Popular Mechanics: No one paid attention to the Wright brothers when they first started working on their airplane. Why do you think that was?

David McCullough: The fact that they were so ignored is astonishing. Ignored by the press, by serious scientific magazines, by the federal government, and by the newspapers right in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Nobody even bothered to go out and take a look. They did it all themselves. They didn't have any foundation backing them. They didn't have the facilities of some institution or corporation. They didn't have political contacts, or an angel funding their experiments. They were paying for it out of their own relatively meager earnings from a bicycle shop, and giving up a hell of a lot in life in order to do it. They were determined to succeed, and they did.

"It's clear in the records that a great many people thought they were crackpots."

Did their success change them?

There was a huge homecoming in Dayton, celebrating their worldwide fame. For two days there were speeches and concerts and parades. And at every opportunity they quietly stepped away and went to their shop. I think that's about as revealing of the kind of people they were as almost anything else that happens.

So were they nerds?

It's clear in the records that a great many people thought they were crackpots. Everybody loved to make fun of them. And that doesn't seem to have ever bothered them.

You mention in the book that, after the Wrights were successful, even the Smithsonian was reluctant to give them the credit they deserved. Why was that?

Out of pride in Samuel Langley. The Smithsonian didn't want to give up on him as the first hero of flight. But eventually they came around. [Editor's note: In 1898 the Smithsonian contributed another $20,000 to a $50,000 War Department grant Langley received to build a piloted airplane called an aerodrome. The aerodrome crashed twice upon takeoff before the project was abandoned.]

"Nobody had ever built a motor out of aluminum before. Nobody had thought of it."

Were there other things the Wrights didn't get credit for?

The propellers are a very big one, along with their original wing-warping system and their use of a wind tunnel. And nobody had ever built a motor out of aluminum before. Nobody had thought of it.

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And all of that was with no formal training?

They hadn't gone to MIT, but they were brilliant. Wilbur was a genius. His letters and speeches were as good as anything being said by anyone. Take his speech before the aerial club in Paris. He stood up there in front of these learned, sophisticated people and gave a speech, which he wrote himself, as good as could be written by any speechwriter at the White House. Better, actually. And here he's supposedly just a mechanic from a bicycle shop in Ohio.

"They realized success didn't mean just creating a flying machine. You have to know how to fly it."

So much of the Wrights' correspondence informed the narrative of your book. When you think about the way we communicate today, as a historian, are you concerned about how we're going to be able to preserve these things for future generations?

Nobody writes letters anymore. When they do write something, they write it in a kind of pidgin English on electronic devices. And we don't keep diaries. No one in public life would dare keep a diary anymore because it can be subpoenaed and used against you in court. On top of all of that, there's a concern about how long the electronic correspondence will last. There is a whole group of people at the Library of Congress currently worrying about this.

Do you think Americans have a proper respect for the Wright brothers now?

The usual picture of them is of a couple of bicycle mechanics from small-town America who got lucky and built an airplane. They didn't just get lucky. They realized that success didn't mean just creating a flying machine. You have to know how to fly it. Before the Wrights, it was all theory.

This story appears in the July/August 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics.

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