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With their former trust in the calculations of Lilienthal and Chanute shattered, the brothers set out that autumn of 1901 to crack the code of aeronautics themselves. It was a brave decision and a crucial turning point. Of primary importance was to find a way to achieve accurate measurements of the “lift” and “drag” of a wing’s surface, and the ingenuity, as well as patience, they brought to their experiments were like nothing done by anyone until then. For three months, working in one of the upstairs rooms at the bicycle shop, they concentrated nearly all of their time on these “investigations” and with stunning results. They devised and built a small-scale wind tunnel—a wooden box 6 feet long and 16 inches square, with one end open and a fan mounted at the other end, and this powered, since the shop had no electricity, by an extremely noisy gasoline engine. The box stood on four legs about waist high. Although a wind tunnel had been used by an English experimenter, Francis Herbert Wenham, as early as the 1870s, and by several others since, including Hiram Maxim, their tests were nothing like those of the brothers, who proceeded entirely on their own and in their own way.
The Wright Brothers
David McCullough
I was doing some consulting for a tech company that decided to let go of its top performer because she had a reputation for being “difficult.” She didn’t get along with everyone, they said; she pushed others too hard and often made people uncomfortable by insisting that everyone needed to do better. Someday maybe I’ll understand why that’s a bad thing; I’ll take difficult and effective over easy and incompetent any day. But there were ego and personality issues, probably because the pressure and tension were too high, and management decided it would be better for “morale” to let her go, along with her huge book of business and years of experience. And within a month of her departure, morale and productivity actually got worse, because those who had the issues with her suddenly had no one to blame for their poor performances, and no one to hold them accountable. And eventually, her former bosses realized that the person who was the “problem” was actually the one holding it all together. The “thorn” in everyone’s side was the most important part of the rose. A rose with thorns lives longer than a rose with the thorns clipped. When
Curiously enough, one thing was for sure. He didn’t see himself as part of any great tidal wave. “No,” he said years later. “I just knew that I was getting away from Florida. I didn’t consider it like it was a general movement on and I was a part of it. No, I never considered that.” He could only see what was in front of him, and that was, he hoped, a freer new life for himself. “I was hoping,” he said years later. “I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.”
The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson
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