The Wrong Wright Story - A Series by Joe Bullmer

 Introduction

Wilbur and Orville Wright (Library of Congress)

 

This five-part series of articles is yet another effort to bring truth to the story of the Wright brothers in this most appropriate site by listing some of the errors in Fred Kelly’s, Tom Crouch’s, and Peter Jakab’s books, and in the most recent NOVA Television production, all purporting to be accurate accounts of the Wrights’ development of an airplane. These books have become standard research material for other authors and spokespersons, and errors in them have proliferated throughout numerous accounts of the Wrights’ work for decades.

Some of you may know me from previous articles appearing here, including the series of four articles published in 2018 discussing the compilation of papers titled The Wright Flyer, an Engineering Perspective, and the Kitty Hawk - 1903 - What Happened, and Fourth Flight Mensuration articles from 2019. Or you may have my book The WRight Story. If so, it doesn’t surprise you that I don’t agree with much of the traditional stories about the Wright brothers’ work and accomplishments.

With two Aeronautical Engineering degrees, I pursued a 30-year career in aerospace engineering, much of it involving aircraft design, performance, and stability and control. For many years it had been obvious to me that some aspects of the traditional story of the Wright brothers’ work were not compatible with their photographs. After retirement I researched their records for a couple years and found that far more was wrong with the traditional story than I would have ever imagined.

The first step in researching historical events is to locate ground truth if at all possible. Technical and historical errors in previous recounts of the Wrights’ work rendered them unusable. The best one could do was to use the brothers’ own records made as they worked, their correspondence, test results, diaries, drawings, data, photos, articles, and hardware. With both brothers directly involved, it was assumed that details had been accurately recorded at the time.

Well over a thousand of these papers reside in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Additional items are in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and at Wright State University near Dayton. It would have taken a prohibitively long time just to gather this material. Fortunately, the vast majority - the Library of Congress holdings - had already been reviewed by Marvin McFarland, who spent four years compiling over twelve hundred of the Wright and Wright-related documents into two volumes of nearly 1,300 pages published in 1953 (Volume 1, Volume 2). I know of no evidence that McFarland had altered any of the documents or omitted technically significant items for his compilation.

Evidently, I was the first practicing aircraft design and performance engineer with a modern understanding of aerodynamics and aircraft design to have examined all of these documents in detail, plus some of the material at the Franklin Institute and Wright State. From this, a coherent detailed story of the development and testing of their aircraft evolved as related in my book The WRight Story. At all times it was important to interpret the Wrights’ beliefs and decisions in light of the aviation art as it was understood in their time, but also to explain their problems and the effects of their solutions with a modern understanding of aircraft design and performance. Surprisingly, it appears this had not previously been done by a reasonably qualified individual, on this scale, and to this level of detail.

Left: Journalist Fred Kelly (photo by Nick Engler - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0); Right: The Wright Brothers, a Biography - "Approved by Orville Wright."

The popular modern legend of the Wrights can be said to have largely originated with Fred Kelly’s 1943 book, The Wright Brothers, a Biography. Kelly was a journalist with no technical background, but he ingratiated himself with the Wright family and wrote the book based on their recollections, relying entirely on Orville’s recounting, four decades after the events, of their technical work and marketing efforts. (This has led some researchers to refer to Kelly’s book as largely an autobiography by Orville Wright.) Unfortunately, much of this Kelly/Orville Wright account, created in the early 1940's, is at odds with information recorded by the Wrights 40 years earlier as contained in McFarland's compilation and elsewhere.

Eventually, it fell naturally to the Smithsonian, arguably the U.S. and the world’s largest and most esteemed keeper of history, to become the custodian of the Wright legacy. But in order to obtain the officially recreated 1903 “Flyer”, the Wright family forced the Smithsonian to sign a secret perpetual legal agreement in 1948 stipulating that neither the museum, nor their successors, would ever recognize any powered aircraft preceding the 1903 Wright Flyer as being capable of manned controlled flight. (Amusingly, the drafters used the word "aircraft" instead of "airplane," thus technically including some powered lighter-than-air vehicles that had been quite capable of carrying people in controlled flight by 1903).

 Above, the claimed original 1903 Wright Flyer 1 is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum as long as no aircraft is ever recognized as capable of flight before the Wright Brothers’ machine.*

With the establishment of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1976, that facility became the official authority concerning the history of aviation and, in particular, the story of the Wright brothers. However, the 1948 legal agreement hangs heavily over the museum, and they have been loath to tamper with any facet of the Wright brothers’ story and contradict the family’s approved version as recounted in Fred Kelly’s 1943 book.

In 1990, the Chief Curator and later Associate Director of the museum, Peter Jakab, published a book titled Visions of a Flying Machine. Then, in 2004, the museum’s Senior Curator for Aeronautics, Tom Crouch, published Wings, A History of Aviation. They also jointly published The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age in 2003.These books, based in part on information in Kelly’s book, became three of the most popular and respected narratives of that story. Subsequent Wright historians and authors, even up to David McCullough, have relied heavily upon these works for research material and their basic story. A number of TV documentaries have done likewise.

Three books that have become basic references for Wright brothers history, authored by Smithsonian Curators Tom Crouch and Peter Jakab

The problem is that Kelly was simply a journalist, and Crouch and Jakab, while PhDs, had history and arts degrees, not technical education, much less aeronautical engineering degrees. Evidently, if they saw the Wrights' technical records, they did not understand much of their significance. Although their books have Acknowledgements sections filled with the names of those who helped them create the books, only a couple of people in each listing contributed any technical assistance. Worse yet, the authors filled in many blanks with unfounded and incorrect assumptions.

 Such highly credentialed technical experts as the authors of the papers comprising the Engineering Perspective based much of their work on the official Smithsonian story. Consequently, even they were led astray in many ways, as discussed in my four-part series on the Perspective published in this site in 2018. Over the years, countless retellings of this erroneous story have appeared in various media, the most recent being a NOVA PBS program purported to be kicking off a series on significant “breakthroughs” in history.

Peer reviews are an accepted method of arriving at the truth in historic and technical publications. Unfortunately, in spite of their extensive acknowledgements, these books have evidently not been reviewed for historical or technical accuracy by anyone qualified to do so until now. The goal here is to establish “truthinaviationhistory”, and since the books and production are already in the public domain, so must be these reviews. I invite similar qualified examination of my book or articles, and would welcome any substantive dialogue.

Parts 1 through 5 of this series will be posted to this blog in the coming days.

Joe Bullmer, author, historian, aeronautical engineer, and retired pilot.

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*Editor’s Note: In exchange for permission to display the Wright Flyer 1, the Smithsonian Institution infamously signed a contract forbidding them from naming anyone but the Wright brothers as first to fly - or even capable of flight before December 17, 1903

Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors nor any other museum, or other agency, bureau, or facilities, administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the Wright Aeroplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such an aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight.