Technology and Culture

Sir Oliver Franks, the British ambassador to the United States, was one of the principal speakers on the morning of 17 December 1948, when the 1903 Wright Flyer joined the Star-Spangled Banner, George Washington’s uniform, the desk on which Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence, and a host of other American treasures on display in the Smithsonian Institution’s Arts and Industries Building. Glancing up at this most historic of aircraft suspended in the entrance hall of the building, Sir Oliver remarked that it was “a little as if we had before us the original wheel.” Ironically, Wilbur and Orville Wright had not equipped the world’s first airplane with wheels, unless you count the flywheel that smoothed the operation of the engine. Instead, the machine was mounted on three bicycle wheel hubs, and achieved flying speed by rolling down a 60-foot wooden monorail fitted with a metal cap strip. Orville Wright had given considerable thought to such matters, having developed a special self-oiling wheel hub for use on the bicycles that he and his brother had begun to build and sell in 1896.

On 4 June 1896, the prescient editor of the Binghamton (New York) Republican had predicted that the invention of a successful airplane might well be the work of bicycle makers. “The flying machine will not be in the same shape, or at all in the style of the numerous kinds of cycles, but the study to produce a light, swift machine is likely to lead to an evolution in which wings will play a conspicuous part.” James Howard Means, editor of the influential but short-lived Aeronautical Annual, agreed that the bicycle and the flying machine were linked. “To learn to wheel one must learn to balance,” he noted in the 1896 issue of the journal. “To learn to fly one must learn to balance.” Otto Lilienthal, the German gliding pioneer who would lose his life as a result of a glider crash in August 1896, complemented [End Page 595] Means on his insight. “I think that your consideration on the development between the flying machine and the bicycle . . . is excellent,” he wrote in a letter to Means. “I am sure the flying apparatus will have a similar development.”

The Wrights’ success validated the prophets. In addition to the wheel hubs, elements of bicycle technology incorporated into their 1903 airplane include the industrial chains and sprockets that transmit power from the engine to the twin counterrotating pusher propellers. You have to look a bit closer to notice the shorter lengths of bicycle chain employed where the warping wires pass over a pulley. Less apparent, but no less important, is the extent to which the Wright brothers’ experience as cyclists and cycle makers shaped their thinking with regard to the control of inherently unstable vehicles. That would have come as no surprise to Means or Lilienthal.

In fact, the world’s first airplane represents a significant convergence of a variety of nineteenth-century technologies. The very structure of the aircraft—a pair of wings trussed together with struts and wires to form a beam—reflects the basic principles of American bridge design, brilliantly modified by the Wrights to permit the operation of their wing-warping control system. The brothers asked Charley Taylor, the machinist whom they employed in their bicycle shop, to construct a four-cylinder, 12.5 horsepower engine for the plane that represented something close to the state of the art in internal combustion engine technology, with a few ideas of their own thrown in for good measure. The 1903 Wright airplane contained other examples of the very latest technology as well. The crankcase, for example, is the earliest known aluminum casting exhibiting precipitation hardening. Shop practice in the Dayton foundry that produced the casting obviously predated...