6min chapter

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network cover image

TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network

CHAPTER

How Did Your Dad Shape You and Your Career?

Richard Son: My father was an assimilated Jewish family in Germany. His parents were both doctors who had moved to the rural countryside after World War II, but they didn't have much of a Jewish identity. He says his grandparents got their two sons out of Germany to a boarding school in England that had been set up to accept German youth. They weren't there too long before the British interned all Germans, age 16 and above. And he eventually enlisted in the army and at the end of World War II he was asked to be a translator by General Bill Donovan for the OSS.

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A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, the Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story. Through the end of the 19th century, daring inventors had made progress in the pursuit of human flight by developing balloons, kites, and gliders that soared through the sky. But by the early 1900s, the challenge had become creating a self-propelled machine that could be controlled in the air by a pilot. At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright had flown their gliders longer and farther than any other pilots, but trying to keep the details of their flights and their flying machine largely under wraps. Meanwhile, in Europe, other inventors and adventurers were launching their own experimental aircraft, often in full view of the public. And elsewhere in the United States, a highly publicized and well-funded machine known as the Aerodrome, built by Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution, was making headlines. But in 1903, Langley's $70,000 Aerodrome crashed into the Potomac River, nearly taking its pilot with it. Just days later, the Wright Brothers would make history. This is Episode 2 of our three-part series on the Wright Brothers, Flyers or Liars. By early 1903, Wilbur Wright and his younger brother Orville had begun working on a new glider, which they planned to test at Kitty Hawk later that same year. But it was going to be different from the gliders they'd flown the previous three years at North Carolina's Outer Banks. Instead of being carried by the strength of the wind alone, it would have propellers that were powered by a gasoline engine. The brothers knew that if it succeeded, they'd become the first inventors to achieve motorized, heavier-than flight. But first, they needed a powerful, lightweight engine. In January of 1903, the Wrights began contacting automobile makers, but none of them could provide an engine that could be mounted onto the wing of a glider. Then they got some unexpected help. Several years earlier, the brothers had hired Charlie Taylor, a farm mechanic from Illinois, to help around their bicycle shop. When the brothers started traveling to North Carolina for their glider experiments, Charlie Taylor stayed in Dayton to help the Wright's sister, Catherine, run the bike shop. But Catherine did not appreciate the help. She thought Taylor was an insufferable know-it and would write to complain to her brothers that Taylor, who she called the hired man, was making her too weary for words. But it was Taylor who came to the Wright's rescue after they failed to find a suitable engine by offering to build a small four-cylinder engine from scratch. Using tools the brothers had amassed in their workshop, including a drill press and metal lathe, Taylor managed to craft a noisy, smoky, 150-pound gas-powered motor that could deliver eight horsepower. Taylor had provided the Wrights an engine, but now the brothers had to design and craft something entirely new to them, propellers, which would spin like fans and carry their glider into the air. But the challenge of crafting the propellers became the source of argument between the brothers. Charlie Taylor and sister Catherine Wright witnessed many loud and heated exchanges between Orville and Wilmer. At one point, Catherine threatened her brothers, if you don't stop arguing, I'll leave home. But the brothers kept at it, arguing constantly while they studied boat propellers and conducted research at the Dayton Library. By the summer of 1903, they had crafted two eight-foot propellers made of hand-shaved spruce. These propellers would be mounted behind the wings of their glider and were designed to spin in opposite directions, one clockwise, one counterclockwise, propelled engine-driven chains. The brothers were growing confident that their engine and propellers would work. So that same summer, when the Wright's friend and supporter, Octave Chanute, invited Wilbur to give a talk to the Western Society of Engineers, Wilbur chose not to mention their work on a powered glider. He wanted to make sure it worked first, before telling other inventors, because the Wright brothers knew they weren't the only ones working toward the first powered flight. For years, Samuel Langley, an astrophysicist and engineer at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, had been experimenting with motorized gliders. By 1903, Langley and his team had built a large, multi-winged machine with a 52-horsepower engine that he dubbed the Aerodrome. On October 7, 1903, Langley watched as his test pilot and engineer, Charles Manley, took the controls and attempted to launch the Aerodrome into the sky above the Potomac River outside Washington. Unfortunately, the machine instantly crashed into the river. Two months later, on December 8, Manley tried again, but with the same result. This time, though, Manley nearly drowned in the wreckage, and Langley was ridiculed in the press for his costly failures. By that time, the Wrights were back at Kitty Hawk. They had spent the entire fall working out kinks in their new machine but experienced setbacks. The engine kept breaking, and at one point, Orville had to travel back to Dayton to get more parts. He was on his way back to Kitty Hawk when he learned about Langley's latest crash. But rather than join in ridiculing Langley, Wilbur and Orville defended their competitor, crediting Langley for his moral courage and for advancing the progress of aviation and influencing their own work. Langley would die three years later, humiliated by his failures, and Wilbur would decry the shameful treatment of him by the press. And perhaps to avoid their own mistreatment in the press, the Wright brothers continued making their test flights in the remote dunes outside Kittyhawk, far from the reporters and photographers whose news stories had mocked Langley. But they did want evidence of their success. So they purchased a state-of camera that captured images on 5x7-inch glass plates and brought it with them to Kitty Hawk in order to take photos of their test flights. And by mid-December, after a stormy October and a snowy November, they were finally ready to launch in their new flyer. At 600 pounds, it was more than 10 times heavier than the glider they'd tested in 1900.

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