43 pages • 1 hour read
David McCulloughThe Wright Brothers
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Perseverance
At every opportunity, McCullough shows the great odds stacked against Wilbur and Orville Wright. He discusses the ingenuity that solving the problem of flight required, along with the brothers’ many setbacks, including mechanical failures, the derision and criticism of the press and public, and physical injury. In short, whatever roadblocks sprang up in the Wright brothers’ way, they overcame them. “They would not give up,” McCullough has said. (Lamb, Brian. “Q&A with David McCullough.” C-SPAN, 12 May 2015, www.c-span.org/video/?325996-1/qa-david-mccullough. Accessed 22 Sept. 2021.)
One potential barrier to their success was that both brothers lacked a formal education. However, while this obstacle may have deprived them of credentials, they taught themselves everything they needed to know. They began with their father’s personal library and Dayton’s public library and then expanded their study to materials that Wilbur requested from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Another major obstacle came at Kitty Hawk in the summer of 1901, when they discovered that the long-established statistical data and ratios they’d used for the curvature of the plane’s wings were all wrong. There was nothing to build on; they had to start from scratch and do it all themselves. The list continues: Orville’s crash at Fort Myer in 1908, years of ridicule from both the American and French press, and the lack of seriousness with which the American government regarded their work—none of it fazed them. They simply continued their methodical march toward their goals.
The Importance of Family
This theme is clear from the beginning, as McCullough puts much emphasis on the brothers’ family background, especially the influence of their father, Bishop Milton Wright. The bishop instilled in them fundamental character traits, along with a love of learning, and supported them in their endeavors. Orville once disagreed with the idea that he and his brother had accomplished much without special advantages, saying, “[T]he greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity” (18). Another time, in a speech, Orville said that the road to success for any young person was to “[p]ick out a good father and mother” (12).
McCullough also emphasizes the significant impact that another family member had on Wilbur and Orville: their sister, Katharine. Both directly and indirectly, her support was instrumental to their success. The most obvious instances include Katharine’s at once taking an indefinite leave of absence from her job to nurse Orville back to health after his life-threatening accident at Fort Myer and her management of the brothers’ social affairs in France. However, less obvious examples were equally important. For an extended period, three years in a row, Wilbur and Orville left their bicycle business to go to Kitty Hawk to test their Flyer. As the bike shop was their only source of income—supporting both themselves and their flying experiments—that was no small thing. While they had a shop manager to oversee things, Katharine undoubtedly helped keep it running, especially the first year when she had to fire the man they left in charge.
Innovation
An historic invention such as an airplane involves innovation. Over the centuries, many prominent people were interested in devising a flying machine, so the question becomes how the Wright brothers did it when others could not. McCullough shows not only how their perseverance played a part but also that without their unique ability to innovate, they would not have succeeded.
That they did this as autodidacts makes it more remarkable. Through close observation, making notes, and working step by step, they devised novel approaches whenever necessary. One example was calculating the correct curvature (or “camber”) for their Flyer’s wings when their experiments showed that the existing literature was wrong. In addition, they were creative and had a penchant for mechanical ingenuity. For instance, they devised a propeller like none ever used before, an achievement that their mechanic Charlie Taylor thought didn’t get enough attention.
Learning from Nature
A minor theme is how the Wright brothers drew on nature for the answers to many technical problems. Both were great birdwatchers, starting in Dayton and continuing in Kitty Hawk, where they tested their plane. An early influence was Otto Lilienthal, who proposed that the secret to flight was in the structure of birds’ wings—not the flapping of them but the way birds soared on the wind with very little movement of their wings. In addition, Wilbur admired the book Empire of the Air, whose author, Louis Pierre Mouillard, thought that “merely observing [birds] with close attention” would lead humankind to fly someday (37). These cues inspired the Wright brothers to spend hours watching and drawing shorebirds such as gannets at Kitty Hawk. They even imitated the way gannets held their wings by copying them with their arms and hands. According to a resident of Kitty Hawk who helped them, the locals considered them “crazy,” though they admired how accurately the brothers could mimic the birds: “They could imitate every movement of the wings of those gannets” (53). In the end, studying birds led Wilbur and Orville to success.
Related Titles
By David McCullough
