The Wright Brothers

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.