You thought you could get away with it, didn’t you? You self-satisfied buffoons actually thought that you could have a whole Wings Week, and laugh amongst yourselves, and have blogs about cities like Detroit and Anaheim and Paris and Arlington(?!), without mentioning the city that made Wings Week possible. The city where humankind created wings. You simpletons probably don’t even know which city that is. Don’t embarrass yourself even further by guessing Buffalo. Buffalo didn’t create wings, they created a sauce.
So let me tell you where wings come from: Dayton, Ohio. Home of Orville and Wilbur Wright. Inventors of powered flight. Stick that in your theme week, you groundlovers.
Weren’t the Wright Brothers from North Carolina? Nobody is from North Carolina except Billy Graham and Mike Krzyzewski and hundreds of thousands of mid-tier bank executives. All North Carolina has going for it that it’s next to an ocean. Wings work best with a sustained wind to help them along, and so when the Wright Brothers, who had already figured out how to fly, wanted to try their first model, they searched for an ideal spot. Beaches have a steady, predictable (by weather standards) wind pattern, and their soft sand is about the best surface you can hope for if your flying machine stops flying. They needed a beach, but one that was real shitty, so there’d be nobody hanging around to bother them. And if you want a shitty beach, you can’t beat North Carolina.
So yes, wings were invented in Dayton, Ohio, and do you know why? Because Dayton is where shit gets done. Do you realize that, while the Wright Brothers were still learning how to fly, Dayton already had more patents per capita than any other city in the whole damn country? We’re the ones that figured out how to start a car engine without turning a giant crank like some chump in a Charlie Chaplin movie. We invented the cash register, and just as you start saying Nobody uses those any more, guess what, we also invented barcodes. And after the barcode on your six-pack gets scanned, you can thank Dayton again, because we invented the pop-top can. Oh, and by the way, have you noticed how the Nazis didn’t win World War II? You’re welcome, because the machine that decrypted the Enigma cipher was made in the good old Gem City. Dayton just can’t stop churning out brilliant minds. Where do you think the only person to win 40 games on Jeopardy! in the last 20 years came from? I’ll give you a hint: It wasn’t North Carolina.
Back to the Wright Brothers: When they sat down to make something that would fly through the air, spitting in gravity’s face and launching a new era for all of humanity, were they wealthy capitalists using their unearned leisure and resources to pursue an idle hobby? Nope! They were the children of an itinerant preacher, who’d roamed all over before finally settling in Dayton (great choice!). Were they the products of some elite Ivy League college, training under the finest minds in the nation? Guess again, buddy. Wilbur might have gone to Yale, but he got hit in the face with a hockey stick by a guy who later turned out to be a serial killer (this really happened), which understandably threw him off for a bit. And Orville dropped out of high school to start a printing company, using a press which the two of them designed and built together. A press they used to, among other things, support one of Dayton’s many other geniuses, the groundbreaking black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. After getting bored with advancing American literature, they started a bicycle shop, and then thought, “Bicycles are cool and all, but what if they could fucking fly?” And because they were in Dayton, they made it happen.
They weren’t the only ones trying to make something that could fly. For example, Samuel Langley was also giving it his best shot. Who’s Samuel Langley, you ask? You’ve never heard of him, because his airplanes sucked shit. He wasn’t working on it in his spare time from a small business he’d created, either. That’s a Dayton thing, and Langley was from—pardon me while I vomit—Boston. In 1898, the War Department and the Smithsonian gave him $2.6 million in today’s money to build an airplane. And what did he do with it? He spent five years building a plane with no landing gear, crashed it into the Potomac River twice, and gave up.
The Wright Brothers didn’t rush. They mathematically laid out all the problems they had to solve, and worked through them, testing carefully as they went. They proved that a formula for calculating lift had been using an incorrect value for the previous hundred years. They figured out the formula for calculating a propeller's thrust, and used it to create propellers with 75 percent efficiency—on their first try! But the most important thing they did was to figure out how wings worked. Langley hadn’t bothered to do that because, I swear to God, he didn’t think airplanes needed to be steered. But the Wright Brothers felt like steering was going to be a pretty important part of an airplane, so they studied birds in flight, built sophisticated wind tunnels to test their theories, and kept gnawing at the problem until they figured it out. (Whenever they got stuck in an argument, they would switch sides and start arguing each other’s position to get unstuck.) The result was a “wing-warping” design that made the whole thing possible. Airplane wings look very different now, but they are still based on the same fundamental insights that the Wright Brothers built into their first prototype.
So they went off to that shitty beach they had found. And they flew.
That first flight wasn’t very long or very far, but they didn’t expect it to be. They knew it would need a lot of improvement to be of any real use. So they got the hell out of North Carolina, and returned to Dayton to finish inventing the airplane. Before long, they had something real, a plane that you could steer and fly, for as long as the fuel held out, and then land safely. In North Carolina, they ran some tests; in Dayton, they changed the world.
You might be surprised at how heated I am about this. Aren’t Daytonians quiet, humble Midwesterners? We are, at least as far as you know. But I felt the need to break Midwestern kayfabe for a minute. Because most Daytonians, whenever they think about it, are just as pissed as I am, even if they don’t show it. Because the Wright Brothers have never gotten their due respect, even from the very beginning: People immediately started complaining that they spent too much effort trying to protect their patent, because God forbid they expect any reward for inventing the airplane! The Smithsonian was so embarrassed about getting shown up by some hicks from Ohio that for years they displayed Langley’s plane, last seen nose-diving directly into the Potomac River, as the first airplane “capable” of powered flight. They were hardly alone in pushing Dayton aside. Henry Ford took the Wright Brothers’ whole bicycle shop to Detroit. North Carolina put Dayton’s plane on their state license plates. They don’t think anyone can stop them from claiming the credit, and they’re right.
But in Dayton, we know where wings were invented, and we know they couldn’t have been invented anywhere else. We don’t need your praise; we know we’ve got something special. I don’t live in Dayton anymore, but I love it, and it’ll always be my hometown. And whenever I see an airplane soaring overhead, I see a kindred spirit. We may have gone out into the world to seek out new challenges and adventures, but that airplane and I first took off from the same place.
