🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
It was the early 20th century, and world leaders everywhere were in a race to create what we now call an airplane. And not just for the sheer wonder of it all. To the winner would go the spoils of commerce and war.
The stakes were high, and our government feared that the British, Germans or French might win the first race to space. What was the American response? We chose to invest in a person, Samuel Langley, and his team of his experts. At the turn of the century 20th century, Langley was a big name: He was the head of the Smithsonian Institution, our nation's preeminent source of government research, and an acclaimed scientist, having taught mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy and physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. He also wrote a lot about aviation.
The prevailing wisdom was simple: Give the nation's top government scientist a pile of cash and see if his band of scientific appointees could crack the man-powered-flight code. That's precisely what happened when the Department of War handed Langley a princely sum and set his team to work.
What did the American people get for their government "investment" in flight? Langley and his team called it the Great Aerodrome, but there was nothing great about it. In front of a crowd of onlookers and reporters, Langley's machine launched from a catapult on a houseboat in the Potomac River and, after a short time in the air, quickly plunged into the river. "It fell like a ton of mortar," one journalist wrote.
A few months and tweaks later, Langley tried again and got the same result. The press had a field day. The Boston Herald suggested Langley ought to give up airplanes and try submarines. "You tell Langley that the only thing he ever made fly was government money," a skeptical member of Congress told a Brooklyn Herald reporter.
Rather than criticize Langley, government officials covered for their guy and pleaded for more time—and money. "We are still far from the ultimate goal, and it would seem as if years of constant work and study by experts, together with the expenditure of thousands of dollars, would still be necessary before we can hope to produce an apparatus of practical utility on these lines," the War Department said.
Two inventors from Dayton, Ohio, didn't get the War Department's memo. On December 17, 1903—only nine days after Langley's failed experiment and with a mere $2,000 of their own money and no reporters or fans around to watch—Orville and Wilbur Wright became the first men in history to launch a sustained, power- and pilot-driven air machine into flight. It flew for 59 seconds, covering 852 feet of ground a few miles from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Who were these two brothers and why did they succeed where others failed? "They didn't have any money, they didn't have any political contacts, they didn't have a great university or a foundation behind them, but they thought they could figure out how it is that birds can soar," David McCullough, author of The Wright Brothers, said in an interview publicizing his book. "But they had been making bicycles and selling bicycles in their little shop in Dayton, Ohio, and, of course, bicycling is about balance, equilibrium."
Langley had failed, it turns out, because he and his team were working on the wrong problem. They were focused on power, but the Wright brothers focused their efforts on the problem of balance. Their practical and applied experience as world-class bicycle makers and engineers gave the two guys from Dayton advantages no amount of government money or scientific pedigree could match.
But that wasn't the only reason the brothers succeeded where Langley had failed. Here's McCullough again: "They realized that it isn't enough just to invent theoretically, or invent in fact, a machine that might fly on its own power but to know how to do it, to know how to fly just as if you made a bicycle. You can't just say here's the bicycle but you don't know how to ride it. And the only way to learn to ride a bicycle is to ride the bicycle.
"So they didn't just invent the airplane. They learned, as no one ever knew before, how to fly it, and that means riding with the wind and having wings that will do the necessary adjustments that will make it possible to stay in the air," McCullough said.
It was dangerous work. Every time the Wright brothers went up in the air—and they went up as often as 100 times a year—they risked being killed. Which is why they decided to never fly together: If one got killed, the other would be alive to carry on with the experiments.
This was a big part of their success: The brothers knew not only how to build the machines but also how to use them. There was no disconnect between the engineer and the pilot. Both men, it turns out, were the world's first test pilots.
What really propelled the brothers into the air—and the record books—was their pioneering work on what's known in aviation as three-axis control, which allows the pilot to steer the aircraft and maintain the machine's balance. It would become an industry standard, and it remains standard on fixed-wing aircraft.
The brothers had another advantage. Freed from the perils of government subsidy, they had to think of ways to innovate with less, explains author James Tobin in his book To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. Because they couldn't afford the costs of too many failed flight tests, the brothers designed their own wind tunnel to test various designs for aerodynamic effectiveness. From those simulations they amassed real-life, practical data sets that they used to hone their aircraft designs.
As with so many great innovations in our own time, powered flight in America was propelled by amateurs with less funding and expertise than their private and public competitors had. The Wright brothers, neither of whom had a college degree, found themselves in the flying business, writes Tobin, "in the sheer spirit of play, of hobbyists."
This was a distinctly American attribute. "If we had been interested in invention with the idea of profit," Orville Wright told his first biographer in 1939, "we most assuredly would have tried something in which the chances for success were brighter. You see, we did not expect in the beginning to go beyond gliding."
He continued: "Even later we didn't suppose the aeroplane could ever be practical outside the realm of sport. It was the sport of the thing that appealed to Will and me. The question was not of money from flying but how we could get money enough to keep on entertaining ourselves with it."
Though the brothers beat Langley and the Smithsonian to man-powered flight, the race for a patent—and credit—was just getting started. With Smithsonian approval, an aviation expert made some slight modifications to Langley's Aerodrome and made some short flights in 1914, all to bypass the Wright brothers' patent application and vindicate the Smithsonian's leader.
In 1914, America's most esteemed historical museum displayed the Smithsonian-funded Langley Aerodrome in its museum as the first manned aircraft heavier than air and capable of flight. Orville Wright, who outlived his brother, was so angry that he sent the 1903 Flyer, the plane that actually made aviation history, to a science museum in, of all places, London.
But truth is a stubborn thing. After considerable embarrassment and pressure, the Smithsonian recanted its false claims about the Aerodrome in 1942. The British museum returned the Wright brothers' historic Flyer to America, and the Smithsonian put it on display in its Arts and Industries Building on December 17, 1948, 45 years to the day after the aircraft's only flights. A grand government deception was at last foiled by facts and fate.
Langley died in obscurity, a broken and disappointed man. Friends often claimed he could have beaten the Wright brothers if only he'd had more government funding—and more time.
As for the brothers, the memory of the two men lives on, their legacy emblematic of all that is possible in America. And improbable too.
