#241 The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. As the saga of early flight becomes more distant, it gains rather than loses fascination.
Air travel is now so commonplace, has been so widely experienced that those who risked their lives every time they took an airplane up, who flew an open aircraft totally exposed to the elements and without seat restraints, who took their machines to great heights in freezing cold or in pelting rain, who died and watched their friends die, pushing up against the limits of performance, have become almost mythical figures.
They were that, of course, but they were also simply young and eager men and women embracing a new technology with the breathless zeal of youth.
The fear of death would dissuade them no more than it did the first climber to summit Everest.
That is an excerpt from the epilogue of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Birdmen, The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies, and it was written by Lawrence Goldstone. So two weeks ago, for episode 239, I reread David McCullough's fantastic biography of the Wright Brothers. In that book, Glenn Curtiss is mentioned several times. Glenn was the most formidable of the Wright Brothers' competitors at the very beginning of the Age of Flight, and so I immediately started looking for a biography on him. As I searched, I came across this book. I immediately started reading the sample on Kindle, and I was immediately blown away by not only the quality of the writing, but just how insane the stories in the first few pages were. I'm going to read something up from the back of the book. It says, A meticulously researched account of the first few hectic, tangled years of aviation and the curious characters who pursued it. And so I want to go right to the beginning. This is the part that I read on the Kindle and immediately ordered the paperback version, which I hold in my hand right now. There are a lot of characters we're going to go over today, and a lot of detail. This book took me well over 20 hours to read and to digest.
So it says, on May 30th, 1912, Wilbur Wright died peacefully in his own bed. Wilbur had contracted typhoid fever one month earlier from, the speculation went, eating tainted clam broth in a Boston restaurant. At five feet 10 and only 140 pounds, his body had lacked the strength to fight off an ailment that in the coming decades would be routinely vanquished with antibiotics. He was only 45 years old. America had lost one of its heroes, one of the two men to solve the riddle of human flight. Across the nation, newspapers decried the sad stroke of luck that had robbed the nation of one of its great men. The Wright family did, now this is what immediately drew my attention. I was like, what is going on here? The Wright family did not believe Wilbur's death to have been the result of bad luck. To them, Wilbur had been as good as murdered, hounded to his grave by a competitor so dishonest, so unscrupulous, so lacking in human feeling as to remain a family scourge as long as any of them remained alive, Glenn Curtiss.
And so Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss are the two main characters of the book. They're gonna be supported by probably a dozen, maybe two dozen other just insanely interesting people that we can learn from. I'm not going to read anything that I covered on episode 239 I won't cover on this one. It's very much, I'm gonna think of these two episodes as like a two part series almost. I think it's beneficial to listen to both of them. So it says, the bitter decade long Wright-Curtiss feud pitted against each other, two of the nation's most brilliant innovators and shaped the course of American aviation. The ferocity with which Wilbur Wright attacked and Glenn Curtiss countered, first launched America into preeminence in the skies and then doomed it to mediocrity. So that's going to be a main theme of the book. I have a ton of highlights on that. I'll just bring it to your attention right now is the fact that you should avoid any activity that distracts you from improving the quality of your product and the quality of your business. They both spent so much, especially more Wilbur Wright than Glenn Curtiss, because Wilbur Wright starts out ahead and then Glenn Curtiss actually passes him by a significant margin and is much more successful in the aviation business than the Wright Brothers ever were in terms of building an actual business. But Wilbur stopped working. You know, he had one of the most gifted engineers and had this crazy inventive mind. And all of it was tied up for the last few years of his life was just fighting lawsuits. And so the quality of his product and the quality of his company suffered dearly. So that's what they meant. Like they launched them into America, took the lead, and then doomed it to mediocrity. And a bunch of other companies overtook the lead from America. It says it would take the most destructive conflict in human history to undo the damage. And so that was actually reversed during World War I when there was a call to arms by the American government for all, stop fighting. Essentially, they said, hey, stop fighting, guys. Not only Curtiss and Wright, but all of them. Stop fighting and start working together. We need to have superior air power to help win this war. The compatents were well matched. This is so fascinating what the author does here. As is often the case with those who despise each other, Curtiss and Wilbur were sufficiently alike to have been brothers themselves. Both were obsessive and serious. Wilbur Wright was the son of a minister, Curtiss the grandson of one.