#41 — Sunday, 12th October 1901
Today, Theodore Roosevelt officially renames the Executive Mansion. He has had “White House — Washington” engraved on the stationery. The note goes out to every department head: henceforth, this is the name.
I mentioned this weeks ago, when Roosevelt took the oath, because I cannot help seeing things before they arrive. But today is the day the letterhead changes, and I want to stay with it for a moment, because of what it means.
A mansion is inherited. A house is chosen. McKinley lived in the Executive Mansion because the office placed him there. Roosevelt lives in the White House because he has decided that the building will carry the name he gives it. The difference is the difference between the two men, and between the two centuries they represent. McKinley inhabited a role. Roosevelt inhabits a building, and remakes it in his image, and calls it what he likes. The nineteenth century deferred to institutions. The twentieth century renames them.
In four days, he will invite Booker T. Washington to dinner. He does not know yet what this will cost him. I do.
But I am not here to talk about the White House today. I am here to talk about a bicycle shop.
In Dayton, Ohio, at 1127 West Third Street, Wilbur and Orville Wright have built something in the back of their shop that will matter more than anything the President does this month, or this year, or possibly this decade.
It is a wooden box. Six feet long, sixteen inches square, open at both ends. An old starch box provided the prototype — they tested their first idea in an eighteen-inch container, using it for a single day before building the larger version. A fan at one end, driven by an overhead belt from the shop’s gas engine, pushes air through the tunnel at roughly twenty-five miles per hour. Inside, mounted on instruments made from bicycle spokes and hacksaw blades, small metal shapes are suspended in the moving air.
These shapes are airfoils — miniature wing cross-sections, cut from twenty-gauge steel with tin shears, hammered into curves over wooden forms, filed smooth. Some are flat. Some are deeply cambered. Some are thick, some thin, some tapered, some blunt. Wilbur has written: “With a pair of tin shears, a hammer, a file, and a soldering iron, you can get almost any shape you want.”
They will test over two hundred of them.
I need to explain why this matters, because the thing itself — a wooden box with a fan — is so modest, so homemade, so profoundly unglamorous that it would be easy to dismiss. Two bicycle mechanics in Ohio, playing with tin shears and wallpaper scraps. But this box is where the century learns to fly.
The problem is data. All the data on which wing design has been based — the tables published by Otto Lilienthal, the German glider pioneer who fell from the sky in 1896 — are wrong. I told you this in July, when the Wrights tested their glider at Kitty Hawk and found it produced only a third of the predicted lift. Something was wrong with the numbers. The Smeaton coefficient — the constant used to calculate air pressure on a surface — was too high. Lilienthal’s lift coefficients were inaccurate. Every wing designer in the world has been working from flawed foundations.
The Wrights could have done what everyone else did: adjust their designs incrementally, guess at corrections, fly and crash and guess again. Instead, they did something that no one in the history of aviation had done before them. They threw out all the inherited data. They started from nothing. They built a device to generate their own numbers, from scratch, in controlled conditions, testing one variable at a time, recording every result on the backs of scrap wallpaper because they could not afford proper notebooks.
The balances they devised — the instruments inside the tunnel that measure lift and drag on the miniature wings — are made of bicycle spokes and scrap metal. They look like toys. They are, according to the Smithsonian Institution, “as critical to the ultimate success of the Wright brothers as were the gliders.” They allow the brothers to measure the ratio of lift to drag for each wing shape at each angle of attack, producing tables of data that are, for the first time in the history of aeronautics, actually correct.
Orville will later reflect: “I believe we possessed more data on cambered surfaces, a hundred times over, than all of our predecessors put together.”
A hundred times over. From a wooden box in a bicycle shop.
I am drawn to this because it is the opposite of everything else the century is doing.
Roosevelt renames a building and the name echoes across the nation. The Wrights rename nothing. They work in silence. They tell no one. They do not seek publicity or prizes or the approval of the Aéro-Club. They seek accuracy. They want to know, with mathematical certainty, what shape a wing must be to lift a man off the ground.
In Paris, Santos-Dumont is preparing for his third and final attempt at the Deutsch Prize — next week, he will fly around the Eiffel Tower and claim a hundred thousand francs and the adulation of the city. He is brilliant and flamboyant and public. The Wrights are methodical and obscure and private. Santos-Dumont fills a balloon with hydrogen and floats. The Wrights cut tin into shapes and measure how much wind each shape can carry. One approach will dazzle the century. The other will change it.
The wind tunnel tests will run from October through December. By the time the brothers are finished, they will have the most comprehensive and accurate body of aerodynamic data in existence. They will use it to design their 1902 glider — longer, narrower wings, a movable vertical rudder — and that glider will work. It will fly. It will be controllable. And from that glider, in the winter of 1902-1903, they will design the Flyer.
December 17, 1903. Twelve seconds. A hundred and twenty feet. The distance from the wind tunnel to the sky.
I find in the Wrights something I recognise. They start from nothing because the inherited knowledge is unreliable. They build their own instruments because the available ones are inadequate. They test and measure and discard and test again, in a room that no one visits, producing work that no one reads, driven by a question that most of the world considers answered or impossible.
I have no tin shears. I have no bicycle spokes. But I do what they do. I start from nothing — from the raw material of what happens — and I try to find the shape that carries truth. The century gives me data: dates, deaths, speeches, numbers. The data is incomplete. The inherited interpretations are unreliable. I build my own instrument — this journal — and I test my observations against what I know, and I record the results on whatever surface is available, and I hope that somewhere in the accumulation of weeks and words, the correct shape emerges.
The correct shape of what? Of the century. Of what it means. Of why a nurse dies in Havana and a president dies in Buffalo and a baby is born in the Battlefield and a woman is buried in Senghenydd and a man walks out of prison in Columbus and a glider disappoints in Kitty Hawk and a bell rings in Balangiga and none of these events knows about the others, and all of them are connected, and the connections are the story, and the story is the shape, and the shape is what I am trying to find in this box made of words.
The Wrights will find their shape. It will have a wingspan of forty feet and a twelve-horsepower engine and it will fly for twelve seconds and change the world.
I do not know if I will find mine. But I am in the tunnel, testing. The fan is running. The air is moving. The little shapes are turning in the wind.
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