Offbeat Question of the Day

[guzziguy]

This morning I was watching "Wright Brothers: First in Flight", an interesting, historical TV show.  I highly recommend it if you are at all interested in flight and/or history.  After their first successful flight, they walked 4 miles to telegraph the news back to Dayton, OH.  I wondered why they walked.  It was 1903 so I can believe that they didn't have an automobile and there probably wasn't a suitable road for one on Kitty Hawk.  But why didn't they have horses or a wagon?  Then I remembered that they were bicycle builders.

 

So my question of the day is "Why didn't the Wright brothers ride bicycles to the telegraph office?

[Grahame]

Because, to badly mangle a line from Captain Lockheed And the Starfighters: interview

 

They were too much of a professional Bicycle Engineer to ride a machine of their own invention?

 

(having already proved they were amateur Aeronautical Engineers, by definition) 

[Dreadhead]

Because the soft sandy ground meant that they could not ride a 1903 era bike? I assume you'd just get bogged down.

[Voltron]

Exactly.  Just go to 5:30 of this video for an example:

 

Edited August 19, 2013 by Voltron

[agile_one]

^^^ Nailed it.  

[guzziguy]

That's pretty funny, Grahame.

 

Because the soft sandy ground meant that they could not ride a 1903 era bike? I assume you'd just get bogged down.

 

1903 bikes were modern bikes.  This site shows that bikes have changed very little since the Wrights' 1898 St. Clair model.  Modern sand bikes are basically regular bikes changed to allow very large tires.  There's no reason the Wrights couldn't have built one.  I'm sure that they could have had big fat tires made.  Akron was the world center of tire production in 1903.  The Wrights went to Kitty Hawk enough times to recognize the need for a sand bike if it interested them to build one.

 

The video is great.  Maybe Brent should buy a sand bike.

[CarlSeibert]

I suspect that dune was a lot bigger then. It's really effin' soft sand. 

[guzziguy]

@ Jacob - I don't know either.  I was just wondering.  I'll try to remember to ask them in the afterlife.

 

@ Carl - Was it dune all or most of the way to the telegraph office?  Maybe the Wrights were so focused on the flying machine that they never gave a thought about what they would do once it flew.

 

Not knowing is one of the reasons I called this an offbeat question.  Hopefully other people will have some too.

[Bigguy]

They used all the bike parts to make the airplane

[manaox2]

Kitty hawk at least today has large dunes and soft deep sand that would probably take ATV or dirt bikes for it to be practical. 

[agile_one]

They used all the bike parts to make the airplane

I'm with Lloyd on this one ...

[Torpedo]

We not even know if they could ride a bike, designing them doesn't imply being able to ride. Maybe they could ride, but not over soft sand.

Edited August 20, 2013 by Torpedo

[Dusty Chalk]

They probably didn't have any complete bikes, bunch of half-finished ones.

[CarlSeibert]

The dune at Kitty Hawk is one mighty big pile of very loose sand. I'm going to assume that at that time, it was basically all dune and beach outside of whatever little settlement there was. Stands of beach vegetation wouldn't have made any easier, either. 

 

North Carolina sugar sand is fierce stuff. A few years ago, our then international correspondent and I rather spectacularly buried a rental car in it after a hurricane.

[Emooze]

...and the Wright-PAtterson museum is one of my favorite places (though less so, since it has been dumbed down over the last 10 years).

 

You'll probably be less happy to hear that the Air Force One and R&D Hangers have been closed due to furloughs.

[grawk]

furloughs aren't done there?

[catscratch]

Well if they wanted a bike, they probably could have used something like this (boring steampunk technogeekery warning):

 

 

Though to be fair, in 1903, this may have been a little old school.

[ironbut]

Hate to get back on topic but my guess is that they had to carry a bunch of stuff to the site (maybe even the whole airplane?) and bikes were out of the question.