Transcript for the Piece Audio version of First Flight, First Hand
FIRST FLIGHT, FIRST HAND
Western Folklife Center Media
Intro:
We have all seen “that” picture. We’ve all read the history books in school. And for as long as anyone can remember, Wilbur and Orville Wright and their famous flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina have been the stuff of legend.
Music:
(Orson Welles poem)
It was a windy day in North Carolina…windy and light
Sun was shining...air was cold and bright
Couple of brothers…the brothers Wright
Stood around, gave orders, lent a hand
When out of its shed on the big gray field…was wheeled…
The contraption, the construction. The plane… (fade under Liane & lose)
Intro:
But as often happens with the passage of time, the real people begin to fade behind their legend. Today, we’re going to tell a first-person history of the Wright brothers… with help from those who knew and worked with Orville and Wilbur—people who witnessed first-hand the dawn of aviation and whose voices were preserved decades ago in a series of interviews that have never been broadcast before. The Western Folklife Center's Hal Cannon reports.
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HAL: Long before Wilbur and Orville Wright became legends, they were simply Uncle Will & Uncle Orv to their niece Ivonette.
ACT: (IWM-W’s notebook) When I was about 6 years old, I was sitting on Uncle Will's lap and he said, “can you write your name?” And I said “yes I could.” He pulled out a very small notebook from his pocket…so I wrote it …Ivonette Wright…in a child’s scrawl. Many years later I found out that was his notebook of the experiments of 1902…
HAL: A very important year for the Wright Brothers. Since 1899 they had set out to solve the mystery of flight.
MUSIC: (Aeroplane Dip) First couple of notes
HAL: Flying had tantalized great minds since the ancient Greeks…and continued to stump the best scientists and engineers of the day.
MUSIC: (Aeroplane Dip / up for phrase, fade under & keep)
HAL: After collecting and absorbing all that had been written about flying…the Wrights began their own experiments. They built gliders with wings covered in fabric sewn mostly in the dining room of the family home. Ivonette Wright Miller.
ACT: (IWM-Wilbur sewing) Orville on the floor drawing the lines & Wilbur using the sewing machine.
HAL: They flew their first glider in the fall of 1900 at Kitty Hawk, a spot they chose for its isolation and consistent winds. Returning to North Carolina over the next three years they methodically improved their design through rigorous testing both in the air and with one of the first wind tunnels ever built. They tested their ideas on each other proposing thoughts then breaking them down.
ACT: (IWM Tis Tisn’t) When they were sitting in their parlor, one of them would make a statement. And then there’d be a long pause, and the other one would make a statement. Then the other would say tisnt’ either…then it would be ‘tis too, ‘tisn’t either, ‘tis too… and before they were through with the argument, each one had presented it so well they’d be on opposite sides.
HAL: One of the Wright's most revolutionary concepts was that turning in mid air was like riding a bicycle. Banking was the key. Not just steering with a wheel or rudder. Their propeller also broke new ground for the first time creating enough thrust to push an airplane through the air By the fall of 1903, they’d incorporated these ideas into a new plane outfitted with an engine they 'd designed and built with their assistant Charlie Taylor. They left Dayton for Kitty Hawk on September 23rd.
MUSIC: (Aeroplane Dip) Last few notes
ACT: IWM- (Sure to fly) Of course the whole family knew they were gonna fly…they knew they were gonna fly..they were just sure.
MUSIC/ACT: (Orson Welles / Airborne Symphony)
There ya go…(music)
The Reverend Milton Wright received a telegram…Success. Four flights Thursday morning…started at level with engine power alone…average speed through air 31 miles per hour… longest 59 seconds. Inform press. Home Christmas. Orville Wright
HAL: The Wrights assumed the press would jump on their story. But they were wrong. Only a handful of papers reported the news, botching the facts. Even in their hometown, this is how one editor reacted to that momentous telegram. Former mayor Henry Stout.
ACT: (H Stout/cardgame) Martin Beard who was the city editor of the Journal was called from a card game to receive that wire. And he came back to the table, picked up his cards and said to the boys “those Wright boys are coming home for Christmas isn’t that nice.”
ACT: (Tom Russel/W were nuts) Peoplethought they were nuts!
HAL: Tom Russel worked for the Wrights from 1910 to 1915.
ACT: (Tom Russel/W were nuts) Well you couldn’t blame people cuz people couldn’t visualize a great big plane flying up in the air you know, it was against their good judgment, see.
HAL: The Wrights didn’t let disappointment slow their work. Yes, the Kitty Hawk plane had flown, but the invention needed many improvements.
MUSIC: (W&E Marsalis) Wright Bros Rag (first few notes)
HAL: Over then next couple of year in a secluded cow pasture just outside Dayton called Huffman Prairie, the Wright’s contraption matured into a practical flying machine.
MUSIC: (W&E Marsalis) Wright Bros Rag (trumpet as swooping plane/under & keep)
HAL: The brothers worked on the motor, strengthened the landing gear and tweaked the steering controls. They also placed the pilot in a seat, instead of on his belly across the lower wing. William Huffman remembers going out to check on their progress…after school one day in 1905.
ACT: (W Huffman/Saw 1st flt) As we were walking up to the farmhouse, they started up in their plane, and the farmer’s son came along in a wagon in which he was hauling corn, and I sat up in the wagon and we watched them. They circled the field 38 times, and the flight lasted 37 minutes. They came down because they ran out of gasoline.
HAL: With a more agile flying machine you might expect the Wright's to have staged some grand demonstration just to prove to a disbelieving world that they had unlocked the secret of flight. Instead they locked up their plane…not trusting rival inventors to get too close. Ivonette Wright Miller.
ACT: (IWM-dishonesty) It’s a funny thing..they could both stand anything but dishonesty. A person could do everything wrong, but if they were honest, they would forgive them everything.
HAL: Many pretenders would stop at nothing to lay claim to the aviation crown. The Wrights had commercial ambitions and they wanted a government contract to build planes. They expected officials to take them at their word. Fearful that they would be robbed, they didn't even want to show photographs of their flights.
Rebuffed by the US, England and France, the impasse continued for almost 3 years. And by that time, the competition…particularly in France…was closing in on the brothers.
MUSIC: (W&E Marsalis) Wright Bros Rag (@3:11-3:15)
HAL: Finally the Wright's got contracts with both the US and France, and were ready to make a public showing. Arriving in Paris for the exhibition flight, Wilbur discovered that their plane had been badly damaged in transit. It would take almost two months to make repairs. Already pegged as bluffers, French impatience and methodical Yankee ingenuity did not make a good mix. Nephew, Horace Wright.
ACT: (HW-Bluffeurs) They got to calling him Le Bluffeur, or something that way.. But the funny thing is that you couldn’t’ hurry Wilbur, he was gonna get it right. And then one day…(fade under)
HAL: And then one day…August the eighth…the critics were silenced.
MUSIC: (French Flying Song)
HAL: Even the French aviators were humbled…
ACT: French Flyer “Les Frere Wright s’attache a l’epoque heroique de l’aviation”
MUSIC: (French Flying Song)
MUSIC: (Song of the Wright Boys)
It’s Wilbur & Oville Wright, who have shown the world their flight
In their aeroplane…
HAL: Nearly five years after Kitty Hawk, Wilbur and Orville Wright were crowned the “Kings of the Air” …even in their own hometown.
MUSIC: (Song of the Wright Boys)
Now Dayton she was slow, but the whistles they did blow
When the boys returned from Foreign lands, with honors of their fame.
ACT: (IWM-Flt w/Orv) We heard from news reports that Uncle Wil had taken a little French girl for a flight.
HAL: So Ivonette & her sister begged to be the first American girls to fly -- a request that Uncle Orville happily obliged.
ACT: (IWM-Fltw/Orv) I climbed into the passenger seat next to Uncle Orv & he smiled a little bit. When he got everything all ready, Uncle Orv gave the signal & took off. There we were in mid-air with the wind blowing in our faces..it was unbelievable. We went up over the trees and telephone poles and circled Huffman Prairie 2 1/2 times…when I looked up and Uncle Orv was pointing at the electric trolley that was coming in the distance from Springfield. He turned to me and said “shall we take it?” I nodded. With that he turned off the engine & propellers, turned into the wind, and glided down to a perfect landing in time to catch the trolley. And that was my first flight and I haven’t been the same since.
MUSIC: Come Josephine in my Flying Machine
(man) Oh say let us fly dear
(woman) Where kid?
(man) To the sky dear
(woman) Oh you flying machine
(man) Jump in Miss Josephine…
HAL: The airplane quickly swooped into popular culture... landing on poster art, post cards, games, comic strips and movies. Aero-plane love songs were propelled off the charts.
MUSIC: Come Josephine in my Flying Machine
(Chorus) Come Josephine in my flying machine…going up she goes, up she goes
MUSIC: (Montage) Me & Jane in a Plane/ Me & Jane in a Plane/Come Take a Trip in
My Airship/ Wait ‘til You Get’Em up in the Air
HAL: Some songs took airplanes to the heavens
MUSIC: (Jesus is my Aeroplane)
Oh Jesus is my aer-o-plane
He holds this world in his hands
HAL: While an airplane could buck a cowboy higher than any old Cayuse.
MUSIC: (The Cowboy’s Airplane Ride)
Well I gets me a bird and away we go she snakes about like a young bronco
Yodels /under & keep
ACT: (Walter Brookins) Naturally I wanted to learn to fly after they had flown, and they promised to teach me when it was possible. So in January 1910, I was Orville’s first civilian student.
HAL: Student Walter Brookins soon became teacher Walter Brookins. By 1910 the skies were filling with competitors. In response Orville and Brookins started training a team of competition pilots out for speed and altitude records across the country…often for big prize money. William Conover was part of that team.
TAPE: (W Conover/plane fire) We was over the Washington monument, and the motor caught fire. I got up out of the seat, you can imagine 4 below zero… cold. Get up to get the fire out…I got the fire out finally after I got up on top. And finally, I twisted it and got the engine going just like that (claps). The engine hit and we hit! If the engine hadn’t come in another second it would have buried us in the ground, you see.
HAL: Other pilots weren’t so lucky…as Wright mechanic Tom Russell remembers.
ACT: (Tom Russell/strut thru body) Now I’ll tell you Johnson was killed at Denver, Now what happened down there… Johnson was only up about 500 ft when this wing started to pull off. And he even got out of his seat to pull it back. And of course it hit the ground and he was really massacred. And those spectators they rushed on the field to get souvenirs, and his mechanic told me he saw one man pull this strut that went right through Johnson’s body…pulled it right out and run away with it for a souvenir, now can you imagine people doing that.
MUSIC: (Heavenly Aeroplane)
You’ve got to be ready if you take this ride,
Quite your sinning and humble your pride.
HAL: By 1912 six of the Wright Brothers original nine pilots had been killed in accidents. And in May came an enormous blow…Wilbur died of typhoid fever at age 45.
MUSIC: (Heavenly Aeroplane)
For Jesus the Savior is coming again,
to take us up to glory in his heavenly aeroplane
HAL: Orville would live another 36 years but got out of the airplane business within three years of Wilbur’s death. He'd grown weary of fighting patent infringements and he just lost heart for the business. But, as the surviving father of flight, he remained intensely interested in aviation.
MUSIC: (Lucky Lindy)
Lucky Lindy…up in thesky..
HAL: Orville lived to see Charles Lindberg cross of the Atlantic. He lived to see the plane used as a weapon in two world wars. And he saw the day when the airliner left the ocean liner in its wake.
SOUND: (Transatlantic Clipper 1934)
Good Afternoon, we are speaking to you from the flight deck of this 41 ton Pan
American airways transatlantic …
HAL: Orville was a confirmed bachelor. He was devoted to his sister Katherine, and his nieces and nephews. He wanted to spend as little time as possible in the public eye. He rarely spoke in front of an audience, and would not allow his comments to be published, or recorded. This is the only-known recording of his voice.... here being greeted by inventor and industrialist, Charles Kettering.
ACT: Man: Hello Orv
Orv: Hey.
HAL: Like the reclusive Orville Wright, the plane that flew at Kitty Hawk also receded from public view. After its fourth and final flight in 1903, a gust of wind flipped the plane causing serious damage. The brothers packed it in a crate and brought it back to Dayton where it sat for years. Orville hoped that the world’s first successful airplane could be displayed for all to see in Washington, but at the time, the Smithsonian had a stake in promoting one of its former officials as the pioneer of flight. At one point Wright even considered burning the plane. Finally, in 1928 he decided to send the plane to London for exhibition. Orville Wright lived to see the dispute with the Smithsonian resolved. But he died in 1948 before the plane was returned to America.
SOUND: (HM-rummaging) (banging sound)
ACT: HM- I don’t know what they used that for…
Man- Looks like a caliper of some sort..
HM- Yeah that’s a caliper
HAL: Many of Orville’s tools and records were left to his nieces and nephews who before their deaths saw that these treasures found their way to museums and libraries.
But on this day, Horace and Susan Wright proudly showed a visitor their most cherished possession: a piece of the original muslin fabric from the Kitty Hawk plane that made a second famous journey…a journey that would have caused even the forward-thinking Wright Brothers to gasp.
ACT: (SW-03 cloth to moon) This is a piece of the cloth that went to the moon (laughs) in Neil Armstrongs boot!
HAL: As Neil Armstrong stepped on to the surface of the moon -- that fabric tucked in his boot -- his words could have as easily been spoken by the Wright Brothers as they flew into history at Kitty Hawk that day in 1903.
TAPE: (N Armstrong) That’s one small step for man…one giant leap for mankind.
HAL: For NPR News, I’m Hal Cannon
Host Back announce:
The Wright Brothers story was produced by Taki Telonidis (TAH-kee tell-oh-NEED-us), with archival material from Carillon (KAR-uh-lahn) Historical Park, The University of Dayton Roesch Library (pronounced RUSH) and the National Air and Space Museum. Technical assistance from Larry Holt (rhymes with bolt) from member station KUER.
Funding Credit:
Funding for our story on the Wright Brothers was provided by the R. Harold Burton Foundation.
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