Category: Uncategorized

A lot of the press coverage on Baltimore has focused on ordinary citizens. The city doesn’t work well for them because they can’t get decent jobs and therefore have to collect various forms of welfare. Sometimes the situation is presented as a zero-sum game (as classic Marxism would require, I think). Because many people in Baltimore are poor there must be a corresponding rich businessperson who is exploiting them (Louis Hyman, a Cornell professor, says that poor people in Baltimore are suffering “economic oppression”; a Hopkins professor says in the NYT that housing and commercial real estate has replaced slavery). The specific businesspeople who are getting rich off the backs of poor Baltimore residents are never identified or interviewed, however, until this Wall Street Journal article. The author is an actual employer in Baltimore and he says that the city doesn’t function well for him either.

So whom does that leave? The city must serve someone’s needs, right? If we subtract private sector employees and private sector employers… that leaves government workers! If they are the ones who can effect change and they are prospering under the current system, why would they try to effect change?

Full post, including comments

Wrapping up my review of The Wright Brothers by David McCullough… (previous posting)

My conception of the Wright Brothers was that they were able to draw heavily on the work of Otto Lilienthal and others for basic aerodynamics. McCullough says that this is essentially untrue. Textbook aerodynamics, such as it was back then, was simply wrong, except for the basics such as “Lift came from air moving faster over the arched top of a wing, thereby making the pressure there less than that under the wing.” The Wright Brothers had to build their own wind tunnel before they could succeed at Kitty Hawk:

It was not just that their machine had performed so poorly, or that so much still remained to be solved, but that so many of the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations and tables prepared by the likes of Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute—data the brothers had taken as gospel—had proven to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly those esteemed authorities had been guessing, “groping in the dark.” … 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.

For nearly two months the brothers tested some thirty-eight wing surfaces, setting the “balances” or “airfoils”—the different-shaped hacksaw blades—at angles from 0 to 45 degrees in winds up to 27 miles per hour. It was a slow, tedious process, but as Orville wrote, “those metal models told us how to build.” Octave Chanute was astonished by what Wilbur had to report. “It is perfectly marvelous to me how quickly you get results with your testing machine,” he wrote. “You are evidently better equipped to test the endless variety of curved surfaces than anybody has ever been.”

It was even worse when it came to propeller design:

Meantime, the design of the propellers had become a still bigger challenge. “I think the hardest job Will and Orv had was with the propellers,” Charlie later said. “I don’t believe they ever were given enough credit for that development.” The problem became more complex the more the brothers studied it. Much to their surprise, they could find no existing data on air propellers. They had assumed they could go by whatever rule-of-thumb marine engineers used for the propellers on boats, and accordingly drew on the resources of the Dayton library only to find that after a hundred years in use the exact action of a screw propeller was still obscure. Once more they were left no choice but to solve the problem themselves. “Our minds,” said Orville, “became so obsessed with it that we could do little other work.”

They began to see the propeller as an airplane wing traveling in a spiral course, and that if they could calculate the effect of a wing traveling a straight course, why could they not calculate the effect of one traveling in a spiral course?

The new Flyer, as they called it, would have two propellers positioned between the two wings just to the rear of the operator. One would turn clockwise, the other, counterclockwise, so the spinning, or gyroscopic action, of the one would balance that of the other. Making the propellers with the proper diameter, pitch, and surface area proved no great problem. Each had a diameter of 8 and a half feet and were made of three spruce laminations glued together and shaped by hand with a hatchet and spoke shaver, or “drawknife,” as used by wheelwrights. That they were different from any propellers ever built before was certain, and the last major problem had been resolved.s

And they had to invent the aluminum-block engine:

It was shortly before the New Year when the Wright brothers sent out letters to manufacturers of automobile engines in seven states asking if they could supply an off-the-shelf engine light enough in weight but with sufficient power for their purposes. There was only one response, and in that case the motor was much too heavy. So again they had some original work to do and they had had no experience building engines.

For Charlie Taylor, however, the description applied almost perfectly, except that he was more than a clever mechanic, he was a brilliant mechanic and for the brothers a godsend. His only prior experience with a gasoline engine had been trying to repair one in an automobile a few years before. But that January, working in the back shop with the same metal lathe and drill press used for building bicycles, he went to work and six weeks later had it finished. The motor had four cylinders with a 4-inch bore and a 4-inch stroke. It was intended to deliver 8 horsepower and weigh no more than 200 pounds, to carry a total of 675 pounds, the estimated combined weight of the flying machine and an operator. As it turned out, the motor Charlie built weighed only 152 pounds, for the reason that the engine block was of cast aluminum provided by the up-and-coming Aluminum Company of America based in Pittsburgh.

McCullough is very weak on explaining aerodynamics and the challenges of flying. Here’s one passage:

In a glide later the same day, the machine kept rising higher and higher till it lost all headway, exactly “the fix” that had plunged Otto Lilienthal to his death. Responding to a shout from Orville, Wilbur turned the rudder to its full extent and only then did the glider settle slowly to the ground, maintaining a horizontal position almost perfectly, and landing with no damage or injury.

I’m not sure if it is the Wright brothers who used the term “rudder” for what we today call “elevator” or if McCullough simply conflated the two. It is tough to see how a high pitch attitude and incipient stall could be corrected with a rudder (yaw control). NASA shows a Wright Flyer having more or less conventional controls and nomenclature.

The Wrights were competing against a Smithsonian-led government-funded project run by the best minds of the time:

Langley maintained extreme secrecy about his efforts. Every aspect of his heavily financed Smithsonian experiments remained confidential. In sharp contrast to the affable Chanute, Langley, a thorough Boston Brahmin, had what his friends kindly termed a “shell of hauteur.” Since the launching of his pilotless, steam-powered aerodrome in 1896, Langley and his Smithsonian “team” had been at work on a far larger, and again well-financed, version of the same machine, except that this would be powered by a gasoline engine and carry a single operator.

On July 14 came the news that in a matter of days, Samuel Langley was to test his “latest contrivance” on the mosquito-infested banks of the Potomac River near Quantico, Virginia, thirty miles south of Washington. This time it was to be a motor-powered “full-fledged airship” called “The Great Aerodrome,” capable of carrying one operator. It had cost $50,000 in public money—in Smithsonian resources and the largest appropriation yet granted by the U.S. War Department. Professor Langley and several of his friends, including Alexander Graham Bell, contributed another $20,000.

… neither [Wright] ever said the stunning contrast between their success and Samuel Langley’s full-scale failure just days before made what they had done on their own all the more remarkable. Not incidentally, the Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money, whereas the brothers’ total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel to and from Kitty Hawk, came to a little less than $1,000, a sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.

After their historic achievement, the Wrights tried to turn it into a business, something Wilbur didn’t expect them to be good at:

In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds [he wrote]. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has. No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition, so long as it is not carried to excess, for such men make the world and its affairs move. . . . I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen.

The U.S. military gave the Wright Brothers the cold shoulder for at least five years and the Smithsonian actually tried to say that their own Langley had been the first to build a flying machine. They blamed the early 1900s crashes on the launch mechanism and demonstrated the machine, now heavily modified by Glenn Curtis, the Wrights’ competitor, doing a bit of flying 10 years after the fact. The Wrights went to Europe and were warmly received, though the French government was not always helpful: “A dozen or more ribs were broken, one wing ruined, the cloth torn in countless places. Everything was a tangled mess. Radiators were smashed, propeller axles broken, coils badly turned up, essential wires, seats, nuts, and bolts, all missing. … But then Wilbur learned that the chaos and damage had not been caused at Dayton, but at Le Havre by careless French customs inspectors.”

It was not always a perfect match:

Léon Delagrange, who before becoming an aviator had been a sculptor and painter, could not help puzzling over what went on behind Wilbur’s masklike countenance, and, being French, found it hard to comprehend or warm to someone who seemed so devoid of the elemental human emotions and desires. “Even if this man sometimes deigns to smile, one can say with certainty that he has never known the douceur [sweetness] of tears. Has he a heart? Has he loved? Has he suffered? An enigma, a mystery

Further, Peyrey, unlike others, had discovered how exceptionally cultured Wilbur was, how, “in rare moments of relaxation,” he talked with authority of literature, art, history, music, science, architecture, or painting. To Peyrey, the devotion of this preacher’s son to his calling was very like that of a gifted man dedicating his life to a religious mission.

The Wrights took their patents to war in the courts (Wikipedia) and won a series of Pyrrhic victories.

Except for one brief training flight he gave a German pilot in Berlin in June of 1911, Wilbur Wright was not to fly ever again [until his death from typhoid in May 1912], so taken up was he with business matters and acrimonious lawsuits. The Wright Company, from the start, demanded a great deal of time and attention. But it was the interminable patent infringement suits that put the most strain on both brothers. “When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments,” Wilbur wrote to a friend in France, “we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.

The world took their

Full post, including comments

“Mom: The Designated Worrier” is a Mother’s Day gift from the New York Times, an example of “tall poppy syndrome” in which the best way to build up mothers is to point out how useless fathers are.

Here’s a representative quote:

Half of the men surveyed in a Families and Work Institute study from 2008 said they were either the responsible parent or shared the role equally with their spouse, while two-thirds of the women said they were the one in charge. This suggests that either men overestimate their contribution or women define the work differently.

Apparently neither the writer nor the editors of the New York Times thought that it was possible for a woman to overestimate her contributions as a parent.

The writer says “One reason women like me get stuck with the micromanagement…,” i.e., the writer and editors are comfortable assuming that children need to be micromanaged.

We can be sure that at least one man in New York is having a great Mother’s Day:

I’ve definitely been guilty of “maternal gatekeeping” — rolling my eyes or making sardonic asides when my husband has been in charge but hasn’t pushed hard enough to get teeth brushed or bar mitzvah practice done. This drives my husband insane, because he’s a really good father and he knows that I know it. But I can’t help myself. I have my standards, helicopter-ish though they may be.

I submitted a comment to the piece:

The author suggests that fathers are essentially useless, except for paying the bills. Her conclusion is that this leads to unacceptable unfairness when mothers and fathers live together. But a woman who desires domestic fairness above all already has an option: avoid a live-together partnership with the father(s) and collect child support. Then nobody needs to change, nobody needs to argue about who did what percentage of the chores or the worrying that the author feels is essential to children, and it all fits under existing laws. In New York, for example, the mother is entitled to roughly 1/3 of after-tax income for a single child. With three children from three different fathers of equal income the mother would end up with 100% of the after-tax income of one father. Then, without the hassle of wedding planning or divorce lawsuits, she’s got the kids and the cash and can stay home to hover if desired.

Other readers’ comments are kind of fun. Here’s a selection:

I really feel sorry for this woman. She and her peers have constructed lives that are replete with drudgery without respite, at least until the kids move out for college, and she can’t understand why husbands are goldbricking … what are her kids doing to help out?

The author has a complete lack of self-awareness. Basically her “list” exists largely in her head, where all tasks are equally urgent. The husband has to buy into all of it, at exactly the same degree of urgency, and perform each task exactly the way she would do it, or risk having it redone the “right” way and failing to “share” the completely artificial sense of urgency.

I think the author conflates productive worrying with non-productive obsessing that is more comforting for the obsessed mom than it is for the dad or more importantly – for the kids.

If we can all agree that becoming a parent is, in most cases, a voluntary act, can we please stop this endless pity party that many mothers seem to revel in? If the job is that hard and thankless, and if the male part of the equation is clueless, why bother doing it at all?

(from a male physician) Female parents such as the author shouldn’t confuse “worry” with caring for children. Obsessing, double checking, and undermining other peoples choices creates dependent and anxious children. Questioning and feeling that you can critique male parental effort causes fathers to step back from care since the “worrying” female parent is going to repeat their effort or criticize until it is done “the right way” (based on a female standard)

I’m a big girl, those are small tasks and part of life. You just run with things. Articles like this make women seem weak and harebrained.

As a pediatrician, I talk with a lot of families. … is it possible that (some of) the difference you are describing is part of a tacit negotiation between the stereotypical mom and stereotypical dad about what is necessary to perform good parenting? If some of a mom’s need to be organized and in control is due to “worry” AKA “anxiety” is it really the dad’s job to take on part of that? Or is she (partly) treating her own anxiety and calming her own worry, rather than doing “more than half” of the NECESSARY parenting?. There is not necessarily one right way to parent.

What would obsessive/compulsive martyrs complain about if there were true Gender Equality?

When men and women operate like interchangeable workers in a factory, not only does the child lose, but the parents also lose out on their chance to shine to their fullest potential,

The author should have married a woman.

Mom: The Designated Victim

As a mother, I saw myself primarily as my children’s teacher, not their maid, that Mommy Marty trap so many women fall into, which allows them to feel important while nursing endless grievances. … Teaching children to do things for themselves takes a lot more time and is much messier than doing it yourself, but raising an independent child who does not need you to survive is the primary role of a parent.

Here finally is a woman bold enough to speak out and complain that her husband is lazy.

As an only-child whose father passed away during childhood, I often wished that my father were around to balance out the stifling (and wholly unnecessary) worries imposed on me day-in and day-out by my own mother.

(from a young-looking woman): So divorce the jerk. You’re doing all the work anyway. I don’t understand why women stay with men like that. What are you getting out of the relationship, other than aggravation?

Related:

• New York chapter of Real World Divorce
• The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (i.e., if the research is right, all of the worrying that the NY Times author is doing is unproductive)

Full post, including comments

According to the New York Post, New York’s top political officials could end up in the same prison (“Club Fed”) if both are convicted on their respective corruption charges.

The Tax Foundation says that New York collects the highest percentage of residents’ income of any state. Is that because corruption makes the state expensive to run? Or do the lavish tax revenues flowing into Albany attract corrupt people? (the good news is that they can continue to collect pensions even after felony convictions)

[Separately, what percentage of New York’s politicians would need to be imprisoned for corruption before the New York Times would stop lecturing other Americans on how they should run their states?]

Full post, including comments

Folks:

We need to hire a user experience/Web/graphic designer (or just the first two if need be) to assist with (1) a Facebook application (all JavaScript/CSS), (2) an online book design (HTML/CSS), and (3) a corporate site (identity/HTML/CSS).

The budget is low but not India/Pakistan-on-guru.com low. This is probably about 25 hours of work for someone experienced.

Recommendations?

[We’re also interested in hiring someone who is an expert at producing photo-heavy Kindle books.]

Full post, including comments

… but instead we became more like the Afghans: “The Fraud of War” (Slate article on in-country Americans who adopted a local attitude toward corruption)

[Of course one might argue that the U.S. has at least an equal share of domestic corruption and cronyism, just in a more bureaucratized fashion.]

Full post, including comments

From the New York Times:

The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday rejected changes that legislators made to fix a deeply troubled public pension system, leaving the state where it had started — with a significant budget crisis, a vastly underfunded pension program and no plan in sight.

All seven members of the state’s highest court found that a pension overhaul lawmakers had agreed to almost a year and a half ago violated the Illinois Constitution. The changes would have curtailed future cost-of-living adjustments for workers, raised the age of retirement for some and put a cap on pensions for those with the highest salaries. But under the state Constitution, benefits promised as part of a pension system for public workers “shall not be diminished or impaired.”

We now know that the Illinois constitution requires that if the state or local government hires a worker at age 18 whatever pension commitments are in place at that time must be preserved for the next 30 years or so (until that worker’s retirement) and then paid until the worker’s death (another 50 years? or 100 if medical technology leaps forward?). Thus Illinois taxpayers are locked in for at least 80 years.

I’m wondering, though, if this lock-in period could be cut to 50 years. What requires an insolvent state such as Illinois to retain any or all of its public employees? Could the governments simply fire all of the workers and then invite people to reapply for jobs with a new 401k-style pension system? And, if not, what does happen when Illinois, about the same population as Greece, runs out of cash (as Greece will shortly)? Do the public employees then get ownership of the highways so that they can establish toll booths? Ownership of city parks on which they can build apartment houses or charge admission fees?

Are there enough private-sector employees with political power in Illinois to obtain constitutional changes before all of the money is gone? Could Illinois raise tax rates enough to fill what is described as a $100 billion hole (probably closer to $200 billion if one were to use realistic accounting procedures, such as not forecasting a higher return than is currently obtainable in the bond market and adjusting for the fact that people who retire in their 50s tend to live longer than average) without causing revenue to fall as people and businesses moved to nearby states with sounder finances and therefore lower tax rates? The Tax Foundation says that Illinois is already collecting a higher-than-average share of residents’ income; the state’s insolvency apparently comes from spending more (and promising government workers more) than other states, not from taxing less. Neighboring Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, and Kentucky all have lower-than-average tax burdens. Wisconsin is the only neighboring state that collects more.

Related:

• “History of Public Employee Unions”
• pensions and the General Motors bankruptcy
• pension commitments as deficit-spending for states
• WSJ editorial with some numbers
• “Why Chicago’s Bonds Are Junk” is a WSJ editorial with some per-worker data: “The Illinois State Board of Education says the average Chicago teacher salary is about $71,000 a year. That compares to Chicago’s median salary of $47,270 in 2009-2013, according to the Census Bureau. The average starting pension for a Chicago teacher retiring in 2011 after a public-school career was $77,496, according to the Illinois Policy Institute. The city will pay a teacher who retired in 2011 some $2.4 million during retirement, up from $1.35 million a decade earlier.”

Full post, including comments

As my California friends complained on Facebook about their tap water being bottled and sold by greedy commercial enterprises, such as Nestle, it occurred to me that California is like 1980s Israel and Israel is like 1980s California.

Israel used to have socialism and shortages of everything. Now Israel has a market economy and plenty of everything.

California was a market economy at one point. Now it is a welfare state that is running out of important stuff (water, money to pay pensions, vaccinated children, etc.)

What do readers think of the analogy?

Full post, including comments

My new drone will be arriving in February 2016 according to Kickstarter. This is the first consumer product of Helen Greiner’s latest company: CyPhy Works. At roughly 1/500th the price of a helicopter and a camera it seems as though it will be worth a try. Go Helen! (grad school classmate)

Full post, including comments

I’ve just finished The Wright Brothers by David McCullough (personal favorite: The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914).

I’ll do another posting about the (recommended) book per se but with this post I just want to highlight some of the changes in American society over the past 130 years revealed by the book.

What constitutes a middle class lifestyle has certainly changed quite a bit:

The brothers were well into their twenties before there was running water or plumbing in the [Dayton, Ohio] house. Weekly baths were accomplished sitting in a tub of hot water on the kitchen floor, with the curtains drawn. An open well and wooden pump, outhouse, and carriage shed were out back. There was no electricity. Meals were cooked on a wood stove. Heat and light were provided by natural gas. House and property had a total value of perhaps $1,800.

Despite the lack of a Starbucks “Race Together” campaign, being black in 19th century Ohio does not seem to have been a bar to success:

A high school friend of Orville’s, Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had been the class poet and the only black student in the school, became a contributor to the West Side News. Later, when Dunbar proposed doing a weekly paper for the black community, Orville and Wilbur printed it on credit, but it lasted only a short time. … In 1893, through the influence of Bishop Wright, a first collection of Dunbar’s poems was published by the United Brethren Church, for which Dunbar himself paid the cost of $125. In another few years, having been discovered by the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, Dunbar had become a nationally acclaimed poet

Being Jewish was not a plus:

In a letter from Katharine [the Wrights’ sister], dated June 30, he was to learn that things were not going at all well at home, that she and Orville felt left out of what was happening in Paris. “Orv can’t work any,” Orv was quite “uneasy,” Orv was “unsettled,” “really crazy to know what is going on,” “wroth” over how things were being handled in Paris without him. Clearly she was, too. She and Orville had lost all patience with Flint & Company and questioned whether they could be trusted. She had had little or no experience with Jews, but having seen a photograph of Hart Berg, she wondered if he might be one. “I can’t stand Berg’s looks,” she wrote. “It has just dawned on me that the whole company is composed of Jews. Berg certainly looks it.”

Women were scarce as both pilots and passengers in the first decade of powered flight, though a rope tied around the ankles and bottom of a long dress was a big help in those “no-cockpit” days. (see this history of female pilots) On the other hand, Katharine Wright, after a career as a school teacher ($25/week; about $24,000 in today’s money), was selected as a trustee of her alma mater, Oberlin College.

Bicycles were potentially shocking and certainly shockingly expensive:

Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.

In 1895, their third year in business, they moved to a corner building at 22 South Williams Street, with a showroom on the street level and space for a machine shop upstairs. There, on the second floor, the brothers began making their own model bicycles, available to order. The announcement of the new product read in part as follows: It will have large tubing, high frame, tool steel bearings, needle wire spokes, narrow tread and every feature of an up-to-date bicycle. Its weight will be about 20 pounds. We are very certain that no wheel on the market will run easier or wear longer than this one, and we will guarantee it in the most unqualified manner. It sold for $60 to $65 and was called the Van Cleve, in honor of their great-great-grandmother on their father’s side, who was the first white woman to settle in Dayton. With the Van Cleve in production, and available in all colors, a second, less-expensive model was introduced called the St. Clair, in tribute to the first governor of the old Northwest Territory, of which Ohio was part. Their income grew to the point where they were earning a handsome $2,000 to $3,000 per year.

… As it was during the first several months of 1904, bike repairs were numbering a steady fifteen to twenty a week. Then there were the sales of a great variety of bicycle “sundries,” as they were referred to in the shop’s large ledger books, including bike tires ($3.25 each), bike bells (10 cents), lamps ($1.00), pedal guards (5 cents), spokes (10 cents), bike pumps (35 cents). Also, as usual in winter, sharpening ice skates (at 15 cents each) provided a steady additional sum

The BLS inflation calculator goes back only to 1913 but $65 in 1913 corresponds to $1541 today and the $3,000 in 1913 would be about $70,000 today. A high-end camera was about the same price as today: “In 1902 they had made what for them was a major investment of $55.55 in as fine an American-made camera to be had, a large Gundlach Korona V, which used 5 × 7-inch glass plates and had a pneumatic shutter.” (Though of course today we don’t have to buy chemicals to develop images from our Canons, Nikons, and Sonys.)

Everything was pointing up:

With the arrival of the New Year 1903, the outlook in Dayton was more promising than ever. The local population had reached nearly 100,000 and according to the Evening News, an equal number were now finding their way there to do business. It was no town for a pessimist, said the paper, “but if there is any hope for him, here he may breathe the glorious air of prosperity and imbibe the spirit of optimism and be cured.” To Americans throughout most of the country, the future was full of promise. A New Year’s Day editorial in the Chicago Tribune said one would have to be of “dull comprehension” not to realize things were better than they had ever been and would be “better still when new science and new methods, and new educations have done their perfect work.” The tempo of popular tunes was appropriately upbeat. Pianists north and south were playing ragtime, people singing and dancing to hits like “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” and “In the Good Old Summer Time.” Employment was up nearly everywhere. In the state of New York practically the entire labor force was working. Wages were rising, the national wealth increasing. Instead of a national debt, there was a surplus of $45 million. In Washington one sensed “a new velocity” under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt. The country was about to take on the building of the Panama Canal, picking up where the French had failed. No new year had “ever brought the people of the United States a more encouraging outlook,” said the Albuquerque Journal-Democrat. Further, as noted in numerous editorials, Sunday sermons, and at many a family dinner table, the world was at peace. One of the few puzzling questions to be considered, said the Philadelphia Inquirer, was why, so far, after so much attention had been paid to “aerial navigation,” had there been so few results?

Transportation to Europe was somewhat more expensive than today:

The Campania, part of the Cunard Line, was known as one of the finest vessels of its kind, and one of the fastest, a “flying palace of the ocean,” which Wilbur particularly liked. The ship was 622 feet in length, with two tall stacks, and burnt some five hundred tons of coal per day. The predominant interior style was Art Nouveau, with staterooms and public rooms paneled in satinwood and mahogany, and thickly carpeted. The weather was “splendid,” the sea smooth, and he had a cabin to himself. With only about half the usual number of passengers on board, he was able to get a $250 cabin for only $100, and he was quite happy about that, too, even if Flint was covering expenses

($100 in 1913 corresponds to $2370 today)

Military aircraft were way cheaper: “On February 8, 1908, their bid of $25,000 for a Flyer was at last accepted by the War Department.” (less than $600,000 in today’s dollars; compare to at least $100 million for an F-35 even using what are likely ridiculously optimistic accounting methods)

Wilbur Wright could have written Bringing Up Bébé: “He especially enjoyed watching the French children, amazed by how well behaved they were.” Italy suffered by comparison to Paris:

But for Orville and Katharine, Rome, after the time they had had in France, left much to be desired. That April was “the choice season” in Rome, that the palaces of the Caesars, the Arch of Constantine, and the Colosseum were even more impressive than expected, was not sufficient. As Katharine told her father, “I was homesick for the first time when we reached Rome.” She and Orville both were “very anxious to come home.” She found their hotel appallingly dirty. “We would appreciate a good clean bathtub and clean plates and knives and forks much more than the attention we receive.” In another letter she reported, “The waiters at the table are so dirty that I can hardly eat a mouthful of food.”

What did it mean to be “fat” in the days before the infinite river of corn products began pouring through American streets?

As it turned out, no one could have been more genial or helpful or generous with his time than Léon Bollée [French car manufacturer]. Short and dark bearded, he was extremely fat, weighing 240 pounds.

President Taft formally presented two Gold Medals on behalf of the Aero Club of America. At six feet two and weighing three hundred pounds, the president loomed large as he stood beside the brothers.

Life without DEET was not pleasant:

Among long-standing summer visitors to Nags Head, the old wisdom was that the infamous Outer Banks “skeeters” struck en masse only once every ten or twelve years. On July 18, it suddenly became clear 1901 was one of those years. As Orville wrote, the mosquitoes appeared “in the form of a mighty cloud, almost darkening the sun.” It was by far the worst experience of his life, he would tell Katharine. The agonies of typhoid fever were “as nothing” by comparison. There was no way of escaping the mosquitoes.

Journalists could be humble:

Writing his autobiography later, James Cox, publisher of the Dayton Daily News, remembered reports coming “to our office that the airship had been in the air over the Huffman Prairie [near Dayton, a year after the Kitty Hawk flights] . . . but our news staff would not believe the stories. Nor did they ever take the pains to go out to see.” Nor did Cox. When the city editor of the Daily News, Dan Kumler, was asked later why for so long nothing was reported of the momentous accomplishments taking place so nearby, he said after a moment’s reflection, “I guess the truth is that we were just plain dumb.”

There were hardly any taxes back then (Sixteenth Amendment was adopted in 1913) but death was a more prominent factor in Americans’ lives:

In the first week of May 1912, thoroughly worn down in body and spirit, Wilbur [having survived a crazy number of what we would consider to be unacceptably risky flights] took ill, running a high fever day after day. It proved once again to be the dreaded typhoid fever. Wilbur Wright

Full post, including comments