David McCullough with Ken Burns on The Wright Brothers

well let me start off this evening by thanking you all for coming to what looks like a packed house understandably I've had the great pleasure of reading this book and it's terrific I remember having the experience in the winter of 1977 of reading a paperback version of The Great Bridge the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and turning to my partners who looked at me with astonishment and a sense of my impending madness when I said I want to make a film about this the history of the Brooklyn Bridge and they sort of shook their head that was my opportunity thirty-eight years ago to meet the gentleman to my left he has had a profound influence on all that I've done because he's taught me so much about how you tell a story and so much about how writing is done how you translate complex information for a general popular audience that helped stitch our country together the way you also edit things together and spend time in archives so I in many ways feel both privileged but also unqualified I thought maybe one thing qualified me for this evening's conversation and that is that my parents honeymooned at Key Hawk in 1950 and therefore I feel that I had some expertise in in aviation though the one thing I want this is a phenomenal book and David as I read it I remember the excitement and the momentum that I had back in 1977 when I read The Great Bridge it had that kind of all-encompassing big arm around stuff and I think the first question I want to ask is maybe two parts one what central to this book is the surviving archival record the extraordinary letters that were written the diaries that were kept the the materials and stuff of life the receipts in the contracts and all of the things that we are in the process and the various things that we do in the process of distilling and what a marvelous record it might be looking across all of your work it seems to me that you take or attempt to take and put your arm around or try to get in touch with an American exceptionalism a very loaded term today because it's used by various folks either to be against or for but we don't quite really understand there's something essentially American something happened between these two oceans and and and your books without ever straying into the hey Geographic without ever becoming pollyannaish meaning that you're willing to lift up the rug and tell the the dark side and understand there are shadows to these extraordinary stories and broad relief this is about something of the American character and and there's something really unique about it and it's a theme that runs through all of the people and the institutions and the events that you've captured so big archives and big subject us how about that yep yeah good my second question but before I attempt to move on with that thought those thoughts I'd like to tell you about something that happened to me just a short while back in Boston where we have an apartment in the Back Bay and it was during the horrendous month of February and we would make marketing lists when the time came up we dared go out to get provisions in order to survive and we did one list and I set off for Shaw's market which is a big supermarket right in Back Bay and I love to go to the market that's a weird thing I know but I really loved it and I'd found everything on the list except cashew nuts and I couldn't for the life of me find them and a young fella went by comparatively young pho with a Shaw's market shirt on and I asked him would you please tell me where the cashew nuts are and he said yes follow me so I went with him and he showed me where they were and I thank you very much and about 10 or 15 minutes later I was checking out at the cash register and he came up to me again he said excuse me but that voice have you ever done voices for television I said yes I have you said were you the narrator of Ken Burns Civil War series and I said yes that's right he said well I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart because that was on the air at a time when I was suffering terribly from insomnia all I had to do is listen to your voice and I went right yes the the archival material for this American story of the Wright brothers is phenomenal is not just that they have survived but that there are well over a thousand letters dealing only with their professional world and their professional struggle and then there are over a thousand letters that are private family correspondence or Diaries and they were raised in a family where a great emphasis was placed by their father on the use of the English language both on paper and when up on one's feet and the letters are not only extraordinary and what they revealed and how intimate they become but also the quality of the thinking and and the use of vocabulary and all the rest and what is so humbling and at the same time stimulating and encouraging is that neither of them ever finished high school and their their capacity to express themselves is is surpassing as is the as was their sisters ability to write and it's the letters correspondence between the father it was a itinerant minister and the sister and the two brothers that makes it possible to get inside their lives as human beings not just as phenomenal accomplishments the creators of a phenomenal accomplishment and yes this is indeed a powerful American story and it is in my view a story with numerous lessons for all of us I think one of the virtues of history is that it serves as an antidote for the hubris of the present and it reminds us constantly of the extraordinary people who went before whose accomplishments have made it a different world and a different you know in a world in which we benefit enormous Li and we owe them far more gratitude than we're commonly used to expressing or is commonly taught and when we also understand how hard they worked and these two brothers are a perfect example of that it wasn't just that they were brilliant but they worked extremely hard and never ever let failure setbacks disappointments near-death incidents stop them from pursuing what they intended to accomplish they had purpose high purpose I don't mean that as a bad pun the PI purpose and this in itself was their way of finding happiness they were never happier than when they were on the job and particularly when the job was getting tough and they weren't in it to make life easier or softer or to get rich or any of those things they're pursuing a wonderful ambitious admirable achievement and they did it alone without any backing no backing from a university no money or support from a foundation no wealthy benefactor no pull in high places no political pull and no money all of all of their expenses they had to cover themselves from the receipts from the proceeds from their bicycle shop in Dayton Ohio but even if they hadn't succeeded I would have wanted to have written this book so revealing so intensely human is their human story and so much of a reminder of standards the behavior and and and ambition worthy ambition that we need to be reminded of because that's part of our story and should be part of our continuing story there's a there's a wonderful moment early in the book when you quote paraphrase Wilbur is saying in order to get ahead in life you need to pick a good father and mother and then live in Ohio so that's really just paint a sense of what Ohio meant in the late 19th century in terms of its ability to incubate not just aviators but presidents and it seemed to be a place I mean I still live in New England where the rocks keep growing up in a soil a lot of smarter people left for the Ohio Valley well there's something particularly American about the Ohio story and it's um when you look at who came from Ohio and what they did it's quite remarkable presidents inventors and there's a strange coincidence maybe it isn't a coincidence that the first human being ever to fly in him in a flying machine Orville Wright and the first human being ever set foot on the moon came from the same section of southwestern Ohio Neil Armstrong yet and then of course John Glenn also came from Ohio as in Edison as in numerous other people in that very protein time you kindly mentioned my book about the Brooklyn Bridge I see this book as the third in a trilogy about phenomenal accomplishment quite aside from politics or the military the first being the Brooklyn Bridge the second being the Panama Canal and I'll this accomplishment by the Wright brothers all three were in there in theory technical accomplishments but all three were also far much more than that involving far much more than just technical expertise all three involved many people they were all three calling upon phenomenal courage because it was very dangerous work in which people were killed and all three changed changed the world in their way in August at Rand but that was because the world was expanding and then the world we really expanded with aviation last year 2014 one Airport in this country and not necessarily the biggest or the busiest O'Hare field 70 million people flew in and out of O'Hare field most of them would then travel at 35 to 40 thousand feet taking it quite for granted that this was perfectly normal bettin if seldom ever wondering well how did it happen who did it who made it happen there's a scene in you me remember I know we've talked about in Butch Cassidy the Sundance Kid where they're being followed by the posse who are this and they keep saying who are those guys those guys because they won't give up they won't stop right and I've in my feeling when I read about the roebling's we built the Brooklyn Bridge where the people who were involved with building the Panama Canal and the breaker I think who were those guys and how the hell did they do it and what and what can we learn from them what can we take to heart to be savored and passed on a value that they taught us by how they conducted their lives you know we live in a media culture everything is way too much information to curate digest certainly and what information we think we do have is mostly superficial so the Wright brothers if Americans can name who started this thing and possibly two guys Wilbur and and Orville but what's so amazing about your book is that these people come fully alive their father Milton the bishop the sister Catherine but these two guys the mother who died early of tuberculosis I believe at age 58 Susan had sort of identified in these two of her sons the two youngest of her sons something going on yes what was that and can you just give us a paint a little bit of a portrait of both of these remarkable human beings because they are extremely like and extremely different in temperament and personality and achievement and the roles they played and and set them so they're not just that superficial Orville and Wilbur I win that jeopardy contest well they'd seemed they seemed too many people like identical twins and they sounded so much alike that but they were in another room and you heard one of them talking you couldn't tell which was which their handwriting looks almost identical they lived in the same house they ate three meals a day together they worked together in the same shop all day long and they work together on this extracurricular crusade they determined for themselves but they were quite different horrible the older was what's in my view and the view of others unquestionably a genius bona fide genius Orville who was four and a half almost five years younger was it was inventive and and innovative mechanically and brightest can be but he was not what his brother Orville was and Orville was the leader he was a big brother and what he said was what they did Wilbur was the big brother Orville was very shy he's painfully shy as their mother had been whereas Wilbur though he didn't like to court the limelight fact he tried to avoid the limelight was a brilliant speaker he could he could stand in front of an audience a professional group or a group of eminent engineers and intellectuals in Paris and give a talk that no professor or presidential speechwriter of our day could possibly equal and again neither one's college Orvil or below could get moody they call him it in the family as his peculiar spells where he would get overtired and touchy and and we would say depressed but it wouldn't last long they could argue something fierce and wind up each taking the side that the other one had had at the beginning of the argument only brothers can do yes and they and they that was one of their ways of working a problem out figuring out the solution to a problem they're always figuring out solutions to problems and seemingly insoluble problems problems that the greatest minds in all history hadn't been able to figure out one of the keys to their success was that they realized it was one thing to invent a flying machine but it was another thing to fly the flying machine now part of that of course comes from the very we take it to be common sense experience a bicycle riding you can't explain to someone how to ride a bicycle they have to get on the bicycle and ride it learn to but about the balance such people says octave Chanute who was a great glider expert enthusiast or Samuel Langley the head of the Smithsonian one of the most brilliant Sciences of his day for Holmes Langley field his name they were wonderful theorists on how the machine could be made to fly but neither one of them had ever set foot on such a machine or ever intended to Wilbur said there are two ways to train him yeah a wild horse one is to sit on the fence and take notes and then go to a comfortable chair and write an essay on how to how to train that horse the other is to go and get on the horse and ride it you said that has been our procedure and every time they went up in their plane or their gliders every single time they knew they were risking their lives they could be killed and because of that they never flew together because they wanted to be sure that one of them got killed the other would be still allowed to carry on with the quest with the mission and it was only in 1910 when they knew that they'd really done what their whole life's efforts had been focused to do that they had accomplished it that they had a big showing airshow we call it today at Huffman Prairie outside of Dayton a cow pasture which is where they done it so much of their most important work where they invited the town to come out and watch and they both went up together which was their way of saying we've done it and they had and Wilbur alas only lived two more years he died unfortunately of typhoid fever in 1912 when he was still in his 40s and there's a tremendous sort of Greek tragedy irony about that because the father was was constantly warning the children to beware of of impure water always be sure you know the water is clean and Orville had very nearly died of typhoid fever when he was still a teenager and and then Wilbur succumbs to it but I think it's a reminder too this was a time when life was not the way it is now and you could die from bad water just as you could die from other Mountain maladies that we are no longer concerned about and to me one of the most phenomenal things of all Kent is that as you well know nineteen three when Orville made his first flight was not very long ago as history goes and yet we live in the world where a VA ssin is everywhere it is it played a often horrifying part in the dreadful Wars of our lifetime and before and yet I could have known Orville Wright many of you here tonight could have no normal right he didn't die until 1948 so as history goes this was just the other day and and the idea that most people know nothing about them I knew nothing about them when I first started on this project is to be a mistake and it's too bad and I think that with all the emphasis we're putting today on innovation all these young people who want to get into up startup ventures of this that kind and the importance of innovation to our future to our economy I think that everybody in that field ought to read the story of Orville and Wilbur Wright I been to see how much more there is to it than just being smart or brilliant or advantage with some position in the place where you can rub elbows with other people who are involved with innovation I loved in the book this sort of combination it's not naivete they're simple they're direct and they've met they can't their pockets can't be picked what's so great about your book is you have all of these darker shadows that are sort of on the outside there's I think a wonderful scene and I don't want to get too much in the weeds of the engineering of it where you have these two theorists as you were talking about lilienthal and Chanute who've got sets of ratios that they're sure going to work that will affect what's called camber and the Wright brothers originally work with their own ratios and have success then in their next trial they go to use lilienthal's and Chanute and nothing works right and it proves that and it also proves in business thing there's you're always you're always on the edge of your seat reading this book thinking oh no now somebody's going to take advantage and I'm this is going to turn it and they were always so resolutely themselves that they resisted the temptations of the quick buck for something else it's very very impressive particularly Wilbur I think like I'd like to read something if I may we have by others I think in many ways one of my favorite parts of the whole book is their story is when they first get to Kittyhawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina which we're very remote in that because there were no bridge over there hanging of that kind and only a few people lived there and they lived a very primitive life to say the least and so you have these two young men from out west in Ohio who show up in business suits and wear coats and ties every day every day as if there were blocking down the street in Dayton and the reaction to the among the local people I think is absolutely wonderful and one of the chroniclers of all of that was a man named John T Daniels who was a served as one of the workers one of the rescue teams at in the Life Saving Station and he was a great big powerful fellow who was good at lifting the plane when they needed to move it one named John T Daniels known as John T to distinguish him from his father who was also John Daniels said later we couldn't help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts they'd stand on the beach for hours at a time just looking at the gulls flying soaring and dipping gannets the giant sea birds with the wings spread of five to six feet seemed a particular interest they would watch the ganas and imitate the movements of their wings with their arms and hands they could imitate every movement of the wings of those gannets we thought they were crazy but we just had to admire the way they could move their arms this way and that and bend their elbows and wrist bones and up and down and which way just like the gammas learning the secret of flight from a bird Orville would later say was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician what they were looking at was the birds that could stay aloft without flapping their wings how did they do that how did they ride the wind how did they understand the waves of the wind and how did they Bank and turn and all the rest and no one had ever really taken that acute interest in watching what was so evident in the skies above us and of course people like John T Daniels soon became soon came to realize that these were remarkable men as he himself said the working us boys I ever saw in my life and for someone on the Outer Banks to say that was really the highest compliment they could pay and and the ability of these brothers not to let that kind of ridicule scorn divert them or discourage them in the slightest and they got more of it back home it wasn't till they got back home when they could develop a plane that would bank and turn this was after the first flight and all the first flight that really did was to take off fly as Ken said not very far and land but not they didn't know how to turn it yet so it was at Huffman Prairie this Pat cow pasture outside of Dayton we're in two years they developed a plane that could do all of those things and even when they did it no one paid any attention to it they would urge the local newspaper people to come out and watch to see what they were doing oh no interest because they knew man can't fly therefore these people are flying therefore they're crackpots and and the United States government slammed the door in their faces over four times saying we're not interested Scientific American showed no interest it wasn't until a delegation showed up from France saying we're very interested in what you're doing we wanted to meet you you bring what you can do over to France demonstrate for us and we will be very interested in purchasing your machines and then it published in gleanings in be oh yes thank you very much there's a little fellow named Amos root who published a beekeepers magazine and Amos wrote was a marvelous little fella and he had made a fortune selling B equipment to beekeepers beekeeping was a huge part of a rural life American life then much more than most of us realized and he heard about the brothers and he broke them and said he was interested to come and see what they were doing and they took his interest to be serious so they invited him come down he saw what they were doing and he wrote an article about it that was both thorough and accurate and he published it in his beekeeping magazine was the first article to appear in print about accurately article about what they had done he offered it to Scientific American telling him they could have it for nothing and they took no interest they never even answered his letter so it's a wonderful example of how we human beings can just shut our eyes and our minds to something as self-evident because we know they can't be true it was not until nineteen eight when Wilbur flew his demonstration flights at lemond in France that the world suddenly realized man could fly so here we have 1900 is the first time they arrived at Kitty Hawk eight years they returned there and then there's Huffman Prairie I think for most of us as part of that just conventional little wisdom we say Kitty Hawk I know that North Carolina license played first in flight but Huffman prairies important and then we migrated to France and LeMond becomes a hugely important thing I mean you've indicated why that the French are the only people showing real interest in this value machine and they've got a long tradition of at least scholarship as well as some entrepreneurs that are trying it but but it really the the real stuff begins to happen in Huffman Prairie and then in yes in France and Huffman Prairie by the way is still there exactly as it was it's been preserved by the US Air Force's now part of wright-patterson field and the house in which the right screw up and their bicycle shop are both at the Ford Museum in Dearborn exactly as they were that house they grew up in a house with no running water no indoor plumbing no electricity no telephone but full of books full of books and full of readers they all read all the time when their sister Catherine was about to have a birthday their first the brothers birthday present to her was a small bust of Sir Walter Scott her favorite author so this was and then when Wilbur arrived in Paris the French were just floored by how much he knew about European history how much he knew about art in music and architecture he wrote wonderful letters home from Paris to his father and his sister describing those buildings that he thought were the most brilliant of the great architectural treasures of Paris and those which he thought were overrated he wrote wonderful article letters to both his father and his sister about the hours he spent in the Louvre studying paintings now this is a bicycle mechanic from Dayton Ohio who can't who can't speak a word of French and the French think he's wonderful and one of the reasons they think he's wonderful is he isn't trying to act like a Frenchman right and they say so no American had ever been so popular in France since Benjamin Franklin as Wilbur Wright and with very good reason I think they loved his modesty and his determination to succeed and his courage must never underestimate but he also had the courage of his convictions he was sure they could do it and he was right they did and always when they succeeded in one step that there I was on the next step up until the time when they perfected the whole thing and went up in the plane together so when they're in Kitty Hawk originally yeah they've got a glider right but then said their bicycle we can we can make that or ervil's of printer first then as a bicycle mechanic they're working together they've got a going concern it keeps growing in in Dayton Ohio the incubator of genius and and and you can sort of see how gliders and bikes you could do this but then they've got to add a motor to it in order to sustain that flight and they have a marvelous assistant who they've got working for them Charlie Taylor Charlie Taylor who's working in the bike shop and and they're flying way ahead of everybody else by just taking a simple simple internal combustion engine modifying it and putting it on their glider yes but also they made it out of aluminum and nobody had ever made an aluminum engine and the rights and Charlie Taylor had never made a motor in their life they were doing it all from scratch that's what's so phenomenal their self teaching themselves everything and when the first the aluminum block of the motor when they first tested it broke they went right back to the Aluminum Company of America it's embryonic little company in Pittsburgh PA and asked for another one they didn't give up they would not give up I think anyone that went through that mosquito attack they were subject one of my questions is skeeters yeah I mean just surviving in Kitty Hawk when they attack I don't think is maybe four of us in his whole audience tonight they wouldn't have gotten up and headed right back home the next morning after that attack it was unbelievable and and the storms and the and the floods and then the crashes Orville Wright crashed at Fort Myer across the Potomac from Washington the army base they're still there and with him was a young lieutenant officer who was interested in aviation named Selfridge who was killed and was the first fatality in the history of aviation only a few days earlier the two different newspapers in Washington ran articles saying the Theodore Roosevelt the president was very interested in going out to Fort Myer and going up for test flight with Orville Wright it could have been him instead of young Selfridge who was on that plane very easily and he would be the first president ever to fly in a plane later on it wasn't with the Wright brothers but while Selfridge was killed Orville was very nearly killed and was damaged seriously both physically and emotionally and as soon as his sister Katherine who was a high school teacher taught Greek and Latin at the local high school and Tate heard that this had happened in mid-afternoon she called the principal said she was taking an extended leave of absence she packed her bags and was on the next train to Washington and stayed with him at his bedside for the next month and several weeks not only looking at making sure he got all the attention for his physical difficulties as possible but boosting his spirits and in many ways I think saving him and he would eventually insist on flying again and would eventually insist on flying again at Fort Myer and would break World Records when he went up again they would not give up no matter what and I think there's a great lesson to be learned in that nor would they ever blame other people or wine or slaps into self-pity or attack their competitors ever I love the phrase cheer up boys there's no hope yeah yeah I I mean you could you know what what news is from the page it was wonderful wonderful and they had a terrific sense of you know your sense of humor this sort of very dry very serious as a humor but they they the commendable thing is they didn't take themselves too seriously and took everything else deadly see I never changed and they never changed it's no matter what helped Amos they got it was exactly the same I it and they are surrounded could you talk a little bit I mean there's some great characters and and and it's worth reading the book to get all the various aviators and and all the folks in the US government and the corporations and the Frenchman and stuff like that but to people the bishop and Katharine the sister I mean you've you've seen her mettle by dropping everything to serve Orville at that incredibly difficult moment but these are two people where you think that these guys don't they can't really make it without the support yeah the father I don't think that the story would have come out the way it did it had Katharine not been part of it I agree and I think you could say the same for the bishop bishop was an amazing man and he kept a phenomenal diary which has been a treasure-house for me and for anyone who writes about the Wright brothers I can't I keep talking about letters and diaries we don't write letters anymore alas and nobody in public life would dare keep a diary because it can be subpoenaed used against you but or an official cell phone are you can erase some of that every time that can or I go to work on a project there's always that hope that maybe you'll find something new something that nobody's seen before notice before and it's happened with every book I've undertaken and I'm very happy to say it's happened again with this book when Wilbur was about 18 he was playing hockey with a gang of local neighborhood boys on an ice pond and he got hit in the teeth with a hockey stick it knocked out all of his upper teeth and left him in terrible pain and swollen painful jaw for weeks and he also lapsed into a spell of depression we'd call it today melancholy they would call it then and became a self-imposed recluse living at home very seldom ever going out to do anything with anyone after three years and he was going to go to college you wanted to go to Yale and people certainly would have gotten in and me but have probably done all kinds of wonderful things who knows what but he never did instead he stayed at home and started reading with an intensity greater than anything that he attempted before and it was at that point that the path of his life took a swerve in a very different direction which consequently led to a very different direction for the for history in general so the question was who hit him with a hockey stick and did he do it intentionally or was it an accident well in 1913 which was a full year after Orville had after Wilbur had died Bishop Wright puts it a notation in his diary saying that the boy who hit hit him with a hockey stick was a man named octave how h au j j8 oliver how h au UHA ugh oliver how later became one of the most notorious murders in the history of ohio he murdered his father his mother his brother and an estimated 12 other people and he's been executed in nineteen six well we did some research on him because needless to say after he became famous as this murderer but there was much written about Billy was the neighborhood bully and he lived right around the corner from the rights and he was very poor because his father was a house painter that number of children and because he they were poor he worked as a clerk in the local drugstore and he suffered from rotting teeth and the druggist and feeling very sorry for this boy help tried to help believe it alleviate his pain by giving them the only painkiller of the day which was codeine excuse me cocaine and he became addicted to cocaine and had to be institutionalized in the hospital later became addicted to alcohol and lapsed into this homicidal career now we don't know whether he did it intentionally or accidentally but I think it's a very important element in the story because it reminds us that this marvelous setting that they grew up in was not exactly a rock Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover kind of thing there were tragedies there were people suffering oh there were was difference between poverty and the lack thereof and the idea that this these two young men would come out of that same neighborhood to me is infinitely fascinating and makes it again an infinitely more human story I think to that and I hope you'll agree that that the part that Katherine plays which has not been made much of by anybody before is of supreme importance he reminds me very much of Emily Roebling indeed and of Abigail Adams but in different ways because she was right she was feisty she was opinionated she could get very mad rafi is she's a theme that's yeah and she was funny and she was always there when they needed her and she was bright should tiny little woman about five foot one tied her hair back in a bun had a gold rim pins nay glasses she looked like the essence of a schoolmarm and she was a great bicycle rider so the memories of reading this book gobbling it up and and and the parallel experience of nearly 40 years ago reading the Brooklyn Bridge book I was reminded about how much you allow the voice of the past the weather its letters are the Diaries to live how much that's influenced me by adding first-person voices to the third-person narration just sort of close exactly what you do your friend because we let them speak for themselves and then you hear the way they speak you you hear both the style of articulation of the time and how they were but you also realize how very much like us they were to it that they have a humanity that it is an enormous Rock well painting that it doesn't have this kind of cliched sense of it these are complicated life as everyone in this room has and I would love before we move to the questions from the audience for you just to read a very late Wilbur I don't want to give too much away is receiving a great honor in France and I've taken a part of a quote there thank you and I'd love you to read it it's it's from I believe I understand it be worried it might put them to sleep I believe it's the French transcribing his English and then here is this this is Wilbur right clearly the genius of it it couldn't been done without both of them but this is the man who I think speaks for for the family and for the age this was a white tie dinner of the elite of intellectual Paris given in the what was the Automobile Club then and still is in a room of a palatial banquet room that's still there in Paris on the shelves Alizee and it it's delivered in English and as Ken said was translated as he spoke by Wilbur for myself and my brother I thank you for the honor you are doing us and for the cordial reception you have tendered us this evening Orville was not there if I'd been born in your beautiful country and had grown up among you I could not have expected a warmer welcome that has just been given me when we did not know each other we had no confidence in each other today when we are acquainted it is otherwise we believe each other and we are friends I thank you to this in the enthusiasm of being a shown in the enthusiasm being shown around me I see not merely an outburst intended to glorify a person but a tribute to an idea that is always impassioned mankind I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space at full speed above all obstacles on the infinite highway of the air that's fantastic I I was also struck by a quote you had from William Dean Howells who said people had the courage of their dream absolutely I think that if that character really good oh hi oh man a good eye oh man exactly I would have it so let me let me go to some of your questions and we'll try to do this in a lightening round to get as many in but the first one I can reject ladies he is married his wife is in the audience please the great Rosalie McCullough may I interrupt a minute that one of the rules lessons of history is almost nothing in consequences accomplished alone exactly and it's never more true than a book particularly the kind of book that I write and all those people authors of history and biography include in their acknowledgments are all people that really contributed but no one has contributed to this book or to all of my books the wave has way my editor in chief has my Mission Control my guiding star my dear wife Rosalie would you stand up please let let let me unfairly pile on and say most helpful of all most encouraging inspiring indispensable as always and most deserving of my wholehearted gratitude is my editor-in-chief and guiding star my wife Rosalie yeah that's a good way to end an acknowledgment let me tell you and that's and that's and that's very sixty years married this year okay we're we're off to a good start yeah right yeah you've had a good half century and then some yeah Ohio and North Carolina both claimed to be the birthplace of aviation can you settle this no no no they are there are both the birthplaces of aviation the first to fly first plane ever to fly happened in North Carolina the first practical plane to take to the air happened in Dayton Ohio has there been a historical figure whom you wanted to do a book on but felt it was too daunting an undertaking no yeah we like to bite off more than we can chew and yeah figure out we always are yeah yeah it's always bigger than you think it is yeah always you have written many excellent books what's your favorite and why it's for me it would be a saying which is my favorite child they can't do that I would say generally speaking it's always the one I've been working on and in now this this book right now is my favorite but who knows what will follow yeah oh you have five children I believe and numerous grandchildren and I have four daughters and I always say exactly that I have copped out since we made our series on jazz by what Duke Ellington our most prolific composer 2500 compositions when asked what his most important one he says the one I'm working on now and and and moves it right along how many languages do you speak what and and not always that way well I I think I I think we can safely say not only one well but writes it very well too I could get by pretty well in Italy but using my arms kid yeah you know Jacques Barzun said that the that the French were Italians in bad moods could you could you please comment on the process you go through when choosing research and writing about a particular topic well when I first started out I thought the way you do this I was an English major in college and I'd really knew nothing about doing historical research or a writing of history or biography I knew I wanted to write and I had a story I wanted to tell so I thought was I should do all the research and then write the book but I very quickly found that I wanted to do both at the same time you do enough research to get yourself motivated and sufficiently knowledgeable to write a few passable chapters because when you get writing that you realize how much you don't know and what you specifically you need to find out so I'm doing research all the way through all the time I have a wonderful research assistant with whom I've worked now for over 30 years Mike Hill who's also worked with Ken he's the best in the business and he lives outside of Washington so he can cover the Smithsonian and Library of Congress National Archives and all that and the amount of reading that goes into any project of this sort is enormous far more than most people realize and part of the problem for him for me at least is I love to read but when I'm within the book working on a book I really have no time or desire to read anything but what I need to know to do the book so I get starved for reading good good fiction mainly out the door and so right now I'm back reading again and I was so sorry to read about Ruth Rendell's yes she was absolutely marvelous writer one of my favorites of all wrote marvelous detective novels but they're much more than that they were great novels and I think that I like people can tell a story well I remember barber type with one of the first books that Billiam impressed me was barber Tuckman's guns of August and I remember she read there's no secret no secret history teaching history or writing history tell stories and so that's what the research is about and he can't make anything up you can't jiggle the statistics or the facts to suit your own desires but so often the truth is more interesting than fiction it really truly is and there are things that happen in real life and if you put them in a novel your editor would tell you to take it out because it was unbelievable imagine Jefferson and Adams dying on the same day and it's the fourth of July oh no that wouldn't happen 350 years to the moment yeah yeah I and also you have to have a terrific editor and I have a terrific editor that had three terrific editors Peter swayed Michael kurta and Bob bender and Bob's here tonight and he's he's tops and and and the your publisher is very important I've had the same publisher for 50 years and I would Simon Shuster I wouldn't change why should I want to change and I always felt if they if I was loyal to them they'd be loyal to me and they sure have and I feel I feel so lucky that they have been my publisher all along I think the world of Simon & Schuster and the people who run it you have a background in painting and there is something very visual about your your writing it makes for good movies other people get inspired by what you do in and make movies or miniseries about it and your books are always you know sometimes the photographs in the middle are kind of afterthoughts and yours are not there very carefully curated can you talk about that part of you that is so visually oriented that the painter in you well I thought for at first I would be a painter and I still paint and I think it's something that having anyone who wants to write should do is take court a lessons in painting or drawing because it teaches you to see to really look and Dickens said make me see that's what a writer's business was about and I'm very interested as you know Ken in photography and it was because of photographs I saw way back in the 1960s at the Library of Congress of what happened to Johnstown when the dam broke in the mountains in 1889 that I got interested in the subject and took that on as my first book and I use photographs as a as a source a resource for research because by looking at photographs you can see things that are often not available to be seen in what's available in print just as paintings are very valuable you're working in the 18th century when there were no photographs you go to look at study the paintings what color were his eyes what really did he look like the paintings of John Trumbull for example of all the founders absolutely invaluable to anyone who wants to write about that time and those people everything about trumble's famous painting of the 4th of July 1776 is inaccurate the whole scene is inaccurate never took place but what is accurate in detail are the faces and that that is of utmost important because every one of those men who signed that document was signing his death certificate he was revealing that he was a traitor and there and it was therefore accountable so it's a very brave thing to have your portrait in that painting and all those studies that Trumbull the faces the drawings and not just the painting are all available to be seen in the collection at Yale and they were the utmost value to me in doing the research for my John Adams books and and for 1776 you brought this up earlier in a recurring theme in some of the questions is this anxiety that we don't write letters anymore oh yeah we'll have the email hard drives we hope man maybe a hundred years from now we'll know how to read them but what's your worry or do you have a worry do you just think that we'll figure out a way to get inside folks the way you well I don't know what would they'll work with in the future and I know the Jim Billington the head of the Library of Congress is very concerned about they're trying to figure out what to do we don't know how long the electronic media electronic communications will last but nobody writes letters and the letters that go out as email or hardly in the English language and and and the young people today don't even do that it's sad I was just talking with more Janklow my agent in and Linda's wife this evening that autumn almost half of the business schools in the country now require their incoming freshmen to take a basic course in how to write a letter because and they're all these people of course these freshmen are all college graduates and they can't write a presentable letter or report or analysis and so forth and they need to learn how to do that and I gave a talk at the Tuck Business School of Dartmouth recently and I urged these young people to take a look this rights brothers story because there's an absolutely shining example of two people who had none of the advantages of going to college or the TUC business school who could write superbly and and it's valuable what's the name of Charlie of Walter the the great hunter investment Warren Buffett Warren Buffett's partner Charlie Munger Charlie Munger Charlie Munger's autobiography he said I never knew a leader who wasn't a reader and that's so true John Adams said you'll never be alone with a poet in your pocket how wonderful and we can all still carry a poet in our pocket and maybe the 15 volumes of poetry of them well you thinking Herve I know that may be the advantage there and and and and young people should be taught to read up read above their heads I read writers that they think are a little hard for them to understand read good writing that's how you that's how you get into the rhythm of it Willa Cather used to sit down with something really well-written before she started each day often reading the Bible I don't think it was for religious reasons I think she would really want to get that feeling of cadence and power this is one and maybe given the time we we might go out on this dear mr. McCullough I just love you as a Pittsburgher would you consider writing a book about our wonderful city PS congratulations on your bridge thank you I had a bridge named for me in Pittsburgh which was about as big an honor as anyone could get and I'm thrilled about it and it was it's not just any old bridges this 16th Street bridge which was designed by the same architect who designed Grand Central and the engineer in charge was the engineer structural engineer for the Empire State Building so they they went and got big talent to do that job and Pittsburgh is is it is a story city oh I think all River cities our story cities and I know other writers have felt that way including somebody named Twain I think yeah not not a lot of literature about Las Vegas yeah or Phoenix or there's printable yes yes I would sir I have concea Slee considered doing a book about Pittsburgh I keep a running list of possible future books and but I've promised myself and my family that I won't look at it until next fall I've got several questions here that are about many other claims to being the first flight Gustave Whitehead Alberto do mall can you okay I mean I even going in and and I thought you'd do an expert job at the end of the book of swatting away a few of these things which we in the history trade are constantly happening to do it wasn't Meriwether Lewis murdered yes well you do know for example that we didn't really land on the moon no no there's a it was all done with special effects yeah yes yes yeah or ice wall didn't kill Kennedy yeah yeah yeah no I don't know what why there's no evidence whatever for the Whitehead claim people who knew him claimed he never flew anything and when he went to demonstrate what he could do with his plane it didn't work it's just somehow this story he erupts or comes back to the surface about every 35 40 years and it's been going on for a long time this is the 1930s yes other people were experimenting but mostly of the only successful ones were in France but when Wilbur came to France and flew a people by Blair EO and delagrandeaventure you we are all trying to take off in the Potomac and splashing and and you have this a real kind of almost a great race that's going on if not simultaneously then at least you realize that if they hadn't done it you know and maybe I think we will go out on this last question this is a good one as a high school student I'm constantly being flooded with stories with the underlying message of anything is possible if you set your mind to it the story of the Wright brothers seems to be no exception but if the Wright brothers were really geniuses as you say how can I just a normal person from very privileged upbringing quite unlike the Wright brothers expect to be able to accomplish something so amazing that's a very very good question and it might be said I think in fairness that Wilbur had not been a genius it wouldn't have worked but Orville was not a genius nor was Charlie Taylor nor was Catherine right nor was built and right they're all working together and so you the part you might play might not be the brilliant mind that can break through where no mind ever has gone before but you can be part of something like that I don't think that that's the message to take from this story to me what is elemental is that we Americans and I'm not being a jingoistic about this we Americans have from the beginning had a certain knack of solving problems that was different from other civilizations other ways of life societies our country is in itself innovation and innovation and the solving of problems is how we have built the country I think for example that future historians will look upon this time and they will see that the phenomenal accomplishments are not what we think are the phenomenal accomplishments one will be medicine imagine what's happened in medicine in our lifetime in this country revolutionary the second is though our universities and colleges have problems and they're expensive expenses a big part of it we have nonetheless in this free country created the greatest universities in all the world the greatest universities in all history and that is the momentous accomplishment if these were cathedrals rising on the horizon we'd all stand back and say that's Chartres Cathedral but we don't see it that way because we're too much involved with what we're all doing and the whole idea of education is central to all what this is about Jefferson said any nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be and that's an underlying theme in our our way of life I think the lesson to be primary lesson to be learned from the Wright brothers story is the virtue and the advantage and the the enlargement of life that comes with having high purpose and that focuses your life that's what makes you want to get up out of bed in the morning and get back to work ladies and gentlemen David McCullough you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 102,975

Rating: 4.7644286 out of 5

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, David McCullough (Author), Ken Burns (TV Writer), The Wright Brothers, History (TV Genre)

Id: 0sTJxX_ORvo

Length: 67min 8sec (4028 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2015

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[u/derdody]

Thank you!