The Wrong Stuff on the Wright Brothers

April 2015

Research is hard work; copying the work of others is a lazy man’s vice.  In the world of family history, as in many other areas of research, there is a vast gulf between the uncritical copying of undocumented allegations and the critical evaluation of primary sources. 

I recently stumbled across a classic example of the victory of credulity over real research.  While reviewing the family history of Wilbur and Orville Wright I was amused (though not especially surprised) to find multiple undocumented reports of the marriage and descendancy of Orville Wright, including proud claims of living persons to be his direct descendant.  Having already researched the Wrights, with whom I share as common ancestors the 17^th century Dutch immigrants Gerrit Wolfertse van Couwenhoven and Aeltje Cornelise Cool, I knew that Orville Wright never married.  Then why do so many family trees posted on Ancestry.com report a wife, children, and even several generations of descendants for Orville?  This question can only be answered by careful research. 

Warning: on Ancestry, many family trees cite no primary sources at all; many others list sources, but the sources they cite actually contradict the information they claim to have found in them.  Citing a reference is no substitute for reading, understanding, and using it!  And remember that the family trees on Ancestry.com are contributed by any interested party, whether they know the rudiments of research or not, and are neither produced nor vetted by Ancestry.

A good place to start is the 1930 United States Census.  In it we find two people named Orville Wright of about the right age and location.  Orville #1, a single male, was born in Ohio in 1871 and lived in Van Buren, Montgomery County, Ohio.  His father was born in Indiana and his mother in Virginia.  Also in his home were his housekeeper Carrie Grumbach and her husband Charles.  At the same date, Orville #2, who was born in Illinois in 1881, was living in Canton, Fulton County, Illinois.  According to the 1930 Census, his father and mother were both born in Illinois.  He was married, and gives his occupation as “farmer”.  His wife, Hattie, was in the same household. 

Which Orville is the “Wright stuff”?  It should be pretty obvious that the Ohio Orville is the better candidate, but let’s go back a decade to the 1920 U. S. Census and check up on them.  In 1920, we find “Orvill Wright”, born in Ohio in 1871, living in Van Buren, Montgomery County, Ohio, with his sister “Catheryn” and the Grumbachs.  His father’s and mother’s birthplaces agree with the 1930 data.  Once again he is listed as a single male.  He reports his profession as “aeronautical research and engineer”.  In 1920 we find Orville #2 living in Illinois with his wife Hattie, occupied as a farmer. 

Pushing back to the 1910 U. S. Census, we find Orville #1 living in Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio with his sister Katherine, brother Wilbur, and their father Milton, an 81 year old widower.  Lest there be any doubt, the brothers give their occupation as “inventor, aeroplane”: not a married Illinois farmer. Family trees that conflate the two Orvilles are, sadly, quite common: Orville #1 ends up with Orville #2’s wife.

Now that we have seen that the Illinois Orville Wright is really Wrong, let us look at his family and descendants.  Several family trees on Ancestry.com give his wife’s maiden name as Hattie McLoren or Hattie V. (or N.) McLaren; the 1910 U. S. Census says Orville and Hattie married 2 years earlier (1908), when Orville was 27, and other trees say that his wife was Bessie F. Haffner, whom he married at age 59 in 1941.  There is no conflict if Orville #2 remarried after the death of his first wife in 1936.

More interesting are the numerous trees that report that Orville and Hattie had a daughter named Buckingham, born in 1890 to Orville in Montgomery County, Ohio.  Now of course the problem is that Hattie married Orville #2 in Illinois, not Orville #1 in Ohio.  In 1890 Orville #2 was not only unmarried; he was 9 years old.  Other trees allege that Orville #1 had two children with Hattie, Viola Ann (born 1890) and Buckingham (born 1890 or 1894).  But Orville #1 was still single and living at home with his parents in Ohio in 1900.

If you think you are descended from either Buckingham or Viola Ann (born 1890), you need to come to grips with several facts.  First, Hattie reports in the 1910 Census that she had never had a child.  There are no children in their household in any Census.  Second, there are no Census, birth, marriage or death records for the alleged daughters Buckingham and Viola Ann.  What sources are cited in the Ancestry family trees that contain these names?  The only sources are references to other trees.  There are absolutely no primary sources cited because there are none.  There is nothing but unsubstantiated rumor to support the claims that Orville Wright #1 (the aeronaut) was married, that he had children, or that he is anyone’s ancestor.  Some of the enthusiasts have conflated Orville #1 with Orville #2, despite overwhelming evidence that they were different people, apparently in order to prove their descent from a famous man.  But even this ploy fails because neither Orville had descendants.  And, by the way, neither did Wilbur.

The bottom line: do your research in primary sources.  Issues of fact are not to be settled by vote or consensus.  Three and a half centuries ago the Royal Society in London took as its motto the epigram “nullius in verbum”.  That means “take nothing on someone’s word”: check the facts for yourself in primary sources.  Do you believe the Apollo program was a fake?  Do you believe in the “hockey stick” temperature graph?  Cold fusion?  Better check it out…

Extraordinary Near-Earth Asteroids I: 2014 PP69

April 2015

 We presently know of about 13,000 Near-Earth Asteroids, including nearly 1000 that are larger than 1 kilometer in diameter.  Typical NEAs range from Earth’s general vicinity out to the heart of the Asteroid Belt on each orbit around the Sun.  Their orbits typically have inclinations (relative to the plane of the Solar System) of 10 to 30 degrees, eccentricities of 0.2 to 0.6, and orbital periods of about 2 to 4 years.  The mean distance of any NEA from the Sun is usually near 2 AU.  But the NEAs are a wildly diverse collection of bodies that originated at widely separated locations in the Solar System.  The outliers of this population include some truly remarkable nonconformists.  One such asteroid is 2014 PP69. 

You will recall that the first five characters in an asteroid’s name tell us when it was discovered, in this case in 2014 in the second half of July.  This provisional name will be used until there is a long enough history of accurate tracking (usually at least one full synodic period, the time needed to “lap” Earth in its orbit around the Sun), to certify a precise, accurately predictable, orbit.  The synodic period is about 2 years for most NEAs.  At that time the asteroid will be given a catalog number such as 155629, at which point it will be referred to as 155629 2014 PP69.  Once an asteroid has been cataloged the discoverer may propose a name for it, such as Eros or Ceres; let’s call this one Egbert.  Then it will be called 155629 Egbert; just plain Egbert to its friends.  But the object of this post is just plain 2014 PP69: in the nine months since its discovery there has been no opportunity for it to pass by Earth again, and therefore no chance to assign it a very precise orbit and enter it into the catalog of numbered asteroids.  Once the refined orbit is determined, the discoverer of the asteroid gets to give it a name.

So here’s what’s unusual about 2014 PP69: its perihelion distance of 1.25 AU, which qualifies it as an Amor asteroid, contrasts sharply with its aphelion distance of 41.79 AU, well outside the orbits of Neptune and Pluto and well into the Kuiper Belt.  Its orbital period is an incredible 99.84 years, longer than that of Halley’s Comet.  But that’s not all: the inclination of its orbit is 93.63 degrees, meaning that it orbits almost at right angles to the plane of the Solar System—in fact, the orbit is slightly retrograde, moving around the Sun in a direction opposite to that followed by the planets.  The eccentricity of its orbit is 0.942, higher than that of the typical short-period comet.  At perihelion, closer to Mars’ orbit than to Earth’s, it is traveling at a whopping 40 kilometers per second.

What do we know about the asteroid itself?  Almost nothing.  The discovery images show that it has a visual (H) magnitude of 20.17, which, by the crude “rule of thumb” used for newly discovered NEAs (an assumed average albedo of 0.14; 14% reflectivity in visible light) corresponds to a diameter of about 330 meters.  However, the orbit is cometary, suggesting that a more realistic albedo would about 0.035.  If it’s that bright and that black, then its cross-section area must be four times as large, and its diameter twice as large, as this crude guess would suggest.  That implies eight times the volume and about eight times the mass, raising the question of its impact hazard.  The good news is that, despite its large size and kinetic energy, the point at which it crosses the plane of Earth’s orbit is far outside our neighborhood. 

The body is almost certainly of cometary composition, similar to the Centaurs and the Kuiper Belt bodies and to short-period comets.  A reasonable guess would be that it is about 60% by mass ices and about 40% rock, which in turn contains perhaps 5-10% of organic matter, mostly complex polymers.

Sending a spacecraft to visit 2014 PP69 would be extremely difficult because of its very high relative velocity.  And then there is the problem that the next optimal launch opportunity is a century off.

How soon will 2014 PP69 qualify for a catalog number?  On its next pass through the inner Solar System we will have an opportunity to track it again with such a long span of observations (a century!) that a very accurate orbit can be calculated.  That will be in the year 2114.  The bad news is that the discoverer will no longer be alive to exercise the option of naming his baby!

The Hyperloop Supersonic Train: the Hot New Idea of 1909

May 2015

Some people are just way ahead of their time.  Leonardo drew plans of helicopters and submarines in 1515; Konstantin Tsiolkovskii wrote of exploiting asteroid resources in 1904.  Now another visionary, Elon Musk, has proposed a supersonic train operating inside an evacuated tunnel, serving the San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor.  This technically demanding scheme seems fated for development many years in the future.

But let us turn to the November 1909 issue of Scientific American.  (No, not 2009!)  In that issue we find an editorial, “The Limits of Rapid Transit”, based on an essay written in 1904 by an undergraduate at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and submitted to Scientific American earlier in 1909, advocating the building of a supersonic rail system serving the Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington corridor.  High speeds are achieved by running the hermetically sealed train inside an evacuated tunnel.  Sound familiar?  If Musk is a certified visionary for proposing this concept in 2012, what would we call the lad who advocated the same idea in 1909?

The precocious lad in question was none other than Robert Hutchings Goddard, father of American rocketry, the first in the world to build and fly liquid fuel rockets.  He was also the first to discuss putting astronauts in suspended animation for prolonged space voyages, and the first to propose the use of gyroscopes to stabilize aircraft—and all of these visionary ideas originated while he was still an undergraduate.

One other coda to append to this story: the website “Russia beyond the Headlines” attributes the origin of the supersonic train idea to one Boris Weinberg of Tomsk, who published the idea in an article entitled “Motion without Friction” in 1914.  The website reports that Weinberg carried out tests of his device in which speeds of 6 km per hour were achieved.  (Six km per hour is 3.6 miles per hour, the speed of a brisk walk.)  Only in Russia is 1914 earlier than 1909, and only in Russia is walking speed supersonic.  Oh, by the way, in 1914 it wasn’t Russia, and certainly not the Soviet Union: it was the Russian Empire.  For your amusement, the puff piece can be read at:

 http://rbth.com/news/2013/08/19/russian_ideas_inspire_californias_hyperloop_plan_29029.html