2025 Issue #22 ✈️🥛

Happy Sunday, Reader!

Greetings from Sheboygan, where in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the release of Penguins Can't Fly this month, this is the first in a series of lessons we can learn from some historical rulebreakers, Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Is it possible that one lesson we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is to be wary of experts? I doubt it; it's a lesson humans seemed doomed to repeat. If the Wright Brothers had listened to experts over a century ago, they wouldn't have made history.

It's not that experts are always wrong. It's just that they're not always right.

Lord William Thomson Kelvin, a British mathematician and physicist, is the guy who determined the correct value of absolute zero to be approximately −273.15 degrees Celsius.

I don't even know what that means.

But I'm confident it took someone pretty smart to figure that out.

So when he said in 1895, "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible," should anyone have doubted him?

It's one thing to dismiss the claims of one so-called "expert." Maybe he or she has a blind spot. Maybe they haven't seen all the data. But what about when all the experts appear to be on the same page?

Take Thomas Edison, the guy who invented the incandescent light bulb and created the entire system for generating and distributing electric power, including generators, wiring, sockets, switches, and meters, enabling the widespread adoption of electric lighting. He was one of the people working on the problem of flight. This is what he had to say in 1895, eight years before the Wright Brothers' achievement: "It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere."

Meanwhile, Simon Newcomb, a distinguished astronomer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, dismissed the dream of flight as no more than a myth. And were such a machine devised, he asked, what useful purpose could it possibly serve? “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.“

In 1902, he said, "Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible."

Guess what happened in 1903? It only took a year for the Wrights to prove him wrong.

But that's not as bad as a proclamation by The New York Times: "The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years."

Considering the Wrights achieved their breakthrough nine weeks later, the paper of record was only off by about...a million years.

These experts look foolish in hindsight, but in the moment, it would have seemed foolish to question them. After all, in any situation where one is unfamiliar or inexperienced, it makes sense to take heed of the ones who know a little something about the subject at hand.

Indeed, Wilbur and Orville owe their success in part to experts.

Even though no one had yet achieved success, much knowledge was gained in the attempts to fly. A man named Octave Chanute was a big believer in the quest and wrote extensively on the efforts that had already been made by people all over the world. This encouraged the brothers, and they exchanged 400 letters with Chanute.

They also heavily relied on the aerodynamic data and equations developed by Otto Lilienthal, a German aviation pioneer, for their early glider designs. Lilienthal's tables and coefficients for lift were widely respected at the time, so they assumed his calculations were correct and used them in their own work.

However, after early disappointing results that failed to generate the predicted lift, the Wright brothers began to suspect that Lilienthal's data might be flawed. They also questioned the accuracy of the "Smeaton coefficient" (a value used in the lift equation for air pressure), which had been accepted for over a century.

This inspired them to conduct their own experiments, including wind tunnel tests. They discovered that the traditional Smeaton coefficient was indeed too high and that this error was the main reason their gliders underperformed—not Lilienthal's lift coefficients, which turned out to be fairly accurate for his conditions.

Again, math and physics are not my strong suit, but here's the takeaway: Wilbur and Orville made great progress in their dream by building on the work of experts that preceded them, but they also stayed open to the possibility that their findings or even widely-accepted principles they based them on could be wrong.

If they weren't open to that possibility, they may have given up and we wouldn't know their names today.

It's entertaining to poke fun at a smartypants who looks stupid in retrospect by getting something wrong by a mile. But the trick that makes breaking this rule so difficult is that it's not wise to dismiss expert opinion out of hand.

Experts are not inherently dumb, malevolent, or untrustworthy.

It's that sometimes they're wrong.

Just as Wilbur and Orville themselves were proven to be in 1927, when a young Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to land in Paris, a feat once thought impossible by the Wrights.

At a banquet in France to honor the brothers, a humble Wilbur shared, "Scarcely ten years ago, all hope of flying had almost been abandoned; even the most convinced had become doubtful, and I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for fifty years. Two years later, we ourselves were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction–as my friends of the press, especially, well know."

As you chase a dream, no matter how big or small, you will inevitably encounter someone, and maybe a lot of someones, who will say, "You can't do that."

They might be right.

They might be wrong.

My advice to you is to find out for yourself.

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🤔 I wonder...is there something you're certain about that could be proven wrong? Hit reply to share your thoughts with me, or join the conversation in the Escape Adulthood League!

Stay young and stay fun,

P.S.

The VIP tickets for Wondernite are already sold out! But you can still be part of a world premiere event. Make it a date night, an epic girls’ night out, or a team bonding appreciation event for their team. Reserve your tickets now!

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