Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain

by Harvey Rachlin

  The workers soon discovered that the postal pet had a penchant for riding in the mail wagon, the horse-driven vehicle that carried letters and packages to and from the Albany post office and local train station. Owney appropriated the seat next to the driver in the wagon, guarding the mail with his life. One day, the story goes, a sack fell out of the wagon on its way to a local post office. Having discovered it was missing, the driver returned to find Owney hunkered over it, waiting defiantly for anyone but the driver to try and claim it.

  Owney’s passion for postal pursuits was realized when the open-minded mail clerks of Albany decided to expand their quadruped’s horizons. They put him on a train, the mail coach, of course, bound for the city of New York. Owney was unfettered by chain or leash, with only a collar bearing his name and home (the Albany post office) should he get lost. But the trip was successful, and it opened up new vistas for the budding sentinel. Soon Owney was zipping around the country as the railway mail dog. He’d sniff the mailbags and lodge in the mail car behind the engine. His unofficial mission, of course, was to safeguard the mail, and he became the mascot of the Railway Mail Service, the train delivery network of the U.S. Post Office Department. Wherever he went, postal workers fed and sheltered him, showed him kindness and affection, and helped their occupational kin get started on his next adventure.

  It became a practice to chronicle Owney’s travels by attaching a leather or metal baggage tag to his collar with the name of the city he had visited written on it. Owney amassed a vast collection of tags—people attached labels and badges of all sorts—and the postmaster general of the United States ordered a harness to hold the lot. It must have been cumbersome for Owney to wear, but it offered a distinctive sight. The clanging of all the tags was rather noisy—like “the bells on a junk wagon,” reported a New York newspaper in April 1894.

  Owney, canine comrade of U.S. postal workers and international traveler extraordinaire, with one of his coworkers.

  By the early 1890s Owney’s fame was widespread. He attended all sorts of conventions and was honored by kennel clubs around the country and, of course, the railway mail clerks. Owney would always show up at these affairs and proudly collect the special engraved medals that would be placed around his neck or on his collar.

  Owney was also an international tourist. He embarked on a world trip with the mail from the West Coast of the United States, traveling to the Orient, the Middle East, Africa, and other places. The canine tourist romped and played and sought adventure wherever he went and always managed to find his way safely to his next destination. Four months after he embarked on his worldwide jaunt, he returned safely by boat to New York City.

  After several years of riding the mail cars, Owney began to experience health problems, and he was given permanent shelter in the Albany post office where his adventures as a mail dog all began. The sedentary lifestyle never appealed to Owney, however, not even in his enfeebled condition, and one day he hopped a train that landed him in Toledo, Ohio. Shortly after arriving he was provoked, and as a result he nipped a mailman. Word of this spread around, and some unknown gunman later fired a bullet into the dog, who passed away on June 11, 1897.

  But Owney lives on! He was stuffed and mounted so that he might never be forgotten. The former canine ambassador to the world, who one night sought refuge from the cold inside a post office and subsequently found a world of adventure, continues to capture the public imagination.

  LOCATION: National Postal Museum, Washington, D.C.

  THE WRIGHT BROTHERS’ FLYER

  DATE: 1903

  WHAT IT IS: The first power-driven heavier-than-air machine ever to be flown successfully.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The Flyer is a biplane, or two-winged plane, one wing above the other. At the front is the elevator (the device that controls the climb and descent of the airplane), and at the rear is the rudder. It has two propellers and a twelve-horsepower gasoline engine.

  Orville and Wilbur Wright were not the first humans to defy the law of gravity. For more than a hundred years prior to their historic flights, men and women had flown in hot-air balloons, hydrogen balloons, steam-driven airships, and gliders. But the Wright brothers were the first to make a sustained, controlled, powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine. One of the extraordinary aspects of the Wright brothers’ historic achievement is the relatively short period in which it was accomplished. The gliding experiments of German aeronautical inventor Otto Lilienthal fascinated the brothers, who owned a bicycle repair shop in Dayton, Ohio, but it wasn’t until 1899 that the Wrights actually set to work in earnest to invent the airplane. Four years later they were airborne.

  How did they do it so quickly? In a nutshell, it was their ability to grasp the nature of the critical problem, the need for control, and their understanding that an airplane is a collection of separate systems, all of which have to work in concert for the entire unit to function. Many of their contemporaries had focused on only one or a couple of these systems and for this reason had not been successful. The Wright brothers knew they had to develop and coordinate a control system, an efficient lifting system (wings), and an efficient propulsion system (propeller and engine).

  Orville and Wilbur built a biplane kite with a five-foot span to test a wing-warping mechanism. They found that it worked reasonably well, so a year later, in 1900, they moved on, building a human-carrying glider based on the aerodynamic data of Otto Lilienthal. They needed a location to conduct flight tests that had strong, steady winds and wide open space, so they wrote to the U.S. Weather Bureau, which made several suggestions, and then to the postmasters and others in these cities. Based on the responses to their letters and the various locations’ accessibility by train, the Wright brothers chose to do their glider testing in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

  In terms of its lift, or ability to sustain itself aloft, the 1900 glider, which resembled a giant rectangular-shaped box kite, didn’t perform as well as Orville and Wilbur had hoped, and in 1901 they returned to Kitty Hawk to test a new and—they hoped—improved glider. Although its performance was somewhat better than that of the 1900 model, it was still far below what their calculations had predicted. The disparity between the calculated performance and the actual performance caused the Wrights to gather their own aerodynamic data upon which to design the glider. To accomplish this, they decided to build a wind tunnel and a collection of different-shaped wings to determine which was the most efficient, generating the best lift for the least drag.

  The Flyer on December 17, 1903, the day it made aviation history when it was successfully flown.

  The wind tunnel was a wooden box six feet long with a fan at one end that generated a flow of air. The model wings were about six inches long and one inch wide, of different shapes and curvatures. As the wind blew down the tunnel and hit the model wings, which were mounted on small test stands or balances, lift and drag were measured. The pointer and scale of the balance recorded how much deflection, or lift, was being generated by each of these little surfaces. Through a series of calculations, the brothers were able to determine the efficiency of each shape: they made up approximately two hundred model wings of different shapes and curvatures.

  In 1902, using what they had learned from the wind tunnel tests, the Wright brothers built a third glider. This design marked a large improvement over those of the 1900 and 1901 gliders. The wing surface was more efficient, and the Wrights had also worked out the problems with the wing-warping control system. The glider performed just as the brothers had predicted, making long, extended glides. Having achieved this success, Orville and Wilbur knew they had solved almost all the basic problems and were ready to build and fly a heavier-than-air powered machine.

  The core of the Wright brothers’ invention was their mechanism of three-axis control: roll (balancing the wings, or moving the airplane through an axis that runs from the nose to the tail), pitch (climb and descent, or bringing the nose up and down), and yaw (shifting the entire airplane from si
de to side or pivoting around the vertical axis that goes through the center of the airplane from top to bottom). Their development of an improved aerial propeller was also very original, drawing from their designs for efficient airfoils.

  They began to construct their first powered airplane early in 1903. The parts were manufactured in Dayton and shipped by train to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. From there the crates were taken by boat to Kitty Hawk, where the brothers were assembling the plane in a work shed. By October they were almost finished, but problems, particularly with the engine, delayed the trial flight until December, when the brothers believed the plane was finally operating reliably.

  The frame of the Wright brothers’ biplane was made of spruce and ash and braced with wire; muslin fabric covered the wings and tail. There was no fuselage, or body, to the airplane, only an open frame. The elevator, which controlled pitch motion, or climb and descent, was in the front, in what is called the “canard configuration.” (As aviation technology advanced, airplane makers put the elevator and a horizontal stabilizer in the back because of less wind resistance, greater advantages for achieving particular control and flight parameters, and other factors.)

  The plane had one engine mounted on the lower wing, just to the right of the pilot’s station. This was connected by chain drives to two propellers mounted about midway out on the back of the wings. The function of propellers is to generate thrust; when enough thrust is generated, the airplane moves forward, and when it’s moving fast enough to achieve flight, it rises into the air. In the Wright brothers’ airplane, thrust was generated by two pusher propellers, as opposed to a tractor propeller. Because its propellers were mounted behind the wings, when they generated thrust they actually pushed the airplane forward by pushing air to the rear. The propeller on most modern-day airplanes is mounted in front of the wings, so when the propeller generates thrust, it pulls the airplane along; this is a tractor propeller.

  For takeoff, the plane sat on a cradle, a two-wheeled dolly that rode down a sixty-foot wooden-rail track, which consisted of four fifteen-foot two-by-fours laid end to end on the ground. The airplane had no seats, being designed for the pilot to lie across the center of the bottom wing in a prone position. This was a carryover from the Wrights’ earlier glider experiments in which the prone position reduced wind resistance at these critical low airspeeds.

  The pilot lay in a hip cradle to which warping wires were connected; the pilot would swing his hips from side to side to control the roll of the airplane. Rudder control cables also were connected to the hip cradle and moved simultaneously with the wing warping, which controlled the airplane in roll.

  The wing tip, or outer edge of the wing, could be twisted up on one side while being twisted down on the other. By creating a difference in the amount of lift on one side of the plane compared to the other, the balance of the airplane could be controlled.

  The first try came on December 14, 1903. Who would fly, Orville or Wilbur? The brothers tossed a coin, and Wilbur won. Wilbur managed to get the plane aloft briefly, but it came close to stalling. Wilbur over-controlled, and the plane hit the ground because it was so low. The aircraft sustained minor damage, so the brothers abandoned any further flights that day.

  Three days after their first attempt, on December 17, the brothers were ready to try again. It was now Orville’s turn to fly. This time history was made! The heavier-than-air machine stayed up twelve seconds and traveled 120 feet. Then Wilbur took a turn, flying 175 feet in 12 seconds. In the next flight Orville covered 200 feet in 15 seconds, and in the fourth and final flight, with Wilbur at the helm, the Flyer remained airborne for a whopping fifty-nine seconds and traveled 852 feet. Later that day, out on the sand dunes, a gust of wind caught the plane, cartwheeling it over the sand and badly damaging it. The plane was never flown again. But the Wright brothers had already achieved a monumental accomplishment: their Flyer was the first heavier-than-air machine to make a sustained and controlled powered flight.

  To perfect their invention, the Wright brothers built two more airplanes over the next couple of years. They called all their aircraft simply “Flyers,” distinguishing each by the year of its construction. Their first plane was called the 1903 Flyer (it became popularly known as the Kitty Hawk, but this name eventually fell into disuse), their next year’s plane the 1904 Flyer, then the 1905 Flyer.

  After testing their 1905 plane the Wrights devoted themselves to protecting their invention and commercially marketing it. With the new flying machine greeted with tremendous excitement, people all over the world tried to build their own planes. Filing patent infringement suits, primarily against Glenn Curtiss in the United States, and against others in Europe, occupied much of the Wrights’ time. In 1908 they demonstrated their plane, which now could fly over an hour without difficulty, both in the United States and Europe. In 1909, after having met various requirements of the U.S. government, including minimum distance and speed capability of the plane, they sold the government a plane they called the Military Flyer (National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.). Following this sale, the Wrights began an aviation business. In the beginning the company didn’t build and sell a great many airplanes, and much of its income was derived from its flying exhibition team, which performed at fairs and other outdoor events. But with aviation a burgeoning industry, the company’s future as a manufacturer appeared promising until Wilbur, at the age of forty-five, suddenly developed typhoid fever and died in May 1912. Orville eventually decided he didn’t want to run the company by himself and sold it to a group of investors in 1915.

  Over the years Orville sat on company boards and came to be regarded essentially as an elder statesman of aviation until his death due to a heart attack in 1948. By that time, with sophisticated aircraft a regular part of the world, he was already regarded as a legend, having with his brother been the first to be airborne in a powered machine, their 1903 Flyer. But in the years following their four historic flights on December 17, 1903, the machine that they worked so hard to perfect, the first airplane to fly, was largely ignored.

  After its flights on December 17, the 1903 Flyer had been immediately shipped back to Dayton, where it was kept in a crate in a back shed for several years. The crate wasn’t opened until 1916, when Orville reassembled the plane for an exhibition at a new building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was displayed at a few other locations in the late teens and early twenties and reconditioned in 1927, the year before the plane went to the Science Museum in London.

  In 1909 the Smithsonian Institution first asked the Wright brothers to donate a plane to the museum, but it wasn’t the 1903 Flyer that was requested. Rather, the Smithsonian wanted a current Wright brothers airplane, the type they were flying in 1909. The Wrights didn’t have one available to give but offered either to rebuild the original 1903 plane from its pieces or to create a model of it.

  The 1903 machine wasn’t of interest to the Smithsonian, and this and other factors—including the institution’s reluctance to credit the Wrights with building the first airplane, in view of the tests by the institution’s secretary, Samuel Pierpont Langley, who built a machine that flew without a pilot—caused a rift between the Wrights and the Smithsonian. Recognition came only gradually through the years, and finally, the disagreement resolved, the Smithsonian requested the 1903 Flyer. But at the time the plane was in England—Orville had sent it there as a gesture of protest against the Smithsonian—and it wasn’t until after World War II ended, in 1948, that it was brought back to the United States and deposited in the Smithsonian.

  The Wright brothers’ landmark flights of December 17, 1903, received little news coverage, and the stories that were printed were highly exaggerated. One, for example, depicted a flight going six miles out over the ocean, which of course was untrue. In January 1904 the Wright brothers held a press conference to disclaim the exaggerated stories and explain precisely what they had done.

  From its three-axis control to its lift an
d propulsion systems, the 1903 Flyer embodied the fundamental elements required of all future airplanes. Indeed, with their remarkable flying machine, Orville and Wilbur Wright ushered in a new era, one that was to have profound effects on virtually every area of society, including transportation, commerce, and war.

  LOCATION: National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.

  THE BREAST-POCKET ITEMS THAT SAVED THE LIFE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  DATE: 1912

  WHAT THEY ARE: Two items that saved Theodore Roosevelt from an assassin’s bullet: the typewritten pages of a speech and a metal eyeglass case.

  WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE: The manuscript pages of the speech measure 8½ inches by 6½ inches. The eyeglass case measures a little more than 5 inches across and is maroon-brown. Both have bullet holes in them; because the speech was folded, it has bullet holes at the top and bottom of the pages.

  It was the quintessence of serendipity—a deadly courier being obstructed by the casual impediments of habit. Ordinary objects, unwittingly but strategically placed by the intended victim of an assassination attempt, blocked the course of what would otherwise have been a deadly bullet.

  October 14, 1912. Theodore Roosevelt was stumping in the Midwest as a Bull Moose candidate for the presidency of the United States. Roosevelt was vice president in 1901 when William McKinley was assassinated, and he ascended to the office of chief executive at the age of forty-two, the youngest president ever. His was a dramatically active presidency in basically uneventful times, and he was affectionately embraced by the public. But he stepped down in 1909 and was succeeded by his candidate of choice, William Howard Taft.