How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  This observation set the Wright brothers on the path to the world’s first flight. They saw an airplane as “a bicycle with wings.” The problem of the aircraft is not flying: like the bicycle, it is balance. Otto Lilienthal died because he succeeded at the first and failed at the second.

  The Wrights solved the problem by studying birds. A bird is buffeted by wind when it glides. It balances by raising one wingtip and lowering the other. The wind turns the wings like sails on a windmill until the bird regains equilibrium. Wilbur again:

  To mention all the things the bird must constantly keep in mind in order to fly securely through the air would take a very considerable treatise. If I take a piece of paper, and after placing it parallel with the ground, quickly let it fall, it will not settle steadily down as a staid, sensible piece of paper ought to do, but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse. Yet this is the style of steed that men must learn to manage before flying can become an everyday sport. The bird has learned this art of equilibrium, and learned it so thoroughly that its skill is not apparent to our sight. We only learn to appreciate it when we try to imitate it.

  That is, when we try to fly a horse.

  These were the Wrights’ first mental steps. Problem: Balance a bucking aircraft. Solution: Imitate gliding birds.

  The next problem was how to reproduce a bird’s balance mechanically. Their first solution required metal rods and gears. This caused the next problem: it was too heavy to fly. Wilbur discovered the solution in the Wrights’ bicycle shop while playing with a long, thin cardboard box that had once contained an inner tube—something roughly the same size and shape as a box of tin foil or Saran Wrap. When Wilbur twisted the box, one corner dipped slightly and the other rose by the same amount. It was a motion similar to a gliding bird’s wingtips, but it used so little force that it could be achieved with cables. The distinctive double wings on the brothers’ airplanes were based on this box; they called the twisting that made the tips go up and down “wing warping.”

  As young boys, the Wrights had loved to make and fly kites—“a sport to which we had devoted so much attention that we were regarded as experts.” Despite their fascination, they stopped during their teenage years because it was “unbecoming to boys of our ages.” And yet, twenty years later, Wilbur found himself cycling through Dayton as fast as he could with a five-foot kite across his handlebars. He had built it with wings that warped to prove the idea worked. He was hurrying to show it to Orville. The brothers had completed their second step.

  And so it continued. The Wright brothers’ great inventive leap was not a great mental leap. Despite its extraordinary outcome, their story is a litany of little steps.

  For example, they spent two years trying to make Wilbur’s kite big enough to carry a pilot before discovering that the aerodynamic data they were using was worthless.

  “Having set out with absolute faith in the existing scientific data,” they wrote, “we were driven to doubt one thing after another, till finally, after two years of experiment, we cast it all aside, and decided to rely entirely upon our own investigations.”

  The Wrights had started flying as a hobby and with little interest in “the scientific side of it.” But they were ingenious and easily intrigued. By the time they realized that all the published data was wrong—“little better than guesswork”—they had also discovered what knowledge was needed to design wings that would fly. In 1901, they built a bicyclemounted test platform to simulate airplanes in flight, then a belt-driven wind tunnel they used to create their own data. Many of the results surprised them—their findings, they wrote, were “so anomalous that we were almost ready to doubt our own measurements.”

  But they eventually concluded that everybody else’s measurements were wrong. One of the biggest sources of error was the Smeaton coefficient, a number developed by eighteenth-century engineer John Smeaton to determine the relationship between wing size and lift. Smeaton’s number was 0.005. The Wrights calculated that the correct figure was actually 0.0033. Wings needed to be much bigger than anybody had realized if an airplane was ever going to fly.

  The Wrights used the same data to design propellers. Propellers had been built for boats but never for aircraft. Just as the brothers thought of an airplane as a bicycle that flew, they thought of a propeller as a wing that rotated. The lessons from their wind tunnel enabled them to design a near-perfect propeller on their first attempt. Modern propellers are only marginally better.

  The Wrights’ aircraft are the best evidence that they took steps, not leaps. Their glider of 1900 looked like their kite of 1899. Their glider of 1901 looked like their glider of 1900 but with a few new elements. Their glider of 1902 was their glider of 1901, bigger and with a rudder. Their 1903 Flyer—the aircraft that flew from Kitty Hawk’s sands—was their 1902 glider made bigger again with propellers and an engine added. Orville and Wilbur Wright did not leap into the sky. They walked there one step at a time.

  8 | TWENTY-ONE STEPS

  Thinking might make planes and phones, but surely art flows from soul to eye? Karl Duncker’s mental steps may apply to the calculation of engineering, but do they also describe the majesty of art? To answer this question, we return to a Berlin on the brink of war.

  On November 1, 1913, Franz Kluxen entered Berlin’s Galerie Der Sturm to buy a painting. Kluxen was one of Germany’s foremost collectors of modern art. He owned works by Marc Chagall, August Macke, Franz Marc, and a dozen Picassos. On this day another artist caught his eye—a controversial figure pushing painting to become ever more unreal: Wassily Kandinsky. The picture Kluxen bought was an abstract of contorting shapes and penetrating lines dominated by blues, browns, reds, and greens called Bild mit weißem Rand, or Painting with White Border.

  A few months before Kluxen walked up to the finished painting in Berlin, Kandinsky had walked up to its blank canvas in Munich with a single piece of charcoal in his hand. The canvas was covered in a white paint made from five layers of zinc, chalk, and lead. Kandinsky had specified the paint precisely. He forbade artificial chalk made from gypsum and demanded more expensive natural chalk made from fossilized cells a hundred million years old.

  Kandinsky drew a picture with the charcoal. Then he mixed paints using as many as ten pigments per color—his purple was made of white, vermilion, black, green, two yellows, and three blues, for example—and brushed them on in layers from lightest to darkest without pausing or missing a stroke. The picture covered thirty square feet, but Kandinsky finished it quickly. This speed and certainty created an impression of spontaneity. It was as if he awoke that morning and rushed to record a vanishing fragment of dream.

  Art is the mastery of making appearance deceive. Kandinsky spent five months planning every stroke of his apparently spontaneous painting and years developing the method and theory that took him to it. Kandinsky was a Russian immigrant living in Germany. He visited his native Moscow in the fall of 1912 just as the First Balkan War began. To Russia’s south, the Balkan League of Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Montenegro was attacking Turkey, then called the Ottoman Empire. It was a brief, brutal war that started at the time of Kandinsky’s trip and finished as he completed Painting with White Border, in May 1913. He returned to Germany packing a problem: how to paint the emotion of the moment—the “extremely powerful impressions I had experienced in Moscow—or more correctly, of Moscow itself.”

  He started by painting a sketch in oils he called Mascau, later renamed Sketch 1 for Painting with White Border. It was a constricted thicket of velveteen green with cadmium red accents and dark hemming lines. A trio of black curves oozed toward the top left corner, evoking the three-horse sled called a troika, a common Kandinsky motif and a symbol used by other Russians, including Nikolai Gogol, to represent their nation’s divinity.

  His second sketch, barely different, diffused the lines until they were more s
tain than stroke—in his words, “dissolving the colors and forms.” More sketches followed. Kandinsky burnished his picture on paper, card, and canvas. He scrawled in pencil, mapping which colors would go where using letters and words. He brushed some studies with watercolor, others with gouache—a blend of gum and pigment halfway between watercolor and oil—and India ink. He crayoned. He made twenty sketches, each no more than one or two steps different from the last. The process took five months. The twenty-first picture—Kandinsky’s finished work—is very similar to the first. Painting with White Border is the old friend you run into after a few years. Sketch 1 is how the friend used to look. But vast differences hide beneath the surface of each piece. They tell the true story of artistic creation.

  The green ground of Sketch 1 is a mix of seven colors: green, umber, ocher, black, yellow, blue, and white. At the painting’s center, Kandinsky first applied a yellow made from five colors: cadmium yellow, yellow ocher, red ocher, yellow lake, and chalk. Then, when the yellow was dry, he painted it over with green. These steps were not artistic: the canvas of Sketch 1 had already been used, and Kandinsky had to cover an existing painting. He did such a good job that it was not until almost a hundred years later, after the advent of infrared imaging, that a team of conservators working for New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which owns Painting with White Border, and Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection, which owns Sketch 1, discovered that there was a picture beneath the picture.

  Once he had prepared the canvas, Kandinsky continued Sketch 1 by layering colors from dark to light, rearranging and repainting the picture many times as he worked. This is partly visible from a close inspection of his brushstrokes and has been fully exposed by X-ray, which undresses a painting layer by layer. An X-ray of Sketch 1 shows a blur: Kandinsky reworked the image so many times that only a few elements of the finished piece can be seen. He painted over almost everything on the canvas in fits of iteration that lasted until he solved his first problem: how to capture “the extremely powerful impressions I had experienced in Moscow.”

  When Sketch 1 was complete, Kandinsky identified remaining problems one at a time. He rotated the image from portrait to landscape, softened the colors, and changed the ground from dark green to luminous white. One sketch shows twenty variations of the troika as Kandinsky tuned its curves like strings on a cello. And then there was the eponymous white border:

  I made slow progress with the white edge. My sketches did little to help, that is, the individual forms became clear within me—and yet, I could still not bring myself to paint the picture. It tormented me. After several weeks, I would bring out the sketches again, and still I felt unprepared. It is only over the years that I have learned to exercise patience in such moments and not smash the picture over my knee.

  Thus, it was not until after nearly five months that I was sitting in the twilight looking at the second large-scale study, when it suddenly dawned on me what was missing—the white edge. Since this white edge proved the solution to the picture, I named the whole picture after it.

  With this final problem solved, Kandinsky ordered the canvas. When he first touched it with his charcoal, he knew exactly what he was about to make. Where an X-ray of Sketch 1 shows a blur of painted work and rework, an X-ray of Painting with White Border is exactly like the painting itself. This is how we know he did not hesitate. After five months and twenty steps, Kandinsky was ready to paint.

  The twenty steps are only part of the story. Kandinsky’s journey did not begin with Sketch 1, and it did not end with Painting with White Border. His first works, painted in 1904, were colorful, realistic landscapes. His last, painted in 1944, were atonal, geometric abstracts. His first and last pictures look wholly unalike, but everything Kandinsky painted in the intervening years was a small step along the road that unites them. Painting with White Border marks a slight move toward more abstract images and is part of Kandinsky’s transition from dark to light. Even in a lifetime of art, creation is a continuum.

  As Karl Duncker showed, all creation, whether painting, plane, or phone, has the same foundation: gradual steps where a problem leads to a solution that leads to a problem. Creating is the result of thinking like walking. Left foot, problem. Right foot, solution. Repeat until you arrive. It is not the size of your strides that determines your success but how many you take.

  1 | JUDAH

  One summer night in 1994, a five-year-old named Jennifer crept downstairs to tell her mother her ear hurt. Jennifer’s pediatrician prescribed eardrops. The pain got worse. One side of her face bulged. The pediatrician doubled her dose. The swelling grew. X-rays revealed nothing. The lump got bigger than a baseball. Jennifer glowed with fever, her head inflated, she lost weight. Surgeons removed the lump. It came back. They took half of Jennifer’s jaw. Still the lump returned. It was removed again. It came a fourth time, reaching toward her skull to kill her. Medicine did not work. Jennifer’s one chance was radiation. Nobody knew if it would affect the tumor. Everybody knew it would stop half her face from growing. Children with that condition often kill themselves.

  As Jennifer’s parents contemplated their choice, her doctor heard rumors of a researcher with a controversial theory that tumors create their own blood supply. This man said growths like Jennifer’s could be destroyed by cutting off their access to blood. Very few people believed him, and his approach was so experimental that it was practically quackery. The man’s name was Judah Folkman.

  Jennifer’s doctor told her parents about this unproven theory. He warned them that Folkman was a controversial man with a mixed reputation, possibly more fantasist than scientist. Jennifer’s parents felt they had little to lose. “Fantasy” is just another word for hope with long odds. It is better than no hope. Jennifer’s father signed a consent form and put his daughter’s life in Judah Folkman’s hands.

  Folkman prescribed injections of a new, unproven drug. Jennifer’s father, a machinist, gave her the shots. Her mother, who worked at a grocery store, held her. For weeks they stuck needles into Jennifer’s arm, over her tear-soaked cries of protest. Folkman’s shots made her worse. They boiled the disfigured, dying little girl in fever and terrified her with visions. Neighbors heard her screaming during the night and remembered her in their prayers.

  Folkman called his theory angiogenesis—Latin for “growth of new blood vessels.” He had conceived it more than thirty years earlier when one of his experiments went wrong. He was an enlisted man, a surgeon required to spend time in the navy researching new ways to store blood on long voyages. To see what methods might work, he built a maze of tubes that circulated blood substitutes through a rabbit gland and injected the gland with the fastest-growing things he knew of: cancer cells from a mouse. He expected the cells to either grow or die. But something else happened. The cells grew as big as dots on dice, then stopped. They were still alive; when Folkman put them back in the mice, they swelled into deadly tumors. Here was mystery. Why would cancer stop on a gland but kill in a mouse?

  Folkman noticed that the tumors in the mice were full of blood and the tumors on the glands were not. In the mice, new blood vessels reached out, greeting the tumors, feeding and growing them.

  Other navy lab scientists found this mildly interesting. Judah Folkman thought it was life-changing. He felt sure he had discovered something important. What if the tumors were creating these new vessels, weaving themselves a bloody web in which to grow? What if you could stop that from happening? Would it kill the tumors?

  Folkman was a surgeon. Wrist-deep in living flesh, surgeons see things lab scientists do not. To a surgeon, a tumor is a wet red mess, like fat on a steak. To a scientist, it is dry and white, like a cauliflower. “I had seen and handled cancers, and they were hot and red and bloody,” Folkman said. “And so when critics would say, ‘Well, we don’t see any blood vessels in these tumors,’ I knew they were looking at tumors that had been taken out. All the blood was drained. They were specimens.”

  After leaving the navy, Folkman
joined City Hospital in Boston. His lab was tiny, and the only natural light that dribbled in was from windows near the high ceiling.

  He worked alone for years. When he finally recruited a team, it consisted of one medical student and one undergraduate. They worked nights and weekends on a debut paper about how blood vessels depend on cell fragments called platelets. It was published in Nature in 1969.

  After that, Folkman’s work was rejected. Cell Biology, Experimental Cell Research, and the British Journal of Cancer refused to print his papers on the connections between tumors and blood. His requests for grants were denied. Reviewers said his conclusions went beyond the data, that what he saw in his lab would not be seen in patients, and that his experiments were poorly designed. Some called him crazy.

  In the 1960s and ’70s, no one in cancer cared about blood. All the glory went to tumor killers wielding radiation and poison. Doctors targeted malignant cells as if they were marauding armies and attacked them with treatments inspired by war. Chemotherapy was developed from the chemical weapons of World War I; radiation resembled the nuclear weapons of World War II. Folkman imagined cancer as a disease of regeneration, not degeneration—a condition caused by the body growing, unlike most other illnesses, which are caused by the body decaying or failing. He did not picture tumors as invaders. He thought they were naturally communicating cells, having what his first research assistant, Michael Gimbrone, called a “dynamic dialogue” with the body. Folkman was convinced that he could stop this communication and make tumors die of natural causes.

  One reason Folkman faced skepticism was that he was a surgeon. Scientists had little respect for surgeons. A surgeon’s place was in the butcher’s shop of the operating room, not the library of the laboratory. But Folkman said that seeing cancer in living people helped his work. He once rushed to the lab inspired by a patient whose ovarian cancer had spread beyond her ovaries. During the surgical procedure to save her, he had found a large tumor full of blood orbited by small white tumors that had not yet signaled for a supply. He thought life was confirming his ideas even though all the experts were rejecting them.