Hello everyone, and welcome. My name is Ranger Ashley, and I'm here at Wright Brothers National
Memorial along with Jess Green from Outer Banks Forever. And we are here to get to speak with Dr.
Tom Crouch about the legacy of the Wright brothers and the ingenuity of aviation. Now, Dr. Tom
Crouch, it's an honor to get to be here with you today. For those who may not be familiar with Dr.
Crouch, he is a renowned aviation historian and author he also was curator or is Curator Emeritus
for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. and author of several books,
but two of which being "The Bishop's Boys: A life of Wilbur and Orville Wright" and
"Wings: A History of Aviation From Kites to the Space Age." So, Dr. Crouch,
thanks so much to be here with us today. --You bet, and don't forget "First Flight" either, the
National Park Service handbook... --That's right! --...on the Wright brothers.
I spend a lot of time on the C&O Canal National Historic Park and at Harpers Ferry,
right across the river. And it's always nice, at Harpers Ferry, in the bookstore, they have a
rack of National Park Service handbooks, and "First Flight" is always there, which makes me
feel good. --That's fantastic, and that's so neat to see. And it's great to know that you have been
involved with us here at the Park specifically, as, I know you were talking earlier, for several
years. But it's great to hear that you're continuing being involved with the Park Service
as well. --You bet! --Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, what we're gonna talk about today is we
have some questions that we've prepared for you, that we think our viewers would love to know,
and have your insight on, and that we're excited to hear about as well. And then we also have some
questions that were submitted to us to ask to you too that we'll kind of be bringing up throughout
our time together today. So to get us started, I think that one of the first questions has to do
with "Bishop's Boys." It's a book that's been very helpful to us I know, and to our rangers
as we're researching and learning about the Wrights, but the question that we kind of had,
is what inspired you to write a book about the Wright brothers, to invest your time?
--Well people often ask me that. I'm, as it happens, a native of Dayton, Ohio.
I was born in Dayton and grew up in the Miami Valley. My father spent half a century working
as a research technician at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. So I grew up with airplanes,
and obviously always knew that the Wright brothers were fellow Daytonians, but it really wasn't that
so much that inspired me to write about them. I became interested in, as a historian,
as I was going through graduate school, in the history of technology. I was really fascinated by
the history of things that have a real impact on change, and so on, and became fascinated
by science and especially by technology. And if you think about the history of the 20th century,
especially, and you think about the technologies that made our world today in the 21st century
very different from the world at the end of the 19th century, well flight
played a big part in that. Flight changed the way in which
we travel, in which the we do commerce, and in which we make war. It made all kinds of things
possible, literally shrunk the world in terms of the time it took to get from one place to another.
And ultimately, you know, it laid the foundation for our ability to fly,
not just in the atmosphere but outside the atmosphere. I have a friend who wrote a really
good book, he won the Pulitzer Prize with, a sort of political history of the space age.
And in the book, he said, you know, space travel represented a really evolutionary change. We
were no longer people tied to the earth, we were people who ventured into space. And that made us
different people, really. And I immediately said, well you know, I think that's true,
but I don't think it started with Sputnik, or the first human beings to fly into space.
It started with the whole notion of flight. It really started with the Wright brothers.
Dayton and Kitty Hawk, and that first time that human beings left the air in a powered,
heavier-than-air machine that they could actually control. That was the beginning of this huge,
evolutionary change. And so with that in mind, it just seemed to me that where aviation came from,
what the roots of the flying machine were, and how people learned to do this incredible thing,
and how the technology evolved from the Wright brothers into the future,
was something that really was worth thinking about and talking about. And, again, it really,
well it doesn't begin with the Wright brothers, but the great moment when human beings fly for
the first time, that's all the Wight brothers. And so it just seemed to me that was worth
understanding for myself and maybe helping other people understand how important it was too.
--I love that. I'm certainly glad that you decided to go down that journey, because
it has been helpful for so many others. And I love that perspective about, you know, how it
changed not just, you know, a little bit, but I mean, really humanity in general. And what was
possible for us. --You know, people often ask what the biggest change brought by the airplane
was. Was it in transportation? Was it in military aviation? I mean, it redefined the battlefield, it
redefined the way we make war. And what I usually say is, all those were great changes, some good,
some not so good. Technology is always that way. It's kind of a two-edged sword. But if you want to
know what I think the biggest change was, I think it was psychological. Before the Wright brothers,
you really did hear people say, "Well gosh, if God had wanted us to fly, he would have given us
wings. It's impossible." After Wilbur and Orville Wright, what you heard people say was,
"Wow, if human beings, flesh and blood people like me, can actually with our own brains and hands,
make this machine that we can get on and it's going to take us into the air--my gosh! What
can't we do?" It sort of psychologically opened the door on the new century, on the 20th century,
and help people to understand that science and technology offered the power of changes
unimaginable in earlier eras. Some of it was going to be bad, some of it was going to be good,
but it was going to be a huge change. And that, I think the whole notion of change of
technological progress and so on, was one of the real impacts of the invention of the airplane.
--Yeah, one of the things we talk about here is making the impossible possible, you know,
as being one of the things the Wright brothers did. And I love how you're saying, you know,
really not only did it make that thing possible, the idea of flight, but also that it just
changed the mentality. That so many more things could be possible than we ever thought of before.
--Right. --That's great, and again like I said, I'm glad that that inspiration
did lead you down that road to write some more and sharing that with others.
And now, speaking of kind of the Wright brothers themselves, I mean we know their
amazing accomplishment of the first flight. And it's kind of easy to to idolize them
because of this, you know, but for you in your research and as you've studied the Wrights,
what have you learned about who Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright were as individual people?
--Well anytime you write a biography, you have to, if you're honest with yourself,
you have to face the fact that there's going to be some of you in this biography, and there's going
to be some of the people you write about. You have to understand them through your own perspective.
And in fact, when I wrote the "Bishop's Boys," I actually spent a lot of time talking to
a fellow at George Washington University who was an authority on family dynamics, the psychology
of family life and how people interact, and so on and so forth in a family.
And that was extraordinarily helpful. Because to understand Wilbur and Orville Wright,
I guess to understand any of us, but them as well, you have to understand where they came from,
and the kind of family they came out of, and the way in which that not only shaped them but shaped
what they did as well. And the way in which they did it. They were, we think of them as the Wright
brothers, as sort of a corporate meshing of these two people. They were actually quite different.
When they talked about themselves, they often sort of even underplayed that difference.
They would say, gosh from the time we were small boys we played together and we shared our toys and
all of this kind of thing. In truth, as small children, we forget they weren't the only two
Wright brothers. They had two older brothers, Reuchlin and Lorin Wright, and then Wilbur,
and Wilbur's actually separated from Orville by the birth of twins who died in infancy,
and then there's Kate. Wilbur and Orville are actually almost four years apart.
Orville and Kate are exactly three years apart. They shared a birthday three years apart.
Orville's three years older than his sister, and when they were growing up, Orville and Kate were
the ones who were extraordinarily close, and Wilbur tended to connect to his older brothers.
He belonged to the same clubs that they did, did the same kind of things that they did,
and it's really not until they're young men when they went into business together,
originally in the printing business, and then in the bicycle business,
that the two of them realized just how closely they really did mesh.
And so while they were separate individuals and you can never mistake one for the other,
Orville for example was a real clothes horse, he really enjoyed looking nice and dressing well and
presenting himself to the world to a much greater extent than Wilbur. When Wilbur went to Chicago
in 1901 to give the most important speech of his life, to the Western Society of Engineers,
he went wearing some of Orville's clothes because they were so much nicer than his clothes. And
so you know, there are those two differences between the brothers and yet they meshed so well
and that's part of the secret of their success. Surely the fact that they knew one another
as well as they did. And what that meant was that not only did they understand one another's
strengths and weaknesses but they also um, for example, they knew one another so well
that they could argue with one another and not be afraid that somebody was going to be alienated
or go off angry or something of that sort. They argued a lot and they enjoyed it, arguing a lot.
They they often joked that um they would get into an argument with one brother on one side
and the other brother on the other side and at the end they would have switched positions
um and that was a huge strength um for those two brothers. The family that they grew up in
um was very close-knit, uh Bishop Wright uh was their father, was an extraordinary guy. He was
a Bishop in the United Brethren of Christ and he had worked his way up in the church
hierarchy to become a Bishop and he was a man who believed that um the path of virtue was narrow
and there were people and forces that were going to try to lure you off the path of virtue.
And what you had to do in life was do what you thought was right. And for heaven's sake. stick
to your family, your family is what you have in life to depend on. Friends will fall away,
family never will. So those were all factors that went into making Wilbur and Orville Wright
who they were as individuals and and as two guys who had grown up in the same family and
were quite close to one another. -I love that I think it's such a good perspective
um because you're right you mentioned in the beginning we tend to think of the Wright brothers,
you know, as just like one unit you know and so it's good to hear about the rules and even that
they weren't the only Wright brothers you know they did have other siblings.-Right.
-And that but they still learned about each other um through growing up and having that trust you
mentioned being able to argue together in things I would think that had to be able to help them
you know when they're working on a machine together. You know to have enough confidence no
matter how hard you push each other you're still going to be there at the end of the day. -Right.
Yeah so I really like that and then um also you talked about you know kind of them sticking to
their path, I can see how that would have been helpful for them. -No, the the Wright brothers
didn't care a whole lot for what anybody else thought. They cared what they thought
but the two of them had worked out together. And if they were sure they had come up with an answer
to some puzzle it it really didn't matter much to them what anybody else thought. They were going
to stick to the answer they had come up with and see where that see where that took them.
Growing up in that family uh shaped them in other ways too. Their father
was um again a church Bishop but a very litigious guy he really believed in using the courts.
After about 10 years in the church when he climbed from being a simple
itinerant preacher to becoming the bishop of the whole west coast for that church, he
became involved in this disagreement with other members of the church
that went on for, the national church remember, and after about 10 years of the disagreement
he walked away with about 10 percent of the total church membership and turned around and sued the
other 90 of church membership for possession of church property across the the United States.
That suit went to seven state supreme courts and the supreme court of Canada. He lost every single
suit but one. But that didn't matter to him, he had taken a stand, made his argument, and that's
what counted. And his sons were very much involved in that, um at the end of that first argument
with the other members of the church he became convinced that someone, a leader fellow leader
of the little schismatic church that he had walked away with, was misusing church money.
And that argument went on for a little while and again he turned around and sued over that and
Wilbur Wright was heavily involved in that. He wrote pamphlets defending his father's position
and again, that's bishop Wright, he's a man who believes when you're right you fight for what's
right. What impact did that have on Wilbur and Orville Wright? Well if you look at the Wrights
after the invention of the airplane after they've become world famous and so on and so forth,
they too aren't reticent about bringing suits in court,
in world courts, in Europe courts in the United States. If they think they're right and they're
being cheated somehow they'll take it to court and they'll fight for what they think is right
and that is part of what they took coming out of that family of theirs. Bishop Wright was in many
ways a wonderful father but he did also shape his children in those really interesting ways.
The Wright brothers were not like their father, they were not terribly trusting individuals. They
tended to think that um "well gosh there are people out there who are trying to get us and
we better defend ourselves" And there was truth in that. There were people out there trying to
take from them what was rightfully theirs by the process of invention. But um you can also see
their father in them. -Yeah and that plays into how they ended up here at Kitty Hawk then with
them looking for a place that had isolation. You know among other things they were interested in.
-Exactly. -You know, so I can totally see how that would be influential as well. So it's good,
it's good to have kind of I think a perspective on them as as individuals. I mean you mentioned a
few things with that too that I think would kind of touch on this question um with you know what
what about them you know what was the magic combination you know about the Wright brothers
that made them successful with flight? Where you had so many other people who were trying
um even people in their own time and weren't successful. And so you touched
on a little bit but what do you see as being some of the things that made them successful?
-One of the things that often bothers me when people talk about the Wright brothers,
they tend to present them as these two kind of lucky bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio who just
kind of chance on to it. And there isn't a bit of truth in that. I mean if lucky bicycle makers
were going to invent the airplane it would have happened a long time before it did. So if when the
question when somebody says "okay what was there about them that was different?" You have to start
you know with the psychology of the Wright brothers, coming out of that family of theirs,
they were intense and focused and trusting their own judgment. Fascinated by mechanical problems um
all of all of those things. And wanting to prove themselves to some extent for the world too,
Wilbur um especially, um at the in the very late 19th century
when he was actually approaching uh his mid-twenties and looking forward to 30
and asking himself you know "here I am going on 30 years old living in my father's house,
for heaven's sakes, unmarried running the very small neighborhood business with my brother.
What have I done to prove myself? My friends are married they're out making their way
in the world and so on, what have I done?" He's really looking around for a challenge.
So unlike some of these other experimenters who just kind of fall into aviation
part of the the secret of the Wright brothers success is the fact that Wilbur especially
focuses on this thing as a way in which to prove himself to demonstrate himself.
Going beyond that kind of impetus they you have to look at their intellectual gifts too. They were
extraordinarily brilliant self-taught engineers. They hadn't spent a day in a college classroom
but at the beginning of the 20th century many in fact most engineers hadn't gone to college
um the typical way to become an engineer was to go to work on an engineering project like a
canal or a railroad or something like that and work your way up learning the business as you
as you worked. And their friend, Chicago friend, Octave Chanut who was one of the most successful
civil engineers in the country had done exactly that, hadn't gone to college he'd started out on a
railroad crew and worked his way up and the wright brothers had done that too in a sense. They were
both extraordinarily well read, their father had a great library and Dayton public library was not
bad at the time. They were able in other words to read up on whatever interested them and mechanics,
science and technology did interest them and they had really trained themselves, they'd gone
well beyond. Both of them had done pretty well in mathematics for example in high school but
they taught themselves well beyond that. So that when they came to the business of inventing the
airplane they were able to access the engineering literature of the period and find anything they
wanted in the work of their their uh predecessors. And um psychologically the Wright brothers had
this ability to look at a problem, sort of as we would say today, from outside the box in a
different way than other people did. And they had the ability to transfer ideas from one technology
to another technology, that was important. If you look at the world's first airplane for example,
the one that you have in the flight room for example at Wright Brothers National Memorial,
if you pay attention to it you can see a lot of bicycle parts in that airplane sprockets
and chains and and bicycle spoke wire and lots of things from the technology that they knew
really well. But I mean that's simple stuff, going beyond that, they had been able to take an idea,
"how do you ride a bicycle?" and really analyze that and what they came up with was well you know
you're not just going to turn the wheel as you're rolling down the street you'll fall off the bike.
You have to, it's complicated, you have to lean into a turn and and um gosh it's pretty
complicated riding a bicycle. If you were to try to explain to a Martian or somebody who'd never
seen a bicycle how you ride it it would be well okay you're gonna balance on these two narrow
wheels and there are these pedals you're gonna pedal and these handlebars you can
you know it would sound as though you had to be the world's greatest acrobat
to ride a bicycle. But the Wright brothers knew that once um you'd learned how to do it
you did it automatically. And so while other experimenters thought
gosh controlling an airplane would be just impossible it would be like balancing something
on the head of a pin, the Wright brothers reasoned that no that's not the case. If you design
a good control system a pilot's perfectly capable of exercising absolute control.
So it's that kind of thing and it's other things, the ability to go from the abstract
to the concrete. They uh, in designing their airplane, they had to know how much wing area
how much surface area they had to have to lift the weight of the airplane and the pilot into the air.
And they could estimate their own weight and they could estimate the weight of the material
was going into the airplane so they knew about how heavy it was going to be. And when they did the
calculations and these guys as intuitive engineers calculated everything they could calculate
what they discovered was you are either going to have to have just a humongous wing, a huge wing,
to lift that much weight or you're going to fly into a headwind. If you're flying into a headwind
the air speed that you have to lift you into the air is a combination of your speed forward and the
wings the wind speed toward you. And so um they were able, in other words, to literally figure out
how much wing area and how they were going to do this before they had driven a single nail
or cut a single uh piece of wood or sewn a single piece of fabric. And and they had gone, when they
did the wind tunnel thing for example um their first glider in 1900 was a little disappointing.
They had based it on those calculations that I talked about and they had discovered this little
place Kitty Hawk, North Carolina where there were strong steady winds and soft dunes and that kind
of thing people weren't going to bother them and they had those headwinds. But when they got
down there they discovered that the lift their glider was producing was really only a small
portion of what they needed to get into the air. In fact, it was only really at the
end of their time at Kitty Hawk that first year, in 1900, that they could make any glides um at
all. So they knew they had that problem and I guess most people would have thrown that first
glider into the dunes and gone fishing and they loved fishing down there. -Yeah! -But instead
of doing that these are the Wright brothers and they're thinking about calculation about numbers
and what they say is "well okay so this thing is creating enough lift to carry us through the air,
how much lift is it creating?" so they fly it as a kite. They use a fish scale and
an anemometer to measure the wind speed that their friend Octave Chanut
had given them. They had a way to calculate the angle of attack that this thing was flying at as a
kite with them controlling it from the ground and using the numbers they got that way, they could
actually back calculate the amount of lift they were really getting in that machine and figure
out how short they were of what they needed to get into the air themselves. And so it's that kind of
thinking that sets the Wright brothers apart from uh everybody else. They when they go back to Kitty
Hawk the second year in 1901 their solution had just been to build a glider that was twice as big
as the one before and Wilbur Wilbur did all the flying in 1900 and 1901 was able to get into the
air in the thing but it was just really scary and uh it's still not producing as much lift as their
calculations suggested. And so what do they do they go back to Dayton and instead of giving up
they build their first wind tunnel, they hadn't invented the wind tunnel
but they were the first ones really to use in a really smart way. This little box of theirs
with a fan on one end and inside the wind tunnel was this little balance that they could use to
test model wings. And a little balance is made out of broken hacksaw blades and bicycle spoke wire,
you can hold it in your hands and if you breathe on it hard it falls apart because it's all
balanced together. But this little balance is just extraordinary, what they have done is to
take these algebraic equations that they use to calculate their wing area and they've gone from
the abstraction of that formula that equation to the reality of this little machine. The balance
that is going to pop out exactly the figure they need to correct their calculations.
Now I suggest to you that it's at moments like that that you kind of begin to say "all right
now I begin to understand how their minds work." in a way that is really much more
useful than anybody else is doing at the same time interested in the airplane problem. And beyond all
that there's their personal drive somebody, Orville writing to their friend George Spratt
early in 1903 before they go back down to kitty hawk to fly the first powered
machine. Orville writes his friend George Spratt a note in which he says "you know
isn't it wonderful that all of these secrets have been preserved all of these years just so
we could uncover the truth" it's um in other words these guys what makes them get up in the morning
is the possibility of going back to attack these really difficult technical problems. I mean
that's what gets them up in the morning and keeps them going and it's that kind of drive
that keeps them in the business. I guess some people think the Wright brothers are probably
you know they're guys who have their hair on fire to go out and fly through the air and I
suppose they enjoyed flying but you have to realize that Orville for example who lived in 1948
made his last flight as a pilot in command in 1918.
So it's not that they want to do nothing better than go out and fly the reason they do this is
because of that that intellectual challenge the stimulation of solving problems and
fundamentally it's all of those things it's complicated
put together that sets the Wrights apart from the other people who are trying to fly.
-Yeah well I mean and there's so I like how many of those different things you touched on because
it's not a simple answer. You know I think it's important to acknowledge um because then we could
I think over over simplifying their accomplishment even. But yeah that you know they they had this
drive to do it and I like the connection that it's really the intellectual drive even. -Yep. -I know
one of my favorite quotes is in a letter Wilbur sends to Octave Chanut and he's afflicted with
the belief that flight's possible you know. And I think that that kind of affliction I could see
going along with what you're saying . -Yep. -Could really drive them to do what they did but then
also I like to talk about them being focused and very also yeah very talented at taking something
and and translating it you know idea and translating it into a tangible thing. Now
one question we had for you so so our theme this year for our December 17th
celebration is the ingenuity of aviation so this highlights you know both the creativity
and dedication of what the Wright brothers achieved and what they did um but also
the many obstacles that were overcome. You know after flight was proved possible you still have
a lot of roadblocks to where we get today so I'm kind of curious because you are not only you know
well well written and knowledgeable about the brothers themselves but also aviation after
that point. And so I'm curious for you ,what do you see as being some of the biggest challenges
people have had to overcome in regards to aviation since those first flights in 1903? -
Well if you look at the history of the airplane,
aeronautical progress hasn't been kind of a steady steady stream every day
in every way we're getting better and better. What's happened is that improvements in flight
have come sort of in bits and starts, there's a revolution and then a period of normal improvement
and then another revolution. The Wright brothers of course were the first revolutionaries,
they built the world's first airplane, and for probably two decades after that airplanes followed
the pattern that the Wright brothers had set. They were almost all biplanes, two wings because you
can build a biplane much stronger structure than you can a single wing monoplane and
the basic things that the Wright brothers had had achieved are still the basis of all the airplanes
built during that period. They're almost all wood and wire and fabric and that kind of thing.
There's a revolutionary change in the 20s and 30s when people begin to when people are no longer
normally building airplanes that way, no more wood wire and fabric. Airplanes are now being built out
of metal because you can do things with metal and you can't do with wood and it inspires a whole new
generation of aerodynamic breakthroughs, propulsion breakthroughs, and all of that
based on structure. And this is why airplanes in a particular generation all look pretty much
alike. If you look at airplanes on that first generation yeah they're almost all biplanes and
that kind of thing, wood, wire and fabric. If you look at airplanes in this next generation
they're almost all metal, they're monoplanes, single wing machines, multi-engine machines
and they all kind of look alike and that's because the technology is all pretty much the same.
There's another revolutionary change just before World War II and during World War
II and its propulsion. By the time you get to the 1940s airplanes in terms of speed are
pretty close to their upper limit. There are people who claim that really fast World War II
generation airplanes like p47s or p51s flew faster than sound, it's actually not true.
What happens is that as those airplanes, which are driven by propellers, go faster and faster
the propeller out in front of them actually becomes a source of drag.
You're moving so fast into the air now that this is like a big plate out in front of you and there
is a limit to how fast you can go that way. The jet engine did and rockets did away with that
and so there's another generation of airplanes which have now swept wings because during World
War II German aerodynamicists did a lot of high-speed wind tunnel and that kind of work
um and to discover new aerodynamic shapes that are going to work better for high-speed flight.
And at the end of World War II the Americans, the British, the French, and the Russians all get that
German data. They all come back and begin building their first jet fighters and military planes
and then commercial airplanes and again son of a gun they all look pretty much alike.
They're metal, they're swept wing and with new great breakthroughs
coming out of research laboratories and so on you get all of them having winglets and and
all of that. So that's the way aeronautics has progressed and while Wilbur and Orville Wright
are singular back here in the beginning and every generation there have been people like
Wilbur and Orville Wright who have achieved those breakthroughs and opened the door to
a new way to fly, a new design of improved flying machines and so on and so forth. And
you go from the airplane to space flight,
space flight and aviation are kind of different in interesting ways.
The airplane really wasn't a creature of science it was a creature of engineering
it was invented by people like Wilbur and Orville Wright who didn't really care about exactly why
this was happening, what they did was to test and theorize and their notion wasn't to figure
out exactly what was happening but to build a machine that was actually going to do it.
And that's the way aeronautical progress is pretty much taking place.
You you get the birth of aerodynamics and so on and so forth a little later on.
Space flight builds on that because I mean the first spacecraft even today spacecraft whether
in this country or any country the Soviet Union, they're pretty much built by people who build
airplanes as well and now they're building spacecraft but the dream is quite different.
Wilbur and Orville
are not much as dreamers, in fact they're pretty hard-nosed engineers who have this set of problems
to solve and they do it and that's pretty much the way the history of flight has gone. Space
flight on the other hand is born of dreamers, I mean it comes out of science fiction roots
and people who want to do this impossible thing and and unlike Wilbur and Orville the people who
pioneer space flight, people like Robert Goddard, are just these wild eyed visionary dreamers.
Can I tell you one night not Wright brothers story that you can cut if you want. -Oh yeah no worries.
-Robert Goddard was 16 in the 1890s growing up outside Boston in Worcester Massachusetts.
The Boston Globe was serializing H.G. Wells novel the War of the Worlds, they rewrote it so it was
taking place instead of in Boston instead of London and so on and so forth. And he'd been,
Robert Goddard had been reading it and one day his father said, "I want you to go out in the backyard
and trim that cherry tree back there" so he took a ladder and clippers and got up in the tree and
trimming the cherry tree and he had a vision he said he saw a craft with whirling centrifugal
things and so on land at the foot of the cherry tree. And he said it was just wonderful and
he said in later life you know I was never the same after I climbed down from that cherry tree.
30 years later he's a fairly famous scientist, he's been a professor of physics, famous for
building rockets, he's out in New Mexico flying rockets with Smithsonian and Carnegie money.
And he gets a letter from home from Massachusetts, 1938 was the year of
the great hurricane that just swept across Massachusetts and a friend had written him saying,
"you know that old cherry tree in your backyard? Well it's gone, the hurricane took it down."
and a few days later in his diary what he wrote was, "Cherry tree gone. Have to carry on alone."
Now Wilbur and Orville Wright would have been aghast at that, they just weren't that
kind of guy but Robert Goddard was. He was the kind of guy, Wilbur and Orville had a tough time
imagining what the future of flight was actually going to be like,
pretty much they always underestimated what was going to happen in just a few years.
Robert Goddard was thinking a thousand years ahead, he was thinking about sending
human cells into space so that the human race wouldn't die. And that's just a really interesting
difference between people like Wilbur and Orville, the engineers
who had created the reality of flight, and the kind of wild dreamer like Robert Goddard who was
in fact never that much of an engineer, he was a physicist. But he has this huge visionary dream
about the future of humanity, quite different than the Wrights and yet two different kinds of
genius. -Yeah I can see that for sure and I like I like what you talked about when it comes to the um
yeah I guess when it comes to kind of looking at aviation and then later looking at you know space
exploration you know as as the progression that it was a kind of revolution, uh some something
that sparked it, a period of improvement things are and then things are kind of similar for a
little bit but each time you get um just kind of these big improvements that will happen in waves
almost. So that something I think that we can see it is really interesting to look at. -That's the
way in which the history of flight took place, not a steady progression, but a revolution,
progress, another change, progress it's been much more like stair steps than a steady slope.
-Yeah that's so interesting to think about too. So I think the last few questions we have for
you actually come from our some things that were submitted to us, and so let's see I know you've
answered a few of these just during uh during our conversation so far. So I'm going to try to
choose some you have not and first of all you had a shout out from Beverly on our Instagram,
she commented that Your book Bishops Boys, the biography, literally changed her life. It was
something that inspired her to dedicate her own time to researching the Wright brothers
after she retired and so I think that's something just to share, I thought was very
very neat to hear about. Well one question that we had I think had to do with the engine on the
1903 Wright flyer. So this thing that people are very curious about because it was a unique engine,
you know built alongside with Charlie Taylor or by Charlie Taylor their mechanic. But one question
from Sid was whether you know what inspired that type of engine? You know was it based on another
similar engine at the time you know what did that process look like? -Well when you think about
the engine of the Wright 1903 Wright airplane you can't just think about the engine, you have to
think about the propulsion system because that's the way the Wrights thought. There's a system for
lift, control and propulsion so it includes both the engine and the transmission and the propellers
and when you look at it that way the revolutionary difficult thing to do wasn't the engine,
it was the propellers. The engine, the first engine that Charlie built actually exploded
so the engine that was on the airplane on December 17th was really the second engine and that engine
would just get cherry red. When you look at the 1903 Wright airplane you can see what looks like
a radiator up along well it's not, it's only a stand pipe. There's no water pump on the airplane
so when the engine starts any water that's in the engine turns to steam like that and the only
cooling that engine is going to get after that while it's running is you're going forward through
the air and maybe there's a little air cooling and that's it. But it just gets really hot. The
real revolutionary change was the propellers, and again the Wrights think about system
they had calculated this they knew how much thrust they had to get out of the propellers
to move the airplane forward and into the air so they start with that. They realize that a
propeller isn't like a screw going into wood, it's like a wing only instead of going forward
it's spinning and instead of generating lift it's generating thrust to move you forward.
And so using their wind tunnel data and a whole lot of just brilliant engineering they were able
to build propellers that whose performance they had absolutely calculated. They knew that this
propeller with these propellers would give them the thrust they needed to get into the air if the
engine could turn the propellers at a fast enough rpm. And so they had these problems with the
engine and with the transmission and uh oh yuck but when they got 12 to 16 miles per hour our rpms
horsepower out of the engine they knew that was it. Other people, Samuel Langley who failed to fly
had developed a radial engine that developed 52 horsepower for about the same weight the Wright
engine had. The Wright engine develops a little over 12 horsepower when it's up and running,
the difference is Langley put that beautiful engine of his into a structure that structurally
and aerodynamically was doomed to failure. The Wright brothers realized the engine is
just a part of a system, this whole thing has to function together, the airplane has to fly. So
even though that horsepower of theirs was, Chanut for example, wondered if it was actually enough
to get them off the ground. The Wright brothers had done the numbers and they said, "You know
we're not building a roman road here, we're not building a hugely successful engine that'll run
forever. This thing is producing enough horsepower to get us off the ground and keep us in the air
that's what we need and we're going to go with it." So when you look at propulsion it is that
difference between the fairly simple problem of developing the engine and the hugely complex
problem of developing the propellers and so on so forth. But it's also the fact that the brothers,
Langley spent so much time on that engine and all too little on the structure and
the aerodynamics so we're going to get them into the air for heaven's sakes. The Wright brothers,
one of the real secrets of their success, is that they recognize that the airplane
is a single machine made up of systems, control, aerodynamics, propulsion
and the whole thing's got to work as a unit. -Yeah well that makes sense for sure and it's neat that
I like that insight into kind of how they thought of it you know as that unit and not just as you
know we're working on an engine to make that important thing you know. So let's see we had
another question about kind of the propellers, how the propellers were made. So if you could
touch real quick you've already talked about them kind of developing in their wind tunnel
but what I mean what tools did they use? Did they carve them themselves?
-They did. Yeah it's strange, when you look at the propellers for the 1903 airplane and later
propellers you've got these complex shapes that are the result of brilliant engineering research.
I mean without those propellers that airplane wouldn't fly, they had to work just as calculated.
And so you've got this these precise equations and difficult thinking and then they carved them with
medieval woodworking tools, they used balls and draw knives. They had templates based on their
wind tunnel research and their own thinking so that they knew what shape the propeller
had to be at every point along its blade, every little station along the blade. But they did the
actual carving with woodworking tools that had been in place since the medieval world.
-Wow so they really are very hands-on with the development of their flyer for sure and all
the pieces of it so that's that's interesting to hear about the tools and things that they used.
So I think uh let's see here so I think the the last question that we have that was submitted to
us um actually has to do um with you in your research process and it's from from tiffany.
So she was curious about kind of how you do your research before you write a book and
how long you spend researching before you begin something. -Well the Bishops Boys was different
because it was a book that I'd been working on without knowing I was working on it
um for 15 years. Anyway part of it was work on my dissertation.
I was really lucky when I was in graduate school at Ohio State when I was working on my doctorate
Marvin W McFarland who was the head of science and technology
at the library of congress and a real mentor for me. I was in Washington visiting doing research
and at the national at the Library of Congress and Mac came out and put a piece of paper with
a phone number on my desk and said, "When you get back to Ohio", I was still living in Ohio
"call her". And it was Ivonette Wright Miller who was the Wright brothers niece and so
a lot of the research I actually did in Ivonette and Harold Scribbs Miller's basement in Kettering.
They still had, when the Wright brothers when the Library of Congress took the Wright papers in 1948
they didn't take everything, they didn't take family papers for example and photographs.
The books, if they had a book that the Wright brothers had already in the Library of Congress,
they didn't take it. So all that stuff was in their basement, it's what's at Wright
State University now in their Wright brothers collection, but I mean that was all part of the
part of the research. McFarland had always said he in 1953 with a group of people from the library
of congress that edited the papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright and it's a masterpiece two volumes
just wonderful just a masterwork of scholarship. And Mac had always said
you don't need to write a biography of the Wright brothers because you have the Wright papers and
you have Fred Kelly's book "The Wright Brothers". And so and in fact my first book the Wright
brothers were in it but it was really about the circle of people they were involved with Chanut
and Langley and the Europeans and all that. So it really wasn't until after McFarland died
that uh all those years of talking with the Wright family
I had come to recognize how important the family had been in this story. The extent to which
it had had an impact on what happened during and after the invention of the airplane.
And nobody had ever talked about that so I thought well I could do a book that would be
different from what came before because it would grow out of the Wright family and um
so I did. And in fact Fred Howard who had worked on the Wright papers with Mac in 1953,
who was probably 20 years older than I was, came out with a really another really good Wright
book called "Wilbur Orville" the year before the Bishops Boys came out. So you had these two new
standard biographies of the Wright brothers coming out at the the same time which was interesting.
That one of the great moments in my life was when I sent the manuscript of the book back to Dayton,
I was already I've been working at the Smithsonian for a decade at that point,
back to Mr. and Mrs. Miller and she had she was getting older and had trouble on the phone
and her husband Harold Scribbs Miller who had been the executor of Orville's estate called
and said, "Tom whatever Ivonette says is these are the people she knew."
Yeah exactly. -That's I mean to be able to take something that you hear from her personally you
know. -To have known her I mean it was like she was someone who could honestly remember she was
a little girl but she could honestly remember the day they walked in the door from Kitty Hawk. Her
family lived just around the corner. I remember working at the Library of Congress one day,
I had never really gone over the Wright brothers notebooks because all of it was in the papers
and it was just easier to get the calculations and all that. But I was looking at the notebook
and I was glad I did because it was in that notebook that I found a little ticket
to the Wright bike shop for a part that somebody had had left and
there was a ticket for it just right in the notebook. But
on the inside back cover and this was just one of those spiral bound things you stick in your pocket
but it's what Orville had taken the flight data down for the 1902 glider and on the inside back
cardboard cover was written in um kind of childish block letters twice "Ivonette Ivonette" and I
called her and I said, "You know your name is in the back of your uncle Orville's 1902 notebook?"
and she remembered. They again lived just down the street from Hawthorne street and uh
her mother would bring them over to the Bishop Wrights all the time
and she said that day she came in and Orville said, "Well how's school?" she was born in 1898
so she was six and had just started school that year and she said, "Well I can write my name!"
and he said, "Well come on up here and show me." and that's what he gave her to write her name on.
-And there it was wow. -And I called her and said, "Did you know about this?" and got to send her a
picture of it and all that. -Yeah oh wow I love I love the family connections and it's so neat
that you have that perspective you know from your time with Ivonette and your other research um and
that it's kind of conveyed in what you wrote too is fantastic. Well um that was all the questions
you have from our visitors. The last question that I have for you, I'll ask for you, is about I guess
kind of just what thoughts you would want to leave us with you know when it comes to I guess what's
a takeaway from the Wright brothers story that you would want people to remember? -Oh as I said
before the most important thing is to recognize that they're not just two lucky bike mechanics,
that these are intuitive engineering geniuses who again have to invent a process of engineering
so they can invent the airplane. And there's a sense in which as my colleague Peter Jacob
has said these guys set the stage for the rest of the 20th century not just
because of the airplane but because of the engineering process uh the way in which to solve
hugely difficult technical technical problems and that's Wilbur or Orville Wright. They're not just
simple inventors not just simple bike mechanics they are truly intuitive engineering geniuses.
-Fantastic well thank you so much Dr. Crouch and thank you Jess and our tech
team for being here to make this possible. -You're going to have to edit this like crazy!
-Won't be bad. -I just ran on and on for you I apologize. -No this has been
fantastic yeah. -Oh good. -And truly thank you for just taking the time to to be here with us
and and it'll we're very excited to get to share this with our visitors and for folks to get to
celebrate December 17th by getting to see this. So we really appreciate it. Thank you very much.