Science & Tech Quote by Wilbur Wright

Wright opens by drawing a hard line between the dreamer and the delusional. Calling himself an enthusiast signals appetite, risk, and curiosity; refusing the label crank is a preemptive strike against the era's loudest species of would-be inventor: the guy with a grand theory and no data. In the late 19th and early 20th century, aviation was crowded with confident failures, newspaper spectacle, and backyard contraptions that treated physics like a negotiable detail. Wright's rhetoric is a credibility play aimed at funders, peers, and history: don't mistake me for a hobbyist with a gimmick.

The key phrase is "avail myself of all that is already known". That's not humility for its own sake; it's a manifesto for method. Wright frames invention as cumulative, almost civic, work. He rejects lone-genius mythology and replaces it with an ethic of research, replication, and incremental improvement. The subtext: real breakthroughs come from respecting prior knowledge, not scorning it.

Then he slides in something sneakier: "add my mite" and "help on the future worker". It's a strategic lowering of expectations that actually heightens them. By presenting success as inevitable but distributed across time, Wright immunizes himself against premature judgment while keeping the horizon clear. If "final success" doesn't arrive tomorrow, the work still matters.

It reads like proto-engineering culture: anti-hype, pro-evidence, suspicious of pet theories, and quietly ambitious. The sentence isn't just about building a flying machine; it's about building legitimacy for a new kind of inventor.