The Wright Stuff

Orville and Wilbur Wright were two of seven children born to Bishop Milton Wright and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright. Wilbur was the third child. He was born near Millville, Indiana on April 16, 1867. Orville was born in Dayton, Ohio on August 19, 1871. The family settled in Dayton at 7 Hawthorn Street where Milton was the editor of a newspaper published by the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. His various jobs as a minister led to the family having to move frequently, but they never sold the house on Hawthorn Street and returned often.

In grade school, Orville was often mischievous and was once expelled. Their father travelled often as a Bishop of the Church and would bring the children souvenirs of his travels. In 1878 he brought home a toy “helicopter”. The toy was based on an invention of French aeronautical pioneer Alphonse Penaud. It was made of paper, bamboo, and cork with a rubber band to twirl the “rotor”. The rotor was about a foot long. Orville and Wilbur played with the toy until it broke. Then they built their own. Over the next few years they built several and the bigger they built them, the less well they flew. Discouraged they turned to building kites. Years later both boys credited their experience with the toy helicopter as the initial spark of their interest in flying.

Wilbur and Orville both attended high school, but neither received diplomas. The Wright family moved abruptly in June 1884 from Richmond, Indiana back to Dayton, less than one month before Wilbur would have graduated from high school. The next year he attended Central High School in Dayton for additional studies in Greek and trigonometry. In the winter of 1885-86 Wilbur was hit in the face with a hockey stick while playing with friends. He lost his front teeth. Up until then he had been a vigorous athlete and although his injuries did not appear severe, he became withdrawn and did not attend Yale as planned. He spent the next few years instead mostly housebound caring for his mother who was terminally ill with tuberculosis and reading extensively in his father’s library.

Orville dropped out of high school after his junior year to start a printing business in 1889. He designed and built his own printing press from a damaged tombstone and buggy parts with Wilbur’s help. Working with his brother Orville on the printing business shook Wilbur out of his depression. Wilbur served as editor while Orville was publisher of the weekly newspaper the West Side News. A few months later they started a daily paper called Evening Item. They also printed the Dayton Tattler, a weekly newspaper. The printing business was the first time they officially referred to themselves as ”The Wright Brothers”.

Spurred by the invention of the safety bicycle and its substantial advantages over the penny-farthing design, the Wright brothers jumped on the national bicycle craze and capitalized on it. They opened a bicycle repair and sales shop, the Wright Cycle Exchange, later the Wright Cycle Company, in 1892. In 1896 they began manufacturing their own brand of bicycles. They built two models called the Van Cleve and the St. Clair. The Wright brothers used their bicycle endeavors to fund their growing interest in flight.

The year 1896 brought three important aeronautical events. Smithsonian Institution Secretary Samuel Langley successfully flew an unmanned steam-powered model aircraft. Chicago engineer and aviation authority Octave Chanute tested various types of gliders over the sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan. Otto Lilienthal of Germany, who had been test flying his gliders for a couple of years, was killed in a plunge of one of his gliders. These three events sparked the Wright brothers’ interest in flight even more. In May 1899, Wilbur wrote a letter to the Smithsonian requesting information and publications about aeronautics. Drawing on the works of Sir George Cayley, Chanute, Lilienthal, Leonardo da Vinci, and Langley, the Wright brothers began their mechanical aeronautical experimentation within a few months of writing to the Smithsonian.

Wilbur Wright defined the elements of a flying machine: wings to provide lift, a power source for propulsion, and a system of control. Of all the early aviation pioneers, Wilbur alone recognized the need to control a flying machine in its three axes of motion: pitch, roll, and yaw. His solution for control was “wing warping”. He came up with a system by twisting an empty bicycle tube box with the ends removed. Twisting the surface of each “wing” changed its position in relation to oncoming wind. Wilbur tested his theory on a small kite and it worked. The brothers also spent a great deal of time observing birds in flight. They noticed that birds soared into the wind and that the air flowing under their curved wings created lift. They also noted that birds changed the shape of their wings to turn and maneuver.

In August 1990, Wilbur built his first glider with a 17-foot wingspan. He contacted the U.S. Weather Bureau for information on windy regions of the country. From the list he chose a remote sandy area off the coast of North Carolina named Kitty Hawk. The winds averaged 13 mph. He and Orville traveled to Kitty Hawk and successfully tested the glider. The next year they again traveled to Kitty Hawk and tested a new glider with a 22-foot wingspan. They were disappointed by its performance. They returned to their bicycle shop and decided to construct a wind tunnel to test the effectiveness of a variety of wing shapes. They tested their 1902 glider at Kitty Hawk in October. They were successful. It glided a record 620 feet. They returned to Dayton determined to develop a propeller and an engine for their next project- a flying machine.

The Wright brothers built their 1903 flying machine in sections in the back room of their cycle shop in Dayton. As they completed each section they shipped it down to Kitty Hawk. They designed a propeller based on the same principles they used to design their wings.  They built a 4-cylinder, 12-horsepower engine. The craft weighed 700 pounds and came to be known as the Flyer. The brothers built a moveable track to help launch the Flyer. The downhill track helped the aircraft gain enough airspeed to fly. On December 14, 1903, Wilbur won a coin toss and made the first attempt to fly the machine. He stalled the engine on takeoff, which resulted in minor damage. They repaired the machine and Orville made the next attempt on December 17, 1903. At 10:35 a.m. that morning he made the first heavier-than-air, machine-powered flight in the world. The flight lasted only 12 seconds and covered just 120 feet.

1904- Wilbur flew the Flyer II for more than five minutes.

1905- The Wright brothers built an airplane that could fly for more than half an hour.

1908- Orville made the world’s first flight of over one hour at Fort Myer, Virginia, in a demonstration for the U.S. Army.

1908- Wilbur made over 100 flights near Le Mans, France. The longest flight was a record at 2 hours, 19 minutes.

1908- Orville piloted a passenger flight that suffered a fatal crash. Orville survived but his passenger, Signal Corps Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, did not.

1909- The U.S. Government bought its first airplane, a Wright Brothers bi-plane.

1911- A Wright Brothers plane, the Vin Fiz, was the first airplane to cross the United States. The flight took 84 days, stopping 70 times.

1912- The first Wright Brothers airplane armed with a machine gun was flown in College Park, Maryland.

1914- The Aviation Section of the Signal Corps (part of the Army) was established. Its flying unit contained Wright Brothers airplanes.

1914- The U.S. Court decided in favor of the Wright Brothers in a patent suit concerning lateral control of aircraft.

Wilbur Wright became ill on a business trip to Boston in April 1912. When he returned to Dayton he was diagnosed with typhoid fever. He lingered in and out of consciousness for several weeks until he died at the age of forty five. Orville succeeded to the presidency of the Wright company upon his brother’s death. Never a fan of the business end of the Wright Brothers’ endeavors, Orville sold the company in 1915. Orville made his last flight as a pilot in 1919. He retired and became an elder statesman of aviation, serving on various official boards and committees, including the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). He served NACA for 28 years. In 1930 he received the first Daniel Guggenheim Medal established in 1928. In 1936 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Orville died on January 30, 1948. He had lived from the horse-and-buggy age to the dawn of supersonic flight.

Orville wrote of his childhood: “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.”                                                                                                     

Jody Victor

The Intelligence Quotient

Alfred Binet was born an only child on July 11, 1857, in Nice, France. His father was a physician and his mother was an artist. When Binet was very young his parents separated and he was raised solely by his mother. After graduating from the Lycee Louis-le-Grand at the age of 15, Benet and his mother moved to Parisso he could attend a famous law school there. In 1878, at the age of 21, Binet received his license to practice law. His family’s wealth made it unnecessary for him to practice law, allowing him to pursue his real interests in psychology. He decided to follow in his father’s family tradition of medicine.

Binet spent much of his time reading psychology at the French National Library. His new-found interest in psychology became more important to him than his medical studies. He became a self-taught psychologist reading books by Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, and others. He published a psychology-related article in 1880. He wrote numerous other articles on hypnosis, animal magnetism, and the effect of magnets on emotions. Binet was an introverted loner and his self-educating suited him. Later he would realize that not attending a University and formally studying psychology would hinder him in his pursuits.

In 1883, Binet was introduced to Charles Fere, who introduced him to Jean Charcot. Charcot was the director of a clinic in Pariscalled La Salpetriere. Charcot became his mentor and Binet accepted a job offer at the clinic. He worked at the clinic for seven years. In 1887, he was honored by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences as laureate with a prize of 1,000 francs, which was a large sum of money in those days. For all those seven years Binet never questioned his mentor’s views. He uncritically accepted and vehemently defended Charcot’s methods. Without formal training in critical thinking at a university, Binet was not used to questioning opposing views. When he left the clinic he never mentioned it or his mentor again.

In 1884, Binet married Laure Balbiani, the daughter of Edouard-Gerard Balbiani, an embryologist at the College de France. Together they had two daughters: Madeleine and Alice (two years apart in age). After leaving Charcot’s clinic, Binet concentrated his interest in the development of his daughters and used them as subjects for developmental testing by age. He became fascinated with the differences between the two girls. He concocted a number of tests for them and found that Madeleine, the older girl, learned and responded differently thanAlice. Binet also worked with his father-in-law who lectured on heredity. He wrote articles and papers on free will versus determinism and studied the psychology of courts of law.

Binet accidently met Dr. Henri Beaunis one day in 1891 on a railway platform. Binet asked Dr. Beaunis for a job at the Laboratory of Physiological at the Sorbonne. In spite of heated arguments that had been carried on between them previously on the subject of hypnosis, Beaunis agreed. Binet worked for one year without pay and by 1894, he took over as director. In 1895, Binet and Beaunis founded the first French journal of psychology, L’Annee Psychologique, which remains in press today.

In 1899, Binet was asked to be a member of the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child.Francehad just implemented a law that made it mandatory for children six to fourteen to attend school. Binet and his fellow members were asked to study children and discern the learning disabled from the normal learners for assignment to special education. Binet took the challenge. L’Etude experimentale de l’intelligence (Experimental Studies of Intelligence) was the book he used to describe his methods. It was published in 1903.

More tests and investigations began soon after his book was published. With the help of a young medical student named Theodore Simon, Binet worked on the intelligence tests he is known for to this day. In 1905, they introduced a new test for measuring intelligence. It was simply called the Binet-Simon scale. In 1908, they revised the scale and arranged it according to age levels three to thirteen. Binet published the third version of the Binet-Simon scale right before he died in 1911. The Binet-Simon scale is still used today and is commonly known as the IQ Test.

Jody Victor