Monday, July 7, 2025

I Read the Wright Brothers Biography, Because Wilbear Deserves to Know About His People

Flying at Huffman Prairie, 2017

The Wright BrothersThe Wright Brothers by David McCullough
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This deep dive that I took into the early history of aviation was always going to lead me to David McCullough.

If possible, I highly recommend reading an in-depth biography like this AFTER visiting one or more of the places relevant to the subject’s life, because I think it’s even more fun in this case to read about a place I know than to visit a place I’ve read about. I’ve never been to Kitty Hawk (although I super want to someday!), but I’ve been in and around Dayton to see Wright Brother sites like their bicycle shop and printing office, Huffman Prairie, and the family gravesite, and more, in my devoted campaign to earn my beloved Wilbear. You can also visit the mansion they had built for themselves there after they got rich on Wright Flyer contracts, but for their original family home you have to go to Detroit, because Henry Ford bought it and moved it there.

original 1903 Wright Flyer in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Henry Ford also, by the way, once snookered his way into the shed where a Wright Flyer was being stored and got caught making measurements of it. Nothing ever came out of that, apparently, but it’s still hella suss.

As an only child, and the parent of two children who love each other but lead decidedly individual lives, I’m fascinated by the experience of two siblings (and sometimes three siblings!) who lived their lives so much in each other’s pockets that a single biography suffices for both. They’re like the Sam and Dean Winchester of manned flight! Do you think they ever had a conversation about their relationship or their future, or did they always just automatically pal up in a way that never needed voice put to it?

And they seem to have automatically palled up even in enterprises that only really interested one. The printing business was Orville’s baby, and although Orville complained a lot about Wilbur not investing his soul into it as much as he himself did, there never seemed to be any question of Wilbur popping off to, say, run his own business or get his own job and leave the boring printing stuff to Orville.

Wright brothers' printing office in Dayton

Instead, they seemed content as life partners, living their lives together just as happily--and probably a lot more equitably--as they’d have been with romantic life partners. When their sister Katharine went off to Oberlin and their dad was doing his traveling preacher thing (the only part of the book that I found too much and too boring was Dad’s preacher work--boring to read about, and also irrelevant as neither Wright brother’s life and works seemed otherwise notably informed by religious belief), the brothers seemed to live contentedly together in the family home, each sharing the load in a way that apparently satisfied them both. Here’s an excerpt from a letter Wilbur wrote to Katharine:

“Orville cooks one week and I cook the next. Orville’s week we have bread and meat and gravy and coffee three times a day. My week I give him more variety. You see that by the end of his week there is a big lot of cold meat stored up, so the first half of my week we have bread and butter and “hash” and coffee, and the last half we have bread and butter and eggs and sweet potatoes and coffee.”

I guess they at least had sweet potatoes often enough to prevent scurvy?



Okay, I lied. I did think the part of the book in which the dad is fired from his preacher job because he was unwilling to accept Freemasons was interesting and hilarious. Seriously, what was UP with Freemasonry?!? They really had better be secretly housing the Holy Grail or some similar nonsense to have been worth all of these conspiracy theories.

When I started the book and read about the brothers’ early years, I thought that I was going to like Orville best. He was so mechanical-minded, even more so than his brother! He was always thinking up ideas of cool new stuff to try! Just between us, he was probably on the autism spectrum, and would have meltdowns when overstimulated and then have to go off and be quiet for a while.

But then… I dunno, Wilbur just really grew on me. It started when he was 17 and was hit so hard in the face by a future serial killer that he pretty much dropped out of school and gave up on his dreams to go to Yale and spent the next two years housebound, the full-time caregiver for his mother at the end of her life. How can you not be sympathetic to that much clear trauma?

Much later, his personality really shone through in the letters he wrote home while he was in France attempting to demonstrate the Wright Flyer and make deals with the French for its production. He mostly worked, because dude worked like a dog, but he also saw cathedrals and museums and tried new foods, and wrote about everything in an unaffected way. This is my favorite part of those letters:

“I was a little astonished and disturbed the other evening, when I sat down to dinner to find my soup which was a sort of noodle soup, turning into all sorts of curious forms and even letters of the alphabet. I began to think I had the ‘jim jams.” On close investigation I found that the dough had been run through forms so as to make the different letters of the alphabet and figures, too! It was like looking into the “hell box” of a printing office, and was all the more amusing because every mouthful of soup you take out, brought up a new combination.”


Wilbur Wright ate his first alphabet soup, and found it charming. How could the reader, as well, not be charmed by that?

Wilbur also impressed everyone who met him in France with his unflappable courage in simply going about his own business to demonstrate his flying machine, not letting anyone sway or influence him into flying when he didn’t think the conditions were absolutely perfect. McCullough gently hints that he seemed to worry that Orville wouldn’t do the same when he was demonstrating their flying machine back in America, and indeed, Orville does also hold the record for piloting the first fatal airplane crash…

You can see the original 1905 Wright Flyer in Dayton

Alas, Wilbur died shockingly young, at just 45, and whether it was grief or just his natural self coming through without any curbing force from his older brother, Orville began to impress me less and less as he aged. First, it was just him, his sister Katharine, and their dad in the family mansion, but when their dad died five years later, it was just him and Katharine for the next nine years. One day, though, Katharine told him that she was going to marry an old school chum from Oberlin and long-time friend to the entire family, and they were going to move to his hometown of Kansas City.

And Orville PITCHED A FIT.

This is where I’m so mad at him that I can’t forgive him. You know that woman kept house for all those men for all those years, even though she had a proper full-time job. Back when Orville had that bad plane accident that killed his passenger she’d even taken a leave of absence from her job and gone to nurse him back to health, sitting up all night, every night in his hospital room to make sure he was properly attended. She was as invested in their business as they were, often doing the social work that would usually have been expected of a wife. And when she wants to do ONE THING that is her idea and belongs to her, Orville has a tantrum that frankly makes him seem like an incestuous creep and refuses to speak to her ever again.

Even when he got word two years later that Katharine was dying, he refused to go see her. He eventually changed his mind and arrived at her bedside just before she died, but that is WAY too little, too late. Wilbur would have NEVER!

I don't know why I'm smiling like that in front of the Wright family gravesite, 2025

It’s interesting to me that although the Wrights proved the possibility of powered flight and flew the first airplanes, our airplanes aren’t really descendants of them, but more like cousins. Their major insight of changing the shape of the wing to steer is the key to powered flight, but the way they did it, by physically altering the shape of their airplane wings by sort of twisting the fabric-covered frames, wouldn’t really scale upwards--it was more of a proof of concept. Now we use ailerons.

Other fun facts from the book: the hobble skirt was created in imitation/homage to the first female airplane passenger, who tied a rope around the bottom of her skirt to keep it in place while she flew. While in France, Wilbur switched out his regular Ohio suit jacket for a black leather motorcycle jacket. When Neil Armstrong became the first human to step onto the Moon, he carried a swatch of fabric from that first successful Wright Flyer.


And here's the most special fun fact of all! Back when the Wright brothers were really starting to crack powered flight, nobody "important" believed them. They tried to interest the military numerous times, and kept getting back form letters that clearly indicated their original letters hadn't even been read. Word of mouth was spreading, obviously, because all you had to do was take the trolley over to Huffman Prairie and you could literally SEE them flying, but whenever anyone big and fancy heard about it, they'd dismiss it as rumor or lies or showmanship or whatever. It was part classism, I imagine, and also partly because the Wright brothers at that time, unlike the other people working on powered flight, *didn't* engage in any attention-catching showmanship. They just went about their business inventing powered flight and popping off the occasional letter to the military to see if they wanted to buy some airplanes.

Eventually, it was France who took notice, and France who invited Wilbur over to demonstrate his plane, and the French citizens who flocked to watch his demonstrations and waited patiently until conditions were just right and then LOST THEIR FUCKING MINDS when they saw it was real and praised and publicized Wilbur so hard that the dumb-ass Americans finally took their thumbs out of their butts and looked at what they had right there in their own heartland. 

But before that part, while the Wright brothers were still working out the kinks in their plane and spending every day out at Huffman Prairie, they did collect a small community of superfans among those who'd believed the rumors. One superfan was an old guy who ran the magazine Gleanings in Bee Culture up near Cleveland. He was THE superfan and would drive his literal Model T all the way down to Dayton, stopping every 10 miles to put more water in the radiator or oil in the oil thingy, just to watch the Wright brothers try to get their hunk of machinery off the ground. 

And then he'd go back home and, in the middle of his articles about bees and beekeeping, he'd write little anecdotes about what he'd seen! THIS is the guy who broke the news of sustained, powered human flight. The first story about the first sustained, powered human flight appeared in Gleanings in Bee Culture in 1905

One hundred and six years later, that same magazine, now shortened to just Bee Culture, bought a few of my beeswax candle tutorials, shitty photos and all. I just need to emphasize that I take MUCH better photos now. Bee Culture, I'd be happy to reshoot this particularly obnoxious set for free!

ANYWAY, that's how the Wright brothers and I came to be represented in the same magazine. The end.

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Wednesday, July 2, 2025

I Read The Writing of the Gods Because I'm Secretary of the Rosetta Stone Fan Club

My 2023 adventure with the Rosetta Stone!

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta StoneThe Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I mentally added this book to my TBR stack while standing in the British Museum gift shop two years ago, and it’s possible that I finally picked it up and dove in exactly two years to the day that I saw the Rosetta Stone in person.

I can’t believe that I waited so long, because it was such a wild and fun ride!

So first, of course, you have to decide if you’re rooting for Young or Champollion. Young is the brilliant child phenom whose mental gifts make him good at everything he sets his mind to, but who cannot seem to set his mind fully to anything. He studied, and then revolutionized, apparently every topic that interested him. He discovered, for instance, how the eyeball sees color, but then buried that information in a boring academic article and promptly moved on to a completely new topic, never following up or progressing it or even really bothering to market it. Some other dude sometime later who was interested in the same subject did a literature review and just happened upon the article in which Young had solved his research problem.


So sure, Young did discover how to decode some pharaohs’ names in cartouches, but he moved on before he made another single connection. Hell, he didn’t even clock the connection that he’d literally already made--he thought that “reading” the hieroglyphs that way was just a gimmick they’d made up to enable them to transcribe Greek words!

And then you’ve got Champollion. Champollion was still bright, of course, but he wasn’t bright the way that Young was. Young’s brain could have powered the entirety of France if he’d just harnessed it correctly. Champollion, on the other hand, was dedicated. Devoted. This dude PERSEVERED. As a young man, he put his mind to hieroglyphs, and that’s where his mind stayed until the minute he died. The very minute, too, because he was still working on his dictionary on his deathbed. Champollion had a hunch that the Coptic language might not be simply an iteration of Egyptian, but an actual descendent of the Ancient Egyptian language, so he learned the absolute snot out of Coptic. He studied it SO hard and SO long, and this was back when there weren’t a ton of resources. Once upon a time, a visitor to the Vatican Library noted that someone had been marking up a book in Coptic with a pencil, making marginal notes and such. So they did some more digging and discovered that ALL their books in Coptic were similarly marked up! Come to find out that when Napoleon briefly conquered Italy he’d had the Vatican Library transferred to France for a time, and while it was there Champollion had sniffed out all the Coptic language books and read them, and nobody had noticed because nobody else was interested in Coptic.



So. Are you rooting for the brilliant but flighty phenom or the dogged academic?

As for me, I’m a Champollion gal.

Dolnick’s description of this race is a really fun part of the book, because who doesn’t love niche drama, but my favorite part of the book is how he makes us understand what it actually is to read hieroglyphs. You’re obviously not going to go off from here and start reading tomb walls, but you do understand how to do it, and the idea of a pictorial language is just so neat.


Okay, so you’ve got a hieroglyph, and let’s pretend it’s of a cat. The way hieroglyphs work is that yes, a picture of a cat could mean “cat.” OR it could mean a word that’s a homophone of “cat,” as in, “You’ve been out catting around.” OR it could mean a phoneme that’s part of the word for “cat,” like “C is for Cat,” which will then be followed by hieroglyphs that spell the rest of the word. This makes it a really hard language to learn, because you have to learn so many things that could be “cat,” but after you know the language, it’s a really easy language to read, because there are so many ways to read “cat!” It’s like how red means stop, and an octagon means stop, and “STOP” means stop. It took you longer to learn that each of those things meant stop than it would have to learn that just one thing meant stop, but now it’s so easy to know when you’re supposed to stop. And hieroglyphs will stack that meaning, too, by adding an additional hieroglyph that works as a determinative at the end of some words to specify an interpretation, like the silent “e” determinative that tells you the difference between “mop” and “mope.” You have to learn all those hieroglyphs and what they do to any given word, but then once you know them it’s much easier to read that word.

Everything that Dolnick explains is equally vivid. The Napoleonic Wars are fascinating under his pen, with Napoleon sneaking out of Egypt, the soldiers he left in the dust struggling to rebuild and maintain old forts, one of the workers finding a cool engraved stone in one of those forts, the general in charge falling in love with that engraved stone and sleeping with it under his bed, and that same general pitching an absolute fit at having to give it up to the British after their defeat because he considered it his own personal engraved stone, not France’s.



The time of Ptolemy is equally fascinating. The rulers were Greek because of Alexander the Great--did y’all know that?!? I did not know that. The good part is that pharaohs stopped marrying their sisters for a while (but not forever!), but the bad part is that none of them even knew the Egyptian language, just Greek, which is why they eventually had to send out an engraved stone to tell the populace that they were nevertheless doing the proper Egyptian stuff even though they weren’t properly Egyptian… and they had to put the message in Greek, too, so they could read it.

What I really need to do next is find a good, accessible, super interesting overall history of Ancient Egypt, because the parts of the book that were a deep dive into the history of Ancient Egypt would have made a lot more sense if I’d gone into it understanding how far, for instance, Cleopatra actually was from proper Ancient Egypt: about 3000 years! That’s longer than Cleopatra to US!



Also? Champollion wins.

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Monday, June 30, 2025

I Went to San Diego and Ate Some Tacos

AND I got another national park passport stamp!

Although we're not planning any big New Zealand-style trips this year, we seem to be making up for it with a good variety of smaller US trips. Oh, well--who needs a retirement fund in this political climate, anyway? Might as well enjoy the pre-apocalypse while it lasts!

Anyway, this deep dive into San Diego and its environs is likely the only trip I'll get this year with all of my immediate family members accounted for (the detours I force them to take on the way to and from college drop-offs are also fun for me, but are, by necessity, brief little swindles away from the proper business of the day), so I enjoyed it even more for the novelty of having everyone I love together in the same place at the same time doing some sightseeing along with me.

Also Wilbear, because I didn't work that hard to earn him just to make him sit around the house for the rest of his life:


Wilbear wanted to see the Pacific Ocean and learn about Spain's genocide against the indigenous peoples of North and South America, so that's what we did!


Welcome to Cabrillo National Monument, everyone!

This was actually our first stop after the airport. Or rather, our first stop after paying for and picking up our rental car at the airport. I didn't realize that there was yet one more step in the process after getting settled in our rental, so I busily set up the car's Bluetooth to play my Going to California Spotify playlist and then MORTIFIED the children when my partner rolled down his window to do exit paperwork with a rental car guy and Katy Perry's "California Gurls" was blaring.


I personally thought it was quite festive!

Here's a conquistador ready to enslave and genocide, comfy in the knowledge that smallpox and syphilis are going to do 90% of his job for him:


And here's the path that Juan Cabrillo and his fellow genocidal maniacs took in their route up Baja California, the California coast, and all the way to Oregon:


Cabrillo National Monument is a little peninsula where supposedly Juan Cabrillo became the first European to step onto the West Coast of the future United States, but presently it's mostly a cool viewing point where you can watch various ships sail in and out of San Diego Bay, most interestingly Navy ships because the monument overlooks part of the naval base.

Here's me briefly abandoning my two most treasured companions so I can get a better look at a submarine:

Three national park passport stamps so far this summer, and at least two more before the road trip to college drop-offs even starts. AND my America the Beautiful pass officially paid for itself here, with eleven more months of national park travels still to come!

You can also hike down to the shore, where in the winter low tides apparently reveal some exceptional tide pools. There weren't any excellent tide pools revealed during this particular summer low tide, but we nevertheless had fun clambering around, getting our knees sandy, and making sure we'd touched the Pacific Ocean:


And then, off to tacos!

One of my goals on this trip was to eat as much Mexican food as I could fit into my mouth, so birria tacos were a good start:


The older kid had a California burrito, and the younger kid stole most of my tortilla chips and drank horchata. She was super excited at first to see that there was an entire horchata dispenser(!!!), but it turns out that, disappointingly, none of the horchata she tried in any of the restaurants we ate at were making fresh horchata in-house. I guess you can get a dry horchata mix, and that was what they were using? Later on this trip I'd order a jamaica that had definitely been made from scratch, but by that time the kid was burned from too many packet horchatas and so stuck to her Diet Coke. 

Tomorrow, Palomar Observatory and the desert!

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Monday, June 23, 2025

I Went to the First State National Historical Park, and I Need to Tell You about Caesar Rodney

 

All I wanted to accomplish was collecting my national parks passport stamp for the First State National Historical Park

Instead, I got myself caught up in the most pleasant and benign hostage situation.

First of all, I feel like all of these New England states just play fast and loose with each others' mottos. We were in Maryland at this point, not even close to New Hampshire! How does this warrant a New Hampshire state motto-themed pun?


The plan was to hit up First State National Historical Park, walk around for a bit--

cobblestones!

--do the museum so we could figure out what on earth we were supposed to be looking at, because I was, sadly and alas, NOT up-to-date on my Delaware state history, and then get back on the road to Philadelphia.

The museum had all my favorite parts. There were old pipes!

Remember when I mudlarked some exactly like this from the banks of the Thames?

Fun chances for guest input!

A "voter ID" is not an example of a voting right? MAGA party line people are so boring.

Hands-on activities!

I think we're supposed to be noticing how the boundary arc is similar to Delaware's current state line... but I don't know the shape of Delaware that well, and there's not an example nearby. You think too much of me, First State National Historical Park!

Cool tag lines!


Weird statuary!

I texted the kids that I found a statue of one of them in this museum, then waited to see which one got to her phone first to congratulate her sister.

We probably should have left after the museum, because we were technically supposed to be moving the kid out of her dorm that afternoon, ahem, but I wanted to check out the outside of the buildings, and as we were walking around the old courthouse--


--there was a sign that said that you could see inside it if you were on a ranger-led tour, and the timetable indicated that a tour had literally just started one minute ago!

So we popped into the building, where there was, indeed a park ranger, and since we were the only people who'd shown up, she started her spiel right away.

Thus began the nicest, most interesting hostage situation I have ever been involved in. 

Y'all, we got the WHOLE story of this courthouse. We heard interesting stories of the people who were tried and jailed here. We learned where the gallows used to be. We saw a cool handprint in one of the handmade bricks on the floor:


 We learned about the tea room that the courthouse turned into, on account of there were so many tourists coming to and fro on the nearby ferry:


We learned about how one time a youthful Shirley Temple visited the court house tea room with her family on the way to or fro the ferry, was heard sassing her mother there, and the person who heard her wrote a newspaper article about it.


We also saw a copy of the newspaper article.

I'll admit that the presentation did feel a little long, and every time I thought the docent was wrapping up she seemed to go back in time to a different interesting story and sort of start the run-through again with all-new information, but honestly it was so interesting and I was having a ball. Like, I knew that time was passing, but seriously, how long could one presentation be? Might as well lean in and learn stuff.

Finally, the docent really did finish telling us every single thing there was to learn about the old court house, and we got up, thinking we were about finished and let's go hit up the gift shop real quick and then hop in the car, when she was all, "Okay, now watch your step as we go upstairs!"

OMG you guys! There was an UPSTAIRS!!!


When we settled down in this room, we learned everything there was to learn about Delaware state history, including the fact that the 13 original colonies is kind of a lie, because up until just before Independence Day, Delaware Colony was actually not its own separate colony, but part of Pennsylvania! There was a bunch of scuttlebutt about the leadership in Pennsylvania never giving Delaware its due, so when they heard about the Declaration of Independence coming up, the people of Delaware were like, "Screw Pennsylvania! We're going to declare ALL the Independence!"

And they did!

We also learned about Caesar Rodney, who was this sickly Patriot dude who had asthma and migraines and cancer so bad that he commonly wore a scarf to hide a tumor on his face and was always in agony, etc. Oh, and his parents had died when he was a kid but that was actually his big break, because then he became a ward of some rich, political guy who set him up in politics when he was grown. 

During the First Continental Congress Rodney got super sick but since there were three Delaware representatives and they were both voting for independence, it was fine for him to travel home so he could properly rest. But then right before the final vote, he heard that one of his fellow representatives was now going to vote no!

So poor Caesar Rodney, asthmatic and riddled with cancer and also super sick with some virus or something on top of it, rode 70+ miles throughout the night, IN A THUNDERSTORM, to come back to Philadelphia to vote. And when he got back to the Continental Congress, not only did he turn Delaware's vote to independence, but he gave a speech so moving that other representatives of other colonies changed their votes, too!

He's on the Delaware state quarter riding his horse. The docent showed us a picture of it.

We also saw a portrait of Marqus de Lafayette, who gave a speech in front of the court house in 1824:


Y'all, I was so into those Caesar Rodney stories that the presentation just flew by. When the docent finally ended it and told us we could finish looking around the place by ourselves, I checked my watch for the first time and had to double-check that I wasn't randomly in a different time zone, because TWO HOURS had passed!

I don't know, you guys. I know I could have questioned it or called a halt at any time, and I literally thought I was walking in for a ten-minute run-down of a cool old court house, but this docent had me eating out of her hand. I was enraptured for two full hours of Delaware history.

On the way out, the docent mentioned that there was a historical cemetery next door. I said, "OOH, does it have Caesar Rodney?!?"

And then the docent had to tell me that Caesar Rodney, this American patriot who bodily suffered for our independence, had actually been buried in an unmarked grave and we never found out where it was. 

I think I was overwrought from so much Delaware history by that point, because I burst into tears, horrifying the docent. And then I was doing the thing where I was laughing at myself because of my behavior and apologizing for crying and actively crying and just kind of repeating, "OMG Caesar Rodney!"

Anyway, the cemetery had some other cool grave markers!





Lol at this statue of William Penn. Delaware couldn't get rid of you fast enough!


Okay, NOW we can go move the kid out of her dorm!

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