The Wright Way

Mark EPPLER

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780814427415
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

When Wilbur and Orville Wright executed the first successful manned flight on December 17th, 1903, they stunned the world. Man could fly! Where had these two brothers come from? The impact was astonishing. (Imagine if Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon in a craft he built himself and paid for with a part-time job!)In ushering in the age of flight, the Wright brothers got past numerous obstacles the world's other scientists hadn't even begun to tackle. The Wright Way defines seven essential problem-solving principles the brothers used in accomplishing this enormous feat, and shows readers how to apply them to common business problems. The book presents practical, inspirational principles for achievement, including: * Hammering out problems through constructive conflict* Addressing the toughest issues -- or "worst things" -- first* Achieving perfection through "inveterate tinkering"* Pursuing useful knowledge through "forever learning"The book gives business leaders and managers constructive tips they can use to tackle their most difficult -- and rewarding -- challenges and opportunities. A perfect combination of savvy management guidance and historical adventure story, The Wright Way shows readers how to make their business soar when others can't even get off the ground.

CHAPTER ONE

THE EVENT OF THE CENTURY

“To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.”

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896), aviation pioneer

It was an odd assortment of men that made the four-mile trek from “Camp Wright” over to Kitty Hawk. One, a lumber dealer from Manteo, had come over to search the rugged Atlantic coast for debris from a recent shipwreck. Hearing talk about a couple of guys who were planning to fly, he had hung around to “see the show.” Three others were surfmen from the Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station, grizzled veterans of the sea who had befriended the two “odd ducks” from Dayton. The last member of the group was the seventeen-year-old son of a Nags Head widow who made her way in life telling the fortunes of vacationers for “twenty-five cents a go.” Despite their considerable differences, the men had come together that day to form a historic team: the world’s first aircraft ground crew. Answering the summons of the Wright brothers to assist them on the morning of December 17, 1903, they had just witnessed the brothers’ leap into the pages of history.

The Death of Impossibility

Having assisted the Wright brothers in their fourth and final flight of the day (an unexpected gust of wind crumbled the delicate flying machine before more attempts could be made), the men were hiking over to Kitty Hawk to share the news. Hearty souls accustomed to solitude, one might assume they walked in silence, contemplating what they had just seen. John Daniels, a strapping young seaman charged by Orville with the responsibility of taking the official photograph of the flight, may have wondered if he’d tripped the shutter in time to capture the moment. Years later, Daniels would be credited with snapping the most famous photograph in aviation history. It was the only picture he would ever take.

Bill Tate, a key figure in the Wright brothers’ story at Kitty Hawk, should have been there to see the flight. On the morning of the 17th, Tate stepped outside his home at Martins Point and felt the bite of a Cape Hatteras sting-wind. That wind, combined with the patches of ice forming on the puddles in his yard, convinced Tate that there would be no attempt at flying that day. Later in the morning he changed his mind and decided to make the trip over to Kitty Hawk. Near the post office, Tate saw a small band of men heading his way. As the group neared, Johnny Moore, the fortune-teller’s son, couldn’t resist telling him of the Wright brothers’ good fortune. Moore broke into a wild run hollering, “They done it! They done it! Damn’d if they ain’t flew!” Tate was heartsick. Missing the Wright brothers’ first flight would be the regret of his life.

Back at the campsite, having just accomplished what man had dreamed of doing since the dawn of civilization, Wilbur and Orville returned to their shelter to warm themselves and enjoy a leisurely meal. They may have just flown, but they were still hungry. Later, eyewitnesses would recall that the brothers didn’t seem particularly enthused or excited about what they had accomplished. Perhaps the bitter cold had numbed their excitement. Maybe the first flight adrenaline rush had worn off, subduing their spirits. Or maybe they had expected to fly all along. They were, after all, used to solving problems.

A Staggering Event Worn Smooth

It would be like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon in a craft he had built himself and paid for with a part-time job.

Time has a way of taking the edge off things. If the achievement of the Wright brothers seems any less profound today than when Johnny Moore first shouted the news, it’s only because its edges have been worn smooth with familiarity. After the Wrights, new ideas and inventions poured forth in such a torrent that the identities of the creators were often lost in the flood. In many respects, the Wright brothers were the first and last “celebrity” inventors of the twentieth century. Today, few people can tell us who invented the microchip or laser, or even television for that matter. We fax messages and make copies daily, yet we have no idea who the creative genius behind each invention was. Combine this with the fact that we’ve lost our ability to be truly amazed by just about anything, and you can see why the magnitude of what Wilbur and Orville Wright accomplished may have been diminished.

When the Wright brothers solved the problem of heavier-than-air flight, they not only achieved a technological breakthrough, they stunned the world. It was an incredible achievement with no modern parallel. The only thing that might come close would be if Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon in a craft he had built himself and paid for with a part-time job. To put it into context, consider this: The big news item in the papers the day Wilbur and Orville conquered the air was the story of Colonel H. Nelson Jackson, who, in order to win a fifty-dollar bet, had driven crosscountry in an automobile in the unheard-of time of just sixty-three days! The Wright brothers’ invention would one day extract 99.8 percent of the time needed to make Nelson’s journey. Wilbur and Orville had redefined the world’s concept of time and distance.

Unacknowledged Heroes

What the Wright brothers accomplished at Kill Devil Hills that December day in 1903 would cast a shadow of influence over the entire twentieth century. It was so staggering that many people—including aviation experts—refused to believe it had occurred. “Their success came so suddenly and from such an unexpected quarter,” says historian Gary Bradshaw, “that their contemporaries could not believe they had done what they claimed.” Aeronautical circles were not easily persuaded, and in the era of William Randolph Hearst, newspapers were not entirely trusted. Five years after the first flight, the majority of Americans refused to acknowledge the feat, even when confronted with pictures in a newspaper. “The public, discouraged by failure and tragedies just witnessed,” Wilbur later commented, “considered flight beyond the reach of man.” Or, as Wright biographer John McMahon expressed it, “The world believed less in the airplane than the sea serpent.”

People not only regarded heavier-than-air flight as out of reach, they felt that those who tried it were deserving of ridicule. Samuel Pierpont Langley, the respected secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who had two embarrassing plunges into the Potomac River to show for his efforts, was hounded by the media. The Boston Herald cruelly suggested that Langley should concentrate his efforts on submarines, not flying machines. An editorial in The New York Times written after Langley’s second failure on December 8, 1903, predicted that manned flight was achievable, but only if scientists and mathematicians worked on it around-the-clock for the next “one to ten million years.” It wouldn’t take ten million years. It wouldn’t even take ten days.

The Giants Had Quit

When Wilbur and Orville took on the challenge of manned flight, it was at a time when most people, including those who had worked on it the longest and hardest, had given up. Making the achievement all the more remarkable was the stature of those who had tried and failed. Alexander Graham Bell couldn’t figure it out. Thomas Edison, whose dogged persistence (thousands of failures before success) in developing the incandescent lightbulb was the stuff of legend, gave up on this one. Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the Maxim rapid-fire gun, spent $200,000 on the problem before calling it quits. These were the lucky ones. Pioneers like Otto Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher, and John Montgomery paid for the privilege of challenging the skies with their lives.

The Wright brothers had methodically and meticulously worked their way through the problem of heavier-than-air, powered and controlled flight, and solved it. The actual flight of Orville wasn’t as much the answer to the problem as it was a confirmation of the process used to achieve it. In solving the problem, the Wright brothers resolved hundreds of smaller challenges that, when taken as a whole, yielded the first flight. For the brothers, the solution to the flying problem was actually a systematic process guided by an established, if not written, set of principles. The first flight was the culmination of that process. That’s why the brothers weren’t particularly excited or enthused when it occurred. For Wilbur and Orville, the first flight was just another step along a problem-solving continuum.

A Problem of Enormous Complexity

It is impossible to overstate what the Wright brothers accomplished. Bill Gates, founder and CEO of Microsoft Corp., calls the first flight “the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing.” Harry Combs, author of Kill Devil Hill: Discovering the Secret of the Wright Brothers, says the achievement “rattled the planet” and places its importance on a par with man’s discovery of the use of fire. Like these people and many others, I believe Wilbur and Orville’s achievement deserves recognition as the event of the twentieth century. If I were an attorney charged with making the case for the brothers, here’s the evidence I’d place before the court:

Their flying machine was the product of their own hands, and it was assembled as if their lives depended on it, which they did.

They solved an “unsolvable” problem. The idea of man flying was accepted, as Wilbur and Orville would later note, as the “standard of impossibility” in 1900. A popular phrase of the day went as follows: “If God had meant for man to fly, feathers would be sprouting on his shoulders!” Lord Kelvin, a highly regarded scientist and president of the Royal Society of London, stated flatly in 1885, “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” By the turn of the century, many of those who had been working on the problem for years had thrown in the towel. “The mystery,” Combs wrote, “had been lethal in defense of its secrets.” The Wright brothers solved a highly complex, technical problem the best and brightest of the day had deemed unsolvable.

They launched the era of aviation. Although people give credit to the Wright brothers for inventing the world’s first heavier-than-air flying machine, few realize that Wilbur and Orville invented the science of flight as well. As Wilbur later noted, there was no art of flying when they began, just a “flying problem.” There was no pilot’s manual in 1903 to guide the men as they eased their flyer into the cold December sky. They literally wrote the book as they went. Many critical elements of flight in use today were originated by the Wright brothers a hundred years ago.

They did it all, with no subcontracting. The achievement of the Wright brothers is made all the more remarkable by the fact that they did everything themselves. They conducted the research, framed the problem, and formulated the strategies to solve it. If they needed a part, they made it. If they didn’t have the tools needed to make the part, they made the tools. Their flying machine was the product of their o...