Opinion

The many wrongs against the Wrights

Monday, December 22, 2003

Walt Sehnert

In December 2003 the world celebrates the 100th Anniversary of the first successful power flight, which was made by Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Wilbur and Orville Wright are heralded as two of the greatest inventors in history -- inventors who changed the world and ushered in a mode of transportation that in less than 100 years led to the exploration of our universe. What a far cry this is from the notice that the brothers received with their first flight that day in 1903.

The Wright Brothers were sons of a Bishop in the United Brethren Church. The Bishop was stern, but kind, and theirs was a close-knit family, where intellectual curiosity was encouraged. In the years following the Civil War, when the boys were growing up, the church moved the good bishop around a good deal, in the area of Indiana and Ohio. Because of the frequent moves, neither boy finished high school.

Wilbur and Orville worked well together, and as very young men entered the newspaper publishing business. They not only gathered the news, edited the paper, and sold ads, but they also built their own press. That experience showed them that they enjoyed the mechanics of building things better than they did the newspaper business. They discovered that they had a knack for repairing bicycles. Soon they were also selling bicycles, which in turn led them to manufacture their own line of bicycles. The bicycle business paid their bills, but did not satisfy their mechanical and scientific curiosity.

Up to the 1890s, the idea of manned flight was reserved for crackpots and wild- eyed dreamers, and was not considered practical. But in the '90s a great number of respected engineers and scientists in Europe and the United States began to work on heavier-than-air flying machines. The Wrights became interested in the work of the German scientist, Lilienthal, the Frenchman, Levavasseur, and the Americans, Chanute, and Langley, who were doing experimental flying with gliders. Wilbur, especially, became obsessed with flying machines and the theory of flight, and read everything he could find that had been written on that subject.

It wasn't long before the brothers were testing the theories of flight, advanced by the leading world scientists. At first their tests were made using kites, and the first-ever wind tunnel, which of course they fabricated. The Wrights developed the ability to test specific parts of a flying machine (glider), without actually flying a plane. They found that the data that the Europeans and Americans had published was often incorrect, and using their own experiments, established correct figures for lift, drag, angles etc. connected with flight. Of all the early aviation pioneers, the Wrights alone recognized the need to control a flying machine in 3 axes of motion -- pitch, roll, and yaw.

Their ability to "twist" the wing of the plane set their invention apart from all others, and made control of the machine possible. This lateral control is considered the most important contribution that the Wrights made to aviation.

The Wright Brothers did their homework, and methodically perfected their theory, and tested that theory exhaustively in their wind tunnel. By the time they took their machines to Kitty Hawk, (gliders in 1901, '02), they were absolutely sure that their plane would fly, and that they would be able to control it.

A motorized plane, for '03, was planned, but they found that a lightweight motor was not available -- so they made their own, a 12 horsepower engine weighing only 150 pounds.

This is the engine that powered the "Flyer" at Kitty Hawk, when Orville made the first successful manned power flight on Dec. 17, 1903.

Initially, it was barely noted what the Wright Brothers had done. The flight was reported (on the inside pages) of several eastern papers, but the papers in Dayton, OH, the brothers' hometown did not even pick up the story.

The Wright Brothers were honest, hard working, and methodical, and regarding their invention -- geniuses. But they were incredibly na*ve regarding business and the world generally. They assumed that if they proved their experiments they would be issued a patent on their inventions. They were perfectly willing to share their patents with the world, in exchange for a modest license fee. They assumed that the government would protect their interests. They were wrong.

Immediately they found themselves embroiled in lawsuits involving their patents. The scientific community just could not accept the fact that these two high school dropouts, bicycle repairmen, for heaven's sake, had captured the secrets of flight that had eluded the world's greatest scientific minds. A widespread smear campaign against the brothers ensued, belittling the contributions that the two had made toward manned flight.

Samuel Pierpont Langley, onetime director of the Smithsonian, for one, had spent a fortune of the Institution's money developing a heavier-than-air plane. In repeated tests it failed to fly, but nevertheless, he contended that his invention preceded the Wrights' "Flyer," and he should not be subject to license fees.

Discouraged with the treatment they were receiving in the United States, Wilbur and Orville turned to Europe, and attempted to license their planes to European countries. Here the treatment was even worse than that they encountered in the United States. The French and Germans were greatly interested in the breakthrough improvements that the Wrights had made, but their governments refused to recognize the U.S. patents, so manufacturers in those two countries merely copied the important features of the Wrights' plane, and paid the brothers nothing for their efforts.

All this controversy had a profound effect on Wilbur and Orville Wright. Their hard work, creativity, and generosity seemed to have counted for naught. In 1912, Wilbur, worn out and exhausted from "a prolonged legal fight in the patent battle against a set of well-financed, viscous, and self-serving collection of airplane developers, succumbed to a mild case of food poisoning."

He was 45. Ironically, soon after Wilbur's death, the courts sided with the Wright Brothers in the patent suits. Orville collected a tidy sum from this legal battle, though the sum was in no way commensurate with the importance of their method of lateral control, to the aviation industry.

Orville Wright lived until 1948, and by the time of his death had seen the airplane play a major role in two World Wars, and had seen commercial aviation begin to overtake the railroads in transporting people around the nation and around the world. He had also received well-deserved acclaim from the nation and the world for his part in making an aviation industry possible. Shortly before his death, in an interview, he gave this description of that historic flight on Dec. 17, 1903: "This flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction in speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it began."