The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

No bird soars in a calm. WILBUR WRIGHT

Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.

Years later, a friend told Orville that he and his brother would always stand as an example of how far Americans with no special advantages could advance in the world. “But it isn’t true,” Orville responded emphatically, “to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

“Encourage Your Boy,” reprinted from Architect and Building News. Do not wait for the boy to grow up before you begin to treat him as an equal. A proper amount of confidence, and words of encouragement and advice . . . give him to understand that you trust him in many ways, helps to make a man of him long before he is a man in either stature or years. . . . If a boy finds he can make a few articles with his hands, it tends to make him rely on himself. And the planning that is necessary for the execution of the work is a discipline and an education of great value to him.

Voices were raised in protest. Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.” Such concerns had little effect. Everybody was riding bicycles, men, women, all ages and from all walks of life. Bicycling clubs sprouted on college campuses and in countless cities and towns,

In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds [he wrote]. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has. No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition, so long as it is not carried to excess, for such men make the world and its affairs move. . . .

In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Otto Lilienthal, they could be killed.

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“The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.”

“The best dividends on the labor invested,” they said, “have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.”

Do not let people talk to you all day and all night. It will wear you out, before you are ready for real business. Courtesy has limits.

People think I am foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important work on the machine. They say I crawl under the machine when the men could do the thing well enough. I do it partly because it gives me opportunity to see if anything in the neighborhood is out of order.

reminds me of Uncle Krishna raj

“If we have to alter the face of the earth before we can fly,” he replied, “we may as well throw up the proposition.” Such

Asked later if she had felt like a bird when flying with her brother, Katharine responded, “I don’t know exactly how a bird feels. Birds sing, I suppose, because they are happy. I sang, I know, and I was very happy indeed. But like the birds, I sang best after the flight was over.”

A machine was like a horse, Wilbur said. “If it’s new, you have to get used to it before it will do just as you want it to. You have to learn its peculiarities.”

“All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden to others.”