Clear Skies Ahead

What the Wright Brothers can teach us about how to develop clean energy in the 21st century

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Can the right government investment unleash a technological revolution?

President Obama believes so, and his plans to unleash a clean energy future are on the top of the domestic priority list. According to the White House website, the President has a "comprehensive plan to chart a new energy future...[and create] millions of new jobs that can’t be shipped overseas." Next to health care reform, the clean energy future appears to be a White House priority.

Sounds pretty awesome. But all hope aside, what is the likelihood of this plan actually succeeding? To answer that, it helps to look at the past experience of transformative technological advancements.

On a trip this summer to North Carolina, I stopped by the Wright Brothers memorial, and learned a little bit about arguably the most transformative technological advancement of our time: the airplane.

While finding out some interesting details about how the Wright Flyer got off the ground, I learned some important lessons for government policy. As school children, we're all taught about the Wright Brothers' gutsy experimentation on the sands of Kitty Hawk. We're told to heed the lessons of perseverance and ambition. While this is all true, there are also some important lessons for our current political leadership.

So without further adieu, here are the three things that the Wright Brothers can teach the White House about clean energy investment:

1) You can't predict the inventor

While President Obama's policy seeks to channel government investment to our best and brightest researchers, it's worth remembering the best and brightest researchers couldn't, for the life of them, figure out how to fly.

By the turn of the 20th century, the most brilliant and accomplished minds in the world had given their best effort to figuring out the problem of flight. These eminences included Leonardo da Vinci, Sir George Cayley, among the inventors of the internal-combustion engine, Sir Charles Parsons, the inventor of the turbine steam engine, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, Thomas Edison, and scores of others. They all failed. Some of them, like flight pioneer Otto Lilienthal, even died trying.

It wasn't just those deep minds who attempted flight, but also those with deep pockets. Sir Hiram Maxim, the renowned (and extremely wealthy) inventor of the machine gun and the mouse trap, put $100,000 of his own money into an unsuccessful effort to develop powered flight. As they still do today, the French government funded a similarly unsuccessful scheme with their citizens' tax dollars.

Enter the Wright Brothers, amateur bicycle shop owners from Ohio. With no background in aeronautical engineering, surely these weekend hackers could have nothing to add to such a crowded field of brilliant inventors and cash-flush investors, right? After all, their entire experience in the industry came from a childhood fascination with kites and gliders.

The Wright Brothers might have been the biggest underdogs in history. Why should they have even bothered? They definitely wouldn't have the experience to get a government contract, even if one was available at the time.

But like all journeys into the unknown, solutions come from unlikely places.

2) You can't predict the invention

The Wright Brothers succeeded where the aforementioned brilliant minds failed simply because they were outsiders willing to challenge tradition and the established scientific consensus. While the mainstream researchers had all made the same initial assumptions and calculations, the Wright Brothers were willing to question everything.

For example, the experimental gliders of the time had rigid wing structures which caused them to fly in a rather erratic and unpredictable manner. No one seemed to be able to solve this quandary, and in the face of it, some scientists even devoted their time to proving the impossibility of manned flight.

But while at home, playing with a simple cardboard box, Wilbur Wright hit upon a solution. By noting how the edges of the box flexed and bent according to his manipulations, Wilbur thought of designing a plane with flexible wing structure, allowing modifications similar to how birds can modify their wings in flight. Buoyed by this new idea, Wrights built a model based on the new structure, and in the late 1800s, the initial unmanned tests had worked successfully.

But manned flight - powered by an engine and supporting the weight of a human being - still was another matter. While developing and testing this model to support the weight of a manned flight, the brothers relied on established air pressure data for the day. But as the brothers found out, the data tables (called Lilienthal tables, after the aforementioned flight pioneer) were incorrect, and disagreed substantially with the empirical results from the Wrights' new flyer.

Were the Wright Brothers crazy, or was the entire scientific establishment dead wrong? It turns out it was the latter. and the brothers took this void as an opportunity. They began making their own air pressure measurements to discover the relevant data for their flight, and rebuilt their flying machine in accordance with their own new specifications. The rest is history.

Their modification was not quite on the level of modifying Newton's laws, but it was pretty close. Through radical revisions of mainstream aeronautical science, these amateur bicycle shop owners changed the course of human history. No government investment would have been capable of supporting the type of revolution that the Wright Brothers achieved. It's rebellion, not conformity, that sparks human progress.

3) Government will miss the innovation

After their successful first flight, the patriotic Wright Brothers hoped earnestly that their new flying machine would be put to good use by the U.S. Government. Yet despite their amazing achievements, the brothers couldn't even convince their elected leaders to take a chance on the new invention.

In 1905, the U.S. War Department (forerunner of the Department of Defense) respectfully declined the Wrights' offer to demonstrate the new flying technology, informing the brothers that the Government would not be interested in the technology until it had been "brought to the stage of practical operation." (Three subsequent letters failed to convince our leaders that the Wright Flyer indeed had been brought to the stage of practical operation over the hills of Kitty Hawk. Oh, well.)

It wasn't until 1908 - half a decade after the Kitty Hawk flight - that the War Department finally made a contract with the Wrights for an airplane. Remember this the next time the President promises to invest in clean energy or advanced medical technology.

Despite great effort, brilliant minds and deep pockets were not enough to solve the vexing problems of flight. No large investment or government contract would have substituted for the elbow grease and experimentation that occurred on those sandy hills of Kitty Hawk; nor will it substitute for the elbow grease and experimentation that will lead our nation into a clean energy future.

The reason man did not fly until 1903 was not because of lack of effort, lack of government funding, lack of research data, or lack of money generally. Man did not fly because the mainstream consensus was incorrect, and it was only corrected by passionate amateurs willing to test their ideas under the curing heat of market failure.

Forget top-down legislation. When you empower entrepreneurial freedom, you can find the Wright solution for any dilemma.