April 13, 2018 ▸ People, Technology

Episode 288: Wright Brothers: Home Grown Genius

On this episode of The Sofa King Podcast, we take to the skies and talk about the life, inventions, business, and first flight of the Wright Brothers. One historian says of Wilber and Orville Wright “”Before the Wright Brothers, no one working in aviation did anything fundamentally correct. Since the Wright Brothers, no one has done anything fundamentally different.” This is true enough. Though their life was one of legal battles and incredible invention, they single-handedly (double-handedly?) changed the world.

The Wright Brothers were both raised in Ohio by a father who was a bishop and a mother who was said to be very inventive and mechanically inclined. One day, their father brought home a toy helicopter, and it got the boys obsessed with flight. Wilbur was a serious student and had a bad accident with a hockey stick in the face that forced him out of school (like you do…). Orville was a mechanical genius who built his own printing press as a teenager and got in on the bicycle frenzy, successfully designing his own self-lubricating chain.

The Wright Brothers were perfect business partners, one being brainy and financially responsible and the other being a self-taught engineer. They studied all known literature on flight, and on December 17, 1903, they flew the first ever self-propelled flight in Kitty Hawk. With no newspapers to cover it, however, haters hated. Nobody believed they did what they claimed, and Orville started showing their plane through demo flights in the US while Wilbur did the same in Europe. Eventually, the Wright Brothers found markets (or invented them) and sold planes to various governments.

So, how far apart did the brothers die? Was Orville romantically involved with his sister? What role did they play in WWI and WWII? Why did they sue everyone on the planet? What aeronautic technology did they invent? Why did they have a beef with the Smithsonian? Why does Dave think Orville had a romance with his own sister, Katherine? Listen, laugh, learn.