I’m reading a fascinating book about the Wright Brothers written by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough entitled The Wright Brothers. It’s the well-known story about their efforts to become the first in powered flight at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. McCullough’s story is not as much about the brothers’ technical achievements as much as it is about the two brothers and Wright family including father Bishop and their devoted sister Katharine. McCullough feels strongly that their sister’s support throughout their struggles and especially after Orville’s crash in 1908 that her part of the story has not been properly covered.

The most interesting part of the book for me has to do with Orville and Wilbur’s ability to overcome adversity. They travelled a great distance from their home in Dayton, Ohio to the sandy hills of North Carolina multiple times covering thousands of miles in which they had to ship everything they would need to Kitty Hawk in order to test their flight theories. Nearly everyone, with a few notable exceptions, thought their experiments and efforts foolhardy and a lamentable waste of effort. And yet, they were undeterred in their willingness to spend a considerable amount of their own money to pursue this dream of flight.

Their accomplishments were astonishing. They determined, on their own, the proper camber and shape of the wing by building their own, homemade wind tunnel testing wing shapes by hammering shapes out of hack saw blades. They next learned through considerable trial and numerous failures to accomplish integrated flight controls by tying the rudder in with lateral control which had never even been considered before the brothers took on this problem. Once their glider experiments proved that dynamic control was possible, they had to come up with a lightweight engine. No engine company at the time – remember this was just past the turn of the century –was willing to produce the brother’s required minimum 8 horsepower while limiting the weight under 200 pounds.

With no readily available engine, they enlisted the help of their shop mechanic Charlie Taylor, who with the barest of guidance from the Wrights, built an all-aluminum opposed four-cylinder engine that not only was lighter than the Wright’s original requirement but ultimately produced 12 horsepower – a 50 percent increase in power. The engine featured a 4-inch bore and 4-inch stroke displacing 201c.i., no traditional carburetor (fuel was vaporized in a pan that fed the intake valves), no fuel pump, and not even spark plugs. A crude set of points were placed inside each combustion chamber and when the points separated, the resultant spark initiated combustion. The engine didn’t use a throttle – it ran basically at WOT continuously at 1,150 rpm. By running the horsepower equation backwards, that means this engine made 55 lb-ft of torque at this rpm. Taylor built this engine in the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop that had no electricity – the lathe and drills were powered by a gasoline engine located inside the shop.

Beyond their technical achievements, the book is mostly about these home-schooled brothers who worked extremely well together and never were deterred from their ultimate goal of powered flight. In fact, it dawned on me that it’s entirely possible that they learned how to fly before they drove a car! They had to overcome enormous obstacles and had to be frustrated at their many failures and yet they persevered despite the overwhelming and dangerous odds. What impressed me most about the story was their ability to tune out what had to be constant negative attitudes and comments about what they were trying to achieve. McCullough’s account mentions several times how conventional wisdom acknowledged that man could never and should never fly. Even after their first powered flight in December of 1903, it was nearly five years before the U.S. government took their invention seriously enough to allow a demonstration for the military and that was only after Wilbur had taken their machine to France and flown it in front of adoring crowds to great acclaim.

The book is an amazing story of courage and perseverance that I found encouraging especially when I consider many of my own languishing projects only because I’m unwilling to put the effort into their completion. Not only were the Wright Brothers willing to work hard, but at least within McCullough’s narrative they rarely seemed to become frustrated when experiments failed. I’ve read stories about attempts around 2003 to duplicate the construction of the Wright Brothers plane only to fail because the technological challenges were too great. I certainly would never judge those efforts, but imagine that despite the technology and knowledge we have today that duplicating the Wright Brothers efforts would be that difficult. To me, that just reinforces the amazing talent and personal moral courage necessary to accomplish something everyone else thought was pure folly.

What I took from this book is that the only thing obstructing me from completing my own projects is my own lack of fortitude. In other words, I don’t really have any excuse – if the Wright Brothers could build an airplane from scratch in 1903, I should be able to get my Chevelle finished and back on the road. Clearly, with David McCullough’s help, the Wright Brothers are still motivating people more than 100 years after their immense achievement.