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On a muggy late summer morning in 1900, postmaster Captain William Tate seated himself at his simple cedar desk and unfurled a letter. The paper was slightly damp from the humidity emanating from the marshy swamps of Kitty Hawk woods that surrounded his home turned post office. Tate did his best to flatten the soggy paper enough to discern that it came from the Weather Bureau with a rather strange request. They were asking him to respond to a letter they received from an Ohio man named Wilbur Wright. Wilbur wanted information about the wind conditions in Kitty Hawk, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. And he wanted this information because he was hoping to test his flying machine there. Tate scratched his head and reread that last line. Flying machine? But rather than dismiss this Wilbur Wright fellow as the Weather Bureau had clearly done, he pulled out a blank sheet of equally soggy paper and began to pen a response, writing “The Weather Bureau here has asked me to answer your letter… relative to the fitness of Kitty Hawk as a place to practice or experiment with a flying machine… In answering I would say that you would find here nearly any type of ground you could wish… our winds are always steady, generally from 10 to 20 miles velocity per hour… If you decide to try your machine here and come, I will take pleasure in doing all I can for your convenience and success and pleasure, and I assure you will find a hospitable people when you come among us.” Roughly a month later, the letter sent off and forgotten about, Captain Tate was startled by an unexpected knock at the door. There stood a travel weary stranger in a bowler cap, a man who quickly introduced himself as Wilbur Wright, the man with the flying machine. As promised, Tate welcomed him inside, giving what must have seemed an absurd visitor the benefit of the doubt. But what Captain William Tate could not have guessed at that moment is that, together with his brother Orville, this Wright fellow would do something no man had ever done before, something that would irrevocably change the course of human history. Let’s fix that.

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I’ve lived my entire life in the shadow of the Wright Brothers National Memorial. Just steps from my childhood home stands a 60 foot tall granite pylon perched atop an imposing hill. It’s striking and completely out of place on this humble strip of sand we call the Outer Banks. It’s something you would see in Washington DC, perhaps, London, Paris, Rome, not here. But this extraordinary monument stands for a reason. Because 121 years ago this Tuesday, something extraordinary happened on that very spot. Wilbur and Orville Wright, two brothers from Ohio, achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flight, something humans had tried and failed to do for centuries.

We visit the monument often. My boys love to climb the big hill. It’s one of the few places you can see both the sound and the ocean at the same time, be reminded of just how narrow our island is, how fragile, how fleeting in a sea of blue green and brackish brown. It’s breathtaking. And this most recent time, we drug my husband Joey along with us. Joey doesn’t often join for two main reasons that you already know if you’ve been with me for a while. Number one, he’s not into history, like at all, couldn’t care less. Number two, he can’t walk very well. He certainly can’t walk up the hill and if you listened to my antibiotics episode, number 62, then you know why. But this time he came, and scootered around the bottom of the hill as we made our way up to the top. After the climb, we met him over by the statues. At the base of the hill they have these really cool metal statues, sculptures of the plane and Wilbur and Orville, and some of the local men who helped them. It’s the photo, the famous photo of the first flight, the cover of this episode, it’s that photo but in life sized sculpture form. And as we caught up to him there, we found him with his hand resting on the wing of the plane, seemingly lost in thought. And he turned to me and asked “who were these guys?” And I launched into my spiel, “well, they were just some guys from Ohio who owned a bicycle shop.” And he just looked at me, astonishment in his eyes and he asked, “well then how did they do this?” And it hit me in that moment, possibly for the first time ever, how absolutely remarkable this story truly is. I’ve known about the Wright Brothers and the first flight my entire life, raised in the shadow of the monument, but I had never truly appreciated the magnitude of it. I was desensitized in a way because I had heard the story so many times from such a young age that it was just normal. But in that moment I realized, nothing about this is normal. And side-note, I was so dang proud of Joey because I could tell, by the look in his eyes, that he had felt it - that thing that we history lovers feel. He had felt a connection to the past that meant something to him.

It was then, that last trip to the monument that I decided I had to cover this topic in time for the anniversary on December 17th and I wanted to bring you an expert this time so I reached out to the park service for an interview but… I didn’t hear back. I was about to give up and just fly solo on this one when I happened to log in to Facebook, as people do. And there, the first post there in my feed was my sister Hannah Bunn West sharing a book by a local author called “Windswept Dreams: The Wright Brothers Legacy from Kitty Hawk’s Dunes and Beyond.” Hannah is a local history author herself with her books “Remarkable Women of the Outer Banks” and “Save Our Sand Dunes.” I’ve referenced both of these books in various past episodes. And Remarkable Women of the Outer Banks has a chapter about Irene Tate, daughter of William Tate from the opener who was 3 years old when Wilbur Wright showed up on her doorstep. Anyway, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Hannah to be sharing another local history book. What struck me though, is that she was sharing a book written by the very man I had been unknowingly waiting for.

[Adonis interview]

Adonis graduated from Howard University, a historically black college in Washington DC and first worked as a tour guide at Arlington National Cemetery and later the US Capitol building serving as Operations Supervisor. He moved to the Outer Banks in 2013 and worked at Jockey’s Ridge State Park and Roanoke Island Festival Park before becoming a seasonal interpretive park ranger at the Wright Brothers National Memorial. And I read his book and it is incredible you guys.

[Adonis interview]

So before we dig into the story of the first flight, I’ll let Adonis set the stage for us, reading a short excerpt from his book:

[Adonis interview]

Wilbur and Orville Wright’s family lived in parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, before finally returning to and settling down in Dayton, Ohio. The father, Milton Wright, was a church bishop which explains why they moved around so often. Their mother Susan met their father while studying literature at Hartsville College in Indiana which was extremely unusual for a woman in the mid 1800s. Milton and Susan married in 1859 and had 7 children, 5 of whom survived to adulthood. Susan was unusual not just because she attended college as a woman in the 1850s, but because she was particularly skilled at mechanical things. She was an accidental woman in STEM. According to an article by the National Air and Space Museum quote “as a girl she spent many hours with her father in his carriage shop on the family farm learning how to use tools. Once she had her own household, she designed and built simple appliances for herself and made toys for her children. As boys, Wilbur and Orville would consult their mother whenever they needed mechanical assistance or advice,” end quote. Unusual indeed and certainly influential. But Milton, their father, was also hugely influential and in fact, the brothers would write to him often throughout their time in Kitty Hawk, keeping him in the loop. Later, they claimed a toy helicopter their father had brought home from his travels first sparked their interest in aviation as children.

[Adonis interview]

Milton and Susan instilled in their children a very particular world view. According to the National Air and Space Museum quote “The Wrights’ parents taught their children that the world was an unfriendly place; untrustworthy people and evil temptations were everywhere. They were convinced that family bonds offered the only real support in life. This supportive home life gave Wilbur and Orville the self-confidence to reject the theories of more well-known and experienced aeronautical experimenters when they felt their own ideas were correct. The emotional anchor provided by their strong family often helped Wilbur and Orville keep going when they ran into difficulties in their research,” end quote. And we can see that tight knit family, what Adonis called “charming,” in the way the brothers continued to include their father Milton in their endeavors. But this is just part of the perfect storm that shaped the unlikely brothers into groundbreaking innovators they would become. Their location played a role as well, Dayton Ohio. In the late 1800s, Dayton was very industrial with a booming manufacturing industry, factories and machines and engineering, it was everywhere and it sucked the Wright brothers right in. This came in the form of a printing press and later a bicycle shop and after that, airplanes. These are machines with gears and doohickies that have to be tinkered with and Dayton, Ohio was the place where people tinkered with doohickies at that time.

Wilbur was the third child of Milton and Susan. The two oldest were also sons, Reuchlin and Lorin. After Wilbur they had twins Otis and Ida but, sadly, both died as infants. Then came Orville who was 4 years younger than Wilbur. And finally, one surviving girl, Katherine who played a much larger role in this story than I ever knew. We’ll come back to her.

Wilbur was a little more reserved than Orville but he was steady and confident. His father once described him as quote “never rattled in thought or temper.” Orville was a bit more energetic, curious, and impulsive. We have a thinker and a doer. But they were both very intelligent and innovative. After a hockey accident when he was 18, Wilbur became depressed. He suffered from lingering health effects from his injuries. He dropped his lifelong goal of attending Yale University and withdrew from the world. Around the same time, his mother Susan, who had been suffering from tuberculosis, reached the point of needing near constant care. So Wilbur dedicated himself to nursing his mother until she died when he was 22 years old. During this time where he withdrew from society, he spent most of his time reading books from his father’s library. Although he never technically attended college, he was as educated if not more educated than most college graduates.

Orville was very innovative, he liked to take things apart and put them back together. He was more of an inventor than Wilbur even though the airplane would ultimately be Wilbur’s idea. However, Orville never graduated from high school. Like his older brother, he was extremely intelligent but he ultimately dropped out of school his senior year and, also like Wilbur, pursued his own self-education. The National Air and Space Museum says quote “Both of the brothers’ educations were comparable to a modern four-year college degree,” end quote. But just like self taught. Which is arguably more impressive.

Wilbur and Orville are rarely called by those names, they’re usually just lumped together as “the Wright brothers,” like they’re collectively only one person. But they were actually quite different from one another.

[Adonis interview]

Orville was the one who brought Wilbur out of his funk. Orville was a doer remember and he had gotten involved in printing with his childhood friend Ed Sines. They started a printing business just out of their houses in 1886 called Sines and Wright. They printed flyers and signs, tickets, business cards, whatever people needed printed. Eventually Orville bought out Ed’s share of the business and recruited Wilbur to take his place. Ed still worked there, he just wasn’t an owner anymore. So Orville brought Wilbur back into the world and together they ran Wright and Wright Printers. They started a local newspaper for a minute called the West Side News that eventually fizzled out and they published three issues of an African American newspaper called the Dayton Tattler that was started by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar went to high school with Orville and would go on to become a famous writer and poet. Actually, I can’t help but draw a slight connection between our very own Adonis A. Osekre (oh-say-cree) and Paul Laurence Dunbar. One of Dunbar’s poems appears in the last issue of the Wright brothers West Side News which reads “Come, come assist me, trusted Muse! For I would sing of the West Side News; A sheet that’s newsy, pure and bright— Whose editor is Orville Wright; And by his side another shines Whom you shall know as Edwin Sines. Now all will buy this sheet I trust, And watch out for their April “bust.”

[Adonis interview]

But the newspaper business wasn’t as lucrative as they’d hoped it would be and they sold their printing company in 1899 after Ed Sines quit. After printing, they got involved in bicycles opening the Wright Cycle company in 1892. In the late 1880s, a bicycle craze was just getting started in the US after the development of a much safer bicycle in England that had two wheels that were the same size. Which, just, duh. But this was new and it got people into bicycles, including Wilbur and Orville. They bought themselves a pair of bikes and soon friends started coming to them for repairs because they were just innately mechanical tinkery guys which led them to open their own bicycle repair shop. But before long they weren’t just repairing and selling bicycles, they were manufacturing their own line of bicycles. Their own designs. According to the National Air and Space museum quote “During their peak production years of 1896 to 1900, Wilbur and Orville built about 300 bicycles and earned $2,000 to $3,000 a year. Only five bicycles made by the Wright brothers are known to still exist,” end quote.

[Adonis interview]

Bicycles are much more similar to early airplanes than you might think. Designs for both machines run into issues of stability and control. Whoever is driving the bicycle or the airplane needs to be able to control it or they’re going to crash. And so the Wright brothers interest in bicycles pretty quickly morphs into an interest in flight. Human flight. This is a secret people have been trying to crack for hundreds of years back to even before Leonardo da Vinci in the 1400s but his early work on flight is certainly the best documented. More recently, a German guy named Otto Lilienthal had made some interesting advancements. He designed and tested gliders which aren’t technically airplanes because they aren’t powered. They don’t have engines. You just like jump off a hill with them and glide down to the bottom, that sort of thing. Like a hanglider sort of. So he is testing and experimenting with gliders and one of these tests goes horribly wrong. Lilienthal is killed when his glider crashes in August of 1896. But, surprisingly, this, news of this reaching America, is what gets Wilbur and Orville interested in aviation. They see this as a challenge. Lilienthal couldn’t do it. He tried and failed like every single other person before him. Maybe we can figure it out? And, finding the Dayton public library lacking in resources on aviation, they write to the Smithsonian Institute for reference materials and they start studying the work of their predecessors like Otto Lilienthal, Octave Chanute, and Sir George Cayley. They realized that the biggest problem with all of the previous attempts at designing an airplane was control. There was no way for the pilot to control the plane. The National Air and Space Museum says quote “One obstacle the Wright brothers were hoping to overcome was controlling an aircraft that was unstable. Many earlier experimenters believed that air currents were too strong and unpredictable for human reflexes, so an aircraft had to be inherently stable… for the pilot to be able to maintain control. Because of the Wrights’ extensive experience with the bicycle—a highly unstable but controllable machine—they reasoned that an airplane could be unstable yet controllable as well,” end quote.

To overcome this control and stability issue, the brothers developed wing warping which they tested using small glider kites they could fly from the ground. Wing warping is basically twisted the wings of the glider to increase lift on one side and decrease it on the other. So they designed these mini glider kites with the ability to warp or twist the wings and they found that they had much better control. They could climb, dive, and bank to the right or left at will. So with this hurdle crossed, they begin designing a full sized glider that can actually carry a man. But the next problem is, there’s nowhere to test it in Dayton. They need a place with steady winds, hills, and soft places to land. They reach out to the National Weather Bureau like “you know of any places like that?” and find themselves in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Now, just quick note to clear up confusion. The Wright brothers National Memorial, the actual location of the first flight is in the town of Kill Devil Hills today. But at that time, early 1900s, there was no Kill Devil Hills. Kill Devil Hills didn’t become a town until 1953. It was called Kitty Hawk then. So Wilbur receives that letter from Captain William Tate, the Kitty Hawk postmaster and shows up on the man’s doorstep a month later. Orville joins him there and they begin making preparations to test their 1900 glider. And I can only imagine what the people of the Outer Banks thought of these two strangers from Ohio and their flying machine. I mean, this is an isolated and quirky place now, but in 1900, it had to have been like stepping back in time. And here come the Wright brothers with the most advanced piece of technology in existence at the time, a flying machine.

[Adonis interview]

Unfortunately this 1900 glider doesn’t work like they want it to. The wing warping does. The wing warping is perfect, it’s working to stabilize the glider and allow the pilot control. The problem is the lift. They can’t get enough lift. They go home, tinker around, make the wings bigger hoping for more lift and return to Kitty Hawk in 1901. It’s another flop. What gives? So far, they had been basing all their calculations on a table created by Otto Lilienthal. Lilienthal had crunched the numbers and created this table of lift and drag characteristics that basically all aspiring aviation pioneers were using. But Wilbur and Orville were only getting about a third the lift they should have been getting according to Lilienthal’s numbers. They start to question the data. Maybe Lilienthal’s table is wrong? And they start gathering their own data using a bicycle they adapted to measure lift and drag. This confirmed that Lilienthal’s table was incorrect. Then they built a wind tunnel to test different designs, as many as 200 different wing shapes. And this in and of itself was groundbreaking, the wind tunnel. They are not only pioneering the first airplane, they are pioneering the whole field of aerospace engineering. They combine all this new information they had gathered into the design of the 1902 glider and they go back to Kitty Hawk to test it and it’s a success, finally. It has the right amount of lift, it has the wing warping control and stability. They are ready to put an engine on this thing, a propulsion system. With the help of Charles Taylor who worked in their bicycle shop, they built an internal combustion engine and popped it on the glider. Then they took it back to Kitty Hawk in September of 1903.

By December 14th, they are ready to test this thing.

[Adonis interview]

That first flight lasted just 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. Wilbur and Orville trade off, making 3 more flights that day, the final and longest flight by Wilbur lasting 59 seconds and traveling 852 feet. And those times and distances may seem insignificant but this was a big deal. No one had ever done this before. Most people didn’t believe it was physically possible. Encyclopedia Britannica says quote “For the first time in history, a heavier-than-air machine had demonstrated powered and sustained flight under the complete control of the pilot,” end quote. So this was a big deal. They knew it was a big deal. The 5 local men who witnessed it knew it was a big deal.

[Adonis interview]

So their testing is done for now, their glider is damaged beyond easy repair. But they had to have been over the moon excited that they pulled this off. But after that, it was just crickets. A local newspaper printed a story about it and that’s about it. But that was fine. They were too busy perfecting their design to bother with publicity just yet. And actually, they didn’t want publicity. They wanted to keep this thing a secret for the most part until they were able to secure patents for their design.

In 1904 and 1905 they built and flew more airplanes in Huffman Prairie near Dayton. And these were way more advanced than the first flight in 1903. The longest of these flights lasted 39 minutes and flew for 24 and a half miles. A proper airplane at this point. But there was a long road ahead. They knew they had done it, cracked the secret of flight that had plagued men for centuries, but the world didn’t know yet and they didn’t want them to yet. They stopped flying their planes altogether, worried that observers would copy them and claim the credit. And they try of course. Some folks start trying to test gliders based on an inaccurate understanding of the Wright flyer’s early design like 1901, 1902 design and fail. Some have success borrowing from the Wright brother’s ideas but nothing even close to what the Wrights have accomplished. Most people refused to believe that the Wright brothers had flown at all. There are a lot of flight deniers. The New York Herald wrote in 1906 quote “The Wrights have flown or they have not flown. They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It is easy to say, ‘We have flown,” end quote. But the brothers don’t care. It’s boots on the ground for them. First they try to sell their airplane design to the US Army. The army says that they would give them $25,000 if they could deliver a plane that could stay in the air for at least one hour with a pilot and a passenger traveling at an average speed of 40 miles per hour. And this is a tall order. This is a stretch. So they go back to Kitty Hawk in 1908 to test some tweaks to the design, upright seating, hand controls, a passenger, and they finally get something put together that they feel they can present to the army.

Wilbur goes to Europe to try to capture that market. France, in particular, has been trying really hard to crack the secret to flying. So Wilbur decides it’s time to show France what they can do.

[Adonis interview]

Europe is stunned. This dispels all doubt about what they had achieved. The Wright brothers become celebrities overnight. According to the National Air and Space museum quote “French aviator Léon Delagrange summed up the matter succinctly: “Nous sommes battus.” new some batu (We are beaten.)” end quote.

Orville is still trying to lock in this deal with the military. He takes the upgraded 1908 flyer to Fort Myer, Virginia in September to do this demonstration for the army. But it does not go well. An issue with one of the propellers causes the plane to crash, injuring Orville and killing his passenger, army Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge, the first person to die in a plane crash.

This is where little sister Katherine swoops in to save the day. Katherine was 15 years old when their mother died and, just sort of because of the times, as the only daughter, she was expected to step in and manage the household in her mother’s place. So she manages the Wright household back in Ohio but she also teaches high school. When Orville is injured in the accident at Fort Myer, Katherine takes a leave of absence from her teaching job in order to care for him. She’s the matriarch, the caregiver, that’s what we do. After nursing him back to health, Katherine accompanies Orville to go meet up with Wilbur in Europe. Wilbur’s just over there having a blast blowing peoples' minds. They join him, they are awarded the legion of honor, the highest French order of merit. They form the Wright Company Katherine helps run. She handles communications and writing while supporting their test flights. She’s like the face of the company while they're off doing their thing. Katherine never returns to her teaching job. They do eventually return to the US in 1909 and cinch that deal with the US army. They actually exceed the required speed of 40 miles per hour and earn a $5,000 bonus. So the army buys their plane for a grand total of $30,000.

They go back to Dayton and establish a factory, a flying field, and a flight school. They actually train Henry H. Arnold, better known as Hap Arnold who would go on to command the US Army Air Forces during World War II. And if you think about it, it very quickly goes from that 12 second flight in December of 1903 to the moon in 1969 just 63 years later.

[Adonis interview]

Sadly Wilbur passed away in May of 1912 of typhoid fever at the age of 45. Orville would continue their work, remaining involved in aviation for much of his life, leading various aeronautics organizations, winning awards for new developments, acting as a consulting engineer during World War I. He even received honorary degrees and awards from universities and organizations across America and Europe. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, quote “During the last four decades of his life [Wilbur] devoted considerable energy to defending the priority of the Wright brothers as the inventors of the airplane. A long-running feud with the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution was particularly noteworthy. During the years prior to World War I, Smithsonian officials claimed that the third secretary of the institution, Samuel P. Langley, had constructed a machine “capable” of flight prior to the Wrights’ success of December 1903. Unable to obtain a retraction of this claim by 1928, Orville lent the restored 1903 airplane to the Science Museum in London and did not consent to taking the machine to Washington, D.C., until after the Smithsonian offered an apology in 1942,” end quote. Back off Langley. Orville died in 1948 at the age of 76, one of the most celebrated Americans of his time.

What I find so remarkable about the Wright brothers and what they were able to achieve, what I realized with Joey as he looked at me, that look in his eyes, his hand resting on the cold metal sculpture of the 1903 flyer “Who were these guys?” They were nobody and everybody all at the same time. They were you, me, us. They were Paul Lawrence Dunbar. They were Adonis A Osekre (o-say-cree). Working as an elevator operator, a bicycle repairman, working at Home Depot, jotting lines of poetry into a small notebook in a moment of calm, twisting their arms on the beach watching the birds, onlookers be damned. They were just regular people with big ideas and they managed to pull off something absolutely extraordinary, something of mythic proportions, something that has absolutely altered our lives forever in an inescapable way. Even as I sat interviewing Adonis for this episode, their legacy surrounded me, made itself known.

[Adonis interview]

Adonis writes in the epilogue of his book quote “The Wright brothers did more than construct an aircraft, they redefined our perception of existence, our understanding of potential, and our pursuit of the highest aspirations. Their enduring legacy stands as a monument to the power of human ingenuity, a testament that when we embrace life with courage and vision, the once impossible yields to man’s relentless spirit. As we close this chronicle, let us carry forward their spirit, reminding ourselves that in the art of true living, lies the power to transcend the bounds of the ordinary,” end quote. I’m going to put a link to purchase Adonis’ book, a narrative poem “Windswept Dreams: The Wright Brother’s Legacy from Kitty Hawk’s Dunes and Beyond” in the description. I’ll also link to his website askadonis.com. You’ll find those links down below. I’m going to let Adonis conclude this episode for me with another short reading from Windswept Dreams.

[Adonis interview]

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. And a huge thank you to today’s special guest, Adonis A. Osekre (oh-say-cree). Remember, you can find links to purchase Adonis’ book and to his website in the description. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.

Information used in this episode was sourced from Remarkable Women of the Outer Banks by Hannah Bunn West, Windswept Dreams: The Wright Brother’s Legacy from Kitty Hawk’s Dunes and Beyond by Adonis A. Osekre (oh-say-cree), the National Air and Space Museum, and Encyclopedia Britannica. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.

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