David McCullough: 2015 National Book Festival

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC thank you so much the Washington Post is a proud charter sponsor of the National Book Festival and for me it's a special honor to introduce one of the greatest historians of our time David McCullough praise for David McCullough's contribution to Americans understanding of their history comes with each of his books and this is his tenth USA Today rightly declared that few historians have captured the essence of America its rise from agrarian nation to the world's dominant power like David McCullough he has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award twice and he is the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom our nation's highest civilian award David's new book the Wright brothers comes at a good time because today we're seeing innovation in our society at a breathtaking pace and this is a story of two of the most resourceful innovators ever we can marvel today at the billion dollar valuation of a new app but you'd have to have quite the app to transform the world as the Wright brothers did when they made the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk North Carolina on December 17th 1903 this book is a reminder that extraordinary innovators can seem like oddballs that's what residents of Kitty Hawk thought when they saw Wilbur and Orville Wright stand for hours watching the giant sea birds and replicating the motion of flying with their own arms and wrists this book is a reminder that innovation requires collaboration Orville and Wilbur did almost everything together living together eating together working together six days a week sharing a bank account they also worked closely with their sister Katherine and with Charlie Taylor the mechanic who repaired bicycles in their bike shop and then built a lightweight engine for the Wright Flyer this book is a reminder that the biggest innovations don't necessarily cost a lot of money the Wright brothers achieve their goal in four years and with less than $1,000 a sum as the book points out paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business now their closest competitor was funded by the funded by the Smithsonian to the tune of $70,000 it then crashed into the Potomac this book is a reminder that innovators don't have to be conventionally credentialed neither will bird and Orville had gone to college or at any training and physics or engineering Daniel Okrent writing in this New York Times Sunday book review said this the Wright brothers is merely this a story well told about what might be the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished we can use inspiration like this today and we can use the inspiration that comes by way of David McCullough now interviewing David will be melissa block one of NPR's great journalists longtime voice of all things considered and now a special correspondent it is my pleasure to turn the stage over to Melissa and David McCullough thank you all so much for coming and for taking flight with David McCullough and with the Wright brothers Wilbur and Orville I want to start by thinking about how the brothers dream of flight began because you described it you trace it back to a toy that they're given at an early age and that this sparked something in their imagination what was that their father was a great believer in the importance of toys in educating children and this was at the time when the kindergarten movement was very strong in the country and using blocks and so forth for children to learn a lot about building and and putting together and working together and innovation of that at that level and he brought home what the boys came to call the bat and it was a simple little helicopter propellers and powered by rubber bands which you would twist and it would take off into the air and he brought it in and he held it in his hands and then all of a sudden he let it go too flew up to the ceiling and as each of the brothers would later recount that's when it began and they were not in any way ambivalent about that and here some years later but not very long Orville was in the first grade and he was whittling away with some wood and his teacher came over and asked him what he was doing and he said I'm working on the kind of flying machine my brothers that my brother and I are gonna build and fly someday and this was only the beginning in many ways of the many examples of their home environment that were absolutely decisive years later Orville was asked by one of his friends would he agree that he and his brother were perfect examples of Americans who grew up with no advantages and they had no advantages as we would think of them no running water no indoor plumbing no electricity no telephone in the house that even with no advantages we can rise to ordinary achievements in Heights because we're Americans and orble was very adamant he said no that's not true because we grew up with the best advantage the greatest advantage anybody could ever have we grew up in a home that encouraged intellectual curiosity and that's exactly what happened Wilbur was later asked when he maybe had an answer to how to succeed he's one of my favorite quotes and the whole story he said yes pick out a good mother and father and grow up in Ohio well it's interesting that you mentioned that because they're from they grew up largely in Dayton and Dayton at the time at the turn of the century was a wellspring of innovation they were not unique in the in the notion that they were inventing and creating things it's not it's not an exaggeration to say that Dayton which was not one of the larger cities even in Ohio was in its way the Silicon Valley of the time in Dayton Ohio more patents were issued on new inventions new products and so forth then based on population equivalents than any other city in the country there was something being developed that built anew almost everywhere you could would turn and they were in the midst of that and that's extremely important and also of course it's an age of innovation and intervention with Alexander Graham Bell and Edison and the invention of the elevator and in the mousetrap it it was things were jumping and things were were succeeding and the advent of the skyscraper it just goes on and so that was a spirit in the country which they understandably and to a very large extent rightly felt was purely American we think about nobre and Orville as a unit don't we I mean Wilbur the older brother by four years Orville mustache elegant always elegant in suit and tie and cap they were very different though in your description a real force together but Wilbur you consider Wilbur to be the true genius so how do you just Wilbur was no genius well there's no question about it in my mind and other people feel the same way Orville was very clever innovative mechanically adroit no slouch right and he and but Wilbur had a reach of mind far beyond Orville's Orville was also painfully shy as their mother had been their mother died when they were in their teens and she was very good at making things just like Orville was and moreover the four years made Orville the big brother in many ways this story is that is a family play with four characters the father the two brothers and the sister and the absence of the mother what sister Katharine in a more important position than she would have had otherwise but Wilbur was the big brother he was the boss always and Orville always deferred to it Wilbur was not afraid to speak in front of organizations in engineering or whatever or to write proposals or to be the spokesman for them whereas port will refuse to do any of them Orville also had spells when he became touchy moody easily offended in the family they were known as his peculiar spells Wilbur on the other hand would be sitting with a group of people and he would look you'd look over and he was clearly lost in his own world he was thinking about something and Wilbur's love of art and architecture will birds use of the English language but this is also could be said of Orville and Katherine they were raised by a father who believed that she not only had to know how to use the English language correctly grammatically but you had to know how to use the English language effectively and their letters which are all here in Washington at the Library of Congress their private family letters alone number in excess of a thousand the professional correspondence most of which Wilbur wrote also numbers beyond a thousand and you go through those letters and you know you you know that they never went to college and further they neither one ever even finished high school and it's humbling how superbly written they are and that's almost entirely due to their father now you have to understand to please that yes they had no plumbing no no electricity no telephone no indoor facilities much of any kind but it was also a house full of books and if there was ever an example of two extraordinary really four extraordinary people rising to a level intellectually and an accomplishment the very few ever have without any advantages supposedly because they read and they read Shakespeare they read Virgil they read Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne they read Sir Walter Scott when when Katherine had her birthday the brothers bought her and she was still a young woman bought her a bust of Sir Walter Scott now the idea these are just a couple of bicycle mechanics has to be eliminated has to be taken away from its eye Melissa I would have wanted to have written this book even if they had succeeded what kind of human beings they were and how much we can learn from them about behavior in life as they say the life lessons that they taught and the father to father was an itinerant minister who was away about half the year always so they hadn't get by on their own which was also an important part of it and the and the sister well you want to go about talk about her let's say a Ferrari she's fascinating she cannot be left out of the equation okay we're gonna save time for Catherine it's important to me too I bet a lot of people in this room have gone across the mall to the Air and Space Museum and seen the 1903 Wright Flyer with the struts and the cloth wings and wondered how is it possible that that flew in December of 1903 with Orville on that first flight what is 120 feet 12 seconds in the air first light first flight was not very impressive lasted 12 seconds and he went 120 feet however and keep in mind please that this is in the midst of bitter winter on the Outer Banks with stiff wind cold and and desolate in the extreme it was all sand virtually then virtually no one lived there there were no roads there were no no contact with the world except that telegraph office the life-saving station and they had a few people there local people helping them and then they took turns they always took turns flying and then it was Wilbur's turn that was born with it all that same day before the day was over Wilbur had flown more than half a mile they had done it no question about it and they knew that if they had done it and that nobody in all history and ever done anything like it and they knew that what they had done could change the world which of course it has right here in Washington DC ten million people a year ten million fly in and out of Reagan and ten million fly in and out of Dulles 20 million people a year and these aren't the biggest airports in our country and yet we all take it for granted oh yeah I'm gonna get on a plane I'll be in Chicago in a couple of hours how did it happen who did it there's a scene in Butch Cassidy the Sundance Kid where they're being chased by the posse and they're riding pretty hard but the posse keeps on coming a little faster and one of them says who are those guys and then they keep getting closer and maybe out fast and who are those guys and then finally one of them said who are those guys well who were those guys that invented the airplane flight and how did they do it they did it with none of the conventional notions that we have advantage of advantage and as that was said in the introduction they had no training and whatever in physics or science or anything like that totally self-taught they had a liberal arts education so let's please keep that in mind Marty Baron in his introduction mentioned how obsessed the Wright brothers were with birds with bird flight and one of the locals that he mentioned on Kitty Hawk would describe them standing for hours on the beach we couldn't help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts he said they could imitate every movement of the wings of those gannets Gannett Birds we thought they were crazy but this was they they were obsessed with studying birds like how they were able to stay aloft how they banked how they that's how they cracked the case and there were others preceding them they had some wonderful French writers who wrote beautiful poetic books about the essential need to crack the mystery of birds how do they do it why can they do it and we can and they did the Wright brothers did now there's a turn of the story that is extraordinary but it's also a lesson about what they learned from the birds and it applies also in their view and I think they equate right to life when he was about 18 Wilbur got hitless teeth with a hockey stick you know big up King local pond knocked out all his upper teeth for life extremely painful very slow recovering and as a consequence of young man is very popular and it was a great athlete but all of a sudden here he is with no teeth half of his mouth and he went into a spell spell of what today we would call depression and he retreated from life in self-imposed seclusion at home in his house for three years and family all thought that's the worst blow that's ever happened to us this is tragic it's awful what a terrible thing to have happened to our wonderful brilliant handsome young son but it was during that time that he started reading as never before and started reading Natural History and particularly these wonderful books about birds and he as much as says that that's what changed his life and he could quote those passages from those books which by the way were on the Shelf of the family collection because his father was very interested in ornithology when I first got involved with the research I asked who hit him and was it intentional or accidental nobody knew but in the Bishop's Diaries the bishop is the father amazing diary after Wilbur's death which was 1912 the father identified who it was that hit him and he had been known in boyhood as the neighborhood bully his father was a house painter name was hey Oliver hey har gh and his extremely poor family and the boy was put to work as a clerk in a drugstore right around the corner from where the Wrights lived and where he lived he lived right around the corner and he because they couldn't afford dentistry the boy's teeth were rotting and he was in extreme pain and the druggist feeling sorry for him provided him with what was the only painkiller of the time which was cocaine cocaine pills and he became an addict now whether he was a cocaine addict at the time of the of the incident we don't know but later on this same young man became one of the most notorious murderers in the the state of Ohio so there you have right in the same neighborhood growing up genius and and young men of the most admirable kind and really genuine evil he murdered his mother his father his brother and an estimated 12 other people so I think what that does certainly ought to do for us is remind us that when we think of the virtues of growing up in a small relatively small city in a nice quiet neighborhood the whole setting is very much like a Norman Rockwell painting but it isn't that simple and never is never was never will be weather Oliver hey did this intentionally or accidentally we still don't know but we shouldn't give up I have never undertaken the book where I didn't find something very important that nobody had seen before or written about before and this certainly was a vivid example of that and of course the excitement that comes with that the sense of a light going on and had they had an idea of suddenly taking on a different shape and form and meaning and importance is well it's part of the love of learning you remember that moment of finding that diary specifically couldn't believe it yeah and it wasn't so the bishop had hidden this yeah write down every one of the many things that I find really confusing about the Wright brothers stories that they've achieved the success in Kitty Hawk they sent a telegram home saying I think alert alert the press what the person oh we've done this they come home to Dayton and they are flying daily it seems an huffman Prairie outside of Dayton and no one is paying them any attention how is that possible it's one of the hardest things to fathom about this whole story they did it they did kitty hawk in front of witnesses and they had done what no human being had ever done in all of history but they weren't whooping and hollering and then he doing a jig and saying aren't we nifty an army grand because they realized that what they had done at Kitty Hawk was only a beginning they had to develop a plane that was practical when that plane wasn't because it couldn't bank and turn sufficiently so they came back to Dayton and in a cow pasture eight miles out of town they began their expect flight experiments there and they succeeded it took him another two or three a half three years but it was right outside of town and you can get there on an inner inner urban trolley it wasn't as though it was out some secret path and the trolley had to stop right by the field where they were doing this and nobody came out to watch not there nothing newspaper reporters not that editors didn't send them someone out to him go how to see this and one of the editors of the one of the daily papers in Dayton was asked about this 10 or 20 years later how could that be it was happening right under your noses and he paused for a minute he said well I guess we were just plain stupid sometimes there's no better explanation is this sense that so you're told that something happens and you know oh no everyone knows that's not true it was the king has no clothes on so many time came along and the first person one of my favorite characters the first person to come and look and see and write it down and write it down accurately at length was a beekeeper a beef a manufacturer of beekeeping equipment from up in the other corner the northeastern corner of Ohio named Amos root great named Amos root and he heard about what was going on down in Dayton and he got in his car his new automobile Jiminy's keep in mind that automobiles are as new as airplanes and bicycles it the phenomenon but transportation is radically changing overnight and he came down and he saw what they were doing and he wrote his article about it and he published it in his beekeepers journal gleaning gleanings in Bicol so it wasn't Scientific American it wasn't the New York Times the Chicago Tribune or one of the day that broke the story it was a mistake he being Journal I'm very pleased to say that Tom Hanks is going to be doing a a miniseries for HBO as he did for my John Adams book and the casting is shortly to begin and I his hope that Paul Giamatti gets the play yeah with full beard who would be the what do you want to play Wilbur Norville I don't know I don't nobody knows they had the screenplay hasn't been written yet that's the first step yeah but we do have a screenwriter I promised that we would spend some time on Katherine right she's the youngest sister she's younger than Orville by about three years so younger than Wilbur by about seven she's the only one of the family to go to college he goes to Oberlin she's a teacher in Ohio and she single-handedly devotes herself to her brother's life when Orville is terribly injured in a crash she stops teaching she goes here to Washington to take care of him and lives her life with her brothers until Wilbur dies early and with her father something happens when she turns 52 she's fallen in love yes with someone she's known for some time and she decides that she will get married and is terrified of telling Orville her surviving brother and he stops speaking with her he never reconciles with her he doesn't go to her wedding he refuses to go see her when she's dying of pneumonia just a couple of years later after she's married and has found happiness it's only under duress that he finally goes to see her how do you explain that what kind of mystery can account for that it's impossible to explain but essentially and he made this he felt she had betrayed him that they had an understanding that they would stay together for the rest of their lives they had been like this all their lives he or Orma was much closer in childhood to Katherine and he was to Wilbur but I'd like to go back a little bit about this because nothing of any consequence or very little of any consequences ever accomplished alone it's a joint effort I just heard Walter Isaacson speak about this very theme this morning wonderfully brilliantly and we have to remember that I wish that some of the members of Congress would so it wasn't just Wilbur and Orville who did made this happen it was Wilbur Orville their father their sister Charlie Taylor who worked with them and the people in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania who had started this what we call startup company little enterprise called the Aluminum Company of America and they built for the Wright brothers the first aluminum block for an engine in order to reduce the weight of the motor which was crucial to having success with a motor driven glider Kathryn I don't think the story would have turned out the way it did in fact if she had not been part of it because she brought several things that that they didn't have first of all she was very sociable and she was good with people and she was amusing entertaining and she was always there when they needed her and most dramatically when Orville nearly was killed in here in Washington Fort Myer she gave up everything came immediately to meet with him and got him through it in a way that he himself later said he wouldn't have gotten to throw it if he hasn't been there and it wasn't just that she made sure he was getting the right medical attention at the base hospital but she brought him through his his depression his sense that I'm never gonna be able to do anything ever again in my life I'm not gonna be able to walk I'm not gonna be able to fly not only did he walk again he flew again and he came back and he's insisted on flying again at Fort Myer right across the Potomac River and he not only flew again he broke several world's records when he flew again and that was her she did it and with of course a lot of returned determination on his part she was also feisty as she liked to say and rathi other way wrathy she can get cross after and keep in line and keep going when they did the spirits happened to get down and when they went to France to demonstrate what they were able to do and she came over she was fantastic with them with the French press much better than either of them ever were and they adored her because she was so opinionated and spoke her mind because as they said the French said she was so American they loved Americans who act acted American fascinating Wilbur Wright didn't speak a word of French she's never really tried and they loved him for it because he was so American and he was so handsome so courageous is so successful and no American had ever had anything like such popularity as Wilbur Wright had not since Benjamin Franklin was in France and and of course the French were crazy about aviation and the Wright brothers were way ahead of the French experimenters there is so much more of this story that we haven't gotten to and I want to save a couple of minutes for questions I do want to just point out that in your acknowledgments you specifically mentioned Tom Fourier who is the person who keeps your old royal typewriter in good working order and has for many many years so congratulations to Tom and to your royal which is going to do time for just a couple of questions if folks want to make their way to the microphones in the front of the room oh I wish this could be long I do too I wonder if you could speak a little bit about you know your book coming what you know twelve years after the the hundredth anniversary a lot of been written at the time what inspired you to go back and retell the story so beautifully there's a letter written by Edith Wharton that appears on page 248 and I was very interested in Edith Wharton as one of those Americans who benefited from her time in France and in the letter she describes how she got out of her car and the limousine that was delivering her to the hotel to Creon where she was staying and I'm the place la Concorde and the hotel so there as is the class of course and she knows people looking up into the sky and she looked up in the sky and she saw to her absolute thrilling wonderment an airplane and she in the letter describes how how beautiful this spectacle was and she knows that's the right plane and when I saw that letter read that letter how she know it's a right plane what's the right plane doing flying over Paris and she said this is imagine that I got to see this the first flight of an airplane over Paris ever well she didn't know this yet but it was the first flight of an airplane over any city anywhere in the world ever and the same flood airplane had just flown over the top of the Eiffel Tower farther up the way which she did not see the eye if she had flown over the Eiffel Tower that minute had flown in probably about fourteen hundred feet in excess of the height of the Eiffel Tower and what a spectacle this wonder wonderful wonderful achievement of structural engineering the Eiffel Tower and an airplane flying it over happening in Paris well the flight was being flown by a young French aristocrat the Conal embarr who had been Wilbur's favorite best student when Wilbur was making his demonstrations at Lamont and Paul in France and it was a right plane which he had bought from the Wright brothers and then I got know more about this now then I realized that Orville was also in France and what were they doing in France they're meant to be back in a bicycle shop yes I didn't know anything about them at that point I knew about just about whether all of us know from knew from our 10 minutes high school history class they came from Ohio they have made bicycles and they invented the airplane okay on to the next subject well I I have written a lot about politics and war but the older I get the more I think about our story is a country we're about the story of a human human activity on earth history isn't just about politics and war it's about art and music and finance and medicine and invention it's about everything it's by the human mind the human achievement human aspirations and so I've considered this book the third in a trilogy of three books that I've tried to make that point my book on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge my book on the building of the Panama Canal and the book about the Wright brothers and All American achievements all thoughts who have been impossible all done against great odds and all against serious risk of life that has to not be forgotten every time these Wright brothers went up in their plane they knew they could get killed and they didn't just go up two or three times they went up a fifty or hundred times a year for about eight years now you don't have to make any of those risks and inventing iPods and and the other thing most people don't understand is it wasn't just they invented the airplane yes they did but they invented they'd figured out how to fly it I want to make one just quick point more please when Wilbur was on the beach at Kitty Hawk studying the soaring Birds he kept voluminous notes and at one point he writes no bird ever soared in a calm the old Irish saying may the wind always be at your back he's saying no much better than the wind's coming at you head on because you need that wind to help you fly and his feeling was that adversity was not just important in flight and in the understanding of the ways of technology it was important in life and of course he had the most terrible adversity imaginable when he had the teeth knocked out in other words a little adversity a little one set of problems will make you lift in life make you try to attain a new height and if you everybody is just perfectly comfortable if everything is going just as smooth as silk not many people are going to try to do something that might be difficult or which require that they get out up to get up out of the chair and turn off the television we maybe have time if we press our luck for one more question let me just say just start off it's such an honor to meet you I'm studying to be a high school history teacher and I wanted to ask you why do you think we should be studying history history is human it's not boring it's not statistics it's not dates you have to memorize it's about human beings when in the course of human events our great document begins any operative where there is human tell stories about real people about what really happened and get them and get your students involved in the research bring the lab technique that's used in science and bring it to the history classroom give them an assignment where they have to do some research about a building around the corner where three of them are four I'm working on a project together they're doing a biography of somebody or something well they're all learned together and learn from each other and keep them reading and don't just don't just require reading conventional history textbook history how to read good books about Missy haven't read novels that have an historic theme or a setting and and and tell them to enjoy it I cannot think of a better ending I think we're out of time we are sadly out of time but um tell them to enjoy it I think it's been an honour David McCullough thank you so much this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 10,685

Rating: 4.8032789 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, David McCullough (Author), National Book Festival (Recurring Event)

Id: ssxvb-kXrcc

Length: 40min 22sec (2422 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2015