Thank God the Wright Brothers Never Followed the Science
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Thank God the Wright Brothers Never Followed the Science
They were “two of the workingest boys” the fisherman had ever seen, “and when they worked, they worked…"
“Follow the Science” is one of the many progressive labels used to end debate. The media and democrat politicians have flooded the culture with this mantra since the rise of the world-ending global warming hoax.
The Wright Brothers working in their Dayton bicycle shop on the greatest invention in human history were surrounded by a culture in both the academy and the press that routinely mocked the notion of human flight. Today the handful of brave scientists and writers and ordinary Americans still in possession of a skeptical mind are mocked for challenging the warming hysteria.
In David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers, astronomer Simon Newcomb from Johns Hopkins University wrote in a September 1901 issue of McClure’s magazine about the usefulness of flight once we succeeded: “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.”
Wilbur Wright wrote to the Smithsonian in Washington asking for all the papers addressing the science of flight. He received a list of books and aeronautical studies written by Octave Chanute, a civil engineer specializing in gliders and Samuel Pierpont Langley, a professor of astronomy and physics who built a pilotless craft resembling a dragonfly that was launched from a houseboat which flew briefly before crashing.
As McCullough writes,
“For more than fifty years, or long before the Wright Brothers took up their part, would-be “conquerors of the air” and their strange or childish flying machines, as described in the press, had served as a continuous source of popular comic relief.”
Debate and ridicule flourished 120 years ago and was expected, especially with folks attempting to pilot strange and ill-fated ships. However, yesterday’s attacks on flying seem quaint against the destructive nature of today’s radical greens--ruining the career of Swedish meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson, or libeling fellow scientists and other scientific journals in the University of East Anglia Climategate scandal where data and articles were manipulated for the cause.
Had the Wright brothers “followed the science” of the day, we would have had excellent-made bikes for generations, yet not their genius that gave us the American Century.
The fisherman at the outer banks initially sized up Orville and Wilbur as odd ducks. John T. Daniels, who snapped the picture of the Wrights’ first flight, said they were “two of the workingest boys” the fisherman had ever seen, “and when they worked, they worked…They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing.”
Thank God the Wright Brothers Never Followed the Science
They did follow science. At one point they requested data from the Smithsonian and realized the data was unreliable and then built their own wind tunnel and made their own reliable set of data.
Because some of the press mocked their attempts does not indicate that the press was on the side of "science" an the Wright Brothers were against it. Other more expensive flight experiments were also mocked.
Like many people in their time the Wright Brothers were self-educated. The vast majority of people back then did not set foot in colleges, a high school education was still rather rare. They studied nature and based their designs on observations of birds, which is part of science. They looked at locomotive engineering as inspiration as well.
In other words they completely followed "the science."
What is remarkable is that they figured it out when people with more education and more funding. However they did read and study science themselves rather thoroughly.