Last modified Saturday, December 13, 2003 8:18 PM PST
Wilbur and Orville Wright's great mistake
By: ROBERT KAHN - Staff Writer
One hundred years ago, on Dec. 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made a big mistake. They got out
of the bicycle business and into airplanes.
Actually, the Wright Cycle Co. of Dayton, Ohio did not go out of business until 1907, when the U.S.
Signal Corps put out a request for bids for a heavier-than-air flying machine. The Wright brothers
won the bid, for $25,000, which was enough money back then for the boys to close up their bike shop.
That's a shame. The bicycle is a much better machine than the airplane. In the history of mankind, I
cannot think of a single case of a bicycle doing anyone harm, except an improvident rider or the
unfortunate person the rider runs over ---- one at a time. With the exception of musical
instruments, the bicycle may be the most human machine ever invented. The airplane is one of the
most inhuman. The scale of the disasters the airplane made possible shows we would be better off
without it.
Just 14 years after Wilbur flew over Kitty Hawk, the U.S. government began the era of modern
warfare by using planes to bomb the troops of Agusto Sandino in Nicaragua. The Fascist bombing of
Guernica in Spain was the first time planes were used to make war upon cities, but it was the U.S.
government that pushed the world down its first steps toward the particular hell we inhabit today.
For 100 years we have been earnestly saving the world by inventing machines to blow it up one piece
at a time.
I prefer the bicycle. Apparently, it was invented in 1816 by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who also
invented photography, with help from Louis Daguerre. The first bicycle was made of wood and was
missing a few things we expect on a bicycle today: pedals and a chain, for starters. The doughty
Frenchmen called it a celeripede, and the rider sat on it and pushed himself around until he got
tired. Englishmen called it a hobby horse.
It took more than 20 years for someone to get around to adding pedals to it. This was Kirkpatrick
MacMillan, of Dumfries, Scotland, who produced the first velocipede in 1840. He was arrested and
prosecuted once for "furious driving."
I must take issue, however, with the bicycle historians who say that MacMillan also invented the
first comfortable bicycle seat. There is no such thing.
It took another 25 years for the first bicycle shop to be opened, by Pierre Lallement of Paris.
I will spare you a detailed recitation of what came next: the high-wheeler, the safety bicycle,
the addition of the chain or drive shaft, pneumatic tires and derailleurs. But all these
improvements came at a human pace ---- years apart, and for no other purpose than to make the
bicycle more fun to ride.
It is a machine fitting for intelligent chimps who have no self-control or social conscience ---- a
machine for humans.
By the 1890s the safety bicycle ---- with rear-wheel drive and pneumatic tires ---- became so
popular that guys had to let women try it. The women liked it, so the bustle had to go, and so did
whalebone corsets, though women still had to wear long skirts so guys could not see their legs, and
so the women would have trouble keeping up.
In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said, "The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than
anything else in the world." And who am I to pick a fight with Susan B. Anthony?
The most interesting scientific fact about the bicycle is that when you get up a head of steam its
center of gravity is actually in front of the place where the front tire meets the road. The greater
the angle of the front fork, the farther forward the center of gravity is. That's why you can ride a
bike with no hands ---- because it keeps falling forward toward its center of gravity. As you slow
down, the center of gravity comes back, and when it's behind the place where the front tire meets
the road, you fall over. Or put a foot down.
Well, if Wilbur and Orville hadn't done it, someone else would have done it, so we can't blame them
for everything. By the way, Wilbur and Orville had an older brother named Reuchlin, which shows that
Mr. and Mrs. Wright had a great sense of humor, or had none at all.
Wilbur died of typhoid in 1912, but Orville made it until 1948. He lived to see the wonderful use to
which we put his invention at Hiroshima. Just a few weeks ago, a group of atomic bomb survivors
protested the National Air and Space Museum's plans to put the Enola Gay in a display of famous
airplanes ---- as though there were something to celebrate.
I think the atomic bomb survivors have a point. We should smash the Enola Gay into tiny pieces and
bury it in the ocean, or shoot it into outer space with a sign on it: "If you can read this, you are
too close." Or we could melt it down and pound it into bicycles