August 1, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, On a winter day in 1903, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers—bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio—changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe that the age of flight had begun, with the first powered machine carrying a pilot. Here to tell the story from his bestselling biography, The Wright Brothers, is David McCullough. Let’s take a listen to the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. On a winter day in nineteen oh three,
in the outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers bicycle
(00:31):
mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, changed history. You're to tell the
story from his best selling biography, The Right Brothers is
David McCullough. Let's take a listen to the story of
Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
One of the most powerful lessons, it seems to me,
from my work on The Right Brothers, was the importance
of how they were brought up, the learning that it
was imposed, and the values that were stressed in their home. Yes,
(01:06):
education is all important, grade school, high school, college and beyond.
But how we're brought up at home by the people
who are shaping us in childhood is an area that
needs far more understanding. So you have to pay attention
to the parents, even if the parents are long gone
or deceased. It's worth thinking about that. These two brothers,
(01:31):
these two amazing Americans who solved the most difficult technical problem,
the most commonly believed to have been impossible problem. Had
no scientific or technical training whatever. They never finished high school,
let alone never went to college. But they grew up
(01:54):
in an atmosphere where curiosity was stimulated. From the time
they are old enough to talk. They lived in a
little house in Dayton, Ohio, which is now at the
Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, a little house with no
running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, but
(02:18):
full of books. And the books that we were there
were selected for them by themselves, to be sure, but
mainly by their father, Bishop Milton Wright, who was an
itinerant minister, and who believed fervently that they must learn
to use the English language, not just correctly but effectively,
(02:39):
and that they must read and read all the time,
and read above their level. So in that little house,
along with a few very spare furnishings, were the works
of Virgil and Plutarch's lives and Thucydides and the Bible,
and Mark Twain and Hawthorne and Sir Walter Scott, and
(03:04):
ornithology and natural history and history, French history, American history, theology,
you name it. It was all there. Their father was
a great believer in the importance of toys in educating children,
and he brought home what the boys came to call
the bat. And it was a simple little helicopter propellers
(03:28):
and powered by rubber bands which you would twist and
it would take off into the air. And as each
of the brothers would later recount, that's when it began.
And they were not in any way ambivalent about that.
And some years later, but not very long, Orville was
in the first grade and he was whittling a waves
(03:49):
with some wood, and his teacher came over and asked
him what he was doing, and he said, I'm working
on the kind of flying machine my brother and I
are going to build and fly. This was only the beginning,
in many ways, of the many examples of their home
(04:11):
environment that were absolutely decisive. Years later, Orbell was asked
by one of his friends, would he agree that he
and his brother were perfect examples of Americans who grew
up with no advantages. And they had no advantages, as
(04:32):
we would think of them, no running water, no indoor plumbing,
no electricity, no telephone in the house. That even with
no advantages, we can rise to extraordinary achievements and heights
because we're Americans. And Orwell was very Adam, and he said, no,
that's not true, because we grew up with the best advantage,
(04:55):
the greatest advantage anybody could ever have. We grew up
in a home that couraged intellectual curiosity. And that's exactly
what happened. It's not an exaggeration to say that Dayton,
which was not one of the larger cities even in Ohio,
was in its way the Silicon Valley of the time.
(05:17):
In Dayton, Ohio, more patents were issued on new inventions,
new products, and so forth than based on population equivalents
in any other city in the country. There was something
being developed, built, a new almost everywhere you would turn,
and they were in the midst of that. And that's
extremely important. And also, of course it's an age of
(05:39):
innovation and invention. With Alexander Graham, Bell and Edison and
the invention of the elevator and the mouse trap, and
the advent of the skyscraper. It just goes on and on.
And so that was a spirit in the country which
they understandably to a very large extent, rightly felt was
(06:03):
purely American their letters have survived. And when you read
the quality of their language, the use of the English language,
it's humbling. The vocabulary. Again, two young men who never
finished high school because they were too interested in other
(06:23):
ideas and other things. They didn't have time for that.
Imagine now this again, I said, most people from the
ten minutes the subject was given in high school, most
of us. We know there were bicycle mechanics from somewhere
in Ohio, and they invented the airplane. All true, but
there's ever so much more to it when you find
out what they were like as people. They were raised
(06:47):
to be honest, They were raised to work hard. They
were raised to be good neighbors. They were raised to
do their best at whatever they did. They were raised
to have purpose in life, high purpose, a mission, as
the father did as an itinerant minister. But they were
(07:07):
to choose their own purpose. And they were raised to
be modest. Remember modesty, Remember when that was thought to
be a virtue.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
When we come back, more of the remarkable story, the
remarkable American story of the Wright brothers. Here on our
American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories.
Every day we set out to tell the stories of
Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities,
and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But
(07:42):
we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows
are free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our American
Stories dot com and make a donation to keep the
stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And we
(08:09):
continue with our American stories, and with the story of
the Wright brothers as told by David McCullough. Let's pick
up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
They never changed. They became the most famous two people
in the world and were amply rewarded financially, not just
the limelight, and they never changed whatsoever. Now, yes, they
invented the airplane, but they also invented flight flying the airplane.
(08:42):
This is a very important point that most people don't understand.
They developed a machine that would fly, but they had
to know how to learn how to fly it. So
they were the first ever test violence. And please keep
in mind that every time they went up on a
test flight, they were risking their lives. They could be killed,
(09:04):
and they were very conscious of this. They weren't daredevils.
They weren't show off stuntsmen. They wanted to make sure
that they got it right so that when they went
up nothing would go wrong and they would get killed.
And they refused ever to go up together when they
developed a plane that would carry two passengers, because if
one got if only one of them got killed, then
(09:24):
the other would still be there to carry on with
the mission. They never married, they never went on vacations,
they never got interested in material possessions. All they wanted
to do was accomplish this purpose, and they were confident
that if they didn't get killed, they could do it.
(09:44):
They also had no money behind them, no foundation, no university,
no Smithsonian institution, no Andrew Kernegie picking up all the bills.
All that they expended their work they paid for out
of what were rather modest earnings. In their bicycle shop.
(10:06):
They built bicycles. They built magnificent bicycles, beautiful bicycles. First
flight was not very impressive, lasted twelve seconds, and he
went one hundred and twenty feet. However, and keep in mind,
please that this is in the midst of bitter winter
on the outer banks, with stiff wind, cold and desolate
(10:32):
in the extreme. It was all sand virtually then virtually
no one lived there. There were no roads, there were
no contact with the world except the telegraph office and
the life saving the station. And they had a few
people there, local people helping them. And then they took turns.
(10:52):
They always took turns flying. And then it was Wilbur's
turn that it was orrible to all that same day,
before the day was over, Wilbur had flown them more
than half a mile. They had done it, no question
about it. And they knew that they had done it,
and that nobody in all history had ever done anything
(11:13):
like it. And they knew that what they had done
could change the world, which of course it has. And
they did all that work at night or on weekends,
after hours. So they were customarily working not eight hours
a day, twelve hours a day, eight hours in the shop,
another four hours or sometimes more on working on their
(11:37):
gliders or their airplanes that they were building in the
shop themselves. And everybody in town thought they were wacko.
It was common knowledge. They were awfully nice fellows, very polite,
very gentlemanly, but weird. The United States government took no
interest in what they were doing whatsoever. When they had
(11:57):
volunteered to bring their plane to Washington to show them
what they could do, they had the door slammed in
their face again and again. The newspapers right in Dayton
had no interest in what they were doing. They wouldn't
even send a reporter out to watch them, flying often
write eight miles out of town. And when one of
the managing editors was asked years later, how in the
(12:19):
world could this be happening right under your noses? But
what was the matter? He said, I guess we were
just plain stupid. And it wasn't until a French delegation
showed up in Dayton in late in nineteen five, having heard,
having gotten the word that this was happening and these
brothers had done it that they said, you come on
(12:41):
over to France and show us, demonstrate what you can do,
and that's what happened. They didn't like to do that,
the right brothers, because they were profound patriots, but they
just were sick of having being snubbed and ignored. So
Wilbert went to France in nineteen eight, and on the
(13:03):
eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year
of the New Century, Wilbur Wright flew at Lehman, the
great racetrack town south east of Paris, for about in
front of an audience in the little racetrack bleachers there
about one hundred people. Within days, thousands were coming to
(13:28):
watch the miracle, coming from all over France and coming
from all over Europe. And that's when the world knew
men had achieved flight. Now, before that happened, there were
two very important Americans who were trying to achieve flight.
The first was Octave Chanout, who was one of the
(13:49):
most important bridge engineers of the day, brilliant bridge engineer,
French born but an American citizen, who built the great
first bridge over the Missouri River at Kansas City, still there.
The other was Samuel Langley, who was an astronomer who
became the secretary of the Smithsonian who developed what he
(14:11):
called his aerodrome, and it looked like a giant insect,
and it was to be launched from the roof of
a huge houseboat just downstream from Washington on the Potomac River.
Neither Langley, neither Chanoute, who worked on gliders, or Langley,
(14:32):
who was working on him on a powered air machine,
ever went up in their inventions. Oh No, they left
that to some other young fellow who was willing to
risk his life, so neither of them ever learned to
glide or to fly. Furthermore, Langley was using public money
(14:58):
to develop his invention, his aerodrome, and while it doesn't
seem like very much to us, it was a fortune
then in public money, Smithsonian Institution money, Smithsonian Institution, a
staff working for him, and wasn't even counted in what
the cost was of fifty thousand dollars, and another twenty
(15:20):
five for thousand or so was contributed by a number
of his wealthy friends, so well over seventy thousand dollars
the total. And Langley's plane was launched about two weeks
before the right plane at Kittyhawk in nineteen three in
the winter, very cold Potomac was full of of sheets
(15:44):
of ice, and the plane shot up into the air,
launched off the top of the houseboat, shot up into
the air about sixty feet, fell over backwards slightly, and
then turned a nose dive right into the water only
twenty five feet or so from where took off. Total fiasco,
total failure, and which crushed mister Langley in spirit, and
(16:09):
he never recovered from it, and it became the laughing
stock and taken to be absolute proof that men cannot fly.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
And you've been listening to the late David McCullough telling
the story of the Ripe Brothers. It's one of his
many best selling biographies. And my goodness, these guys had
no money behind them. They didn't just make the plane,
he said, they flew it. So there were none of
these problems between engineers and the actual people running the plane.
(16:41):
They were learning from each other, and this was dangerous.
They never flew together because these planes, these iterations of
the plane, when they fell to the ground, well they
were injuries. In fact, their sister was seriously injured in
one of these flights. And when they did it, by
the way, they knew they had changed the world. Regrettably,
(17:02):
the world didn't know what they'd done. The local newspapers
ignored them, Washington, d c. Ignored them, and it was
only a French delegation that invited them, the French government
to come to Paris and show the world what they'd done.
It started out with hundreds watching and soon it was thousands,
and the world would know by the way. All the while,
(17:25):
Americans back when they were trying to get to flight.
Americans like Langley, with lots of government money, were taking
their planes up and back down into the Potomac. Government
investment sunk right along with the plane. When we come
back more of this remarkable story of American ingenuity and
(17:45):
innovation and character. The story of the Wright brothers continues
here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(18:09):
American stories and the story of the Right Brothers with
the late David McCullough. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
When Wilbur was asked about this approach that he and
his brother had taken, he gave it a wonderful analogy.
He said, there are two ways to train a wild horse.
One is to sit on a fence with a notepad
and watch the horse, and if you collected enough notes
(18:40):
on your pad, retire to a comfortable chair and a
good lamp and write a thesis on how to train
a wild horse. The other is to get on the
horse and ride it, which is exactly what the Right
brothers did. They not only invented the machine, they mastered
the art of flight. Now how did they do that?
(19:00):
They did it by watching soaring birds. And it all
goes back to what they were reading at home in
that little house in the back streets of Dayton, Ohio,
and the importance of reading, of research, of the inspiration
that comes from books. And the book that had the
(19:23):
most influence on them by far was a book written
by a French theorist who was also an extraordinary writer,
very poetic, and Wilbur, who was the older of the
(19:43):
two brothers. Wilbur should be clear, Wilbur was a genius,
no question about it. Orville, the younger brother, was very clever,
ingenious mechanically, but he didn't have the reach of mind
that Wilbur had. And this book, which was called called
The Empire of the Air, which had been translated into English,
(20:03):
was published in Paris in eighteen eighty one. Nothing Wilbur
had ever read so affected him. He would long consider
it quote one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical
literature ever published, and the operative word there was literature.
For Wilbur. Flight had become a cause, and Mullard, the author,
(20:26):
Pierre Mullard, and Millard one of the greatest missionaries of
the cause, like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting
the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility
of human flight unquote. At the start of the Empire
of the Air, Milliard gave fair warning that one could
(20:48):
be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of
flight could be solved by man. When once this idea
has invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively. Exactly what
happened to the Wright brothers, Oh blind humanity. Millard wrote,
open thine eyes, and thou shalt see millions of birds
(21:08):
and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. All these creatures
are whirling through the air without the slightest support. Many
of them are gliding therein without losing height, hour after
hour on pulseless wings, without fatigue. And after beholding this
demonstration given by the source of all knowledge, thou wilt
(21:29):
acknowledge that aviation is the path to be followed. He
was writing about one of his favorite soaring birds of
vulture that he liked to observe in North Africa. Millard
was and he said to Rode, he knows how to rise,
how to float, how to sail upon the wind without effort.
He sails and spends no force. He uses the wind
(21:52):
instead of his muscles. Now, from that and from their
own observation of soaring birds, particularly at Kittihowk once they
got there, and particularly the giant gannets, which I have
wingspans of five to six feet, who can stay up there,
just as myard writes, for hours without clapping their wings,
(22:14):
just by riding the wind. It became apparent to Wilbur
and to Orville that the wind was the answer the
ways of the winds. Now. I have a lot of
Irish ancestry, and I love the old Irish saying, may
the wind always be at your back. But that's exactly
(22:35):
what they saw, not to be the process or the
route to the success in this endeavor and in life,
and one of the most powerful of all the observations
written in Wilbur writes notebooks on his observations on bird
for soaring birds, which he wrote at Kittihok. He writes,
(22:55):
no bird ever soared in a calm. If you want
to get up there, you can't do it in a calm.
You have to have the wind, which is why they
went to Kitti Hook, because they needed the wind, and
also they loved the idea of all that soft sand,
of the sand dunes on which to land, and the
fact that there were very few people living there and
(23:16):
they wouldn't be bothered much by the curious and the
questioning of constantly commitsers. When the people who lived on Kittyhock,
and there were relatively few, as I say, mostly fishermen
and their families, saw these two brothers who arrived there
in wearing their business suits that we would wear on
(23:39):
the streets of Dayton, and hats and starch white collars
and neckties out on the beach, imitating the soaring birds
and twisting their hands and wrists the way the birds
twisted at the end of their wings. They thought these
two are absolutely crackpots. And it only was when they
(24:02):
saw how hard they could work that they began to
think they're all right. As one of them said, they're
the workinness boys we ever saw. And to work to
survive on that the outer banks of North Carolina, they
could remember, no bridges, no roads to survive. It was
the meagerest kind of living took all the work that
(24:24):
anybody could give, all through their lives from childhood on
the first written account of real flight achieved back at
the Huffman Prairie Cow pasture in Dayton in nineteen five,
was written by a man who produced beak keeping equipment
(24:46):
in Ohio, a little fellow about five foot four, Amos Roots.
He had made a fortune with his beekeeping, and who
was interested in everything. And he got wind of what
the Wright brothers were up to, and he went down
to watch and see for himself, with their permission. He
asked rode ahead and ask if could he come, and
(25:08):
he wrote this marvelous piece, which he then published in
his beekeeper's journal. And it was not only long and detailed,
but totally accurate. And it was the first published account
of this miracle ever to appear in a beekeeper's journal,
(25:30):
The New York Times, Scientific American, Chicago Tribune, you name it.
None of them bothered even come and watch. When Amos
Root offered this piece that he'd written to Scientific Americans
for free to publish, they didn't even bother to answer
his letter. So blind were they all to what had
(25:50):
been done, and what a miracle it was done by
these two men, And how narrow viewed of us to
take no interest in it. It changed the world in
a matter of no time. We get on airplanes today,
we fly through thirty five forty thousand feet at six
(26:12):
hundred miles an hour or not and think nothing of it.
How did it happen? Who were those guys? How'd they
do it?
Speaker 1 (26:21):
And you've been listening to David McCullough tell the story
of the Right Brothers. Who were those guys? And how
did they do it? Well, you're learning the answers to both,
and they'll be more fascinating storytelling to come. I love
what he said about learning how to ride a wild horse.
You could get on that fence and study it and
take notes, or you could get on the horse. Now,
(26:42):
it didn't mean the Right Brothers didn't study. Boy did
they read, and boy did they study flight, and particularly birds.
And that one French piece of aeronautic literature changed so much,
particularly for Wilbur. The genius of the two whend was
the answer. No, Wilbur said, ever sword in a calm,
(27:02):
And that's why they loved Kittihawk. And if you've ever
been in that part of the country, you know the winds,
you know the dunes, and you know that soft sand
in case of a crash, A boy that beats landing
on concrete or a hard red Clay surface. When we
come back more of this remarkable story, the story of
the Right Brothers. Here on our American stories, and we
(27:37):
continue with our American stories, and the story of the
Right Brothers is told by the late David McCullough. And
go to Amazon or the usual Suspects and pick up
this book. You will not put it down. Let's pick
up with the Story of the Right Brothers.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
When he was about eighteen years old, Wilbur was hitting
the teeth with a hockey stick and him pick up
game with some of his neighborhood friends on a frozen
pond in the area, and it knocked out all of
his upper teeth. Now, this was a time when dentistry
was pathetic, primitive, when anesthetics were virtually unknown. The pain
(28:19):
was excruciating and it took a long time just to recover.
But it was also humiliating for him in the extreme.
He was a handsome young man, and he was popular,
and he was a good athlete, and suddenly he's this
disfigured boy whose face was hard to look at given
(28:39):
what had happened to it, and he retreated into a
self imposed isolation at home. He was going to go
to Yale University. His father thought that was a fine idea,
and he was ambitious to pursue an academic career. Instead,
he stayed at home in the house looked after much
(29:00):
of the time his mother, who was dying type of tuberculosis.
And it was then that he began to read for
three years in this self imposed isolation, and it caused
a terrific swerve in his whole life direction. The talk
(29:23):
of Yale ended. He was off on this pursuit of knowledge,
writing to the Smithsonian asking for information. All of that,
and it's a consequence let him down a path that
led to the invention of the airplane. This beneficial change
that could have happened, but it was adverse. No bird
(29:45):
sores in a calm. He had a headwind the likes
of which nobody ever imagined, nobody in the family well.
In Bishopwright's diary entry that followed Wilbur's death in nineteen twelve,
he died when he was still in his forties, tragically
(30:07):
died of typhoid fever. His father had warned about the
perils of impure water all their lives. Was like a
Greek tragedy. They'd been warned and warned and worn, and
that's what killed him. But the question was who hit
him in the teeth with a hockey stick and was
it intentional or not. In the Bishop's diary he writes
(30:30):
to explain who the boy was to hit him and
what happened to him. His name was Oliver Hay h
au g h and Oliver Hay lived right around the
corner in the same neighborhood, and he became the most
notorious murderer in the history of Ohio. He killed his father,
(30:53):
his mother, his brother, and an estimated twelve others or more.
Now isn't it fascinating that one of the ultimate geniuses
of our story as a people grew up in the
same neighborhood with the ultimate expression of evil in a
(31:18):
human being. I keep coming back to the brothers themselves
and what they wrote, and to Catherine and what she wrote.
One of the most horrific experiences of all was when
Orville had a crash when he finally was invited to
demonstrate what they had developed at Fort Meyer, across the
(31:40):
Potomac River from Washington, and thousands came over from the government,
from the White House, from the Cabinet, from the Congress,
to watch this miracle. And Orville went up and was
breaking all kinds of world records almost by the day,
at the same time that Wilbur was over at Lehman
demonstrating there in front of it. It was like a
two ring circuit, with one brother in each location. And
(32:04):
then one day Orville took a young Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge,
Army lieutenant up with him as a passenger. He'd been
taking many others, and something went wrong with the plane
and it crashed seventy five feet straight down into the ground,
and young Selfridge was killed, the first fatality in aviation history.
(32:26):
And Orville was very nearly killed, had many bones broken,
and he was badly scarred and bruised. And again his
confidence was shaken. He was horrified by the death of Selfridge.
And when Catherine back in Dayton, got word that this
(32:47):
has happened on an afternoon after she'd returned from teaching
at the high school, she called the principal of the
school and said she was taking an indefinite leave of absence.
She was packed and on a train bound for Washington
before the day was over. She then spent the next
six five and a half six weeks with Oriville at
(33:10):
the base hospital at Fort Meyer, making sure he got
the best care possible and making sure that she could
do did everything she could to keep his spirits up.
It was thought that he would never walk again, then
they would certainly never fly again. And she saw him
(33:31):
through it, and he later set himself and others did too.
If it weren't for her, he probably wouldn't have made it.
And she got him back to Dayton and kept working
with him, kept encouraging, and he not only walked again,
but he flew again. And at his insistence, much against
the advice of both Wilbur and Catherine and the father,
(33:54):
that he shouldn't go back to Fort Meyer. It was
too traumatic for him, too many memories, too many feelings
of regret or guilt over the death of young Selfridge.
But he insisted he had to go back where it happened,
and he went back, and he flew again, and he
continued to break more records. It's one of the most
(34:14):
remarkable comebacks I've ever known in what I've written about,
and one of the lessons that you get from this
story is they would not give up, and they always
learned from their mistakes. They always learned from their failures.
Where there was a technical failure with an aluminum motor
(34:37):
block that they pioneered split when it was first tested,
they built another one and it worked, or whether it
was finding that all the details, the data, the tables
of technical mathematics used by people like Chinout and Langley
were wrong, they were worthless, as Orwell said. They then said, well,
(35:02):
we'll have to do that ourselves. So they created their
own wind tunnel. They created little models of wing shapes
out of axaw blades, and they created their own tables
which were correct, all way ahead of anybody at MIT
or Renseleer or the Smithsonian Institution, all on their own
(35:25):
by learning from their mistakes. Their point was that if
you're knocked down, you don't lie there and whimper and
wine and lapse into self pity. You get back up
on your feet, figure out what you did wrong, do
it right, and go at it again. And what a
lesson for young people to learn today, and what a
lesson to learn about use of the English language. Almost
(35:49):
half of all the business schools in our country today
require incoming freshmen, who are all college graduates, to take
a basic writing lesson because they are incapable of writing
a presentable letter or report or proposal. Pathetic. And here
they are, these two examples of the boys that young
(36:11):
men that never even finished high school because of the
way they were brought up. Wilbur was asked once, if
you had to give advice to somebody young people today
about how to succeed, what would you say? He said,
I would tell him to pick out a good mother
and father and grow up in Ohio.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
And a great job on the editing of that piece
by our own Greg Hengler. And you've been listening to
the late David McCullough his book The Right Brothers go
to Amazon or the usual suspects pick it up, you
will not put it down. That accident, or maybe it
wasn't with a hockey stick. When Wilbur was eighteen, my
goodness had changed his life. He was disfigured, in great pain.
(36:57):
There were no dentists around back in the day to
give you implants or any of the current technologies that
can help fix such a thing. He was disfigured, and
he retreated into his self imposed isolation, and instead of
going to Yale, stayed put in his family home and
just cleared out and cleared through and went through the
(37:20):
entire family library. And it was three years that would
ultimately change the direction of his life. The adversity that
would change the direction of his life. The same adversity
would happen to Orville in a crash that would almost
kill him, and most people would have never tried it again.
And there he was not long later, in the same place,
(37:42):
back up on that plane. That's the way they were
brought up, to never give up and to try again,
and to learn from their mistakes. And we ended where
we began with those parents and the advantage of having
parents who drive you to think for yourself, work hard,
and take responsibility for your life. The story of the
(38:03):
Wright Brothers a quintessentially American story. Here on our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, to Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. On a winter day in nineteen oh three,
in the outer Banks of North Carolina, two brothers bicycle
(00:31):
mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, changed history. You're to tell the
story from his best selling biography, The Right Brothers is
David McCullough. Let's take a listen to the story of
Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
One of the most powerful lessons, it seems to me,
from my work on The Right Brothers, was the importance
of how they were brought up, the learning that it
was imposed, and the values that were stressed in their home. Yes,
(01:06):
education is all important, grade school, high school, college and beyond.
But how we're brought up at home by the people
who are shaping us in childhood is an area that
needs far more understanding. So you have to pay attention
to the parents, even if the parents are long gone
or deceased. It's worth thinking about that. These two brothers,
(01:31):
these two amazing Americans who solved the most difficult technical problem,
the most commonly believed to have been impossible problem. Had
no scientific or technical training whatever. They never finished high school,
let alone never went to college. But they grew up
(01:54):
in an atmosphere where curiosity was stimulated. From the time
they are old enough to talk. They lived in a
little house in Dayton, Ohio, which is now at the
Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, a little house with no
running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, but
(02:18):
full of books. And the books that we were there
were selected for them by themselves, to be sure, but
mainly by their father, Bishop Milton Wright, who was an
itinerant minister, and who believed fervently that they must learn
to use the English language, not just correctly but effectively,
(02:39):
and that they must read and read all the time,
and read above their level. So in that little house,
along with a few very spare furnishings, were the works
of Virgil and Plutarch's lives and Thucydides and the Bible,
and Mark Twain and Hawthorne and Sir Walter Scott, and
(03:04):
ornithology and natural history and history, French history, American history, theology,
you name it. It was all there. Their father was
a great believer in the importance of toys in educating children,
and he brought home what the boys came to call
the bat. And it was a simple little helicopter propellers
(03:28):
and powered by rubber bands which you would twist and
it would take off into the air. And as each
of the brothers would later recount, that's when it began.
And they were not in any way ambivalent about that.
And some years later, but not very long, Orville was
in the first grade and he was whittling a waves
(03:49):
with some wood, and his teacher came over and asked
him what he was doing, and he said, I'm working
on the kind of flying machine my brother and I
are going to build and fly. This was only the beginning,
in many ways, of the many examples of their home
(04:11):
environment that were absolutely decisive. Years later, Orbell was asked
by one of his friends, would he agree that he
and his brother were perfect examples of Americans who grew
up with no advantages. And they had no advantages, as
(04:32):
we would think of them, no running water, no indoor plumbing,
no electricity, no telephone in the house. That even with
no advantages, we can rise to extraordinary achievements and heights
because we're Americans. And Orwell was very Adam, and he said, no,
that's not true, because we grew up with the best advantage,
(04:55):
the greatest advantage anybody could ever have. We grew up
in a home that couraged intellectual curiosity. And that's exactly
what happened. It's not an exaggeration to say that Dayton,
which was not one of the larger cities even in Ohio,
was in its way the Silicon Valley of the time.
(05:17):
In Dayton, Ohio, more patents were issued on new inventions,
new products, and so forth than based on population equivalents
in any other city in the country. There was something
being developed, built, a new almost everywhere you would turn,
and they were in the midst of that. And that's
extremely important. And also, of course it's an age of
(05:39):
innovation and invention. With Alexander Graham, Bell and Edison and
the invention of the elevator and the mouse trap, and
the advent of the skyscraper. It just goes on and on.
And so that was a spirit in the country which
they understandably to a very large extent, rightly felt was
(06:03):
purely American their letters have survived. And when you read
the quality of their language, the use of the English language,
it's humbling. The vocabulary. Again, two young men who never
finished high school because they were too interested in other
(06:23):
ideas and other things. They didn't have time for that.
Imagine now this again, I said, most people from the
ten minutes the subject was given in high school, most
of us. We know there were bicycle mechanics from somewhere
in Ohio, and they invented the airplane. All true, but
there's ever so much more to it when you find
out what they were like as people. They were raised
(06:47):
to be honest, They were raised to work hard. They
were raised to be good neighbors. They were raised to
do their best at whatever they did. They were raised
to have purpose in life, high purpose, a mission, as
the father did as an itinerant minister. But they were
(07:07):
to choose their own purpose. And they were raised to
be modest. Remember modesty, Remember when that was thought to
be a virtue.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
When we come back, more of the remarkable story, the
remarkable American story of the Wright brothers. Here on our
American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories.
Every day we set out to tell the stories of
Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities,
and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But
(07:42):
we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows
are free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to our American
Stories dot com and make a donation to keep the
stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And we
(08:09):
continue with our American stories, and with the story of
the Wright brothers as told by David McCullough. Let's pick
up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
They never changed. They became the most famous two people
in the world and were amply rewarded financially, not just
the limelight, and they never changed whatsoever. Now, yes, they
invented the airplane, but they also invented flight flying the airplane.
(08:42):
This is a very important point that most people don't understand.
They developed a machine that would fly, but they had
to know how to learn how to fly it. So
they were the first ever test violence. And please keep
in mind that every time they went up on a
test flight, they were risking their lives. They could be killed,
(09:04):
and they were very conscious of this. They weren't daredevils.
They weren't show off stuntsmen. They wanted to make sure
that they got it right so that when they went
up nothing would go wrong and they would get killed.
And they refused ever to go up together when they
developed a plane that would carry two passengers, because if
one got if only one of them got killed, then
(09:24):
the other would still be there to carry on with
the mission. They never married, they never went on vacations,
they never got interested in material possessions. All they wanted
to do was accomplish this purpose, and they were confident
that if they didn't get killed, they could do it.
(09:44):
They also had no money behind them, no foundation, no university,
no Smithsonian institution, no Andrew Kernegie picking up all the bills.
All that they expended their work they paid for out
of what were rather modest earnings. In their bicycle shop.
(10:06):
They built bicycles. They built magnificent bicycles, beautiful bicycles. First
flight was not very impressive, lasted twelve seconds, and he
went one hundred and twenty feet. However, and keep in mind,
please that this is in the midst of bitter winter
on the outer banks, with stiff wind, cold and desolate
(10:32):
in the extreme. It was all sand virtually then virtually
no one lived there. There were no roads, there were
no contact with the world except the telegraph office and
the life saving the station. And they had a few
people there, local people helping them. And then they took turns.
(10:52):
They always took turns flying. And then it was Wilbur's
turn that it was orrible to all that same day,
before the day was over, Wilbur had flown them more
than half a mile. They had done it, no question
about it. And they knew that they had done it,
and that nobody in all history had ever done anything
(11:13):
like it. And they knew that what they had done
could change the world, which of course it has. And
they did all that work at night or on weekends,
after hours. So they were customarily working not eight hours
a day, twelve hours a day, eight hours in the shop,
another four hours or sometimes more on working on their
(11:37):
gliders or their airplanes that they were building in the
shop themselves. And everybody in town thought they were wacko.
It was common knowledge. They were awfully nice fellows, very polite,
very gentlemanly, but weird. The United States government took no
interest in what they were doing whatsoever. When they had
(11:57):
volunteered to bring their plane to Washington to show them
what they could do, they had the door slammed in
their face again and again. The newspapers right in Dayton
had no interest in what they were doing. They wouldn't
even send a reporter out to watch them, flying often
write eight miles out of town. And when one of
the managing editors was asked years later, how in the
(12:19):
world could this be happening right under your noses? But
what was the matter? He said, I guess we were
just plain stupid. And it wasn't until a French delegation
showed up in Dayton in late in nineteen five, having heard,
having gotten the word that this was happening and these
brothers had done it that they said, you come on
(12:41):
over to France and show us, demonstrate what you can do,
and that's what happened. They didn't like to do that,
the right brothers, because they were profound patriots, but they
just were sick of having being snubbed and ignored. So
Wilbert went to France in nineteen eight, and on the
(13:03):
eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year
of the New Century, Wilbur Wright flew at Lehman, the
great racetrack town south east of Paris, for about in
front of an audience in the little racetrack bleachers there
about one hundred people. Within days, thousands were coming to
(13:28):
watch the miracle, coming from all over France and coming
from all over Europe. And that's when the world knew
men had achieved flight. Now, before that happened, there were
two very important Americans who were trying to achieve flight.
The first was Octave Chanout, who was one of the
(13:49):
most important bridge engineers of the day, brilliant bridge engineer,
French born but an American citizen, who built the great
first bridge over the Missouri River at Kansas City, still there.
The other was Samuel Langley, who was an astronomer who
became the secretary of the Smithsonian who developed what he
(14:11):
called his aerodrome, and it looked like a giant insect,
and it was to be launched from the roof of
a huge houseboat just downstream from Washington on the Potomac River.
Neither Langley, neither Chanoute, who worked on gliders, or Langley,
(14:32):
who was working on him on a powered air machine,
ever went up in their inventions. Oh No, they left
that to some other young fellow who was willing to
risk his life, so neither of them ever learned to
glide or to fly. Furthermore, Langley was using public money
(14:58):
to develop his invention, his aerodrome, and while it doesn't
seem like very much to us, it was a fortune
then in public money, Smithsonian Institution money, Smithsonian Institution, a
staff working for him, and wasn't even counted in what
the cost was of fifty thousand dollars, and another twenty
(15:20):
five for thousand or so was contributed by a number
of his wealthy friends, so well over seventy thousand dollars
the total. And Langley's plane was launched about two weeks
before the right plane at Kittyhawk in nineteen three in
the winter, very cold Potomac was full of of sheets
(15:44):
of ice, and the plane shot up into the air,
launched off the top of the houseboat, shot up into
the air about sixty feet, fell over backwards slightly, and
then turned a nose dive right into the water only
twenty five feet or so from where took off. Total fiasco,
total failure, and which crushed mister Langley in spirit, and
(16:09):
he never recovered from it, and it became the laughing
stock and taken to be absolute proof that men cannot fly.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
And you've been listening to the late David McCullough telling
the story of the Ripe Brothers. It's one of his
many best selling biographies. And my goodness, these guys had
no money behind them. They didn't just make the plane,
he said, they flew it. So there were none of
these problems between engineers and the actual people running the plane.
(16:41):
They were learning from each other, and this was dangerous.
They never flew together because these planes, these iterations of
the plane, when they fell to the ground, well they
were injuries. In fact, their sister was seriously injured in
one of these flights. And when they did it, by
the way, they knew they had changed the world. Regrettably,
(17:02):
the world didn't know what they'd done. The local newspapers
ignored them, Washington, d c. Ignored them, and it was
only a French delegation that invited them, the French government
to come to Paris and show the world what they'd done.
It started out with hundreds watching and soon it was thousands,
and the world would know by the way. All the while,
(17:25):
Americans back when they were trying to get to flight.
Americans like Langley, with lots of government money, were taking
their planes up and back down into the Potomac. Government
investment sunk right along with the plane. When we come
back more of this remarkable story of American ingenuity and
(17:45):
innovation and character. The story of the Wright brothers continues
here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(18:09):
American stories and the story of the Right Brothers with
the late David McCullough. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
When Wilbur was asked about this approach that he and
his brother had taken, he gave it a wonderful analogy.
He said, there are two ways to train a wild horse.
One is to sit on a fence with a notepad
and watch the horse, and if you collected enough notes
(18:40):
on your pad, retire to a comfortable chair and a
good lamp and write a thesis on how to train
a wild horse. The other is to get on the
horse and ride it, which is exactly what the Right
brothers did. They not only invented the machine, they mastered
the art of flight. Now how did they do that?
(19:00):
They did it by watching soaring birds. And it all
goes back to what they were reading at home in
that little house in the back streets of Dayton, Ohio,
and the importance of reading, of research, of the inspiration
that comes from books. And the book that had the
(19:23):
most influence on them by far was a book written
by a French theorist who was also an extraordinary writer,
very poetic, and Wilbur, who was the older of the
(19:43):
two brothers. Wilbur should be clear, Wilbur was a genius,
no question about it. Orville, the younger brother, was very clever,
ingenious mechanically, but he didn't have the reach of mind
that Wilbur had. And this book, which was called called
The Empire of the Air, which had been translated into English,
(20:03):
was published in Paris in eighteen eighty one. Nothing Wilbur
had ever read so affected him. He would long consider
it quote one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical
literature ever published, and the operative word there was literature.
For Wilbur. Flight had become a cause, and Mullard, the author,
(20:26):
Pierre Mullard, and Millard one of the greatest missionaries of
the cause, like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting
the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility
of human flight unquote. At the start of the Empire
of the Air, Milliard gave fair warning that one could
(20:48):
be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of
flight could be solved by man. When once this idea
has invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively. Exactly what
happened to the Wright brothers, Oh blind humanity. Millard wrote,
open thine eyes, and thou shalt see millions of birds
(21:08):
and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. All these creatures
are whirling through the air without the slightest support. Many
of them are gliding therein without losing height, hour after
hour on pulseless wings, without fatigue. And after beholding this
demonstration given by the source of all knowledge, thou wilt
(21:29):
acknowledge that aviation is the path to be followed. He
was writing about one of his favorite soaring birds of
vulture that he liked to observe in North Africa. Millard
was and he said to Rode, he knows how to rise,
how to float, how to sail upon the wind without effort.
He sails and spends no force. He uses the wind
(21:52):
instead of his muscles. Now, from that and from their
own observation of soaring birds, particularly at Kittihowk once they
got there, and particularly the giant gannets, which I have
wingspans of five to six feet, who can stay up there,
just as myard writes, for hours without clapping their wings,
(22:14):
just by riding the wind. It became apparent to Wilbur
and to Orville that the wind was the answer the
ways of the winds. Now. I have a lot of
Irish ancestry, and I love the old Irish saying, may
the wind always be at your back. But that's exactly
(22:35):
what they saw, not to be the process or the
route to the success in this endeavor and in life,
and one of the most powerful of all the observations
written in Wilbur writes notebooks on his observations on bird
for soaring birds, which he wrote at Kittihok. He writes,
(22:55):
no bird ever soared in a calm. If you want
to get up there, you can't do it in a calm.
You have to have the wind, which is why they
went to Kitti Hook, because they needed the wind, and
also they loved the idea of all that soft sand,
of the sand dunes on which to land, and the
fact that there were very few people living there and
(23:16):
they wouldn't be bothered much by the curious and the
questioning of constantly commitsers. When the people who lived on Kittyhock,
and there were relatively few, as I say, mostly fishermen
and their families, saw these two brothers who arrived there
in wearing their business suits that we would wear on
(23:39):
the streets of Dayton, and hats and starch white collars
and neckties out on the beach, imitating the soaring birds
and twisting their hands and wrists the way the birds
twisted at the end of their wings. They thought these
two are absolutely crackpots. And it only was when they
(24:02):
saw how hard they could work that they began to
think they're all right. As one of them said, they're
the workinness boys we ever saw. And to work to
survive on that the outer banks of North Carolina, they
could remember, no bridges, no roads to survive. It was
the meagerest kind of living took all the work that
(24:24):
anybody could give, all through their lives from childhood on
the first written account of real flight achieved back at
the Huffman Prairie Cow pasture in Dayton in nineteen five,
was written by a man who produced beak keeping equipment
(24:46):
in Ohio, a little fellow about five foot four, Amos Roots.
He had made a fortune with his beekeeping, and who
was interested in everything. And he got wind of what
the Wright brothers were up to, and he went down
to watch and see for himself, with their permission. He
asked rode ahead and ask if could he come, and
(25:08):
he wrote this marvelous piece, which he then published in
his beekeeper's journal. And it was not only long and detailed,
but totally accurate. And it was the first published account
of this miracle ever to appear in a beekeeper's journal,
(25:30):
The New York Times, Scientific American, Chicago Tribune, you name it.
None of them bothered even come and watch. When Amos
Root offered this piece that he'd written to Scientific Americans
for free to publish, they didn't even bother to answer
his letter. So blind were they all to what had
(25:50):
been done, and what a miracle it was done by
these two men, And how narrow viewed of us to
take no interest in it. It changed the world in
a matter of no time. We get on airplanes today,
we fly through thirty five forty thousand feet at six
(26:12):
hundred miles an hour or not and think nothing of it.
How did it happen? Who were those guys? How'd they
do it?
Speaker 1 (26:21):
And you've been listening to David McCullough tell the story
of the Right Brothers. Who were those guys? And how
did they do it? Well, you're learning the answers to both,
and they'll be more fascinating storytelling to come. I love
what he said about learning how to ride a wild horse.
You could get on that fence and study it and
take notes, or you could get on the horse. Now,
(26:42):
it didn't mean the Right Brothers didn't study. Boy did
they read, and boy did they study flight, and particularly birds.
And that one French piece of aeronautic literature changed so much,
particularly for Wilbur. The genius of the two whend was
the answer. No, Wilbur said, ever sword in a calm,
(27:02):
And that's why they loved Kittihawk. And if you've ever
been in that part of the country, you know the winds,
you know the dunes, and you know that soft sand
in case of a crash, A boy that beats landing
on concrete or a hard red Clay surface. When we
come back more of this remarkable story, the story of
the Right Brothers. Here on our American stories, and we
(27:37):
continue with our American stories, and the story of the
Right Brothers is told by the late David McCullough. And
go to Amazon or the usual Suspects and pick up
this book. You will not put it down. Let's pick
up with the Story of the Right Brothers.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
When he was about eighteen years old, Wilbur was hitting
the teeth with a hockey stick and him pick up
game with some of his neighborhood friends on a frozen
pond in the area, and it knocked out all of
his upper teeth. Now, this was a time when dentistry
was pathetic, primitive, when anesthetics were virtually unknown. The pain
(28:19):
was excruciating and it took a long time just to recover.
But it was also humiliating for him in the extreme.
He was a handsome young man, and he was popular,
and he was a good athlete, and suddenly he's this
disfigured boy whose face was hard to look at given
(28:39):
what had happened to it, and he retreated into a
self imposed isolation at home. He was going to go
to Yale University. His father thought that was a fine idea,
and he was ambitious to pursue an academic career. Instead,
he stayed at home in the house looked after much
(29:00):
of the time his mother, who was dying type of tuberculosis.
And it was then that he began to read for
three years in this self imposed isolation, and it caused
a terrific swerve in his whole life direction. The talk
(29:23):
of Yale ended. He was off on this pursuit of knowledge,
writing to the Smithsonian asking for information. All of that,
and it's a consequence let him down a path that
led to the invention of the airplane. This beneficial change
that could have happened, but it was adverse. No bird
(29:45):
sores in a calm. He had a headwind the likes
of which nobody ever imagined, nobody in the family well.
In Bishopwright's diary entry that followed Wilbur's death in nineteen twelve,
he died when he was still in his forties, tragically
(30:07):
died of typhoid fever. His father had warned about the
perils of impure water all their lives. Was like a
Greek tragedy. They'd been warned and warned and worn, and
that's what killed him. But the question was who hit
him in the teeth with a hockey stick and was
it intentional or not. In the Bishop's diary he writes
(30:30):
to explain who the boy was to hit him and
what happened to him. His name was Oliver Hay h
au g h and Oliver Hay lived right around the
corner in the same neighborhood, and he became the most
notorious murderer in the history of Ohio. He killed his father,
(30:53):
his mother, his brother, and an estimated twelve others or more.
Now isn't it fascinating that one of the ultimate geniuses
of our story as a people grew up in the
same neighborhood with the ultimate expression of evil in a
(31:18):
human being. I keep coming back to the brothers themselves
and what they wrote, and to Catherine and what she wrote.
One of the most horrific experiences of all was when
Orville had a crash when he finally was invited to
demonstrate what they had developed at Fort Meyer, across the
(31:40):
Potomac River from Washington, and thousands came over from the government,
from the White House, from the Cabinet, from the Congress,
to watch this miracle. And Orville went up and was
breaking all kinds of world records almost by the day,
at the same time that Wilbur was over at Lehman
demonstrating there in front of it. It was like a
two ring circuit, with one brother in each location. And
(32:04):
then one day Orville took a young Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge,
Army lieutenant up with him as a passenger. He'd been
taking many others, and something went wrong with the plane
and it crashed seventy five feet straight down into the ground,
and young Selfridge was killed, the first fatality in aviation history.
(32:26):
And Orville was very nearly killed, had many bones broken,
and he was badly scarred and bruised. And again his
confidence was shaken. He was horrified by the death of Selfridge.
And when Catherine back in Dayton, got word that this
(32:47):
has happened on an afternoon after she'd returned from teaching
at the high school, she called the principal of the
school and said she was taking an indefinite leave of absence.
She was packed and on a train bound for Washington
before the day was over. She then spent the next
six five and a half six weeks with Oriville at
(33:10):
the base hospital at Fort Meyer, making sure he got
the best care possible and making sure that she could
do did everything she could to keep his spirits up.
It was thought that he would never walk again, then
they would certainly never fly again. And she saw him
(33:31):
through it, and he later set himself and others did too.
If it weren't for her, he probably wouldn't have made it.
And she got him back to Dayton and kept working
with him, kept encouraging, and he not only walked again,
but he flew again. And at his insistence, much against
the advice of both Wilbur and Catherine and the father,
(33:54):
that he shouldn't go back to Fort Meyer. It was
too traumatic for him, too many memories, too many feelings
of regret or guilt over the death of young Selfridge.
But he insisted he had to go back where it happened,
and he went back, and he flew again, and he
continued to break more records. It's one of the most
(34:14):
remarkable comebacks I've ever known in what I've written about,
and one of the lessons that you get from this
story is they would not give up, and they always
learned from their mistakes. They always learned from their failures.
Where there was a technical failure with an aluminum motor
(34:37):
block that they pioneered split when it was first tested,
they built another one and it worked, or whether it
was finding that all the details, the data, the tables
of technical mathematics used by people like Chinout and Langley
were wrong, they were worthless, as Orwell said. They then said, well,
(35:02):
we'll have to do that ourselves. So they created their
own wind tunnel. They created little models of wing shapes
out of axaw blades, and they created their own tables
which were correct, all way ahead of anybody at MIT
or Renseleer or the Smithsonian Institution, all on their own
(35:25):
by learning from their mistakes. Their point was that if
you're knocked down, you don't lie there and whimper and
wine and lapse into self pity. You get back up
on your feet, figure out what you did wrong, do
it right, and go at it again. And what a
lesson for young people to learn today, and what a
lesson to learn about use of the English language. Almost
(35:49):
half of all the business schools in our country today
require incoming freshmen, who are all college graduates, to take
a basic writing lesson because they are incapable of writing
a presentable letter or report or proposal. Pathetic. And here
they are, these two examples of the boys that young
(36:11):
men that never even finished high school because of the
way they were brought up. Wilbur was asked once, if
you had to give advice to somebody young people today
about how to succeed, what would you say? He said,
I would tell him to pick out a good mother
and father and grow up in Ohio.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
And a great job on the editing of that piece
by our own Greg Hengler. And you've been listening to
the late David McCullough his book The Right Brothers go
to Amazon or the usual suspects pick it up, you
will not put it down. That accident, or maybe it
wasn't with a hockey stick. When Wilbur was eighteen, my
goodness had changed his life. He was disfigured, in great pain.
(36:57):
There were no dentists around back in the day to
give you implants or any of the current technologies that
can help fix such a thing. He was disfigured, and
he retreated into his self imposed isolation, and instead of
going to Yale, stayed put in his family home and
just cleared out and cleared through and went through the
(37:20):
entire family library. And it was three years that would
ultimately change the direction of his life. The adversity that
would change the direction of his life. The same adversity
would happen to Orville in a crash that would almost
kill him, and most people would have never tried it again.
And there he was not long later, in the same place,
(37:42):
back up on that plane. That's the way they were
brought up, to never give up and to try again,
and to learn from their mistakes. And we ended where
we began with those parents and the advantage of having
parents who drive you to think for yourself, work hard,
and take responsibility for your life. The story of the
(38:03):
Wright Brothers a quintessentially American story. Here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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