Writing History Isn't Like Building an Airplane
You've got a lot more degrees of freedom before you change it so much that it won't fly.
My 6th grade teacher lied to me about how airplanes fly (but he was lied to in his turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats).
I feel comfortable using the word “wrong” for this description of how airfoils work. If you tried to build an airplane using this model, it wouldn’t fly. In engineering, design decisions are influenced by culture and individual perspective, but physics gets a veto.
That’s why, when Wilbur Wright invented the airplane, he first tested it in a wind tunnel before inviting his brother and sister to come help him finish it.
What, isn’t that how you learned the story?
Did Two Wrights Make A Plane? A Surprisingly Hard Question.
Some historians have recently started arguing that Orville’s role in inventing the airplane has been overstated. Wilbur’s early writing about the project used the first person singular, only switching to the plural after the key insights had been tested. Wilbur, in the family’s letters, comes across like an inventor, while Orville comes across like a technician. It’s not clear whether Orville was actually there for some of the earliest experiments, although he did win the coin-flip that entitled him to be the first successful test pilot.
The story they weave tends to attribute the “myth of the Wright Brothers” to a public relations decision the two made early on. To overcome skepticism and win patent battles, they needed a good story, and two equal partners made for a better one. Some people also point to the fact that Orville lived much longer than Wilbur, causing the only “authorized biography of the Wright brothers” to be one authorized only by Orville. So, if you want drama, you can even paint this as Orville rewriting history to steal credit.
In defense of this alleged “myth,” one might point out that you do, in fact, need a skilled technician in order to build a working prototype of a new machine. Even if we accept the inference that Wilbur was the creative and motivating force behind the project, the fact remains that he requested and relied on Orville’s help and may not have succeeded otherwise. Orville also sacrificed greatly for the project. He never fully recovered from an early crash. So why not go along with the news coverage of the time and let Orville share top billing?
But once you go from one to two, it’s difficult to find a principled way to stop there, rather than going on to three.
Meet Katharine Wright
Did I say that the news coverage of the time always credited the two brothers? Sorry, that was kind of a half-truth. Sometimes, especially in Europe, the story went more like this: “Wilbur did the science, Orville did the engineering, Katharine did the math.”
Katharine, the youngest of the three siblings credited, always denied this. “I did no pioneer work in connection with the invention of the airplane,” she wrote in a letter to a magazine. “That pretty story was the outcome of someone’s imagination.”
Her “no pioneer work” claim is probably mostly true. There’s no evidence, anyway, that she was outright lying. People are willing to doubt her brothers’ claims of being equal partners, but generally not this claim of Katharine’s.
Still, she’s stretching the truth just a tad.
Katharine definitely made substantive contributions to the project after the initial invention. During the design, she served as, at minimum, a rubber duck, in addition to being in charge of logistics and press, and working a full-time job as a teacher. This last bit maybe helped ensure they had, as tech startups put it today, enough runway. What we know for sure is that starting in 1909, she became the public face of the Wright Company in Europe. Myth-building was essential for the company—they would live or die based on public and governmental perception. Did they have the moral rights to their patents? Could this machine be trusted with our lives and money? They needed a celebrity, and for a time, Katharine was happy to oblige.
When Orville severely injured himself in a crash the previous year, Katharine’s life had been changed along with his. She left her teaching career, forever as it turned out, to tend to him during his recovery. Orville felt she had saved his life. If Orville’s life-changing injury qualifies him for a place in the myth, then, well, maybe it qualifies Katharine too.
Aviation was never her true passion, though. As Orville used to joke, feminism was her Roman Empire. She wrote about it in 1924:
I get “het up” over living forever in a “man’s world,” with so much discussion about what kind of men women like, that it’s a good deal like the particular subject of woman suffrage used to be with me. Orv always teased me about that. When we were working for it, he used to say that woman suffrage was like Rome in one respect: all roads led to it, with me. No matter however where the conversation started. I always managed to switch it off on to the woman suffrage track. It wasn’t quite as bad as that but I was very much “in earnest” about it, to put it mildly, I know that’s settled and I look around for other worlds to conquer. But no man can ever know how some women, at least, felt about that.
After selling the company, Katharine leveraged her celebrity as a Wright Sibling to push Ohio to become one of the first states to ratify the 19th Amendment, granting all sexes the vote. The next world she conquered was her alma mater, Oberlin College, at which she became an active alum and eventually a member of the Board of Trustees.
She died estranged from Orville, who felt she’d “abandoned” him by getting a life of her own. So, here too, if you want to postulate an Orvillian rewrite of history, you have a motive for him to diminish her role.
Wilbur, Brothers, or Siblings?
Who invented the airplane? There are some wrong answers to this question. It wasn’t aliens. It wasn’t Charles Lindbergh. It wasn’t Marilyn Monroe. There’s a base reality that gets a veto here too.
But the correct answer depends on where you’re departing from, and where you’re hoping to arrive. If you’re studying the mindset behind bold, creative innovation, it might make sense to say it was Wilbur. If you’re trying to tell an appealing and factually accurate story, whether you go Brothers or Siblings depends on you and your audience. If you’re trying to celebrate the invention, well, what kinds of work are you interested in celebrating, and what kinds of people?
“Who invented the airplane?” is not a precise enough question to necessarily have a definitive answer (see also, those endless patent battles). “Invented” is a much more problematic, culturally-dependent term than, say, “flew”. It doesn’t have an objectively correct description you can derive using experiments in a wind tunnel.
If you’re arguing with someone about who invented the airplane, with each of you having reasonable positions, one of two things is happening. You may have accidentally started arguing over definitions (“is a hotdog a sandwich?”) while feeling like it’s over something more substantive. Or you might be in a political conflict. The two of you might have different goals in telling the story. In either case, neither of you is wrong about who invented the airplane. Both of you are wrong about how many valid answers there are. Words can have multiple popular definitions. History should be pluralist.
I shaded this story with one of my biases at the end of the last section, did you catch it? I wrote that the 19th Amendment granted all sexes the right to vote. Should I have said “granted women” instead? The Amendment doesn’t use the words “women” or “men”. But I’m sure almost all of the people who voted on ratification believed there were only two human sexes, and that men’s suffrage was not in danger. On the other hand, “all sexes” comes closer to defining the current meaning of the Amendment, in the practical sense of how it’s likely to be interpreted by the courts. The 2020 United States Supreme Court ruled, in a case about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that the intents or beliefs of the writers when they used the word “sex” don’t matter, since the actual phrasing is so unambiguous. On the third hand, I was writing about the narrative arc of Katharine’s life, and Katharine thought of it as “woman suffrage”.
Like the number of Wrights who invented the airplane, gender is not a matter of arithmetic.
History is facts, but it isn’t just facts. It’s also the story you choose to tell with them. That story depends on your culture, values, and intent. That’s what I mean when I say that history’s been cyberpunked. Without a dominant culture, we can’t have a consensus history.