Bicycle Mechanics From Dayton Beat the Government-Funded Langley Into the Air

Picture a contest for the first powered flight in history. In one corner, a distinguished scientist, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, with a government grant, a staff of assistants and a launching rig on a boat in the Potomac. In the other corner, two brothers who repaired bicycles in Dayton, Ohio, financed it from the till of their shop, neither holding a college degree. Place your bets. If you picked the scientist, you have just discovered why the federal government is the world's most expensive way to lose a race.

Nine days apart in December 1903, the two efforts came to their moment of truth. One ended in the river. The other ended in the history books. Let me walk through why, because the lesson is more interesting than the usual "private good, public bad" slogan, and it is a lesson conservatives ought to be able to state precisely.

The Contestants

Samuel Pierpont Langley was no fool. He was a first-rate astronomer, a respected physicist and, from 1887, the Secretary of the Smithsonian. He had built steam-powered unmanned model aircraft he called aerodromes, and on May 6, 1896 one of them flew for more than half a mile over the Potomac, a real achievement that earned him serious reputation. In 1898, with the Spanish-American War looming, the War Department awarded him $50,000 to build a full-size, man-carrying machine. The Smithsonian added about $20,000 of its own. It was a lot of money for the time and a genuine vote of confidence.

Wilbur and Orville Wright were bicycle mechanics. They ran a shop in Dayton, built and sold their own bicycle brands and printed things on a press in the back. Wilbur was born in 1867 and Orville in 1871. Neither had a college degree. They had curiosity, mechanical skill, a stubborn work ethic and a family that valued learning. They got interested in flight in the 1890s, after reading about the death of the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal in 1896. In May 1899 Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian to ask for the published research on flight, and the Smithsonian sent him material that helped him on his way. Think about that. The government's institution answered a letter from a bicycle repairman, and the repairman did more with the reading list than the institution did with its grant.

The Contest in a Table

The table summarizes a pattern, and I want you to see each row.

What the Wrights Did Differently

Here is the argument in numbered form, since it is the part that applies to everything from rockets to health care.

1. They solved the right problem. Most of the early flight experimenters tried to build an aircraft stable enough to fly itself, like a boat on water. The Wrights decided that the key to flight was control: a pilot had to be able to steer and balance it, the way a cyclist balances a bicycle. They were bicycle makers, so the analogy came naturally. Their method for roll control was wing-warping, twisting the wing tips to bank the aircraft. Wilbur is said to have gotten the idea in 1899 from twisting the sides of a long, narrow inner-tube box. The story is charming and I am telling it as the tradition has it.
2. They tested relentlessly. They flew gliders at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1900, 1901 and 1902. Kitty Hawk was chosen for its steady winds and soft sand. When the 1901 glider performed worse than the published aerodynamic tables predicted, they did not blame the weather. They concluded the tables were wrong. In the fall of 1901 they built a small wind tunnel in their Dayton shop and tested dozens of wing shapes, by some accounts about two hundred. The result was a set of data that was, for its time, the best in the world. Because they had measured it themselves, they trusted it.
3. They built their own engine. When no manufacturer could supply an engine light enough for the Flyer, Charlie Taylor, their shop mechanic, built one. It produced roughly twelve horsepower. The brothers designed the propellers themselves, treating them as rotating wings, a considerable insight, and they got them right.
4. They paid for their own mistakes. Every crash was their own cost, their own time, their own bruises. When a design failed, nobody explained it away in a grant report. They fixed the machine. That feedback loop, a failure hitting the person who made the mistake, is the most underrated engine of invention in history.

December 1903: Two Outcomes

Langley's first attempt to launch his Aerodrome with a pilot, Charles Manly, came on October 7, 1903, and the machine fell into the river almost at once. The second try, on December 8, ended the same way: the craft struck the water immediately after leaving the launching rail, and Manly was rescued from the river. Langley's critics in the press, who had questioned the whole project, were unkind, and some members of Congress were unkind with them, since the War Department's money had been spent. Langley, to be fair to him, had made a serious try and had no way to know what the Wrights knew.

Nine days later, on the morning of December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, the Wrights' Flyer rose into the air. There were four flights that day.

1. First flight: Orville at the controls, about 12 seconds, about 120 feet.
2. Second flight: about 12 seconds, around 175 feet.
3. Third flight: about 15 seconds, about 200 feet.
4. Fourth flight: Wilbur, about 59 seconds, covering about 852 feet over the ground.

Those numbers are modest, and I like that. Orville's first flight was shorter than the wingspan of some modern airliners. But it was the first sustained, controlled, powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine with a pilot aboard, and it was the beginning of the air age. After the fourth flight a gust of wind flipped the Flyer and damaged it, and the day was over. They had flown. A handful of local men watched from the beach, which is the sort of audience that history's biggest moments often attract.

They sent a telegram home, asking their father to tell the press. The reaction was slow. A garbled story ran in a Virginia paper, and other editors did not believe it. The brothers kept working, flying farther at Huffman Prairie, outside Dayton, in 1904 and 1905. Their 1905 Flyer could stay up for more than half an hour (the longest flight that year ran just over 38 minutes), and still the press shrugged. Not until public demonstrations in 1908, with Wilbur flying in France and Orville at Fort Myer, Virginia, did the world take full notice. The brothers had to prove it again, in front of cameras, before the coverage caught up. Dear reader, if you are wondering whether the press has always been the last to know about the main story, you are in good company. The people who report the future are usually the last to believe it.

The Strongest Objection

Let me give the case for government science fairly, because it is not a weak one.

The objection runs like this. Government funding has produced extraordinary things: nuclear power, the interstate highway system, GPS, the early internet, the Apollo landings. Langley's failure was one failure, and Langley's earlier work contributed to the field. Private inventors such as the Wrights stood on a mountain of publicly supported knowledge, starting with the Smithsonian reading list they requested. It is simply false, the objection goes, to say that private initiative did it alone.

I accept the last point and part of the others. The Wrights did read what the Smithsonian sent, and they did stand on the work of Lilienthal, of Octave Chanute and of Langley himself. No invention comes from nothing. And there are some projects, such as national defense and the exploration of space, where the government is the only possible customer, which is how Apollo succeeded. For the case of a government with a clear goal, a deadline and the discipline to meet it, see We Choose to Go to the Moon Read Closely as a Speech About Doing Hard Things and Apollo 11 From Liftoff to Splashdown in Dated Steps With the Words Spoken.

But the objection misses the argument. I am not claiming that government never funds anything useful. I am claiming something narrower: that the Langley grant did not produce a flying machine, and that the reason was structural. Here is the structure.

• A grant funds a plan; a business funds a result. Langley's money was committed to a design before the design had been proven. When the design failed, the money was spent. The Wrights spent small sums at each step and had to see results before they spent more.
• Failure was cheap for the Wrights and expensive for Langley. The Wrights broke gliders and rebuilt them in days. Langley had one large, costly machine and a launch that depended on a complicated catapult. Each test was an event. Each failure was a public disaster.
• The incentives pointed at different things. Langley wanted to avoid embarrassing the Smithsonian and the War Department. The Wrights wanted to fly.
• There was no committee. A committee asks whether the idea can be defended. A tinkerer asks whether it works.

That is not an argument against research. It is an argument about how to organize it. Public funds work best when they buy a defined outcome from competing private bidders. They work worst when they bet a large sum on one approach, one team and one design.

The Constitutional Anchor

There is also a point from the Founding. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Notice the method. The Founders did not tell Congress to fund the inventors. They told Congress to secure to the inventors the right to their own discoveries, to give them a property right, and to let the reward do the rest.

The Wrights used that system. They received a patent on their flying machine's control system, and they spent a good deal of the next years defending it in court. You can argue about whether they overdid the litigation, and some historians think they did, but the principle is the one the Founders wrote down. An inventor who can keep what he invents has a reason to keep inventing. The incentive that built the Flyer is the same one built into the Constitution. For other stories of private inventors and the systems that rewarded them, see Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Was the First Invention Factory and It Changed Work and Henry Ford's Five-Dollar Day and the Assembly Line That Built a Middle Class.

What the Episode Teaches

Take it down from the grand theory to something an ordinary citizen can use.

First, be wary of the sentence "Government should lead on this because the private sector will not." Sometimes it is true. But the Wrights are a standing reminder that the private sector often will, and that the people who will do it may not be the ones the official experts expect. Nobody on the government's list of promising aviators in 1903 was a bicycle mechanic.

Second, beware of the argument from credentials. Langley had the title, the degrees and the endorsement. The Wrights had the results. A free economy lets results beat credentials, and a planned economy lets credentials beat results. That is a rule worth remembering the next time someone says only licensed experts should be allowed to try something.

Third, pay attention to feedback. The best test of any program is whether failure has consequences for the people who run it. The Wrights' failures cost them. A government grant's failures usually cost somebody else, which is why bad programs are so hard to end. For the wider set of cases, Solyndra to Amtrak, why government picks losers when it picks winners goes through what happens when public money picks the horse, and Creative destruction, why the buggy whip makers lost and America won explains how the system rewards the people who find a better way. The same contrast shows up in transportation of another kind in Two Railroads Across America and the One James J. Hill Built Without Land Grants.

And now the last joke. Langley's launch platform was a catapult on a boat. The Wrights' was a pair of rails laid on a beach. One of those is the kind of thing a committee designs. I will let you decide which.

The Case in Brief

1. Samuel Langley's Aerodrome, backed by a $50,000 War Department grant and Smithsonian funds, failed on October 7 and December 8, 1903.
2. Nine days later, on December 17, the Wright brothers flew four times at Kitty Hawk, the longest lasting about 59 seconds and covering about 852 feet.
3. The Wrights won because they solved the control problem, tested relentlessly with gliders and a wind tunnel, built their own engine and paid for their own mistakes.
4. The lesson is structural: grants fund plans while markets fund results, and the Constitution's patent clause rewards inventors with a property right instead of choosing winners.
5. Government has a role in defined projects with clear goals, but private initiative, credentials-blind and feedback-driven, often gets there first.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 on the Constitution page, then ask your representative which federal research grants in your state are tied to a defined, measurable outcome.