The Last Laugh
Everything described below actually happened.
Well, pretty much of it…
They laughed at the Wright brothers. “Stick with what you know,” they said. “Bicycles.”
What kind of a world would we have now, if everyone stayed in their lane?
“That’s a lawn mower engine,” I said, quite accurately. “It was made specifically for lawnmowers. You can’t make a hovercraft with it.” That was my advice to my brother, Wes.
“Think about it,” Wes advised. “A lawnmower is halfway to being a hovercraft. You just attach a propeller instead of a blade, and instead of the lawnmower, you build a big frame with a plastic lining, mount the engine on top of it, attach a propeller, and you’ve got a hovercraft.”
Wes had a way of making absurd ideas seem reasonable. We were in our early teens. He was perhaps fifteen, and that would have made me thirteen.
“Does that engine even work? And even if it does, where are you going to get a propeller?” I liked to challenge Wes, but he always had an answer.
“Bobby’s father just got a new lawnmower, and was trying to get rid of the old one. He was giving it away! So, I took it, and pulled the engine off it.”
Free stuff! I’ve always been attracted to free junk. You just never know when you might find a use for it. Free stuff represents opportunity to the imagination, opens both window and doors. Sometimes it is the windows and doors.
“Well great. But who’s giving away free propellers?” I was sure I had him this time.
“Ralph’s uncle is an airplane mechanic at the airport. He works on those little planes, not the big airliners. He’s got an old propeller he doesn’t need.”
Wes is like that. How many people do you know who, at the age of fifteen, could come up with a free propeller? Lawnmower, maybe, but a propeller?
“OK,” I said, “But how does an airplane propeller attach to a lawnmower engine?” It was a rhetorical question. For all I knew, they bolt right on.
“No problem,” Wes said. “I’ll work it out.”
Wes was always working things out, sometimes succeeding, but never discouraged.
I won’t go into the boring details, but Wes took some old plywood left over from when my father had an addition put onto the house, cut it into curved shapes that only his imaginative mind could conceive, and ended up with a framework, about four feet by four feet, lined it with leftover vapor barrier plastic, also from the addition, and mounted the lawnmower engine onto the top of it. And yes, somehow he got the propeller attached to the engine.
It wasn’t elegant, this hovercraft. But it looked like it might work. Now, for the moment of truth. With the hovercraft sitting in our driveway, Wes started the engine. And it worked! The hovercraft lifted an inch or so off the driveway and, well, hovered.
Imagine the sense of accomplishment that Wes felt, but also the nagging question, ‘Now that I’ve built it, what do I do with it?’ And that takes me back to the Wright brothers. They couldn’t let go of the idea that they could make a machine, a flying machine (the term ‘airplane’ did not yet exist). And just what, exactly, did they think they were going to do with it? Did they anticipate 747s and huge airports, and air freight and flying to the other side of the world in hours, rather than sailing for months? Probably not. They were just convinced that they could build a flying machine, and that was enough.
So, what to do with this hovercraft floating in our driveway? Wes’ first thought, of course, was to have someone climb on and ride it. There were only the two of us. Wes volunteered me.
“I’m going to have my butt just inches away from the propeller. What if something goes wrong?”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong. The hovercraft is just an inch off the ground. Even if the engine quits, no problem.”
That was a very reassuring answer, which in no way addressed the question. What about my butt? Just inches from the propeller? But he’d been talking me into things my entire life, so why stop now?
At this point, I should fill in a few details. Our driveway was flat, but our street was on a hill, a fairly steep hill. That’s a factor, here. When I was about ten, we had had an ice storm one winter, and that street, on the hill, was slick with ice. What do we do on ice? We skate, of course. So, I put on my skates and tried skating down the hill. Only after I had gotten up to speed did it occur to me that I had no way to stop. There was a moment of terror, but then the skates hit a rough spot, I fell and rolled down the hill aways, but was unscathed. So, now I know what happens when you skate down a hill and have no way to stop. Valuable knowledge, wouldn’t you say?
If only I’d learned. But my sister got a skateboard a couple of years later. You’ll never guess what I did. Having never before been on a skateboard (they were a new thing back then) I decided to skateboard down the hill. Some people never learn, even when they have the knowledge! Only after I’d picked up speed did I realize that I had no idea how you stop a skateboard. Down I went, this time with a sprained ankle.
“Come on, get on,” Wes said. It was equal parts suggestion, command, and challenge.
“Look how fast that propeller is going,” I pointed out.
“You’ll be fine.”
The truth is, I wanted like hell to get on that thing and experience ‘flying’ on a hovercraft. But I’m no fool. I didn’t get on right away. First, I talked myself into it, and then got on. It was just the sort of experience that a thirteen-year-old boy craves. Huck Finn had nothing on me!
We both celebrated the moment. Wes could push the hovercraft, with me on it, in any direction, and it easily glided on its cushion of air. I think we were experiencing the same feelings that the Wright brothers experienced. Fundamentally, it worked! But now what?
“I’m going to push you out to the street and see how it goes down the hill,” Wes proclaimed.
Should I have known better? Yes. Had previous experience taught me all I needed to know? Yes. But was I going to pass on this chance to ride the hovercraft down the hill? Hell, no!
Wes pushed me out to the street. We had anticipated no possible consequences. We were boys, thirteen and fifteen. It’s in our genes.
I took off on the hovercraft which, in no more than a second, had reached a speed that precluded me from climbing off. Wes was chasing after me, but couldn’t hope to catch up.
Here’s the good news. As fate would have it, the hovercraft ran over a sewer grate. The cushion of air went down the grate, and the hovercraft stopped. Wes caught up in a few seconds, and killed the engine. Of course I could have killed the engine, but had neglected to think of that.
That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, people say. Apparently, it doesn’t necessarily make you wiser. Three trips down that hill, and not once did I stop and consider. But I lived, so what the hell!
They laughed at the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers could easily have failed, have gotten themselves killed. A loose bolt, a failed weld, any miscalculation at all could have meant the end of the Wright brothers. And they did initially have an accident. But they stitched the machine back together, made some adjustments, and carried on.
Two young bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio thought they could build a machine that flies. Some people thought they were crazy, and perhaps they were. Perhaps it takes just the right blend of crazy, luck, and persistence to succeed at things others have never even considered. A broken cable, a shift in the wind, and the Wright brothers might have been killed, rather than become known to the world as the inventors of the flying machine. They might then have become a cautionary tale, been compared to Icarus, as a lesson to discourage anyone from daring to take on the impossible.
Someone else would still have found a way to fly. It was going to happen. But they could never have anticipated what it would mean. We can never know those things. We can only push limits and see what happens. So, here’s to all the damned fools who should’ve known better, but didn’t.
Thanks for reading. If you missed the previous installment of Chip & Wes’ adventures, click The Legendary Donut Stomping Incident, below.
Wow, I'm totally impressed that you and your brother were able to build a working hovercraft. Even more impressed that you agreed to challenge "the hill" one more time. This was a fun one, Chip. Stuff like this doesn't seem to happen anymore.
I've been on a hovercraft. Very cool. But I surely wasn't mechanically minded to make try to make one. I/we, nailed skate wheels on boards for our skateboards, that was about a mechanical as I got. They were pretty good. I enjoyed this story.