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But Charles Goodyear believed in his mission to solve the problem that kept natural rubber, known and used for at least 200 years, from fulfilling its many potential uses: It turned sticky in hot weather, hard and brittle in cold weather. He finally solved the problem with a process called vulcanization, discovered when one of his combinations of sulfur and rubber was "carelessly brought into contact with a hot stove," as Goodyear put it. Detractors dismissed it as accident, not genius.
"The fundamental flaw in calling Goodyear a fortunate rube is that human discovery is largely the story of accident converted into opportunity," counters his biographer. "Alexander Fleming, the Scottish bacteriologist, wasn't looking for penicillin when he noticed a strange mold growing in an old culture dish. But where a hundred other men would have reached for a scrub brush and trash can, Fleming's peculiar genius was to recognize potential in this humble growth."
Goodyear himself compared it to "the falling of an apple."
An interesting allusion. Isaac Newton himself was a head case, even before the apple fell on it. How many people had watched an apple fall? But only Newton wondered why the apple fell and the moon didn't, then went on to figure out in mathematical detail why that was.
Young Isaac was a daydreamer, a peculiar chap who assiduously kept records, a prolific reader, an average student. He was always making things, including a mill that ground wheat into flour using mouse power. At one point, trying to figure out how eyes worked, he actually inserted an object behind his eyelid. No wonder he never married. Yet out of his solitary absent-minded weirdness, Newton invented calculus and discovered the laws of motion that are a major component of physics.
Not bad for a nut case. But neither he nor Goodyear apparently ever imagined air travel as one of the results of their work.
New Twist
Wilbur and Orville Wright, by contrast, were just mildly eccentric. They were quiet, introverted, cerebral. When Orville assembled an "army" made up of playmates when he was about 7 years old, 11-year-old Wilbur helped them develop a battle strategy based on Plutarch. Their father was a bishop of the United Brethren Church who became a vocal spokesman for church Radicals fighting to keep Freemasons out of the church. (Biographer Crouch, noting the influence of this headstrong father, called his biography of Wilbur and Orville The Bishop's Boys.) Milton Wright traveled widely on church business and would bring back toys. One, in 1878, was a toy helicopter, powered by a wound-up rubber band. Orville tried to reproduce the toy on a somewhat larger scale, but never succeeded.
Both Orville and Wilbur overcame serious illnesses as young men. Wilbur at 19 was struck in the head with a bat while playing a game on ice skates. It caused several after-effects, and he had an extended recovery. He came to think of himself as a "potential invalid," and he gave up thoughts of going away to college. He fell into a depression. Over the next three years he nursed his mother, who had become an invalid from tuberculosis, and spent his spare time in his father's extensive library.
In 1896, typhoid struck Orville. He nearly died. By then the brothers had their bicycle shop, and glider experiments were in the headlines. The year brought the death of Otto Lilienthal, who had made perhaps a thousand brief flights before his plane stalled and fell 50 feet with Lilienthal strapped underneath. The same year, Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian, got a small, steam-powered, unmanned "aerodrome" 3,000 feet in the air. As Wilbur and his sister Katharine nursed Orville back to health, their father's books on birds and flight, plus newspaper stories about the flying experiments, prompted study and discussion. In 1899 a book about ornithology finally moved the Wrights to action, they would say later. It showed them that if birds of all shapes could fly with modest exertion of their wings, humans could fly too.
On June 2, 1899, a letter from a Wilbur Wright arrived at the Smithsonian. Wilbur, 32, said he was "an enthusiast, but not a crank." He wanted copies of anything the Smithsonian had published on flying and suggestions of other reading. Wilbur was determined to amass all the accumulated knowledge about flying. From June to August 1899, that's what he did, focusing not on what was already known but things that weren't known.
Powered flight, Wilbur concluded, would depend on three things: wings with the proper design so that airflow would lift the plane into the air; an engine strong enough to move it forward into the wind fast enough to generate the lift; and a way to control the plane in the air. It was the third issue, Wilbur concluded, that had to be addressed. Lilienthal and others had already managed to get gliders into the air. Advances in engines for the new automobile showed that power was going to be available. But the only way to test theories of control was to have someone be onboard a plane to handle the controls.