- There was once a time in human history
where manned flight, yes, flying in an airplane
seemed impossible.
And it sure seemed impossible because so many people tried
and failed, in fairly spectacular and unbelievable ways.
Today, we're going to talk about what it took
to push humanity forward into the age of aviation.
A time that brought the world together
and changed the course of humanity through technology.
What seemed impossible, made the crossover to possible.
Brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright made this happen
in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
What does it take to push through?
What lessons can you and I take away from 1903?
If you want to invent, create and push humanity forward,
we can learn a lot.
Let's get started.
To better understand this, I sat down with my friend,
Jason Crawford, who runs the nonprofit,
The Roots of Progress.
He's a startup founder
and former software engineering manager
who has a particular interest in breakthrough tech,
like what the Wright brothers built.
- I'm Jason Crawford.
And I write about the history of technology
and the philosophy of progress at the blog,
the Roots of Progress @rootsofprogress.org.
- You know, it takes a special kind of person
to create something that has never existed before.
- It was a writer for Le Figaro,
a Frantz Reichel who met Wilbur Wright in Europe
when he went there to demonstrate the airplane
and wrote about him later,
that "The flecks of gold in his eyes
ignite a passionate flame because Wilbur Wright is a zealot.
He and his brother made the conquest of the sky
their existence.
They needed this ambition and profound,
almost religious, faith in order to deliberately accept
their exile to the country of the dunes, far away from all...
Wilbur is phlegmatic, but only in appearance.
He is driven by a will of iron
which animates him and drives him in his work."
- Could you imagine what it takes to build a flying machine?
You've got a whole universe of haters arrayed against you.
Nobody thinks you can do it.
Of course, it took an iron will to get started.
And that iron will meant that the Wright brothers
were willing to invest in themselves.
- The Wright brothers were entirely self-funded.
Over the first few years of their experimentation,
they spent a total of about a thousand dollars.
Now that might be closer to 25,000 in today's money,
but it was not a lot,
entirely out of the profits of their own bicycle shop.
And they were even offered, you know, more funding.
At some point, they probably could have gotten much more,
but they wanted to retain their independence
and they didn't want the temptation
of just spending more money and not being self-sustaining.
- The Wright brothers, they were self-funded
on something this crazy,
all the while, they were up against
a much better funded competitor, Samuel Langley.
Astronomer, physicist, inventor, and aviation pioneer.
And he had government backing.
Langley had 70 times the money that the Wright brothers had,
he was the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
And even had his early designs witnessed
and photographed by Alexander Graham Bell himself.
The odds were stacked against the Wright brothers
who were investing their own money
from profits of literally a bicycle shop.
Here's a case where Langley's over-funding
became his downfall though.
Langley's second and final attempt at controllable aircraft
failed on December 8th, 1903.
Because he was dependent on outside funding,
that was his final attempt.
Nine days later,
the Wright brothers achieved what he couldn't.
Now that's some real grit,
going up against overfunded credentialism.
The next time you think you have odds stacked against you,
think of the Wright brothers.
How do they do it when so many others failed?
One thing is clear, they didn't do it like everyone else.
- The Wright Brothers went about their work
in a very smart way.
So they knew that people before them had failed
because they had failed to control their glider
or their flying machine.
In fact, people had died in crashes,
such as the famous experimenter Otto Lilienthal
had died when they could not control their glider.
So the Wright brothers did something very smart.
They said, we're not even going to put a motor in this thing
at first.
They found a place on a beach,
the beaches of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina.
And they took off from hills.
So they were going very low, over soft ground.
And if they crashed, in fact when they crashed,
they weren't going very far.
They hit soft ground and they survived
without any major injuries.
They did this for a couple of years
until they were actually able to control the glider.
And then once they had solved the problem of control,
only then did they even put a motor in the airplane.
- That was a key takeaway for all inventors of all kinds.
Progressive iteration.
They knew they had to start with something safe
and they moved onto a bigger problem,
only when the earlier problems were solved.
- The Wright brothers were very smart about risk-taking.
They took risks, but they were far from reckless.
So when they went out and did their experiments,
they were gliding low, over soft ground.
They knew that people before them had died.
And so they took calculated risks,
but they were not out to do stunts or out to just, you know,
to show off.
They were as careful as they could be
within the confines of what was needed
for their experimentation.
- In the case of aviation, the wage of hubris is death,
and it's a price, many paid.
But the Wright brothers showed something else.
Be thoughtful, be methodical.
A lot of people say,
you need to take unnecessary risks to make a breakthrough.
But this example shows,
that is a false and self limiting belief.
Being able to do your own research
and engage in first principles thinking, is super timeless.
It's as important in 1903 for the Wright brothers,
as it is for you and me today.
Elon Musk talks about this all the time.
- I think it's also important
to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
So the normal way that we conduct our lives is
we reason by analogy.
It's, we're doing this because
it's like something else that was done.
- But what the Wright brothers discovered
is that other people's research is sometimes,
absolutely wrong.
- One of the setbacks that the Wright brothers encountered
was at a certain point,
they realized that some of the published data
that they were relying on for their designs, was wrong.
So they had a wing with a certain aspect ratio
to the size of the wing.
And they realized it was actually,
not the optimal one at all.
They had gotten better results with a previous design.
- And that is where the idea of first principles
came into play for the Wright brothers.
- First principles is kind of a physics way
of looking at the world.
And what that really means is you kind of boil things down
to the most fundamental truths and say,
"Okay, well, what are we sure is true
or are sure as possible is true?"
And then reason up from there.
That takes a lot more mental energy.
- So that is what the Wright brothers did.
In technology, we frequently say,
"Do your own research".
When you run across data that is wrong, ask why,
and maybe come up with your own observations directly.
- So they suddenly realized first off,
this was really disappointing and frustrating
because, "Oh no, this data we were relying on was wrong."
But then when they thought it out again, they realized,
"Wait, this is kind of exciting.
It means maybe the reason people failed
was they just didn't have the right data
and we can go collect the right data
and then we'll have a competitive advantage."
And that's exactly what they did.
They went and designed and built their own wind tunnel
and collected their own data by doing their own experiments.
They made all sorts of different shapes and sizes
of airfoils and put them against high winds
and measured the pressures on them
to give them data, to use to design their wing.
So they went back to first principles
and even questioned the data when it seemed to be wrong
and collected their own.
- When you are on the cutting edge of human knowledge,
there are gonna to be mistakes.
Some are going to be your own,
and some are going to be the mistakes of others.
Now, this is an interesting case.
Is it possible that the bad data of other people
got out there and set human flight back by years?
I think the answer is yes.
It took brothers outside the mainstream
to question what they were seeing,
discover that outside research was wrong
and make their own experiments.
And this is where credentialism becomes a huge problem.
I think credentialism actually holds back society
even today, when we hold things that are wrong
so close to our hearts.
We spend so much time in our lives,
assuming everyone else and everything else is correct.
But I think if we spent some time
directly experiencing life,
we might realize we have to go to first principles.
Examine every assumption, make up your own mind.
Other people's research can help or hurt you.
Do your own research.
We're in the age of fake it till you make it.
Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos,
they went too far when they came out
and announced it was working many, many years
before they could have possibly achieved it.
- The Wright brothers did not seek any publicity
for what they were doing until they were really sure
that the glider worked
and that they could demonstrate it very well.
- Remember earlier, we were talking about Samuel Langley.
He was an overfunded, over credentialed competitor
to the Wright brothers.
He had raised 70 times more money than the Wright brothers.
And he quit when he ran out of cash. Remember that guy?
- Langley went out and did a very public demonstration
before he'd really proved the thing would work
and it crashed right into the water.
So it was a huge public failure.
The newspapers were all there and they wrote about it.
Sure enough, very soon people were asking,
why is the government giving this guy money?
His funding was cut off.
Congress, I think actually said,
there's going to be no more money
for any kind of flying experience at all.
No more money for aviation research.
And so it was a big public failure
'cause he just went out there too early.
The Wright brothers made their historic flight in 1903.
A lot of people know that date.
What they don't know is they actually didn't go out there
and do public demonstrations for a couple of more years.
It wasn't until they'd gone through a few iterations
of their airplane and had a lot of practice themselves
as pilots and were very confident in their skills.
It was around 1905,
I think they invited anybody to come watch them.
And 1908 actually, five years later,
was when they did the huge demonstrations in Washington
and in Europe.
- In the immortal words of Steve Jobs, "Real artists ship."
It's hard to believe that the Wright brothers
spent another six years after their initial breakthrough
before showing the world their creation.
Now I'm not saying that's what you should do today,
but it's very telling.
They massively under promised and over delivered.
And this was a big deal.
By 1909, they were doing military demonstrations
and flying for more than an hour.
And the result, people celebrated this
as the remarkable breakthrough it truly was.
It's not like cynics didn't exist in 1909.
But for that moment, that ever-present cynicism,
the kind that we marinate in daily,
the way mainstream media talks about technology,
that cynicism was extinguished.
The Dayton Daily News wrote, "Too many people
were beginning to believe that all the world's problems
had been solved.
Money was beginning to tell in the affairs of men.
And some were wondering whether a poor boy
might work for himself, a place in commerce
or industry or science.
This celebration crowns anew the efforts of mankind.
It crushes for another 100 years,
the suspicion that all of the secrets of nature
have been solved or that the avenues of hope
have been closed to those who would win new worlds.
It points out to the ambitious young man
that he labors not in vain, that genius knows no class,
no condition."
It is today as it was in 1909.
There are further new Wright brothers out there.
Outsiders, first principles thinkers,
risk-taking inventors and thoughtful zealots.
You might be that person and you're watching right now.
There are people telling you that money is what matters,
that you can't have a place in commerce,
industry or science.
That everything that could be discovered has already been.
It wasn't true in 1909 and it's not true today.
In that moment, manned aviation was the reminder.
More than 100 years later, what are you going to create?
Special thanks to my friend, Jason Crawford
of the Roots of Progress,
who was my guest and co-writer for this episode.
- If you want more like this, visit rootsofprogress.org.
You can sign up for our email list there
or follow me on Twitter.
My handle is Jason Crawford.
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