Financial History Issue 122 (Summer 2017) | Page 10
EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
Winning Without Subsidies:
Planes, Steamships and Automobiles
By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper
David McCullough, paraphrasing
Orville Wright, highlights the brothers’
accomplishments at Kitty Hawk: “Their
flights that morning were the first ever in
which a piloted machine took off under
its own power into the air in full flight,
sailed forward with no loss of speed, and
landed at a point as high as that from
which it started.” However, from a finan-
cial perspective, the next paragraph in his
biography of the Wright brothers is much
more interesting.
In that paragraph, McCullough notes that
the Wright brothers spent less than $1,000
in total to develop their flying machine.
In contrast, competitor Samuel Pierpont
Langley spent 70 times that amount, much
of it financed by the government, in his
failed attempt to be the first to fly a manned
heavier-than-air craft.
The brothers used profits from their
bicycle business to fund their experiments
in flight. The Wright brothers’ authorized
biographer, Fred Kelly, commented on the
surprising smallness of their expenses, not-
ing that most of the costs involved mechan-
ical labor, which the Wrights did them-
selves. Kelly goes on to address the legends
of where the brothers procured that $1,000.
Many of Dayton, Ohio’s wealthy business-
men claimed to have funded them. The
money, some claimed, came from the sale
of an Iowa farm owned by the family or
from a mortgage on the family home. Kath-
erine Wright, Wilbur and Orville’s sister,
was amused by claims that she provided
the funds from her schoolteacher’s salary.
She found that to be about as laughable as
the rumor that her brothers relied on her
mathematical skills to build their airplane.
According to Kelly, “Their bicycle busi-
ness had been giving them a decent income,
and at the end of the year 1903 they still had
a few thousand dollars in a local building
and loan association.”
Langley was a professor of astronomy
and physics at the Western University
The object of the statement, concerning which you made inquiry,
was to make it clear that we stood on quite different ground
from Prof. Langley, and were entirely justified in refusing to
make our discoveries public property at this time. We had paid
the freight, and had a right to do as we pleased. The use of the
word “any,” which you underscored, grew out of the fact that
we found from articles…and…correspondence that there was a
somewhat general impression that our Kitty Hawk experiments
had not been carried on at our own expense, &c. We thought
it might save embarrassment to correct this promptly.
— Wilbur Wright to Octave Chanute, January 18, 1904
of Pennsylvania and the director of the
Allegheny Observatory when he became
interested in aviation. His work in Penn-
sylvania enabled him to show that Isaac
Newton was wrong when he theorized
that motorized flight was impossible. His
reputation as one of the foremost scientists
of his time led to a position as Assistant
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in
1887. He became Secretary of the Smithso-
nian a few months later upon the death of
then-Secretary Spencer Baird. In 1896, with
friend Alexander Graham Bell as witness
and photographer, Langley conducted the
first unmanned mechanical flight with two
flying machines he dubbed “aerodromes.”
Some among early aviation enthusiasts
believed that manned flight was achiev-
able only with government funding. Of
course, aviation’s potential usefulness in
times of war attracted the interests of gov-
ernments around the world. Thus, anyone
with a credible and convincing plan to
build a heavier-than-air flying machine
would find government funding readily
available.
Langley believed it would cost at least
$50,000 to build an aerodrome that could
carry a man, but he was reaching the
end of his career and doubted he would
be involved in making manned flight a
8 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Summer 2017 | www.MoAF.org
practical and commercial reality. How-
ever, increased tensions between the
United States and Spain that eventually
culminated in the Spanish-American War
renewed the US military’s interest in the
possibilities of manned flight.
Langley was not politically astute, but
his associates in the scientific commu-
nity who had important political connec-
tions quickly brought his experiments in
flight to the attention of President William
McKinley. Langley soon found himself
meeting with representatives from the
Army and the Navy. This led to an agree-
ment with the War Department’s Board
of Ordinance and Fortification (BOF) to
finance Langley’s experiments. The BOF
agreed to advance Langley $25,000 with
the promise of an additional $25,000
when Langley could demonstrate substan-
tial progress to the board.
By late 1900, Langley had assembled a
staff that included chief engineer Charles
Manly, seven machinists and three car-
penters. The monthly payroll ballooned
to $800 not including Manly’s salary, the
cost of building the engine or the cost of
building the houseboat that would serve
as a launch pad for the aerodrome. Lang-
ley burned through the initial $25,000
allotment in no time and nearly ran out