The Airplane - Jay Spenser [11]
It was at college that Susan Koerner and Milton Wright met and fell in love. Theirs was a relationship of equals that took delight in intellectual pursuits. When they married and started a family, it was no surprise that their household should boast a sizable and eclectic library. The Wright children were given free rein and encouraged to delve deeply in this library, which boasted Greek and Roman classics, European histories, biographies, scientific volumes, and the writings of naturalists. Also at their disposal were august reference works such as Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia—now a century out of date but still fascinating—and the newer Encyclopaedia Britannica.
But books alone would not prepare Wilbur and Orville for the peculiar challenge they would take up as adults. Fortunately, they had also been taught another path to learning, one crucial to their invention of the airplane. This alternative source was empirical knowledge of the physical world gained through observation and experimentation.
Here Susan Wright deserves the lion’s share of the credit. Clever at “adapting household tools or utensils to unexpected uses,” she patiently taught her children how to build what they could imagine.3 If they needed help with any of these creative projects, she was right there to propose how a thing might be done.
The children’s maternal grandfather, John Koerner, also played a role. As he had done for his daughter, he instructed the youngsters in the use of tools. Construction techniques, rules of thumb, and reading or drawing plans became second nature to them.
In so doing, father and daughter gave the next generation a priceless gift. “We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity,” Orville would later reminisce. “In a different kind of environment, our curiosity might have been nipped long before it could have borne fruit.”4
In 1878, the family was living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Milton’s work had taken them. Orville and Wilbur were seven and eleven, respectively, that autumn evening when he came home with something concealed in his arms. “Before we could see what it was,” Orville recounted, “he tossed it into the air. Instead of falling to the floor as we expected, it flew across the room till it struck the ceiling where it fluttered a while and finally sank to the floor. It was a little toy known to scientists as a ‘hélicoptère,’ but which we with sublime disregard for science at once dubbed a bat.”5
Made of bamboo and cork, this clever plaything—an improved version of the Launoy and Bienvenu toy that had delighted young George Cayley almost a century earlier—employed a braided rubber band to spin two paper-covered rotors, one at each end, that turned in opposite directions. When wound up and released, it ascended energetically into the sky, delighting the boys.
The Wrights’ free-flying helicopter was the invention of young Alphonse Pénaud, a Parisian confined to a wheelchair by a crippling hip disease. Yearning for lost freedom, Pénaud hit upon the idea of twisting rubber bands to power a variety of model aircraft that he conceived with delight. When he wound them up and let them go, his trapped soul soared off with them.
In addition to his helicopter, Pénaud developed two models that flew horizontally. One was a toy ornithopter that passed through the air like a rapidly flapping butterfly. The other was a fixed-wing design he called the Planophore, an excellent flyer that drew directly from the work of George Cayley. Pénaud had stumbled across Cayley’s writings and republished them in France along with aviation concepts of his own.
Pénaud was quiet, with a resigned set to his mouth and serious eyes that missed little. In his humility, he had no idea how important his efforts were or how inspirational they would be to others who shared his dreams.