YouSaid · the spoken record

David McCullough

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37

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2018-06-25

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2018-06-25

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1. “And this is Wilbur right on the idea of flight. In the enthusiasm being shown around me, I see not merely an outburst intended to glorify a person, but a tribute to an idea that has always impassioned mankind. I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles on the infinite highway of the air. I just included that because I thought it was beautiful language. And here's where I'm going to close on two. Two paragraphs that just brought a smile to my face and I thought were.”

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2. “While he's in Europe, his brother is somewhere in the Washington DC area, and he winds up almost dying. And he passenger actually died. They nosed die from 150 feet. And so Wilbur Wright is talking about how he was criticized for micromanaging. They called him old oil can because he wouldn't even let you touch his oil can. And so here's his Basically, what he felt, why he felt he was right. People think I'm 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”

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3. “10,000 people would be in the crowd for these demonstrations. Over 200,000 people came to watch Wilbur Fly in six months in France alone. And a short time later, 200,000 people showed up to one demonstration in Berlin. And this is Wilbur Wright on making the case for micromanaging. When he was doing these flights in Europe, he would ship the flyer in boxes and then have to reassemble and do everything himself. He wouldn't even let he was at Le Mans and this other airfield in France too, where they had mechanics and people standing by. He wouldn't even let them put oil in it. And then after...”

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4. “Going to Kitty Hawk. Were extremely frugal focus. This is the next note I have for myself is focus. Neither the impatience of waiting crowds nor the sneers of rivals, nor the pressure of financial conditions not always easy could induce him to hurry, this is Wilbur Wright talking about, could induce him to hurry over any difficulty before he had done everything in his power to understand and overcome it.”

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5. “I think there's just another to me that it just, you got to think for yourself. And if you think something is valuable and you think you can do it, then do it because even people that other people think are smart, they just don't have the same experience. It's just one of the, just great writing when they actually find success and they actually fly for the first time. Success and most certainly was and more what had transpired that day in 1903 in the stiff winds and cold of the outer banks in less than two hours time was one of the turning points in history. The beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those presents could have possibly imagined with their homemade machine Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly and if the world didn't know it yet they did. Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight.”

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6. “Their preference, even though they read a lot, they wanted to apply what they were learning and they felt the only way you could really learn was by doing. So this is a quote on Wilbur about that. He said that men had to learn to manage in order to fly, and there were only two ways. One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met. The other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, meaning the flying machine, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former on the whole turns out the larger proportion of good writers. If one were looking for perfect safety, he said, one would do well to sit on the fence and watch the birds. But if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”

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7. “I love this idea of how they think they recommend discovering things for yourself. It was not just that this machine, that their machine had performed so poorly or that so much still remained to be solved, but that so many of the long-established supposedly reliable calculations and tables prepared by the likes of Lilenthal, Langley, and Chanute, data the brothers had taken his gospel, so if you remember previously in the podcast I was talking about how they had to re-figure out their own ratios. This is what I was referencing. Data that the brothers had taken as gospel had proved to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly, those esteemed authorities had been guessing, groping in the dark. The accepted tables were in a word worthless. We had to go ahead and discover everything ourselves, said Orvillwright.”

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8. “The day was clear, the wind just as wished. It was october nineteenth, and after this gives you an idea of how hard they've been working, it was October 19th, and after nearly four years of concentrated study and effort by the brothers, it proved a day of days. Wilbur made one man flight after another. How many is unknown? No count was kept. He did record, however, flights of three hundred to four hundred feet in length, and speeds on landing of nearly thirty miles an hour. So before they had any kind of measurable success, they studied and worked for four years on this idea.”

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9. “Stressed over that. So, if you want to watch that video, it's like two minutes. I definitely think it's worth your time. I'll leave the link to the YouTube video in the show notes on your podcast player and at founderspodcast.com. So, this next section is about hard work and its results. Hard workers were greatly admired, and the rights were two of the workingest boys they had ever seen. And when they worked, they worked. They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing.”

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10. “Okay, so this next section, when I was reading this, what immediately popped into my mind was this video I saw on YouTube, and it's a young Jeff Bezos talking about stress. And so I'll explain that to you in one second. Let me read this part from the book. Far from home on their own in a way they had never been, the brothers seemed to sense as they never had the adventure of life. Orville would later say that even with all the adversities they had to face, it was the happiest time they had ever known, and how that relates to Jeff Bezos' opinion on stress, he was saying that stress comes from not taking action over something that you have some control over, and stress comes from ignoring things you shouldn't be ignoring. So Jeff uses the following metaphor to explain his point. Stress doesn't come from hard work. You can be working incredibly hard and loving it. Likewise, you can be out of work and be incredibly stressful.”

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11. “Actually, get that thing to fly with a person. It's human powered at that point. This is before they build motors. This is, I thought Wilbur Wright has a great quote on risk that I think is worth sharing with you. 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.”

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12. “Seal of workers. All right, so the first prototype I thought was really interesting. In the final weeks of August, the brothers built a full-size glider with two wings that they intended to reassemble and fly a kitty hawk. First as a kite, then if all went well, fly themselves. Its wing span was eighteen feet. The total cost of all necessary pieces and parts, ribs of ash, wires, and cloth to cover the wings was not more than fifteen dollars.”

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13. “For Wilbur, flight had become a cause, and Mulliard, one of the great missionaries of the cause. Like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight. At the start of his Empire of Air, Milliard gave fair warning that one could be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of flight. Excuse me, let me read that again. Mulliard gave fair warning that one could be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of flight could be solved by man. This is a quote from Molliard, when once this idea had invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively.”

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14. “Let's see. This is the note I left for myself books transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers. So they wrote Wilber Writes to the Smithsonian, saying, hey, I'm interested in controlled flight. Can you send me any information you have? And they sent him a bunch of books and data that have been collected. And so among the material that Smithsonian provided him was an English translation of a book titled Okay, so the translator, I don't know how to say it in France, but the translation is empire of the air. It was published in Paris in 1881. It had been written by a French farmer, poet, and student aflight, Luis Pierre Mouliard. Nothing Wilbur had yet read so affected him. He would long consider it one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical.”

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15. “That was one of the most shocking things I read because it just puts it into perspective. Imagine there's a problem that everybody in modern time, the most successful scientists, entrepreneurs, people that have almost virtually unlimited resources, government, et cetera, are working on a problem they can't solve it. And you have two guys relatively of modest means, no formal education, no technical training, no anything, just the desire to solve this problem wind up becoming solving the problem in the sense where Thomas Ederson, Alexander Graham Bell, and all these other people had failed. That's actually really inspiring to me.”

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16. “And now here's the surprising part. In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur or overwrite any more than the fact that they 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 on their own are the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Alanthal, they could be killed.”

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17. “Next thing is you are not too late. Sometimes you must ignore the odds. Along with Lilenthal, Chenute, and Langley, these are all guys that came before, right, that were studying and writing about different ideas on how humans could learn how to fly. Numbers of others among them, the most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the 19th century had been working on the problem of controlled flight, including Sir George Cayley, Sir Hiram Maxim, Maxim was the inventor of the machine gun, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison. None had succeeded. Hiram Maxim had reportedly spent one hundred thousand dollars of his own money on a giant steam powered pilotless flying machine, only to see it crash in an attempt to take off.”

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18. “So rereading, revisiting the old ideas says the news of Lilenthal's death Wilbur later wrote, aroused in him as nothing had an interest that had remained passive from childhood. His reading on the flight of birds became intense. On the shelves of the family library was an English translation of a famous illustrated volume Animalism written by a French physician I have no idea how to pronounce it. We're going to call him Marley. More than 30 years before. Birds were also an interest of Bishop Wright, hence the book's presence in the house. And Wilbur had already read it. Now he read it anew. Wilbur was drawn upon a quote from Pettigrew, this is another author, for years, like the inspiring lectures of a great professor, the book had opened his eyes and started him thinking in ways he'd never had.”

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19. “So the next thing I want to talk to you about is rereading and revisiting old ideas. So I was just telling you that I reread books. I have conversations with my friends all the time about how I like specific podcasts I listen to over and over again. The reason I add time markers in the podcast I do is because you may listen to this one time and there might be an idea that sticks out to you. Well, I want to make it easy if you go back to this podcast to find it. Some of my podcasts are short, but some of them are long. So maybe you only need like a five minute idea or two minute idea. You don't want to have to listen to the whole podcast to get that. So I do think there's a huge value in rereading and revisiting old ideas because you can read or learn something once and then a few years pass and you wind up rereading it again and you're a different person when you're rereading it. And those ideas may have been compounded and added on to and they might have additional value to you or maybe you have a different interpretation.”

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20. “He stood like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol. Then he would run down the slope and into the wind, hanging on as the wind lifted him from the ground, he would swing his body and legs this way or that way as a means of balancing and steering, and then glide as far as possible and try to land on his feet. It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird Lilenthal had written. It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight. So I was at a science center with my daughter a few months ago and I'd already read this book last year. This is the first time I was introduced to Auto Lilenthal and part of the section of the Science Center was dedicated to flight. And sure enough, right at the beginning was videos and pictures or I guess pictures because there was no videos back then. Pictures of auto Lolenthal and some of his machines.”

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21. “Reading the biographies, you realize they have faults just like URI. But I do think having people you look up to is extremely important and it's motivating, at least for me, and I'm sure it is probably for you as well. So this is the importance of heroes. This is the person that really stuck in their, again, they're reading about flight. This is where they're getting the idea. And they've had a lifelong passion for this. So this guy named Otto Lilenthal, let me just jump into this. Wilbur had begun reading about the German glider enthusiast, who had recently been killed, who had been killed and who had recently been killed in an accident. Much of what he read, he read aloud to Orville. Over the years, Lilenthal had designed and built more than a dozen different gliders. He called him sailing machines. As a pilot he would hang by his arms below the wings. Lilenthal would position himself as on a steep slope, the wings held above his head.”

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22. “And that was, so they sold a bunch of other accessories and stuff like that, but the vast majority of their income, they would sustain on the fact they invented their own model of bicycles and started selling them directly. And then as the business grew, they hired a person to help run them. So when they were off, remember, they're living in Dayton, Ohio at the time. They spend months in Kitty Hawk going back and forth.”

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23. “Could, I guess, have sex. Not infrequently accompanied by seduction, I guess that's what they're saying, right? So, in response to this huge trend, Wilbur and Orville opened their own small bicycle business, the Wright Cycle Exchange, selling and repairing bicycles. They eventually changed the name to the right cycle company. And it says sales at the right cycle company picked up again to the point where they were selling about 150 bicycles a year and they stayed with it. Then the second part that I found so interesting was they got tired of selling other people's products and decided to sell their own. There, on the second floor, the brothers began making their own model bicycles available to order.”

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24. “And it's strange to me. So the note I just left on myself left on myself, the note I left myself here was humans are in a state of constant change, yet fear change in our nature. And there's all kinds of examples from history on this. So this is the first paragraph is what in hindsight looks like the hilarious initial reaction to the new technology that is bicycles in the early 1900s. 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, 15 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. So I took that to read that young people were using bikes to get away from their parents.”

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25. “So, I want to tell you a little bit about the beginning of their side business. So I don't know how many people know this, but the only reason they were ever able to be successful in creating The first non human powered flight machine was they had saw a trend with bicycles and they decided to open a bicycle shop. So let me just tell you a little bit about this from the book. Now the first paragraph is interesting to me because I feel I've talked about on the podcast that history never repeats human nature does. And this whole idea that”

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26. “With the paper, so they started a newspaper, with the paper showing some profit, Orville moved the business to a rented space on West 3rd Street, where the city's electric trolley ran, and Wilbur, now twenty-two, was prominently listed as editor. The next section is you need less than you think you do. And this talks about pretty humble beginnings that the Wright brothers, their lives are pretty simple. The brothers were well into their 20s before there was running water or plumbing in the house. Weekly baths were accomplished sitting in a tub of hot water on the kitchen floor with the curtains drawn. An open well and wooden pump outhouse and carriage shed were out back. There was no electricity.”

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27. “Wilbur's for shop two. While still in high school, Overville started his own print shop in the carriage shed behind the house. Interested in printing for some while, Oval had worked for two summers as an apprentice at a local print shop. He designed and built his own press using a discarded tombstone, a buggy spring, and scrap metal.”

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28. “High level businessmen. Now they did have a small business and I'm going to talk about that, the importance of having like a side project that sustained all these experiments. But they would never operate at such a scale before and they were able to navigate that successfully because they believed in their own thought processes and their way that they could basically think things through and then apply those thoughts into action and navigate these environments and experiences that they never actually had before. So something I always like to talk about when reading these biographies because everybody knows who the Wright brothers are, just like everybody knows who Walt Disney is, Jeff Bezos, all these other people. But what's fascinating to me is in reading these biographies, you see them way before they became who they know them as. So I like to talk about the first job they have. And see how industrious they were. So this is Orville. Orville's first job and then it winds up being”

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29. “Take off and immediately crash. And this whole sentence where it says every mind should be true to itself, should think, investigate, include to itself, that theme comes up over and over and over again in the book from inventing the flyer to making it just a glider, then to making it machine-powered, then to building the company and operating an arena, again, these were inventors and tinkers. And all of a sudden, they had the world's most valuable product and they had to navigate on how to become”

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30. “And they have a series of experiments. They're very happy. So they go back home and they build the second flyer. But on the second flyer, instead of using the same ratios that they discovered through trial and error, they started using ratios written about by people that had never flown but had thought they knew the math or the way the answer behind it, right? Happens is”

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31. “Right. And certainly he ranked reading as worthy. And a byproduct of reading is you have these ideas that They just stick in your mind and they never go away. And so the note I left myself was something they read became a part of their way to get through life. And it's just two sentences. It says, every mind should be true to itself, should think, investigate, and conclude for itself. So in other words, you reject dogma and you try to apply your own first principles thinking about what is actually happening. So I don't know if I talk about this on the podcast, but in the book There's many people that have written about human power machine-powered flight for humans to figure out a way to fly. And they even had some calculations based on theories and the like. And what would happen is the Wright brothers would just learn through trial and error, right? And so their very first flyer, there's an example in the book where their very first flyer winds up doing spectacularly well. I think the first flight, you know, is like maybe a minute long or something like that.”

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32. “Subject so much that they spend years of their life writing the book. So this is the importance of reading, and I'm not alone with that conviction. The Wright Family Book Collection, however, was neither modest nor commonplace. The reason they're saying they're not modest or commonplace because they grew up very humbly, and we'll get into that in a little bit. But one area they didn't hold back on. They weren't cheap in in that sense was books. So it says it was neither modest nor commonplace. Bishop Wright, again, that's their dad, a lifelong lover of books heartedly championed the limitless value of reading between formal education at school and informal education at home, it would seem he put more value on the latter. He was never overly concerned about his children's attendance at school. If one or the other of them chose to miss a day or two for some project of interest, he thought worthy it was all.”

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33. “Are three years younger than Wilbur, but as big as a man as was known and was known as the neighborhood bully, as would be written in the Dayton Journal following his execution, Oliver never was without the wish to inflict pain or at least discomfort on others. After the accident, Wilbur remained a recluse, more or less homebound for fully three years. Three years when he began reading as never before. So after this accident, he's bedridden, he's taking a long time to recover. This is the early 1900s, and he starts reading books on flight. So we're going to get there in one second. This next idea that stuck out to me was the importance of reading, something I talk about all the time on the podcast, something that's been a lifelong hobby of mine and the entire reason I do the podcast is because I do believe that if people read more, their lives would be better. The ability to focus on”

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34. “So it's almost like a form of stoicism. And reading this excerpt, that idea popped into my head. So let's go to Wynne Wilbur's boy. Wilbur was smashed in the face with a stick, knocking out most of his upper front teeth. What exactly happened is hard to determine, but to judge from the little that is known, there is much more to the story. According to an entry in Bishop Wright's diary written years afterward, so Bishop Wright is their father, the man who threw the bat that struck Wilbur became one of the most notorious murderers in the history of Ohio. Oliver Crook Howe, who in nineteen oh six was executed for the murders of his mother, father, and brother, and was believed to have killed as many as a dozen others besides. At the time of the hockey incident, Hal lived just two blocks from the rights. He was only fifteen.”

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35. “So, I want to tell you this moving ahead, I want to tell you this little excerpt about something that happened to Wilbur Wright when he was a young boy and how he took a tragedy and turned it into something that changed his life. And the note I left myself is there's this great video on YouTube from this guy named Jock O'Willock, who also has a podcast called Jocko Podcast. And he has this concept of good. And I'll leave a link to the YouTube video in the show notes, and it's available at Founderspodcast.com. But the theme of the two-minute video is there's going to be a lot of things that happen throughout your life that are bad that you have little to no control over. All you can really control over is the action that you take next. So basically saying, look for the good when you're going to a tumultuous or a bad situation and then focus on that, re-engage, and get back towards whatever you're working towards.”

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36. “This next part is advice from their father, and it's just a quick sentence, two sentences that they kept the lessons, a lot of lessons from their father. They would repeat throughout their entire lives, even up until the point after their father passed away. So the advice from their father was 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.”

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37. “To have his picture taken. Truth to tell, one reporter wrote, the camera is no friend either to the brothers. But what is most uncharacteristic about the pose is that they are sitting and doing nothing, something they almost never succumb to. The brothers had tremendous energy and working hard every day but Sunday was a way of life, and if not on the job then at home on improvements. Hard work was a conviction, and they were at their best and happiest working together on their own projects at some waist high bench. What the two had in common above all was unity of purpose and unyielding determination. They had set themselves on a mission. So that term right there, after reading the book, now this is my second time reading through it, unyielding determination. I think that's the best two-word description of the right.”

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