David McCullough with Ken Burns on The Wright Brothers

Well, let me start this afternoon by thanking you all for coming to what seems like a full house, understandably. I had the great pleasure of reading this book and it is fantastic. I remember having the experience of reading a paperback version of The Great Bridge in the winter of 1977, the epic story of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and turning to my companions who looked at me in amazement and with a sense of my impending madness. when I said I want to make a movie about this, the story of Brooklyn. Bridge and they kind of shook their heads.

That was my chance 38 years ago to meet the gentleman on my left. It has had a profound influence on everything I have done because it taught me a lot about how to tell a story and There is a lot about how you write, how you translate complex information for a general popular audience that helps unite our country, the way that you also edit things and spend time in files, so in many ways I feel privileged but also Not qualified I thought that perhaps one thing qualified me for this late night conversation and that is that my parents spent their honeymoon in Kittyhawk in 1950 and therefore I feel like I have some experience in aviation, although all I want is a phenomenal experience. book and and David.

As I read it, I remember the excitement and the drive that I had back in 1977 when I read The Great Bridge, it had that kind of sweep around things and I think the first question I want to ask These are maybe two parts: one, the core of this book is the surviving archival record, the extraordinary letters that were written, the diaries that were kept, the Life materials and things, the receipts, the contracts and all the things that we are in the process of. and the various things we do in the distillation process and what a wonderful record it could be to look through all your work, it seems to me that you take or try to take and put your arm around or try to get in touch with a American Exceptionalism is a term very loaded nowadays because several people use it to be against or for it, but we don't really understand it.

There is something quintessentially American about it. Something happened between these two oceans and their books without even deviating from the hagiographic without even becoming a polyana means that you are willing to pull up the rug and tell the dark side and understand that there are shadows in these extraordinary stories in broad relief, this is about something of the American character, um, and there's something that's really unique and it's a theme that runs through all the people and the institutions and the events that you've captured in such large archives and such large themes. What about that? Yeah, well, my second question now before I try to do it. keep going with that thought those thoughts I would like to tell you about something that happened to me recently in Boston where we have an apartment in Back Bay and it was during the horrendous month of February and we were doing marketing When the time came, we dared to go out and look supplies to survive and, um, we made a list and I headed to Shaw's Market, which is a big grocery store right in Back Bay and I love going to the market, it's weird.

I know, but I really love it and I found everything on the list except cashews and I couldn't for the life of me find them and a young man walked by, uh, a comparatively young guy in a Shaws Market t-shirt and I asked him. Could you tell me where the cashews are and he said follow me so I went to him and he showed me where they were and I thanked him so much and about 10 or 15 minutes later I was paying at the register and he. He came up to me again and said: Excuse me, but that voice, have you ever done voices for television?

I told him yes, he told me that you were the narrator of the Ken Burns Civil War series and I said yes, that's true, 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 uploaded uh yeah, uh, the footage of this American story from the wri

brothers

It is phenomenal, it is not just that they have survived but that there are more than a thousand letters that deal only with their professional world and their professional struggle and then there are more than a thousand letters that are private family correspondence or diaries and they were raised in a family where their father He placed great emphasis on the use of the English language both on paper and when standing, and the letters are not only extraordinary for what they reveal and how intimate they become, but also for the quality of thought and use of vocabulary and everything else and what is so humbling and at the same time exhilarating and encouraging is that none of them finished high school and their ability to express themselves is second to none just like their sisters. ability to write and it is the epistolary correspondence between the father who was an itinerant minister and the sister and the two

brothers

that makes it possible to delve into their lives as human beings not only as phenomenal achievements, the creators of a phenomenal achievement and yes, this In fact, it is a powerful American story and, in my opinion, it is a story with numerous lessons for all of us.

I think one of the virtues of history is that it serves as an antidote to the arrogance of the present and constantly reminds us of the extraordinary people who came before us and whose achievements have made it a different and different world - a world from which we benefit greatly. and we owe them much more gratitude than we are used to expressing or what is commonly taught and when we also understand how hard they worked and these two brothers are a perfect example that not only were they brilliant but they worked extremely hard and never let them failures, setbacks, disappointments, near-death incidents prevented them from pursuing what they set out to do. to achieve it they had a purpose High purpose I don't mean that as a bad pun High purpose and this in itself was their way of finding happiness.

They were never happier than when they were at work and particularly when the work was getting difficult and they were not in it to make life easier or smoother or to get rich or any of those things, they are chasing some wonderful, ambitious, achievement. admirable and they did it alone, without any support, neither support from a university, nor money, nor support from a foundation, nor rich benefactor, without influence in high places, without political funds and without money, all their expenses had to be covered with income from the profits of his bike shop in Dayton Ohio, but even if they had not been successful, he would have wanted to do it.

I have written this book so revealing, so intensely human is your human story and a great reminder of the standards of behavior and, uh, and of ambition, a worthy ambition that we must remember because it is part of our history and it must be part of our continuity. In the story there is a wonderful moment at the beginning of the book where you quote Wilbur saying that to get ahead in life you need to choose a good father and a good mother and then live in Ohio, so you just paint a picture. of what Ohio meant in the late 19th century in terms of its ability to incubate not only aviators but also presidents and seemed to be a place, I mean, I still live in New England, where the Rocks continue to grow in the much smarter soil. people went to the Ohio Valley, yeah, well, there's something particularly American about Ohio history and that is, when you look at who came from Ohio and what they did, they're pretty notable inventor presidents and there's a strange coincidence, maybe It's not a coincidence that the first human being to fly in a flying machine and the first human being to walk on the moon came from the same section of southwestern Ohio, Neil Armstrong and then of course John Glenn also came from Ohio, just like Edison.

Did many other people do it in that protean era? uh, you kindly, uh, you mentioned my book about the Brooklyn Bridge. I see this book as the third in a trilogy about phenomenal achievements, apart from politics or the military, the first is the Brook Bridge, the second is the Panama Canal and now this achievement of the Right Brothers, all three were in theory technical achievements, but all three were also much more than that, involving much more than just technical expertise, all three involved many people, all three demanded phenomenal courage because it was a very dangerous job in which people died and, um, the three changed the world in their own way and of course it all had to do with transportation but that was because the world was expanding and then the world really expanded with aviation last year. 2014 an airport in this country and not necessarily the largest or busiest O'Hare Field 70 million people entered and exited O'Hare Field, most of them would travel between 35 and 4000 feet assuming that this was perfectly normal, but I rarely wonder how it happened, who did it, who made it happen, there is a scene where you remember, I know we talked in Butch choosing the sundan kid where the pos follow them, who are those and They keep saying who they are those guys, who are those guys who won't give up, won't stop, and I have my feelings when I read about the robbers who built the Brooklyn Bridge or the people who were involved in the construction. the Panama Canal and the Bri.

I think about who those guys were and how the hell they did it and what and what we can learn from them, what we can take to heart to be savored and passed on, a value they taught us. how they conduct their lives Ed, you know, we live in a media culture, everything is too much information to curate, certainly, and the information we think we have is mostly superficial, so the right brothers, if Americans can you name who started this um and possibly. two guys, Wilbur and Orville, but the amazing thing about your book is that these people come completely alive, their father, uh, the bishop, um, sister Catherine, but these two guys, the mother who died prematurely of tuberculosis, I think At age 58, Susan had identified herself.

In these two of her children, the two youngest of her children, something is happening. Yeah, what was that? Can you just give us a little portrait of these two extraordinary human beings because they are extremely similar and extremely different? in temperament and personality and accomplishments and the roles that they played and shaped them to not be just that superficial Orille and Wilbur. I win that Jeopardy contest. Well, to many people they looked like identical twins and they sounded a lot. It seemed like they were in another room and you heard one of them talking you couldn't tell which was which their handwriting seems almost identical uh they lived in the same house they ate together three meals a day they worked together in the same store all day and they worked together in this extracurricular crusade that they themselves determined, but they were quite different. um Orville, the oldest was, in my opinion and in the opinion of others, without a doubt a genius, a genuine genius, Orville, who was four and a half, almost five years younger. uh, he was mechanically inventive and innovative and brilliant as can be, but he wasn't what his brother Orville was and Orville was the leader, he was an older brother and what he said was what they did.

Wilbur was the older brother. Orille was very painfully shy. shy as his mother had been, while Wilbur, although he did not like courting Limelight, in fact tried to avoid it, was a brilliant speaker, could, could, could stand in front of an audience, a professional group, or a group of imminent engineers and intellectuals in Paris and give a talk that no professor or presidential speechwriter of our day could match and again none of them went to university um Orville Orville could get in a bad mood, they called him in the family are his peculiar spells where he He would get tired and touchy and, um, we would say, depressed, uh, but it wouldn't last long, they could argue something fierce and end up each taking the side that the other had taken at the beginning of the argument, as only brothers can do. they do yes and they and they um that was one of their ways of solving a problem, discovering the solution to a problem, they are always discovering solutions to seemingly insoluble problems and problems, problems that the greatest Minds in all of history had not been. able to discover one of the keys to their success was that they realized that it was one thing to invent a flying machine but another thing to fly the flying machine.

Now part of that, of course, comes from what we consider it to be. common sense experience when riding a bike, you can't explain to someone how to ride a bike, they have to get on the bike and learn how to balance people like Octave Shenut who was a great glider expert enthusiast or Samuel Langley. the director of the Smithsonian, one of the most brilliant scientists of his time, whose name is Langle Field. They were wonderful theorists about how a machine could be made to fly, but none of them had ever set foot on such a machine or had any intention of doing so.

Wilbur said there are two ways to train 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 train that horse and the other is to go and get on the horse. and set it up and they said that had been our procedure and every time they went up in their plane or in their gliders every timeThey knew that they were risking their lives, they could kill them and that is why they never flew together because they wanted to make sure that one of them had been killed.

Others would still be alive to continue the search for the mission and it was not until 1910, when they knew that they had really done what their entire life's efforts had been focused on and that they had achieved it, that they had a great uh Air Show we would call it today at Huffman Prairie outside of Datton, a cow pasture which is where they did much of of their most important job where they invited the city to come out and look and they both went up together. which was their way of saying we had done it and they had done it and Wilbur, unfortunately, only lived two more years; sadly he died of typhoid fever in 1912, when he was still 40 years old and there is a tremendous Greek tragedy irony in that because the father was constantly warning the children to be careful with impure water, always make sure you know that the water is clean and Orville had almost died of typhoid fever when he was still a teenager and then Wilbur succumbs to it, but I think it's a reminder.

Also, this was a time when life was not what it is now and you could die from contaminated water just as you could die from other diseases. Evil that no longer concerns us and, to me, one of the The most phenomenal things of all, Ken, is that As you well know, when Orville made his first flight it wasn't that long ago as the story goes, and yet we live in a world where aviation is everywhere and often , has played a horrible role in the terrible wars of our lifetime and before and yet you might have known Orville Wright, many of you here tonight might have known Orville Wright, he didn't die until 1948, so according to As the story goes, this was just the other day and um, and the idea that most people don't know anything about them, I didn't know anything about them when I first started on this project is to me a mistake and it's a shame and I think with all the emphasis we are putting on innovation today, all these young people who want to start companies of this and that type and the importance of innovation for our future for our economy I think everyone in that field should read the story of Orville and Wiber Wright and see how much there is in it beyond being intelligent or brilliant or having an advantage to occupy a position in a place. where you can rub up against other people who are involved with innovation.

I loved this type of combination in the book, it is not naive, they are simple, they are direct and they have NE, they cannot, their pockets cannot. The cool thing about your book is that you have all these darker Shadows that are on the outside. I think it's a wonderful scene and I don't want to get too much into the engineering weeds. you have these two theorists while you were talking about Lilian thaal and chenut who have sets of proportions that will surely work and that will affect what is called camber and the wri brothers originally work with their own proportions and then they succeed in in their next test they are going to use Lilian thals and shenu and nothing works and that proves it and it also proves that in business you are always on the edge of your seat reading this book thinking oh no, now someone is going to take advantage and this is going to turn into and they were always so resolute themselves who resisted The Temptations of the QuickBook uh for another thing it's very, very impressive particularly Wilbur I think thank you I'd like to read something if I may have borrowed this U.

I think in many ways one of my favorite parts of the entire book is their story, when they first arrive at Kittyhawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which were very remote at the time because there was no bridge there. or something like that and only a few people lived there and they lived a very primitive life, to say the least, and then you have these two young men from western Ohio who show up in business suits and wear coats and ties every day . every day as if they were walking down the street in Dayton and the reaction 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 served as such. of the workers of one of the rescue teams at the lifesaving station and was a big powerful guy who was good at lifting the plane when they needed to move it, one called John T Daniels known as John T to distinguish him from his father who was also John Daniels who later said that we couldn't help but think they were just a couple of poor crazy people who stood on the beach for hours at a time just watching the seagulls fly, glide and dive at the Ganets, the giant seabirds with outstretched wings. .

From five to six feet they seemed to be of particular interest. They observed the Ganet and imitated the movements of its wings with their arms and hands. They could imitate every movement of the wings of those G. We thought they were crazy but we just had to admire the way they could move their wings. arms from side to side and bending the elbows and wrist bones and up and down and to the W, just like the Ganet learning the secret of a bird's flight, Orville would later say that it was very much like learning the secret of a bird's magic.

A magician what they were looking at were the birds that could stay in the air without flapping their wings, how did they do it, how did they ride the wind, how did they understand the waves of the wind and how they tilted, turned and everything else? No one had ever shown such great interest in observing what was so evident in the skies above us and, of course, people like John T. Daniels soon realized that these were extraordinary men and, as he himself said, the guys who worked at EST that I ever saw in my life and for someone on the Outer Banks to say that was really the greatest compliment they could give and the ability of these brothers to not let that kind of ridicule put them down or discourage them in what minimal and they got more of that at home it wasn't until they returned home that they were able to develop an airplane that would pitch and turn.

This was after the first flight and all the first flight really did was take off, fly like Ken said, not too far away and Landed but I didn't know they didn't know how to turn it yet so it was in Huffman Prairie, this cow pasture in the outskirts of Dayton, where in two years they developed an airplane that could do all those things and even when they did them. no one paid attention, they urged the local journalists to come out and watch what they were doing without interest because they knew that man cannot fly, therefore these people do not fly, therefore they are nuts and um. and the US government slammed the door in their faces more than four times saying we are not interested Scientific American did not show any interest it was not until a delegation from France showed up saying we are very interested in what They were doing what we wanted To meet you, bring what you can do to France, demonstrate to us and we will be very interested in buying your machines and then it will be published in Gleanings in Be.

Oh yes, thank you very much. There was a little guy called Amos Root who published a Beekeepers magazine and Amos Root was a wonderful little fella and he made a fortune selling beekeeping equipment to beekeepers. Beekeeping was a big part of rural life. American life was much more than most of us imagined and the brothers heard about and wrote about. them and said he was interested in coming and seeing what they were doing and they took his interest seriously so they invited him to come and he saw what they were doing and wrote an article about it that was both complete and accurate and published it . in their beekeeping magazine was the first article to appear in print about a precise article about what they had done.

He offered it to Scientific American saying they could have it for nothing and they showed no interest, didn't even respond to his letter, so that's wonderful. An example of how we humans can simply close our eyes and minds to something is evident because we know it cannot be true. It wasn't until 198, when Wilbur made his demonstration flights in Leon, France, that suddenly the world realized that man could fly, fly, so here we have 1900, it's the first time they reach the cyhawk years , they go back there and then there's Huffman Prairie. I think for most of us, as part of that little bit of conventional wisdom, we say Kitty Hawk.

I know North Carolina. license played First in Flight um, but Huffman Prairie is important and then we migrate to France and Lon becomes very important. I mean, you've pointed out why the French are the only ones who are real and have a tradition. of at least scholarships, as well as some businessmen who are trying, but really the real things start to happen in Huffman Prairie and then in France and Huffman Prairie, by the way, is still there exactly as it was, it has been preserved by the La Fuerza U.S. Air Force is now part of Wright Patterson Field and the house that Rights grew up in and their bike shop are at the Ford Museum in Dearborn exactly as they were that house they grew up in in a house with no running water or indoor plumbing. no electricity, no telephone, but full of books, full of books and full of readers, everyone read all the time when his sister Katherine was about to have her birthday, her birth, the birthday gift her brother gave her was a B little one by Sir Walter Scott, his favorite author.

So when Wilbur arrived in Paris, the French were stunned by how much he knew about European history, how much he knew about art and music and architecture. He wrote wonderful letters from Paris to his father and his sister describing those buildings. which he thought were the brightest of the great architectural treasures of Paris and those he thought were overrated, he wrote wonderful letters to his father and his sister about the hours he spent at the Loof studying paintings. Now this is a bike mechanic from Dayton Ohio, who can't, who doesn't know how to speak a word of French and the French think he's wonderful and one of the reasons they think he's wonderful is because he's not trying to act like a Frenchman and they say no American had ever been there. as 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 should never be underestimated, but he also had the courage of his convictions, he was sure that they could do it. and he was right, they did it and whenever they were successful in one step, their eyes were on the next step until the moment they perfected everything and got on the plane together, so when they were originally in Kittyhawk, yes, we have a glider right, but then they are bicycles, we can make Orville a printer first and then a bicycle mechanic and they are working together, they have a concern that continues to grow in Dayton, Ohio, the incubator. of genius and um and you can see how gliders and bicycles could do this, but then they have to add a motor to sustain that flight and they have a wonderful assistant that they have working. for them at Charlie Taylor Charlie Taylor, who works at the bike shop and is flying miles ahead of everyone else just by taking a simple internal combustion engine symbol, modifying it, and putting it on his glider, yes, but they also did it aluminum. and no one had ever made an aluminum engine and the rights and Charlie Taylor had never made an engine in his life they were making everything from scratch that's what's so phenomenal that they are buying everything themselves and when the block first appeared The aluminum part of the engine, when they first tried it, it broke, they went right back to the Aluminum Company of America, this little embryonic company in Pittsburgh, PA, and ordered another one, they didn't give up, they didn't give up.

I think anyone who went through that mosquito attack was subdued. One of my questions is skeers, yes I'm just talking about surviving Kittyhawk when they attack. I don't think there were maybe four of us in this entire audience tonight who wouldn't have gotten up and gone home the next morning. After that attack it was incredible and U and the storms and the floods and the accidents. Orville crashed at Fort Meyer on the other side of the photo from Washington, the army base there was still there and with him was a young lieutenant officer who was interested. in aviation named Selfridge, who died and was the first fatality in the history of aviation just a few days before, two different newspapers in Washington published articles saying that Theodore Roosevelt, the president, was very interested in going to Fort Meyer and climbing . for the test flight with Orille Wright it could have been him instead of the young Selfridge who was on that plane very easily and he would be the first president to fly on a plane later, it wasn't with the right brothers, but while Selfridge was assassinated.

Orville was nearly killed and severely damaged both physically and emotionally, and as soon as his sister Katherine, who was a high school teacher and taught Greek and Latin at the local high school in Dayton, learned that this had happened.It happened in the middle of the afternoon, he called the director and said. She was taking an extended leave, 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 to ensure that he received full attention for his physical difficulties, possible, but it lifted his spirits and in many ways I think it saved him and he would eventually insist on flying again and eventually he would go in and insist on flying again at Fort Meyer and he would break world records when he got back up, they wouldn't give up no matter what and I think there's a big lesson to be learned in that they would never blame other people or complain or indulge in self-pity or attack their competitors ever.

I love the phrase, cheer up guys, there's no hope. Yes, that's right, yes, I mean, would you know what oozes from the page of this wonderful and wonderful and they had a great sense of humor. Their sense of humor is a very dry and very serious sense of humor, but they, what is commendable is it. They didn't take themselves too seriously and they took everything else very seriously and they never changed and they never changed, no matter how famous they became, they were exactly the same. I love it and they are surrounded. Could you talk a little?

I mean, there. There are some great characters and the book is worth reading to meet all the airmen and all the people in the US government and the corporations and the French and things like that, but two people, the bishop and Katherine, the sister , I mean you. Have you seen his metal in dropping everything to serve Orville in that incredibly defining moment, but these are two people where you think these guys can't do it without the support, yeah, the father? I don't think the story would have turned out the way it did if Katherine hadn't been a part of it.

I agree and I think the same could be said of the bishop. Bishop was an incredible man and he kept a phenomenal diary that has been a treasure to me or anyone who writes about the Right Brethren. I keep talking about letters and diaries. We don't write letters anymore. Unfortunately, no one in public life would dare keep a diary because it can be subpoenaed and used against you, but um or an official cell phone, well, you can delete some of that. Every time Ken or I go to work on a project, there's always the hope that maybe you'll find something new, something no one has seen before that has happened with every book.

I have undertaken it and I am very happy to say that it has happened again with this book. When Wilbur was about 18, he was playing hockey with a group of neighborhood kids on an ice pond and they hit him in the teeth with a hockey stick. and it knocked out all of his upper teeth and left him in terrible pain and a painful, swollen jaw for weeks and he also fell into a period of depression that we would call today Melancholy, they would call it then and he became a self-imposed recluse living in in home, uh, I very rarely went out to do anything with anyone, uh, for three years and I was going to go to college, I wanted to go to Y and I certainly would have gone in and probably would have done all kinds of wonderful things, who knows. what, but he never did, instead he stayed at home and began reading with an intensity greater than anything he had attempted before and it was at that moment that his life's path took a turn in a very different direction which consequently took him in a very different direction for history overall, so the question was who hit him with a hockey stick and whether he did it intentionally or was it an accident in 1913, which was a full year after Orville did it after Wilbur's death.

Bishop Wright makes an entry in his journal that said the boy who hit him with a hockey stick was a man named octave how ha j j h Oliver how h o u h a u g h Oliver how later became one of the most notorious murderers in history from Ohio, murdered his father, his mother, his brother. and an estimated 12 other people and he had been executed by 196. Well, we did some research on him because needless to say, after he became famous as this murderer, a lot was written about him. Well, he was the neighborhood bully and he lived nearby. corner on the right and he was very poor because his father was a house painter for that many children and since he was poor he worked as a clerk in the local pharmacy and suffered from rotten teeth and the pharmacist felt very sorry for this.

The help guy tried to help relieve his pain by giving him the only painkiller of the day, which was Codine, excuse me, cocaine, and he became addicted to cocaine and had to be institutionalized in the hospital, then he became addicted to alcohol and fell in this murderer. career now we don't know if he did it intentionally or accidentally but I think it's a very important element in the story because it reminds us that this wonderful setting they grew up in wasn't exactly a rock Norman Rockwell Saturday night issue cover kind of things there were tragedies there were people suffering uh all there was was the difference between poverty and the lack thereof and the idea of ​​these two young men coming out of the same neighborhood to me is infinitely fascinating and makes it again infinitely more human history I also believe That U and I hope you agree that the role Catherine plays, which no one has given much thought to before, is of the utmost importance.

She reminds me a lot of Emily stealing and Abigail Adams, but in different ways because she was very feisty she was stubborn she could get very angry when she said angrily that's right and uh she was fun and she was always there when needed and she was brilliant she was a tiny little woman five, 5 feet, one tied her hair back in a bun, she had gold-rimmed Pinn glasses, she looked like the essence of a mm school and she was a big cyclist, so the memories of reading this book engulfed him and and and the parallel experience of uh Ago Almost 40 years ago, reading the Brooklyn Bridge book, I was reminded of how much you allow the voice of the past to live on, whether it be the letters or the Diaries, how much that influenced me by adding first-person voices to the third-person narration for order.

Well, that's exactly what you do dear friend because we let them speak for themselves and then you hear the way they speak, you hear both the style of articulation of the time and what they were like, but you also realize how much alike they were. us. also that they have a Humanity that is not a Norman Rockwell painting that does not have this type of cliché. These are complicated lives like everyone in this room has and I would love to before we move on to questions from the audience um so you read very late U uh Wilbur I don't want to give too much away is that he is receiving a great honor in France and I have taken part from a date there thank you uh and and I I love that you read it, it's, uh, from I think I understand, are you worried that it might put them to sleep?

I think it's the French transcribing his English and then here's this, this is Wilbur, clearly, the genius of this, he couldn't. He has done without both, but this is the man who I believe speaks for the family and for the times. This was a black and white tie dinner of the elite of intellectual Paris hosted in what was the Automobile Club then and still. it's in a room, a palatial banquet hall, it's still there in Paris at the Chan and it's delivered in English and, as Ken said, Wilbur translated it while he was talking to me and my brother.

I thank you for the honor you are doing us and for the cordial reception you have given us this afternoon. Orville wasn't there. If I had been born in your beautiful country and grown up among you, I would not have expected a warmer welcome than the one you just gave me when we did not know each other. Today we didn't trust each other when we met, otherwise we believe each other and are friends. I thank You for this in the enthusiasm shown in the enthusiasm shown around me. I don't see simply an outburst intended to glorify. a person but a tribute to an idea that has always fascinated humanity.

Sometimes I think that the desire to fly like birds is an ideal passed on to us by our ancestors, who on their exhausting journeys through unexplored lands in prehistoric times looked with envy at the birds flying freely through space at full speed. above all obstacles on the infinite Highway of the air, that's fantastic. Hmm, I was also struck by a quote you had from William Dean Hows, who said that people had the courage of their dreams. I think that does characterize a good Ohio man and a good Ohio man exactly. I would add that, so let me answer some of his questions and we'll try to do this in a lightning round to get as many participants as possible, but I can decline the first one, ladies. he is married his wife is in the audience please um the great Rosalie Mulla um Can I interrupt for a minute that one of the lessons of history is almost nothing of consequences achieved by itself exactly and that there is never anything truer than a book , particularly the type of book? that I write and all those people that history and biography authors include in their acknowledgments are all people who really contributed, but no one has contributed to this book or all my books, in the same way that my editor and boss have my mission, They control my guidance. star my dear wife Rosley, would you please stand up?

Please let me pile on unfairly and say the most helpful of all, the most encouraging, inspiring and indispensable as ever and the most deserving of my sincere thanks is my editor, boss and guiding star, my wife Rosie, yes that's it. a good way to end a thank you let me tell you and that and that and that is very very true 60 years married this year okay we're we're we're we're off to a good start yeah right yeah you. I've had a good half century and then some of yeah, um, Ohio and North Carolina claim to be the birthplace of aviation, can you figure this out?

No, no, they are, they are both the birthplaces of aviation, the first to fly, the first airplane to fly. It happened in North Carolina The first practical airplane to take off happened in Dayton Ohio Has there been a historical figure that you wanted to do a book about but felt it was too daunting to undertake? No, we like to bite off more than we can chew. and then discover how we are always yes, yes, it is always bigger than you think, yes, always, you have written many excellent books, which one is your favorite and why, for me, it would be to say who is my favorite child, them, I can't do that.

I would say that generally speaking it's always the one I've been working on. And now this book is my favorite, but who knows what will follow. Yes. You have five children, I believe, and numerous grandchildren. I have four daughters and I always say exactly that I have escaped since we did our series on Jazz with Duke Ellington, our most prolific composer, 2500 compositions when I ask him which one is the most important, he says the one I'm working on now and and he moves it towards the right how many languages ​​do you speak one and not always so well well I think we can safely say not only uh one well but he also writes it very well I can get along quite well in Italy but using my arms, okay, yes, you know, Jacqu Baren He said that, uh, uh, that the French were moody Italians, could you comment on the process you go through when choosing to research and write about a particular topic?

Well, when I started, I thought. the way you do this I was studying English in college and I didn't really know anything about doing historical research or writing history or biography. I knew I wanted to write and I had a story I wanted to tell, so I thought I should do it. do all the research and then write the book, but I quickly discovered that I wanted to do both at the same time. You do enough research to motivate yourself and have enough knowledge to write some decent chapters, because it's when you start writing that I realize how much you don't know and what specifically you need to find out, so I'm doing research all the time.

I have a wonderful research assistant who I have worked with for over 30 years, Mike Hill, who is also worked with Ken, is the best in the business and lives outside of Washington, so he can cover the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the National Archives and all that, and um uh, the amount of reading that goes into any project of this type is enormous. a lot more than most people realize and part of the problem for me, at least, is that I love to read, but when I'm on a book working on a book I really don't have the time or desire to read anything other than what I read.

I need to know. to do the book, so I'm starving to read good fiction, mainly, which I love, so now I'm back to reading and I was very sorry to read about the death of Ruth Ryle, she was an absolutely wonderful writer, one of my favorites of all. I wrote wonderful detective novels, but they are much more than that, they were great novels and I think I like people who can tell a story well. I remember Barbara Tuck. One of the first books that really impressed me was The Guns of August by Barbara Tuckman and I Remember Reading: There's No Secret, There's No Secret to History, Teaching History or Writing History, Telling Stories, and That's What Research Is All About and notYou can't make anything up, you can't alter statistics or facts to suit your own. wishes, but very often the truth is more interesting than fiction, it really is, and there are things that happen in real life that if you put them in a novel, your editor would tell you to cut them out because it's incredible.

Imagine Jefferson and Adams dying. the same day and it's the 4th of July, no, that wouldn't happen in real life, 50 years later, yeah, yeah, me, and you also have to have a fantastic editor and I have a fantastic editor. I had three fantastic editors. Peter sched Michael Corda and Bob Bender Bob is here tonight and he is the best and his editor is very important I have had the same editor for 50 years and I wouldn't Simon Shuster I wouldn't change Why should I want to change? and I always felt that if they, if I was loyal to them, they would be loyal to me and they sure have been and I feel very lucky that they have been my editors all along.

I think the world of Simon and Chuster and the people. Who runs it? You have a background in painting and there is something very visual in your writing. They are good U films, other people are inspired by what you do and make films or series Min about it and your books are always, you know, sometimes the photographs in the medium are kind of an afterthought and yours aren't, they are very carefully selected. Can you talk about that part of you that is so visually oriented than the painter in you? Well, at first I thought I would be a painter and I still paint and I think it's something that everyone who wants to write should do. a painting or drawing lesson because it teaches you to see to really look and Dickens said make me see, that's what a writer's business was all about and I'm very interested as you know Ken in photography and it was from the photographs that I saw a long time ago. in the 1960s in the Library of Congress of what happened in Johnstown when the dam broke in the mountains in 1889, I became interested in the topic and took it up as my first book and use photographs as a source and resource for research. because by looking at photographs you can see things that are often not available to be seen in what is available in print.

Justice's paintings are very valuable. You are working in the 18th century. When there were no photographs, you go to look, you study the paintings. what color his eyes were, what he really looked like, John Trumble's paintings, for example, of all the founders, absolutely invaluable to anyone who wants to write about that time and those people, all about Trumble's famous painting of the 4th July 1776 is inaccurate the whole scene is inaccurate it never happened but what is accurate in detail are the faces and that is of utmost importance because each of those men who signed that document was signing his death certificate was revealing that he was a traitor and there and therefore he was responsible, so it's very brave to have his portrait in that painting and all those studies that Trumble did of the faces, the drawings, not just the painting, are all available to be seen in the Yale collection and they were of the highest quality.

The valuable thing for me in doing research for my John Adams books and for 1776 you mentioned this before in a recurring theme in some of the questions is this anxiety that we don't write letters anymore oh yeah, we'll have email. We hope there are hard drives and maybe in a hundred years we will know how to read them, but what is your concern? Do you think we'll find a way to get people like you in? I don't know what they're going to work with in the future and I know Jim Billington, the head of the Library of Congress, is very concerned about that and they're trying to figure out what to do, we don't know for how long. electronic media electronic communications will last but no one writes letters and letters that are sent as email or barely in English and and um and young people today say don't even do that it's sad um I was just talking to you Mort Jano, my agent and the wife of Linda, this afternoon that almost half of the business schools in the country now require their freshmen to take a basic course on how to write a letter because and it's all these people, of course, all these freshmen They are college graduates and cannot write a presentable letter, report or analysis, etc., and they need to learn how to do so.

I recently gave a talk at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and urged these young people to take a look. In this Right Brothers story because there's an absolutely brilliant example of two people who didn't have any of the advantages of going to university or business school Tuck who could write magnificently and it's valuable, what's Charlie's name? great investment in ENT Warren Buffett Warren Buffett's partner, Charlie Char Charlie Merer in Charlie Munger's autobiography said I never met a leader who wasn't a reader and that is so true. John Adams said you will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. wonderful and we can all still carry a poet in our pocket and maybe 15 volumes of poetry in one of these little yes, that may be the advantage there and and and young people should be taught to read read over their heads read like writers who They think it's a little difficult for them to understand reading good writing, that's how you get into the rhythm.

CA used to sit down with something very well written before starting each day, often reading the Bible. I don't think so. It was for religious reasons. I think she would have really liked that feeling of cadence and power. This is, uh. Maybe, given time, we could get away with this. writing a book about our wonderful city PS: congratulations on your bridge, thank you. She had a bridge name for me in Bitburg, which was the greatest honor anyone could receive and I'm excited about it and it was. It's not just anything. The old bridge is the 16th Street Bridge, which was designed by the same architect who designed Grand Central and the engineer in charge was the structural engineer of the Empire State Building, so they went and got some great talent to do that job and Pittsburgh it's a it's a city of stories, I think all River cities are cities of stories and I know other writers have felt that way, including someone named Twain, I think so, no, there's not a lot of literature about Las Vegas or Phoenix or That's printable, that's it, yeah, would you have seriously considered doing a book about Pittsburgh?

I keep a running list of possible future books, but I've promised myself and my family that I won't look at it until next fall. I have several questions here that are about many other claims of being the first flight Gustaf Whitehead uh Alberto Dumal, can you? I mean, you even go in and I thought you do an expert job at the end of the book of eliminating some of these things that we have in the story, the trade is constantly happy to do, wasn't Maryweather Lewis murdered? Yes, well, you know, for example, that we didn't really land on the moon, no, no, there are those, everything was done with special effects exactly, yes, yes, or Oswal.

You won't kill Kennedy, yes, no, I don't know why there is no evidence for the claim. People who knew him claimed that he never destroyed anything and when he went to demonstrate what he could do with his plane, it didn't work, it's just. somehow this story blows up or comes back to the surface about every 35 or 40 years and it's been going on for a long time, this is the 1930s, yes other people were experimenting but most of the only ones who were successful were in France, but when Wilbur came to France and people like blo and Del Grange flew, everyone said they did it, he was way ahead of everyone and they were, uh, they were way ahead of everyone, exciting, it was absolutely exciting.

I find one of the wonderful things about who those guys are within this. book, uh, it's all these other scientific parallel attempts and real people trying to take off in the pomace and splashing and you have this real kind of almost a big race that's happening, if not simultaneously, at least you realize that if you don't. had, yes, and maybe I think we'll address this last question. This one is good as a high school student. I am constantly inundated with stories with the underlying message that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. The story of the Wri brothers seems to be no exception, but if the right brothers were truly geniuses, as you say, how can I, a normal person from a very privileged upbringing, very different from the Wright brothers, expect to be able to achieve something so amazing? very, very good question and you could say, I think to be fair, if Wilbur hadn't been a genius it wouldn't have worked, but Orville wasn't a genius and Charlie Taylor wasn't and Katherine wasn't right and Milton wasn't right, they're all working. together and then the role you could play might not be that of the brilliant mind that can break through where no mind has gone before, but you can be part of something like that.

I don't think that's the message to take. What is Elemental to me about this story is that we Americans, and I'm not being jingoistic about this, we Americans, from the beginning, have had a certain ability to solve problems that was different from other civilizations, other ways of life. , societies, our country is in itself. Innovation and innovation and problem solving is how we have built the country. I think, for example, that historians of the future will look this time and see that phenomenal achievements are not what we think are the phenomenal achievements that one will be medicine, imagine what it is. happened in medicine during our lifetime in this revolutionary country, the second is that although our universities and colleges have problems and spend, expenses are a big part of it, however, in this free country we have created the best universities in the whole world . history and that is a momentous achievement if these were cathedrals rising on the horizon we would all step back and say it is a fragmented cathedral but we don't see it that way because we are too involved with what we are all doing and everything the idea of ​​education is central to everything we are about um Jefferson said that any nation expects to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be and that is an underlying theme in our way of life.

I think the lesson should be. The main lesson that can be learned from Brother Wri's story is the virtue, advantage and life enlargement that comes with having a high purpose and focus in your life, that is what makes you want to get out of bed at night. tomorrow and rest. Back to work ladies and gentlemen David Malala oh