#28 The Wright Brothers

What I learned from reading The Wright Brothers by David McCullough --- Unyielding determination (2:30) Jocko's concept of GOOD (4:00) The ability to focus on an idea for a long time is the antidote to short bursts of dopamine we get from checking social feeds all day. (6:30) The beginning of their side business (13:00) The importance of heroes (16:00) Rereading / revisiting old ideas (18:30) Books transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers (22:00) Wilbur Wright on risk: “The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.” (24:30) Jeff Bezos on stress (25:00) Discover things for yourself (28:00) "Success it most certainly was." (31:00) Profitability of flying machines (33:30) The distribution channel of flying machines (35:00) Wilbur Wright on the idea of flight: "In the enthusiasm being shown around me, I see not merely an outburst intended to glorify a person, but a tribute to an idea that has always impassioned mankind. I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air." (38:00) ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  Orville's first teacher in grade school would remember him at his desk tinkering with bits of wood. Asked what he was up to, he told her he was making a machine of a kind that he and his brother were going to fly someday.

• 0:15David Senra?

  I'm David Senra and you're listening to Founders, my podcast about the biographies of founders. I got the idea for this podcast from listening to another podcast years ago. Elon Musk was being interviewed and said something that stuck with me. He was asked, "When starting a company, who did you look to for advice?" Elon said he looked for feedback in a historical context. Books, basically. He continued, "I didn't read many general business books. I liked biographies and autobiographies. I think those are pretty helpful." So that made me think, if Elon found biographies useful, why not start reading them all the time? Then I decided to share what I learned from reading these books and create this podcast.

• 0:58David Senra?

  So with that said, I'm going to tell you some of the ideas I learned from reading The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. Before we begin, this episode is brought to you by Audible. Audible is offering listeners of this podcast a free audiobook just for trying Audible. You get 30 days of membership free, plus an audiobook to get you started, and after that you get one credit a month, good for any book regardless of price. Audible's ad-free premium audio that you can listen to offline. There's no interruptions and you own your amazing library. Keep the books even if you cancel. They also offer 30% off of exclusive member-only savings, easy exchanges. If you don't like a book, they'll swap it out for free at any

• 1:38David Senra?

  time. So, to claim your free audiobook, go to audibletrial.com/founders. That's audibletrial.com/founders. You can log in with your Amazon account. It only takes a few seconds. And if you're looking for an audiobook to listen to, I'd recommend listening to Shoe Dog by the founder of Nike, Phil Knight. It's a great story. I've also did a podcast on that a few episodes ago that you could listen to as well. So, once again, audibletrial.com/founders and get your free audiobook today. Alright, so let's get right into some ideas that I found valuable in this book.

• 2:15David Senra?

  Before I read this excerpt, this is the note I left myself was entrepreneurship is action. And let's go right to the book. It says, "To judge by the expressions on their faces, they had little if any sense of humor, which was hardly the case. Neither liked to have his picture taken. Truth to tell," one reporter wrote, "the camera is no friend either to the brothers. But what is most uncharacteristic about the pose is that they are sitting and doing nothing, something they almost never succumb to. The brothers had tremendous energy and working hard every day but Sunday was a way of life. And if not on the job, then at home on improvements.

• 2:58David Senra?

  Hard work was a conviction and they were at their best and happiest working together on their own projects at some waist-high bench. What the two had in common above all was unity of purpose and unyielding determination. They had set themselves on a mission." So that term right there, after reading the book, now this is my second time reading through it. Unyielding determination, I think that's the best two-word description of the Wright brothers.

• 3:27David Senra?

  This next part is advice from their father. And it's just a quick sentence, two sentences, that they kept the lessons, a lot of lessons from their father, they would repeat throughout their entire lives, even up until the point after their father passed away. So, the advice from their father was, "Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded. All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others." So I want to tell you this, moving ahead, I want to tell you this little excerpt about something that happened to Wilbur Wright when he was a young boy and how... He took a tragedy and turned it into something that changed his life.

• 4:08David Senra?

  And the note I left myself is there's this great video on YouTube from this guy named Jaco Willich, who also has a podcast called Jaco Podcast, and he has this concept of good. And I'll leave a link to the YouTube video in the show notes, and it's available at founderspodcast.com. But the basic, the theme of the two-minute video is, there's going to be a lot of things that happen throughout your life that are bad, that you have little to no control over. All you can really control over is the action that you take next. So, basically saying, look for the good in when you're going through a tumultuous or a bad situation, and then focus on that, reengage, and get back towards whatever you're working

• 4:51David Senra?

  towards. So it's almost like a form of Stoicism. And reading this excerpt, that idea popped into my head. So, let's go to when Wilbur's boy. "Wilbur was smashed in the face with a stick, knocking out most of his upper front teeth. What exactly happened is hard to determine, but to judge from the little that is known, there is much more to the story." According to an entry in Bishop Wright's diary, written years afterward, so Bishop Wright is their father, "The man who threw the bat that struck Wilbur became one of the most notorious murderers in the history of Ohio. Oliver Crook Howe, who in 1906 was executed for the murders of his mother, father, and brother, and was believed to have killed

• 5:36David Senra?

  as many as a dozen others besides..." "At the time of the hockey incident, Howe lived just two blocks from the Wrights. He was only 15, or three years younger than Wilbur, but as big as a man and was known as the neighborhood bully. As would be written in the Dayton Journal following his execution, Oliver never was without the wish to inflict pain, or at least discomfort, on others." After the accident, Wilbur remained a recluse, more or less homebound, for fully three years. Three years when he began reading as never before. So after this accident, he's bedridden, he's taking a long time to recover, this is

• 6:20David Senra?

  the early 1900s, and he starts reading books on flight. So we're gonna get there in one second. This next idea that stuck out to me was the importance of reading, something I talk about all the time on the podcast, something that's been a lifelong hobby of mine, and the entire reason I do the podcast is because I do believe that if people read more, their lives would be better. The ability to focus on an idea for a long period of time, I think is an anecdote to, or an antidote, sorry, to the short burst of dopamine that we get just checking our social feeds all day. It's the exact opposite, and I think the way any of us feel after scrolling through feeds

• 6:59David Senra?

  of mostly junk all day is unpleasant, compared to when you're really interested in a book and you spend many hours in a one-sided conversation with the author, and the feeling that you get when that book is done, it's a pleasurable, there is like a melancholy feeling that I've talked about before, how you finish a book, and it was so good you don't want it to end, but it is pleasurable to get, to learn new ideas, to expand your curiosity, and I think books, it's just an easy way to do that long form, where you can spend, you know, five, seven, 15, 20 hours, having a one-sided conversation with somebody that's thought deeply about the subject, so much that they spend years of their life writing the book. So, this is the importance of reading, and I'm not alone with that conviction.

• 7:44David Senra?

  The Wright family book collection, however, was neither modest nor commonplace. The reason they're saying they're not modest or commonplace, because they grew up very humbly, and we'll get into that in a little bit, but one thing, one area they didn't hold back on, they weren't cheap in, in that sense, was books. So it says, "It was neither modest nor commonplace. Bishop Wright," again, that's their dad, "a lifelong lover of books, heartily championed the limitless value of reading. Between formal education at school and informal education at home, it would seem he put more value on the latter. He was never overly concerned about his children's attendance at school.

• 8:25David Senra?

  If one or the other of them chose to miss a day or two for some project of interest he thought worthy, it was all right." And certainly, he ranked reading as worthy.

• 8:38David Senra?

  And a byproduct of reading is you have these ideas that they just stick in your mind and they never go away. And so, the note I left myself was "Something they read became a part of their way to get through life." And it's just two sentences. It says, "Every mind should be true to itself, should think, investigate, and conclude for itself." So in other words, you reject dogma. And you try to apply your own first principles thinking about what is actually happening. So, I don't know if I talk about this in the podcast, but in the book, there's many people that have written about human-powered, uh, excuse me, uh, machine-powered flight, for humans to figure out a way to fly. And they even had some calculations based on theories and the like.

• 9:22David Senra?

  And what would happen is, the Wright brothers would just learn through trial and error. Right? And so, their very first flyer, there's an example in the book where their very first flyer winds up doing spectacularly well. I think the first flight, you know, is like maybe a minute long or something like that. And they have a series of experiments, they're very happy, so they go back home and they build another, the second flyer. But on the second flyer, instead of using the same ratios that they discovered through trial and error, they started using ratios written about, uh, by people that had never flown, but had, uh, thought they knew the math, or the way, like the answer behind it, right? And what happens is, they take off and immediately crash.

• 10:07David Senra?

  And this whole sentence where it says, "Every mind should be true to itself, should think, investigate, and conclude to itself", that theme comes up over and over and over again in the book. From inventing the flyer, to making it just a glider, then to making it machine-powered, then to building the company. And, uh, operating in an arena, again, these were inventors and tinkers. And all of a sudden, they had the world's most valuable product. And they had to navigate and had to become, uh...

• 10:38David Senra?

  High-level businessmen. Now, they did have a small business, and I'm going to talk about that, the importance of having like a side project that sustained all these experiments. But they would never operate at such a scale before. And they were able to navigate that successfully because they believed in their own thought processes and their way that they could basically think things through and then apply those thoughts into action and navigate these environments and experiences that they actually had before. So, something I always like to talk about when I'm reading these biographies, because everybody knows who the Wright Brothers are, just like everybody knows who Walt Disney is, Jeff Bezos, all these other people. But what's fascinating to me is, in reading these biographies, you see them way before

• 11:23David Senra?

  they became who we know them as. So I like to talk about the first job they have. And see how industrious they were. So this is Orville's first job, and then it winds up being Wilbur's first job, too. "While still in high school, Orville started his own print shop in the carriage shed behind the house. Interested in printing for some while, Orville had worked for two summers as an apprentice at a local print shop. He designed and built his own press using a discarded tombstone, a buggy spring, and scrap metal." With the paper, so they started a newspaper. "With the paper showing some profit, Orville moved the business to a rented space on West

• 12:04David Senra?

  Third Street where the city's electric trolley ran, and Wilbur, now 22, was prominently listed as editor." The next section is "You Need Less Than You Think You Do." And this talks about the, you know, pretty humble beginnings that the Wright Brothers, their lives are pretty simple. "The brothers were well into their twenties before there was running water or plumbing in the house. Weekly baths were accomplished sitting in a tub of hot water on the kitchen floor with the curtains drawn. An open well and wooden pump outhouse and carriage shed were out back. There was no electricity."

• 12:47David Senra?

  So I want to tell you a little bit about the beginning of their side business. So I don't know how many people know this, but the only reason they were ever able to be successful in creating the first non-human powered flight machine was they had, they saw a trend with bicycles and they decided to open their own bicycle shop. So let me just tell you a little about this from the book. Now, the first paragraph is interesting to me because I feel, I've talked about on the podcast that, that history never repeats, human nature does. And this whole idea that, and it's strange to me.

• 13:30David Senra?

  So the note I just left on myself, myself, I had a note left on myself. The note I left on myself here was, "Humans are in a state of constant change. You have fear, fear change in our nature." And there's all kinds of examples from history on this. So this is, the first paragraph is, is the, what in hindsight looks like the hilarious initial reaction to the new technology that is bicycles in the early 1900s. "Voices were raised in protest. Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now, children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, 15 minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with

• 14:10David Senra?

  books, and more seriously, that suburban and country tours on bicycles were not infrequently accompanied by seductions." So I took that to read that young people were using bikes to get away from their parents so they could, I guess, have sex. Not infrequently accompanied by seduction, I guess that what they're saying, right? So, "In response to this huge trend, Wilbur and Orville opened their own small bicycle business, The Right Cycle Exchange, selling and repairing bicycles." They eventually changed the name to The Right Cycle Company. And it says, "Sales at The Right Cycle Company picked up again to the point where they were selling about 150 bicycles a year, and they stayed with it."

• 14:54David Senra?

  Then the second part that I found so interesting was they got tired of selling other people's products and decided to sell their own. There, on the second floor, the brothers began making their own model bicycles available to order. And that was their, so they sold a bunch of other accessories and stuff like that, but the vast majority of their income, they sustained on the fact they invented their own model of bicycles and started selling them directly. And then, as the business grew, they hired a person to help run them, so when they were off, remember, they were living in Dayton, Ohio at the time. They spent months in Kitty Hawk going back and forth over several years, and the months that they're gone away from Ohio, the bike shop is still running because they have somebody in charge, and they're using the profits from the bike shop to actually fund their experiments.

• 15:40David Senra?

  Okay, so this is, um, this next note I left myself was the importance of heroes, and I think everybody has people that inspire them. People that obviously come before and have contributed to the field that they want to spend their time doing. Obviously, most of the books that I cover here are people that have built companies that you can learn from, some of which, you know, I would say are almost idolized. If you look like, somebody like Elon Musk is, I think, the most admired entrepreneur alive right now. Jeff Bezos is up there, and then going back in history, you realize that, I've talked about this whole idea where books are the original hyperlinks. You realize that Jeff Bezos looked backwards, Elon Musk looks backwards, so Jeff Bezos looked backwards to Sam Walton,

• 16:24David Senra?

  and Sam Walton looked backward to J.C. Penney, and all this other, it's all basically connected. So I think it's really important to have people, and I don't mean idolize, like, I don't think you should idolize humans, because they're all just humans. Reading these biographies, you realize they have faults just like you are, right? But I do think having people you look up to is extremely important, and it's motivating, at least for me, and I'm sure it's probably for you as well. So this is the importance of heroes. This is the person that, um, that really stuck in their, again, they're reading about flight. This is where they're getting the idea, and they've had a lifelong passion for this. So this guy named Otto Lilenthal, let me just jump into this. Wilbur had begun reading about the German glider enthusiast Otto Lilenthal,

• 17:07David Senra?

  who had recently been killed in an accident. Much of what he read, he read aloud to Orville. "Over the years, Lilenthal had designed and built more than a dozen different gliders. He called them sailing machines. As a pilot, he would hang by his arms below the wings. Lilenthal would position himself at a steep slope, the wings held above his head. He stood like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol. Then he would run down the slope and into the wind. Hanging on as the wind lifted him from the ground, he would swing his body and legs this way or that way as a means of balancing and steering. And then glide as far as possible and try to land on his feet.

• 17:48David Senra?

  'It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird,' Lilenthal had written. 'Is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight?' So I was at a science center with my daughter a few months ago, and I'd already read this book last year. And this is the first time I was introduced to Otto Lilenthal, and part of the section of the science center was dedicated to flight. And sure enough, right at the beginning was videos and pictures, or I guess pictures because there was no video back then, pictures of Otto Lilenthal and some of his machines.

• 18:25David Senra?

  So the next thing I want to talk to you about is rereading and revisiting old ideas. So I was just telling you that I reread books, I have conversations with my friends all the time about how like specific podcasts I listen to over and over again. While the reason I add like time markers in the podcasts I do is because you may listen to this one time and there might be an idea that sticks out to you. Well, I want to make it easy if you go back to this podcast to find it. Some of my podcasts are short, but some of them are long. So maybe you only need like a five-minute idea or two-minute idea, you don't want to have to listen to the whole podcast to get that. So I do think there's a huge value in rereading and revisiting old ideas because you can

• 19:06David Senra?

  read or learn something once and then a few years pass and you wind up rereading it again and you're a different person when you're rereading it. And those ideas may have been compounded and added on to, and they might have additional value to you, or maybe you have a different interpretation.

• 19:21David Senra?

  So, rereading, revisiting old ideas. Says, "The news of Lilenthal's death," Wilbur later wrote, "aroused in him as nothing had an interest that had remained passive from childhood. His reading on the flight of birds became intense. On the shelves of the family library was an English translation of a famous illustrated volume, Animal Mechan- Mechan- Mechan- Animal Mechanism, written by a French physician, I have no idea how to pronounce it, we're gonna call him Marley, uh, more than thirty years before. Birds were also an interest of Bishop Wright, hence the book's presence in the house, and Wilbur had already read it. Now he read it anew.

• 20:02David Senra?

  Wilbur was drawn upon, uh, he was drawn upon a quote from Pedegras, this is another author, "For years, like the inspiring lectures of a great professor, the book had opened his eyes and started him thinking in ways he'd never had." Uh, next thing is, "You are not too late, sometimes you must ignore the odds." Along with Lilenthal, Chanute, and Langley, these are all guys that came before Wright, that were studying and writing about different ideas on how humans could learn how to fly. Numbers of others, among the most, uh, among them, the most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the nineteenth century, had been working on the problem of controlled flight, including Sir George Kayleigh, Sir Hiram Maxim, Maxim was the inventor of the

• 20:47David Senra?

  machine gun, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison. None had succeeded. Hiram Maxim had reportedly spent a hundred thousand dollars of his own money on a giant steam-powered pilotless flying machine, only to see it crash in an attempting to take off. And now, here's the surprising part, "In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur or Wright, any more than the fact that they had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money on their own, are the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Otto Lilenthal, they could be killed."

• 21:31David Senra?

  That was one of the most shocking things I read because it just puts it into perspective. Imagine there's a problem that everybody in modern time, the most successful scientists, entrepreneurs, people that have almost virtually unlimited resources, governments, etc., are working on a problem, they can't solve it. And you have two guys relatively, you know, of modest means, no formal education, no technical training, no anything, just the desire to solve this problem wind up solving the problem in the sense where Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and all these other people had failed. It's actually really inspiring to me. Uh, let's see. This is the note I left for myself.

• 22:14David Senra?

  "Books transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers." So they wrote, Wilbur writes to the Smithsonian saying, "Hey, I'm interested in controlled flight, can you send me any information you have?" And they sent him a bunch of books and data that had been collected. And so, "Among the material that Smithsonian provided him was an English translation of a book titled..." Okay, so the translation, I don't know how to say it in France, but the translation is "Empire of the Air." It was published in Paris in 1881. "It had been written by a French farmer, poet, and student of flight, Louis Pierre Moliard. Nothing Wilbur had yet read so affected him.

• 22:56David Senra?

  He would long consider it one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature ever published. For Wilbur, flight had become a cause, and Moliard, one of the great missionaries of the cause, like a prophet crying in the wilderness, extorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight. At the start of his empire of air, Moliard gave fair warning that one could be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of flight..." Excuse me, let me read that again. "Moliard gave fair warning that one could be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of flight could be solved by man." This is a quote from Moliard.

• 23:37David Senra?

  "When once this idea had invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively. For Wilbur and Orville, the dream had taken hold. The works of Lilienthal and Moliard, the brothers attest, had infected us with their own unquestionable enthusiasm and transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers."

• 23:59David Senra?

  Alright, so the first prototype I thought was really interesting. "In the final weeks of August, the brothers built a full-size glider with two wings that they intended to reassemble and fly a Kitty Hawk. First as a kite, then if all went well, fly themselves. Its wingspan was 18 feet. The total cost of all necessary pieces and parts, ribs of ash, wires, and cloth to cover the wings, was not more than $15." And they actually get that thing to fly with a person. It's human powered at that point, this is before they build motors. I thought Wilbur Wright has a great quote on risk that I think is worth sharing with you.

• 24:40David Senra?

  "The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks." Okay, so this next section, when I was reading this, what immediately popped into my mind was this video I saw on YouTube, and it's a young Jeff Bezos talking about stress. And so I'll explain that to you in one second, let me read this part from the book. "Far from home, on their own in a way they had never been, the brothers seemed to sense, as they never had, the adventure of life. Orville would later say that even with all the adversities they had to face, it was the happiest time they'd ever known."

• 25:25David Senra?

  And how that relates to Jeff Bezos' opinion on stress, he was saying that stress comes from not taking action over something that you have some control over, and stress comes from ignoring things you shouldn't be ignoring. So Jeff uses the following metaphor to explain his point. "Stress doesn't come from hard work. You can be working incredibly hard and loving it. Likewise, you can be out of work and be incredibly stressed over that." So if you want to watch that video, it's like two minutes, I definitely think it's worth your time. I'll leave the link to the YouTube video in the show notes on your podcast player and at founderspodcast.com.

• 26:05David Senra?

  So this next section is about hard work and its results. Hard workers were greatly admired, and the rights were two of the workingest boys they had ever seen. And when they worked, they worked. They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing. The day was clear, the wind just as wished. It was October 19th, and after, this is, gives you an idea of how hard they've been working. It was October 19th, and after nearly four years of concentrated study and effort by the brothers, it proved a day of days. Wilbur made one man flight after another. How many is unknown, no count was kept.

• 26:44David Senra?

  He did record, however, flights of 300 to 400 feet in length, and speeds on landing of nearly 30 miles an hour. So before they had any kind of measurable success, they studied and worked for four years on this idea. I love this idea of how they think you have, they recommend discovering things for yourself. It was not just that this machine, that their machine had performed so poorly, or that so much still remained to be solved, but that so many of the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations and tables prepared by the likes of Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute, data the brothers had taken as gospel, so if you remember, previously in the podcast,

• 27:28David Senra?

  I was talking about how they had to re-figure out their own ratios, this is what I was referencing. Data that the brothers had taken as gospel had proved to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly, those esteemed authorities had been guessing, groping in the dark. The accepted tables were, in a word, worthless. "We had to go ahead and discovering, and discover everything ourselves," said Orville Wright.

• 27:56David Senra?

  Their preference, even though they read a lot, they wanted to apply what they were learning and they felt the only way you could really learn was by doing. So this is a quote on Wilbur about that. "He said that men had to learn to manage in order to fly, and there were only two ways. One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met. The other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile," meaning the flying machine, "and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good writers. If one were looking for perfect safety," he said, "one would do well to sit on the

• 28:40David Senra?

  fence and watch the birds. But if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial." So on several podcasts, I've introduced this section that is, I think, present in every single biography I've read so far, and it's, "Critics Don't Know Shit." Obviously, it's me being tongue in cheeks, there's some criticisms that are accurate, but what I'm saying is that even the people that are faced immeasurable odds or wind up, such as the Wright Brothers, inventing one of the most important machines or products

• 29:20David Senra?

  or tools the world's ever seen, all of them have to overcome people telling them that they don't know what they're doing and they're gonna fail. So this is the Wright Brothers' version of that. Meanwhile, an article in the September issue of the popular Macleod Magazine, written by Simon Newcomb, a distinguished astronomer and professor at John Hopkins University, dismissed the dream of flight as no more than a myth. "And were such a machine devised," he asked, "what useful purpose could it possibly serve? The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker and will carry nothing heavier than an insect."

• 30:02David Senra?

  So here's this guy, he's a distinguished professor and astronomer, has a residency at John Hopkins University, which was, you know, looked upon as like a great institution then, and I guess still now, and he's...

• 30:18David Senra?

  He's saying, "Why even waste your time trying to fly?" Like, what, he says, "What useful purpose could it possibly serve?" And even if you were able to do it, it would never carry anything heavier than an insect.

• 30:33David Senra?

  I think there's just another, to me, that it just, you gotta think for yourself. And if you think something is valuable and you think you can do it, then do it. Because even people that other people think are smart, they may, they just don't have the same experiences. This is one of the, I just, great writing when they actually find success and they actually fly for the first time. "Success in most certainly was, and more. What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours' time, was one of the turning points in history. The beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those presence could have possibly imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly.

• 31:17David Senra?

  And if the world didn't know it yet, they did. Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power, into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started. Being the kind of men they were, neither ever said the stunning contrast between their success and Samuel Langley's full-scale failure just days before." So, let me interject there, Samuel Langley, he was, he solicited donations of tens of thousands of dollars. And, again, he was one of the most revered scientists and thinkers about flight.

• 32:00David Senra?

  And he was gonna be super successful and he had all this media attention on him. And he just crashed over and over and over, and he never was able to actually solve the price, solve, create a piloted machine that took off under its own power. So, that's who Samuel Langley is in the story. So, it says, "Samuel Langley's full-scale failure just days before made what they had done in their own all the more remarkable." Not incidentally, this is the part I found most interesting. "The Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money. Whereas the brothers' total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel to and from Kitty Hawk, came to a little less than $1,000."

• 32:46David Senra?

  A sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.

• 32:53David Senra?

  That just puts a smile on my face. The idea that somebody with all the resources in the world was outmaneuvered and failed in a spot where two very determined

• 33:06David Senra?

  brothers were able to succeed with one seventieth of the resources. Uh, this next note is onward. I think this is just a good, uh, like a good aphorism, good quote for life. They were always thinking of the next thing to do. They didn't waste much time worrying about the past. Um, here's some interesting parts, the probability of flying machines. So like every podcast, I'm, I'm just skipping ahead. This is not meant to be a summary, so I'm just pulling out things that were interesting to me. So at this point, uh, this is later in the book. They have successfully now created a bunch of different flying machines. They're flying longer and higher than they ever have, and they're starting the business.

• 33:49David Senra?

  So, uh, they wind up doing a, a deal with, uh, these wealthy people in France and they're going to sell them a plane for two, uh, flying machine for $200,000. So this is the profitability of flying machines. Meantime, a sum of $5,000 was to be deposited in a New York bank in escrow. $200,000 was an exceedingly large sum and the $5,000 the brothers were, were to receive. However, the further negotiations went. So basically they keep that five grand, no matter what happens, would more than cover all the expenses they had since first going to Kitty Hawk.

• 34:25David Senra?

  They were extremely frugal. Focus. This is the next note I have for myself is focus. Neither the impatience of waiting crowds, nor the sneers of rivals, nor the pressure of financial conditions, not always easy, could induce him to hurry. This is Wilbur Wright talking about, could induce him to hurry over any difficulty before he had done everything in his power to understand and overcome it.

• 34:50David Senra?

  What I found really interesting is the distribution channel of flying machines. So you make this huge invention, how are you going to sell this thing, right? So what they figured out was, when you do something new, this part kind of reminds me of what Elon did with SpaceX and Tesla recently, where, you know, you got, I'm sure I'm not alone, there's probably millions of people that watch these SpaceX flights, the media covers it all the time, because, you know, we've never seen a private company being, been able to, to take off, have a rocket take off and land, and so basically doing something brand new is going to get you media attention, right? And then he capitalizes on that by sending like his Tesla Roadster into space, and that gets him, what, hundreds of millions of dollars of free advertising, who knows what the actual dollar amount is?

• 35:33David Senra?

  So they're built, they built something that no one's ever seen, it's powered controlled flight. And so they do these huge demonstrations all over the world, where hundreds of thousands of people show up to watch, so the media covers it because they think it's crazy, and then people are attracted because the media covers it, and it becomes like a show. And then what happens is now there's way more people that are aware that these flying machines exist, and the orders just roll in. So here's a little part of that. "In the days that follow, Orville provided," they're, they're both doing demonstrations, Orville's in the United States, and Wilbur's flying in, in Europe at the time. "In the days that followed, Orville provided one sensational performance after another, breaking one world record after another.

• 36:18David Senra?

  As never before, the two, quote-unquote, bicycle mechanics," as they were referenced, some people referred to them as, "and their flying machines were causing simultaneous sensations on both sides of the Atlantic. They had become a transcontinental two-ring circus. Ten thousand people would be in the crowd for these demonstrations. Over 200,000 people came to watch Wilbur fly in six months in France alone, and a short time later, 200,000 people showed up to one demonstration in Berlin."

• 36:54David Senra?

  And this is Wilbur Wright on making the case for micromanaging. When he was doing these flights in Europe, he would ship the flyer in boxes and then have to reassemble and do everything himself. He wouldn't even let, like he was at a Le Mans and this other airfield in France too, where they had mechanics and people standing by. He wouldn't even let them put oil in it. And then after, while he's in Europe, his brother is somewhere in the Washington DC area and he winds up almost dying. And his passenger actually died. They nose died from 150 feet. And so, Wilbur Wright is talking about how he was criticized all for, you know, micromanaging. They called him like

• 37:38David Senra?

  "old oil can" because he wouldn't even let you touch his oil can. And so, here's his, like, basically what he felt, why he felt he was right.

• 37:52David Senra?

  "People think I'm foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important work on the machine. They say I crawl under the machine when men could do those things well enough. I do it partly because it gives me opportunity to see if anything in the neighborhood is out of order." So what happened to his brother was, the, one of the propellers fell off. And Wilbur's like, "Well, if I was there, that wouldn't have happened because we would have checked and he'd have been methodical over and over again of checking the machine." He didn't care if there's 20,000 people outside waiting. If something was wrong, he just wouldn't fly. And this is Wilbur Wright on the idea of flight. "In the enthusiasm being shown around me, I see not merely an outburst intended to glorify

• 38:31David Senra?

  a person, but a tribute to an idea that has always impassioned mankind. I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air." I just included that because I thought it was beautiful language. And here's where, I'm going to close on two. Two paragraphs that just brought a smile to my face and I thought were

• 39:17David Senra?

  heartwarming or inspiring for lack of a better word. And, uh, well, let's just jump into it. "Of the immediate family only Bishop Wright had yet to fly," remember Bishop Wright's their father. "Nor had anyone of his age ever flown anywhere on earth. He had been with the brothers from the start, helping in every way he could. Never losing faith in them are their aspirations. Now at eighty-two, with the crowd cheering, he walked out to the starting point, where Orville, without hesitation, asked him to climb aboard. They took off soaring over Huffman Prairie at about three hundred and fifty feet for a good six minutes, during which Bishop's only words were, 'Higher, Orville, higher.'"

• 40:02David Senra?

  And I just think, uh, having a child, just imagine how proud you'd be of what your child was able to accomplish. And then being eighty-two, being in a plane for the first time, and just saying, "Higher, over, higher," I don't know, that just, that makes me smile. Okay, and then this, this last sentence was amazing. Um, "On July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in western Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the Mussoline from a wing of their nineteen oh-three flyer."

• 40:39David Senra?

  And that's where I'm gonna leave it. Thank you for listening this far. If you want the full story, buy the book. I left a link in the show notes that are available on your podcast player and at founderspodcast.com for not only this book, but every single other book that I've featured on the podcast so far. And if you want to support the show, if you like the work that I'm doing here, please, uh, I need some help from you. Head over to Apple Podcasts, even if you don't, e- even if you don't use Apple Podcasts as your primary, uh, listening device, or listening app, rather. Open up Apple Podcasts, put in Founders, leave a 5-star rating. It takes 10 seconds and it's just a... It's huge. If you want... It's just the best thing you could possibly do for the show.

• 41:19David Senra?

  I appreciate all of you that have already done this and I read your reviews and I appreciate the kind words. It's very nice. And if you want to support the show and get a free audiobook in the process, go to audibletrial.com/founders and claim your free audiobook. Thanks for the support. Thank you for your time. I appreciate both and I'll talk to you soon.