The American Experiment by David M. Rubenstein

Author:David M. Rubenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

DAVID McCULLOUGH on the Wright Brothers

Historian; author of The Wright Brothers and many other books

“Then I began to understand what kind of human beings they were and what they were up against when they set out to achieve this immensely exciting mission, which no one in history had ever been able to do. How did they do it? Why was it they who accomplished this?”

Many of the world’s most singular and transformative achievements have been the work of the most unlikely of individuals. That was certainly the case with manned flight.

For millennia, humans dreamed of following birds and flying from destination to destination, saving time and energy. And the greatest human minds, like Leonardo da Vinci, developed possible ways to achieve that feat.

But no human was actually able to do this until two unknown brothers, operating out of a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, showed the world how planes that they had designed and built could indeed take humans off the ground—and, importantly, also bring them safely back.

That Wilbur and Orville Wright, with no formal engineering or aeronautical training and no college degrees, did this, with their own limited funds, after years of experimenting on the isolated beaches of windswept Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, is truly remarkable.

But as remarkable as that accomplishment was, it seems just as remarkable that the Wright brothers were unable to convince the U.S. government to support their efforts or, later, even to affirm their success. Indeed, it was the French government that lured the Wright brothers to Paris to show their feat, and it was there that they demonstrated their invention to large French crowds, who were utterly amazed. Acceptance in the U.S. came a bit later, a bit to the brothers’ chagrin.

Without doubt, one of America’s most distinct contributions to human progress during the twentieth century was the invention of the airplane. And what better person to chronicle this contribution than America’s most beloved historian, David McCullough?

Over the past five decades, David has written best-seller after best-seller about such historic American creations as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal and such American leaders as Teddy Roosevelt, John Adams, and Harry Truman. David has now written more than a dozen books, all of which are still in print.

For the quality of these and other books about America, David McCullough has won every award an American citizen can win: two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, the National Humanities Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and more than fifty honorary degrees.

I have had the privilege of interviewing David on many occasions, and he is always as enthusiastic and voluble in describing his subject as someone who is speaking about the subject for the first time. That was true as well in this interview about the Wright brothers, which took place as part of the Congressional Dialogues series at the Library of Congress on June 24, 2015. The secret to the brothers’ success, in David’s view, was that they never gave up. They failed repeatedly but kept tinkering and experimenting and reinventing.

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