above it or below it, which means that you're
going to turn one way or the other depending on which way your wing is curved. And he said,
hey, if we could figure out how to make our wings do that, that might really work. But how about,
how about how, Chuck? Yeah. So here's the sort of movie, one of the aha moments and
hopefully it happened like this. This is a great story if it wasn't, but he was in his bike shop,
he sold a dude and inner tube and was holding the empty box when the guy left. And he said,
by Zeus's beard, this looks like two parallel wings of a biplane. And when I twist this thing
just right, the right wing tips curve down and the left wing tip curves up on this box. And he was
like, I think I've just stumbled upon the way to do this, except we're going to do it initially
with what was basically sort of like a glorified box kite. We're going to do it with wires running
through the wings that you can twist and warp these things from the ground, which was a big,
big deal. They were doing this in Dayton. People would walk by and they're like, man, that is one
crazy kite. I've never seen a kite do this kind of stuff. Oh, I think you should do that in Sammy
Davis. That is one crazy kite, babe. Very nice. So, yeah, so they were in Dayton still at this
point, flying this box kite around and they were starting to get the hang of bending these wings
to their will to make it do stuff. Yeah, that's what humans do. Man, it has changed not just the
podcast, but my life, frankly, for the better. Oh, boy. So, yeah, they started testing out as
kites, which is pretty sensible because the goal ultimately is to get a human in there and then
to power the whole thing. But you want to make sure that the thing's not going to crash or stall
out or whatever. So they would do, they would build these gliders and then basically control
them like kites before they got in there very sensibly, which I think is a pretty smart move.
Yeah, they just started building them bigger basically, like each one was a little bit bigger
than the one before. Right. And then once they would see like, okay, yeah, this principle actually
works, then they would start to get into the glider, they would convert the kite to a glider and
then try themselves with them in there. So, again, the purpose was to get a person aloft,
it's supposed to be human flight, but they realized that to get a human in the air,
you needed a really, really big glider or you needed a really good, strong headwind. And they
didn't have the money or the resources to build a really, really big glider of the size that it
would have taken to just fly it around Dayton. So they started looking for places that have
really high winds. And I mean, if this is going to be turned into a really good movie,
there's going to be like letter writing scenes because they do a lot of letter writing and it
actually like moves the story forward quite frequently. Oh, totally. And this is one of those
cases they wrote to the National Weather Service or the US Weather Bureau. And they said, hey,
can do you have any wind data around the United States? And they said, by God, sorry, by Zeus's
beard, we do, we have reams of that stuff. And they sent them the September and August, I believe,
weather data for the United States, all the weather stations across the United States.
And they started pouring over the data looking for reliable, strong winds and they found several.
Yeah, what they wanted, though, was they wanted to kind of work in private. So they said, who has
a lot of wind and not many people around and where they landed quite literally was Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina. And this is at the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which now is sort of a different
place. I mean, it's still, it's not like Daytona Beach or anything. But back then, there was like
not much of anything there. It had really good wind. It had sandy dunes that if you did crash this
thing, it wouldn't be as bad as crashing like in a hard field and like a frosty field and date in
Ohio. And so they said, this is the place. Let's go down to Kitty Hawk. They did so in 1900 with a
17 foot wingspan glider. They had that same, you know, same wire technology to bend these wings
like the box kite. And they couldn't get it off the ground with a passenger. So it couldn't be a
glider. And they said, we still got to treat this thing as a kite, basically. Yeah, they went back
to the drawing board. They couldn't figure out what the problem was. And they realized that there
might have been something wrong with the wing. So they started kind of pouring themselves into the
wing a little more. They figured out that maybe the curvature of the top of the wing needed to be
taller and closer to the front. And they came up with another glider, the 1901 glider, which had a
22 foot wingspan and went back to Kitty Hawk. And this time, they did manage to get in the air.
They took this glider for a flight. But just like with auto lillenthal, it stalled out with Wilbur on
it. And it crashed to the ground. He cracked his head open on a strut, a wing strut, I believe.
And could have died. He was very lucky. He didn't die, but he didn't. And they said, okay, well,
back to the drawing board. We've got to figure this out. And they figured something out that I
think probably pushed them along. What they were doing wasn't wrong. They were following data that
was wrong. From the guy who died. From auto lillenthal. They should have been their first clue.
They figured right. They figured out that his data wasn't particularly reliable. Or it was just plain
old incorrect. And that there was always something called Smeaton's coefficient, which was the value
for air density that you would use when you're figuring out things like drag or lift.
Or lift. And they went back to the drawing board and said, we are going to have to conduct
our own experiments and create our own tables. And this is when they built their very famous
now, thanks to our episode on wind tunnels, wind tunnel. That's right. They, like we said,
there were wind tunnels around, but they had one themselves. I think it was about six feet long.
And they built 200 little model wing designs. Because, you know, we've said it before, but
it bears in mind repeating that they're working with, these wings are stacked. So it's not just like,
it's not a, why is that funny? Forget it. I think I know what you're talking about.
It's not just a single wing coming out each side. It's like a biplane or a box kite. So you've got
you've got four different, well, not four different, it's really two different things
you're trying to figure out, but you've got four wings. And, you know, they had to carve
these things to, you know, that like, what if the top wing is a little bit different and the
bottom wing is a little bit different. So it's a lot of experimentation that went into this.
They built 200 model wings and tested them in that little wooden wind tunnel.
And the real key though, was that they had equipment that could very accurately measure
that lift and drag. And they could really kind of stack everything out head to head
and see which one worked the best. Yeah, the combination rather.
Yeah, they built what are called balances, which measure the movement of the, say like the wing
or the, the, the movement of the air around the wing. We talked a lot about that in the wind tunnel
episode, but I didn't realize that engineers basically consider that the balances that they
created to be on par, if not exceeding the impressiveness of the fact that they, they
achieved flight. Like these balances were not so precise and they built them out of old bike
spokes and hacksaw blades. But that, that was one of the things they were well known for was
they could take, they could say, oh yeah, a hacksaw blade. What could I use this for? And they would
just fit it into different scenarios in their mind and say, oh, I could do this, or I need to build
this. What could I use for this? And they would come up with hacksaw blades and bike spokes,
and then more impressive than that, these things would actually work. So thanks to their dedication
to experimentation and, and taking down data and then building these balances that gave them very,
very accurate data, they not only were able to build their own tables to figure out which
wing shape and form and size was going to produce the best lift and the best control.
They also were able to revise Smeaton's coefficient, which had been in use since the 18th century,
from 0.05 to 0.0033. And if you, if you do the math today using modern equipment,
it was almost exactly precise. And they figured it out thanks to their hacksaws and bike spokes.
That's right. And Jimmy Smeaton sat up in his grave, burped out a little dust bubble.
Right. And then laid back down.
I don't feel like it to me. So they have their own data now. They go back to Kitty Hawk in 1902,
well armed, feeling good. They get their third glider going based on this data and it worked.
They could carry a person and they had this, you know, they had this sliding effect that
caused Wilbur to crash in that last flight. So they added a rudder to stabilize things during
turns and they made thousands of test flights with this glider over the course of like 1902
and 1903. A couple of times they went over 600 feet, like you said earlier, in altitude and a
glider. And they said, and I think it's a great time for a break. They said, I'll tell you what's
next. We've got to power this thing with an engine or we're just gliding around like a bird.
Yeah. So we'll be back right after this to talk about their power source.
the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance
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Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you
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Okay, Chuck. So they have the shape, the size, the design of the actual flying machine,
but unless they power it, it's just gliding basically. And they knew that gliding wasn't going
to cut it. What's more, it's worth pointing out, Chuck, that they had already contributed to
aeronautics and our understanding of aerodynamics to an astounding degree that the data sets that
they came up with from their wind tunnel was the greatest, most advanced set of data any
scientist on planet Earth had at the time. And again, these are the self-taught Wright brothers
working in their bicycle shop who are doing this. But they said, that's not enough. We're really
close. We think we can figure this out. We are going to invent the airplane, basically.
And that's what they said about doing. Yeah. And I still can't imagine, dude, being 600 feet up,
the poop your pants feeling that must have been. Yeah. You know who could do it really well? I
see Sam Rockwell. Oh, yeah. It's either Orville or Wilbur. Maybe Orville. Both. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He'd
be like Tom Hardy and legend. Yeah. You just change him up. He wouldn't be twins, but he could play
both parts. That'd be kind of cool. Sure. You only got to pay one guy. That's right. But you have to
pay him twice. So they go back to Dayton. They decided they were trying to figure out how to
power this thing. And they said, well, if we're going to power this, we need to figure out the
engine and the propeller. And they thought about the Navy. They were like the Navy builds plenty
of propellers for their boats. And they were very surprised to learn that in all those years,
that the Navy never really worked on thrust and the design of a propeller. So they said thrust
is the key here. So we're going to go back here and we're going to carve dozens and hundreds of
little tiny propellers by hand from little tiny pieces of wood. I'll bet you love that, don't
you? Miniatures. Oh, God, I love it. And I mean, I try to carve something every time I go camping.
And in 35 years, I've never carved anything that was worth keeping.
What do you do you have like a go to like fertility idol or knife? I used to try and carve like
tobacco pipes and then just little people. And that was just never any good at whittling and
stuff. But it's how would you get the hole through the pipe? That was the problem. Sure.
So you got the pipe, it was just not functioning. Well, I would have to then take it home and
like use a drill or something, but it never made it. They always just ended up in the fire.
I got you. Okay. But back to where you came from, you stupid pipe. So they're carving these little
propellers and they and Dave points out to that they may have been the first engineers ever to
come to the realization that the same forces that generate lift and an airplane and a curved wing,
which is Bernoulli's principle, was the same force that worked with a propeller and that a
propeller was essentially just a wing that's vertical and spins. Yeah, they figured out that
there's a direct correlation between lift and thrust and it just has to do with whether the wing
is horizontal or vertical. And the idea that they were the first ones to figure this out is just
mind boggling to me, but they seem to be and at the very least, even if they weren't the first
ones to figure it out, they were the ones who figured out how to build a propeller blade
such that it did produce thrust. So they figured out how to get this thing to be more than a glider
by propellers moving and pushing the plane through the air, propelling it, you could say,
but they had to figure out how to power the propellers. And that was a big, big problem because
at the time, the thing that had held people back for a very long time was steam technology was
basically all you had. And you just were not getting off of the ground with a steam engine.
So the Wright brothers apparently wrote a bunch of letters to a bunch of different engine making
companies and said, here are parameters, or design parameters, can you fulfill these? And
they couldn't. Not a single company came back and said, we can do this. Although apparently a
couple did, but said we could do this for a King's ransom. They're like, we can't afford that. So
the Wright brothers being the Wright brothers just said, we'll just do this ourselves.
Yeah, we'll go back to that bike shop. And they had a guy work in there named Charlie Taylor,
who was a machinist. And he was, you know, it just sounds like another one of these guys that was
just really good at figuring stuff out. In the movie, Charlie and Catherine would be
romantic interests of one another. It'd be super cute. Oh, there's actually a sad story later that
involves that. But will it make the story even better? For the end. Okay. Let's say just they
just had a brief fling and maybe she inspired him to tinker better. Okay. Does it work that way?
Sure it can. Why not? Or maybe she gives them the brilliant idea during some like hot coitus.
I guess. I was thinking maybe like a rowboat ride on the lake, but sure, coitus. I guess you could
have coitus in the in the rowboat on the lake. You should just abandon this. All right. So Charlie
builds a six grade classes, by the way. I know. We should probably take all that out. Okay. So
Charlie builds a four cylinder engine out of aluminum and no one had ever used aluminum before
an aircraft construction. So this was yet another thing that the Wright brothers in Charlie Taylor
came up with that would ended up like revolutionizing aviation. It became the backbone of aviation
is using this lightweight aluminum, super strong, super light. And they connected this thing to
the propeller using bicycle chains. Yeah. And if they if they weren't showing off before, they were
by then because the engine they created, they figured out they needed a minimum of eight horsepower
and the engine they created was 12 horsepower. So it had more than enough to to power the propellers,
which would produce thrust, which would actually create powered flight. And those bike chains
were pretty ingenious too, because there were two sets of gears, one on each side going toward
each propeller. And those bike chains connected the propeller to the engine, but they to keep the
propellers from shooting the, I guess it would be yaw out the yin yang from creating a gyroscope
with the two propellers going the same way. They decided to have the propellers going
the opposite direction of one another. To make that happen, they just turned one of the bike
chains into a figure eight. How ingenious is that? Yeah, going in opposite ways, kind of like, oh,
I don't know, like you see on airplanes these days. Exactly. So the Wright brothers figured that out
too. So now suddenly put all this stuff together. They put together some controls, because remember,
controls were like one of the big, that was one of the big challenges. They figured out a whole
set of controls that controlled the rudder that controlled these elevators in the front of the
airplane that kept the nose from diving or lifting too much. And then they had the little lever that
warped the wing one way or another to let you bank. So they could control pitch roll and yaw
on a engine powered aircraft with dual propellers, and they were ready to go.
All right. So here's how this thing is actually flown, which is pretty interesting. Because,
you know, like you said before, they were figuring out, like the biggest trick was how to figure
out how to control this thing. So you could make it go where you wanted it to go. And no one had
really done this effectively yet. So it sort of operated like, like you said, like a hang glider,
and that the pilot is laying down on a stomach in the middle of the plane. You've got the engine
on the right. And then right in front of the pilot was what was known as the elevator, which
are two little stacked wings that could be adjusted. And you adjust them with a little wooden lever
and the left hand of the pilot to control the pitch. And that is nose up or down.
Right. And those apparently used to go in the back of the plane, and Otto Lillenthal
crashed with the elevators in the back. So the Wright brothers were the ones that moved
them to the front, which helped quite a bit. That was a big one. There is also the hip cradle.
Yeah, that side to side. Yeah, it was like using your hips to steer the plane, basically.
And so the, this little, the hip cradle that you laid in was connected to wires that pulled on the
wings that caused them to warp one way or another. And then it also was connected to the rudder
so that that would stabilize yaw as well. So you had two different mechanisms that
controlled those three different axes. It's very ingenious. And now all of a sudden,
it really is super ingenious. Now all of a sudden you have a plane that's under human control.
Right. Like they couldn't figure out at this point a joystick that could control all those
things at once. So that hip cradle was, I think, pretty smart. To take off, like this is the one
thing I actually never knew. I always wondered how did they, like surely they didn't have that
engine powerful enough to get them going and take off. And that is correct. They actually had to get
up in the air for those 12 horses to do their work. And to do that, they slid this thing on a dolly
on a 60 foot rail, basically, by the hub of a bicycle wheel. So they get it going on this dolly
and then it launches. And then that's when the engine has enough, I guess enough of a head start
with the thrust to get it going in the air. Yeah. So when the thing kind of launched off of the
rail, it was in glider mode a little bit. Sure. That helped the engine kick in or take over,
get enough power. Yeah. I mean, I imagine they had the engine going though, don't you think?
No, they totally did. But like you were saying, it wasn't enough to just go from a standstill.
They needed that glide to get it started. Right. So on December 17th at 10.35 a.m.,
actually there was an unsung test flight that doesn't get a lot of praise. But on December 14th,
they tried their first attempt in this powered flyer and they tossed a coin to see who would go
and Wilbur won. And it went down the track and went off of the track and crashed immediately
and broke the elevators. So they took three days to repair the elevators. And on the next try,
on December 17th, it was Orville's turn. And so he became the first human to fly in a powered
flight. Orville Wright did. He flew for 12 seconds, just a few feet, I believe. I think
it was about 120 feet. But it was controlled. He landed it and it was a genuine powered flight.
And from that first flight, I think even from the one that Wilbur tried three days before,
they were like, this is going to work. They can tell from the way the controls responded and
like this is going to work. We just got to keep trying. So they did.
Yeah. So on that same day, they did three more flights. And the longest one, Wilbur,
I love that they were taking turns. I think it's so cool. Wilbur piloted 852 feet in about a minute
in the air, which is remarkable. Like this is the moment of the movie, you know, where
where everyone is just going crazy. It's like the high point of the film. And then they go in and
just like a movie, they go inside, they're having a cocktail, they're warming up, and they're so
happy. And a big gust of wind comes in and lifts this thing off the ground and smashes it and
breaks it into pieces. Oh man, can you imagine? Yeah. So yeah, I can't imagine seeing that.
You just be like, oh, look, the thing's being lifted in the air. Look at it. Oh God, no.
They're like, it's tied down. And then Sam Rockwell goes to Sam Rockwell. Yeah, but crash.
Right. Yeah. That's the problem. So they apparently were not particularly worried about this at this
point because they'd already shown multiple times that this proof of concept was, it would work.
Yeah. They had undertaken the first flight. They'd done it, basically. So they went back
to Dayton. They had a habit of leaving their test flyers at Kitty Hawk because they'd beat
them up so badly that it wasn't worth, you know, moving them back. And some of them are preserved.
And I believe that first flyer that they created is in one of the Aaron Space Museums. Maybe in
Dayton. I'm not sure. I think I've seen that somewhere. It might be at the one out by Dolos.
Maybe. Or maybe I've just seen a replica. I feel like I've seen one in an airport
and not a museum. So that was definitely a replica. Gotcha. And it was actually only six inches wide
and a kid was flying it around. Sure. It was RC controlled. Yeah. Come to think of it. I've got
this all wrong. So the Wright Brothers, they released a press release. Like they were acutely
aware of, you know, what they'd just done. This wasn't something they had fallen backwards into.
This wasn't something that, you know, just happened through sheer luck. Like they worked their way
to powered flight. So they let the world know about it. And they got zero response in return,
basically. Yeah. This was pretty disappointing. I think they, you know, they sent out this press
release, like you said, and got nothing. And I think they were like, um, hey, everyone, we flew
a plane. Like this thing that everyone's trying to do all over the world. We did it. Hi. And it
seems to be just a case of, like Dave says, a boy who cried wolf, like these newspaper editors
had been burned by writing about other people who said they'd done it. And they're like, yeah, right.
Um, and it took, this is kind of one of the greatest parts of the story, I think,
in September 1904, a journalist that was writing a beekeeping journal called Gleanings and Bee
Culture. Mr. I. A. Root was the first person to actually say, yeah, I'll write about this thing.
That sounds like a good story. Gleanings and Bee Culture. Who would, who would play him?
Who? I, uh, John C. Riley, I think. Oh, yeah. Good, good call, man. Okay. So, so John C. Riley
shows up. He, he had read about the rights and he said, can I, can I see one of your flights? And
they invited him out. And he wrote about it and it didn't get much attention at the time, because
I don't think Gleanings and Bee Culture had a really huge readership. It was a glowing story,
though. I think you should read this quote and whatever, whatever accent you want to read.
No, I'm just going to read it regular. Okay. God and His great mercy has permitted me to be at least
somewhat instrumental in ushering in and introducing to the great wide world an invention that may
outrank the electric cars, the automobiles, and all other methods of travel, and one which may
fairly take a place beside the telephone and wireless, uh, telegraphy. Am I claiming a good
deal? Well, I will tell you my story and you shall be the judge. So that was pretty good. I mean,
for no accent whatsoever. Oh, I thought you were talking about the actual article.
So, um, yeah, they, they still didn't get any kind of attention from that, but it is a pretty
great little footnote to the whole thing that that was the first article that was written on them.
Yeah. Gleanings and Bee Culture. They even wrote the War Department and said, hey,
we invented an airplane. Do you want to buy it? And they said, nah. Yeah. One of the reasons why
was because the War Department was like, well, can you send us the specifications? The Wright
Brothers are like, no, we invented this and yeah, you give us a contract first and then we'll give
you the specifications. And the War Department said, no, even worse than the fact that they weren't
getting any kind of credit for their accomplishment and no takers on selling their, their design,
was that over in France, remember we said that even the Wright Brothers thought that the French
would be the first to, to a powered flight. Um, the French were convinced that they would be the
first to the powered flight and that they had cracked it. There were, um, there was a Brazilian
balloon that's named Alberto Santos Dumont. I think they made a movie about him recently. He's a
super colorful character, right? I don't know. I believe they did. He gave a demonstration in Paris.
He gets a movie. He got a movie. Yeah. I feel like they just called it Dumont with an exclamation
point maybe. Um, but he, he flew a plane in Paris, I believe of his own design. Um, and it just flew
in a straight line, no control, but it was enough at the time because again, no one was paying
attention to the Wright Brothers. It was enough for the French to be like, Sakura blue, you know,
this is, this flight has been achieved and the Wright Brothers are like, no, this doesn't know
what we're doing is so much better than this. 1908, there was a guy, a Frenchman named Henri
Farman who was the first to fly a powered plane in a one kilometer closed circle. This is 1908.
It, it bears mentioning that the Wright Brothers, who again, they're total outsiders,
no one's listening to them. Three years previous to this, they had stopped the experimental stage.
They had reached the point where they had produced a reliable plane and by 1905, three years before
this French pilot did that one kilometer closed circle flight that just knocked the socks off
of the French. Um, they had done a 24 and a half mile circle in 39 minutes. The Wright Brothers had
three years before this. And so imagine accomplishing this and then seeing people doing like, like
preschool or stuff compared to what you're doing, getting all of this praise and attention and press
lavish on them and no one's listening to you. This is the situation that the Wright Brothers found
themselves in at the time. Okay. So Wilbur has had enough. He goes to France in 1908 on August 8th
and he said, you know what? I'm going to go demonstrate this thing. I'm going to show them
that flying straight is stupid and I'm going to show them that we can actually make this thing turn
and do whatever we want. And so he went to a little small racetrack outside of Le Mans and
uh, got on the ground and said, gentlemen, I am going to fly. And they all spoke French and they
were like, I don't know what he said, but uh, he said something. I think he's about to do something
big. So, uh, he, he flew and if the French were like soccer boo at that one flight, they were
really knocked out at this one. Uh, they all realized that what was going on in front of their
eyeballs was something that the French had never accomplished, that no one had ever accomplished
before and that they were basically done. And uh, there was a Frenchman supposedly that was there,
uh, that was quoted in the newspapers by saying, Nussain Batu, uh, we are beaten.
Yeah. So, I mean, imagine being like a French at the time and seeing like, you know, somebody in
a hang, a hang glider with a bicycle gear on it and being like, people are flying, people are flying,
and then somebody shows up in like a, a, a piper cub is like, watch this. That was kind of the level
of knock your socks off that, that the French saw. Um, and that was it. Like from that point on,
the Wright brothers were overnight sensations. They were the first superstars of the 20th century
for being the first to fly. And they finally started to get their claim.
So yeah, these guys are superstars. Catherine is actually, uh, if you remember, we haven't
talked about her in a bit. She's actually a superstar too, because she goes with them. She
learns French for the express purpose of helping the brothers out while they go on an eventual
European tour. Um, she negotiates a deal with, because these guys, you know, I get the sense that
neither one of them are business men and they really sort of had their head in the invention game.
And so Catherine was really key for, you know, initially managing that bike shop and then
helping them out with their journaling and data keeping. And then, uh, she's the one that actually
negotiated with the army because, uh, yeah, the army said, Hey, we'll give you guys some money.
We'll give you guys $25,000 as a grant, but you got to be able to fly a pilot and a passenger.
Um, and I presumably, you know, a couple of bombs or something in a gun, maybe
sure would be my guess. Or at the very least a guy with a rifle.
Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So was this before or after, um, the tragic game of hide and seek
with Catherine and Charlie Taylor, where he hid in the trunk and got locked in and suffocated
to death that you referenced earlier? I don't know. I'm not sure. Okay. But it was around that
time from what I understand, right? I think so. So Catherine, uh, she negotiates this money
and Wilbur, uh, is in France and Orville at this time goes back to DC and he eventually in DC
does a flight that goes for 70 minutes. Yeah. So the, the French, when they saw this,
the French government was like, take our money. How much do you want for this plane?
And they started to negotiate with France to sell their military planes.
That got the attention of the U S war department finally said, okay, we're on board. We'll start
buying planes from you too. And one of the things that a lot of people don't realize about the
rights is that they spent several years, um, around this time training the militaries of,
the U S in Europe, how to fly planes and selling them planes. They're the first flight
instructors. Yeah, they really were. So, um, during one of this, these training, I guess,
kind of demonstrations, Orville had a passenger named, uh, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge and they
went up and were circling a field and, uh, I'm not quite sure what malfunction they had. Do
you know what it was? Uh, no, I just know that Orville had to cut, you know, cut the engine
basically and try and land. He was going to try to glide in and it didn't go very well. The plane,
I guess, lost its lift and just fell out of the sky again, which is a real problem back in those
days. And, um, Orville broke some ribs. Um, he sprained his back, but Thomas Selfridge died. He
fractured his skull. He became the first casualty of a, a powered airplane crash in the history
of humanity, which is kind of a dubious honor really. Yeah, it was. Uh, Orville recovered,
of course, uh, he came to France and this is when Catherine also came to France and this
is where they did their big sort of, um, sort of the victory tour where they were demonstrating
this thing all over Europe. Uh, people loved it. It was huge. Um, and like you said earlier, they were
Wilbur and Orville and Catherine were the first big celebrities of the 20th century. It's,
it's pretty astounding. And Orville was like, where's Charlie Taylor? And Catherine was like,
I don't know. I haven't seen him in like a year now. He just kind of dropped off the face.
It's so strange. So, um, when they, their, uh, company, uh, became established, they,
the right company is to, to design and build planes. Um, when that got, again, got off the
ground, sorry everybody. Um, Orville was kind of dedicated to the actual production and
invention side while Wilbur dedicated himself to the business side, meaning he ran around
suing anybody he thought was infringing on their patents. Um, and he spent a lot of time doing
that. Again, remember they were kind of raised not to trust outsiders. Like they trusted their
family, um, which is the opposite of the stuff you should know motto. Um, and on some trip,
while he was, I believe filing one of these patent infringements or investigating it,
he died after a trip to Boston. He caught typhoid and I looked and typhoid Mary was not cooking
at the time. She was on hiatus. Not her fault. Cause I thought, wouldn't that just be amazing if
he caught typhoid from typhoid Mary, but he did not. Um, or as far as I could find, he did not.
So he went back home to Dayton and he died and he was only 45 actually. And remember Orville and
Wilbur planned to like spend the rest of their lives together. So this had a pretty big effect
on Orville. Yeah. I get the sense. And this is where I sort of hinted earlier about Catherine
and her romance. Um, she went with him and kind of stayed with Orville. He didn't have much interest
in running the right company anymore. So he sold it in 1915, sold all their patents for a million
bucks, uh, about $26 million today. So a huge sum of money to, you know, retire for the rest of
your life. And that's what he did. Um, he still did stuff. And this was a Hawthorne Hill is
big mansion in Dayton. Um, like he built, uh, an automatic toaster that sliced the bread.
He built a system of chains that, uh, let him adjust the furnace from upstairs.
He built a circular shower. Like he was, he was never going to stop building things, but it was
all, I got the sense and just sort of, uh, retirement hobby sort of way. Yeah. But Catherine,
the sad ending there is, um, she met a man and fell in love. I can't remember his name
and decided to get married and was really nervous about Orville. I think he was so used,
so dependent on her being around that she rightfully was scared and she was correct.
And he, uh, refused to speak to her ever again after she, uh, got engaged and got married.
Oh wow. Which is really kind of cruddy. Uh, that's the nicest way to say it. And it made
me kind of think ill of him at the end. And she, uh, got pneumonia and was dying basically.
He still wouldn't talk to her. And finally one of his friends said,
you got to go talk to Catherine, man. This is your sister. And apparently he did, uh, arrive
at her death bed at least, but, um, but she had died. Yeah. Well, I don't, I think he got there
first, but she, she did pass away of pneumonia and, uh, just very sad ending to her story of,
after not getting much credit over the years and sort of being at the beck and call of these
brothers that were brilliant inventors and being a key part of their team.
And then being too scared to tell her brother that she had fallen in love and getting married.
It was really sad. That is very sad. Um, so she, so Orville outlived her as well,
huh? I hadn't realized that. Well, he kept, uh, like you said, tinkering kind of in retirement
as a, as a, as a consummate inventor for the rest of his life. And he actually died. Um,
well he suffered a heart attack while fixing a doorbell and then died three days later.
Apparently super alone. Didn't realize that. That was a real bummer ending that hadn't
anticipated Chuck. Yeah. It's a double bummer. I thought we were going to end it kind of like,
um, him saying, him being like, I invented to the end. And then, you know, the, the, um,
Susaband starts playing. I got mad at my sister because she found love and I never did. Yeah.
Or he did find love and it was his brother who died years before. Yeah, perhaps. So, uh,
that's it for the right brothers, huh? That's it. Evil. Can evil got a two-parter and the
right brothers didn't. Yeah. Well, he broke more bones. We're never going to live that down.
Nope. I'm never going to let us live, live that down. Uh, you got anything else? Nothing.
Did I say that already? Maybe. Okay. Either way, it's time for listener mail.
Uh, I'm going to call this from a 10 year old fan. We love hearing from our young listeners.
Yeah. Uh, hi guys. My name is Quinn and I'm a 10 years old and from Vancouver,
BC, I really enjoy listening to your podcast on my way to school. The two most interesting
podcasts that I've listened to so far. So what about soap? It's really cool how soap is made.
And the second one about porcupines. It's so cool that the old world porcupines have straight
quills. Now the new world porcupines have barbed quills and how they're harder to get out of your
body. Uh, I am very interested in the Titanic and the story behind it. And I was wondering if you
guys ever thought of doing a podcast on the Titanic. Totally. Yeah, we totally should. Uh,
if you have, it's a very interesting topic to listen to. Uh, so if you thought about doing that,
then maybe you could do it. It would give me something to look forward to on the car ride to
school. I really hope you read this email and I'm also hoping that you can write back if you have
time. Uh, you guys keep up the good work and please keep making podcasts for me to listen to.
All caps. Thank you so much. Sincerely, Quinn. That was a great email, Quinn. Thanks a lot for it.
It's great. And that cute thing happens to where it's from the parents email, uh, which is always
one of my favorite things. So I wrote back to Quinn's, I think dad said to tell Quinn that this
was going to be, uh, it's going to be a listener mail. So, uh, yeah, Quinn, we've been wanting to
do a Titanic episode for a while, but there was a period there where everyone had seen Titanic
so recently, the movie, that it was like, why, why would you even bother to do an episode on it
right now? Everybody be like, well, that's not what James Cameron says. Now we can do one. And
it's high time. I've wanted to since, since day one. So listen out for a Titanic episode and know
that, that, that came from you there, Quinn. Yeah, that'll be a two-parter probably.
We'll see. Only time will tell. If we mention Evil Knievel in it, then yes, it probably will. Right.
If you want to get in touch with us like Quinn, did we are always on the lookout for emails from
you. You can send it to us at stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com.
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Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.
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