thank you everyone for coming it's really exciting for the friends of the belmont public library to host ted rowlands signed tonight i'm quite sure that everyone here has seen him for years and feel like we know you but it's really exciting to see you here at the belmont public library and i'll just give a little rundown about all the things that ted has done he's a journalist and reporter for chronicle america's longest running locally produced t v news magazine he often appears in the studio at the anchor desk or delivering an opinion commentary but it's out in the field where the viewers are most familiar seeing him i think everyone probably has their favorite piece that he's done mine isn't brattleboro vermont that is where we have a summer home and that was really exciting to see all the things on t v from every corner of new england he has found the offbeat the unique the moving and the just plain memorable all while telling the stories of the region's people and places both of which all of which can be found in the two books that are that he wrote that are in the back that are for sale ted also files a weekly report for w political roundtable show on the record and he is a member of the station's editorial board he hosted the premier season of the discovery channel's popular mechanics show and on the h d t v network he brought viewers up close to some of america's most iconic landmark  landmarks on lighthouses i didn't know all about these different shows that you did for the travel channel's photo adventure series freeze frame the explored why is volcanoes the caves of puerto rico and the south pacific islands of tahiti so there's lots more to add if we want to search for these things to see his first book a new england notebook one reporter's six states uncommon stories was published in two thousand and thirteen in april two thousand and sixteen his second book wicked piss new england's most famous feuds was published will be talking about that book to knight and i'm very excited to introduce ted minds t thank you very much jenny this is this is exciting i mean this is not i've been for the last three and a half years traveling around new england mostly massachusetts and wonderful book events like this one to many libraries and other folks but to see so many friends here tonight is really is really special so thank you thank you all for coming out so i don't want to like to do is start out with a little kind of an appetizer round of some tasty finger feuds and then and work our way up to kind of the main course which is a really delicious dispute that has become really my favorite not did not until i started researching the book a couple years ago and it is now become my favorite few that i've never heard of and i think i think you will feel the same way so the thing about feuds that i have found is that they're fascinating right i mean people love fuse now has a little bit of that rubber necking thing to it you know where it's like you know kind of a record a highway you can't take your eyes off because the thing about feuds is they're really fascinating unless they're yours then not so much you know it's a little bit like it's a little bit like mel brooks is definition of comedy and tragedy you know you ever heard a comedy is when you slip on a banana peel tragedy is when i slip on  banana you know so it's very relative with feuds but in the book i really i start at the beginning i started beginning with with family feuds i mean right at the beginning right at the beginning biblically at the beginning  abel you know there was terrible on the other hand i have always taken great comfort in the fact that the first family right now to me was dysfunctional so i think it makes you feel like whatever happens in your family there's plenty of precedent there's plenty of precedent now i could not resist a chapter in the book on probably well it's a twofer really when it comes to feuds in new england so with the demise of the battling you've got a family feud and a food fight so it's kind of it's kind of a feud to for so i want to start out with recognizing the fact that so many of these feuds that i ended up including in the book were feuds that i'm embarrassed to say i didn't even know existed and they involve some very very famous people right here in new england now this is a little bit of a literary environment to anyone anyone would take a guess who this is england one of the iconic figures in world literature anybody know you've already gone anybody anybody know where rudyard kipling spent three of the most productive years of his writing life very good kipling built he called it no laca which is a hindi word meaning gem of gems this was meant to be crippling lifelong home he was a young man when he moved there just married just starting a family and he and his wife had been there it's beaut anybody else ever been there to know laca it's beautiful as you know gorgeous house meant to resemble kind of a ship on the rolling hills looking out toward the hills of new hampshire and he would have likely spent his entire life there that's kipling in the study of no locker and it's where he wrote arguably his most famous book the jungle book unfortunately for rudyard kipling he had a terrible falling out with his brother in law which caused him no end of anx and and all the rest and you know if you have a family feud and you live in belmont and your family feud member with whom your feuding lives in ohio you know i may be sad but you're not going to be at each other all the time kipling his brother in law live next door that's tough tough that's that's tough to avoid and it drove kipling from vermont never to return the good news is no laca is still there and you can rent it and it's a gorgeous place people rent it for a weekend a little bit you know it's you it's kind of thing you want to do it with a large family or couple of family huge place and and you can sit as i did and  some of you are wondering what the hell are we talking about so so as it happens i think arguably the best pizza in the world and i'm including italy in that is in new haven connecticut and the story starts in the one nine hundred twenty s when frank pappy immigrates from naples italy comes to the italian section of new haven wester street and he opens frank pepe's pizzeria with making the neapolitan pizza that he grew up learning how to make in the old country and he beats as they say in connecticut is at the other end there's sally somebody still working the the original brick oven and it is still i think the best pizza you can find now after family feuds in the book i go back to the founding few which birds america right a war i mean that's really america is founded in a feud it doesn't get a bigger feud than a full on war and the thing is here's what's funny about the founding feud and what it ends up morphing into because you know lexington right side of the lexington green where the famed shot around the world is fire in april one thousand nine hundred seventy five and there's an engraving and then the british go on to conquer it in the old north bridge where they're met by a far larger force and of course the day goes down very quickly but here's the thing great britain is now america's be f f over everybody right it is it is they are our closest ally our closest friend in the world you know we're still fighting the american revolution conquered in lexington to this day this is the poster for an exhibit which you can still see at the bachmann tavern in lexington which my friend rena knows well and they're still fighting over which town deserves the mantle of the birthplace of american liberty meanwhile great britain looks at this and wonders like i thought that was over but anyway the other the other feud from that era again which i had no idea it's sort of embarrassing to continually i'll be saying this all night that i had no idea some of these feuds existed you know that if you and i think most of you here are from new england you know that the battle of bunker hill was fought not on bunker hill but on brits and of course that battles fought less than two months after the battle of lexington and the british lose the battle but win the battle but essentially begin to lose the war here's the thing so the battle was fought on breed's hill not bunker hill and it has been called by many leading historians the grossest historical inaccuracy in american history a formative battle in the country's founding and the name is wrong right so nothing new philbrick i find this kind of fast and he's a wonderful historian i don't know if any of you read he's written a definitive book about the pilgrims and the mayflower and he wrote five years ago a definitive book about the battle of bunker hill in which in which nathaniel philbrick refers to the battle of bunker hill and its historical aftermath is the greatest historical error in this country's history that should always have been rectified they have family reunions every year and it seems not to bother them at all that everything that has come to them has been ill gotten i mean they get the the monument they get the guided missile frigate they get the community college named after them they get cities and towns across america this one's in oregon named after them they get it they get a drag strip and in the end you want crazy they get a chili sauce is bunker hill the first thing you would think of if you were may be the alamo you know you know what the breeds get pretty much baucus they get a plaque up that's not even actual size it's bigger but plaque is smaller and it really bothers the descendants of the breeds like gen breed of cambridge thirteenth generation descendant of alan breed and he still will tell you that he still if you hear people talking about the battle of bunker hill he still politely corrects them i tell you he's lucky not to have been slugged after all this time  in the one chapter i chose on sports simply deferred to the rivalry which every new england who knows refers to the sox yankees that begins with the greatest red sox of all time who becomes the greatest yankee of all time and it goes through the decades with dimaggio in and ted williams and on into the seventy's with munson and fisk and it leads to the creation of the the months and nixon line which is the putative boundary between red sox nation and evil empire and it runs through hartford connecticut which is perfect which is perfect because that's where our main course is going to begin just south of hartford connecticut in bridgeport connecticut so going to sink our teeth into this is the system this the malicious feeling so if you see this photograph which has been called the most reproduced photograph in history you're looking at what wright brothers first flight right the early morning hours of december seventeenth one thousand and three kill devil hills kitty hawk north carolina orville wright listen to the air for about twelve seconds at a height of about six feet and first light bright and six years later the wright brothers photographed here on their porch in dayton ohio world famous aviation pioneers aviation as we know it today stems from what the wright brothers did in in kitty hawk except they will tell you in bridgeport connecticut and now in tw sixteen they've been telling you in bridgeport connecticut that this might have been the first flight this might have been the first flying machine they've been telling you that for most one hundred years but now in two thousand and sixteen there's a lot of other people who feel that there's evidence that this man this man may have beaten the wright brothers into the air for the first powered controlled sustained manned flight by two years his name was g born in germany he emigrates to america changed his name to whitehead his first job actually not too too far away in milton at the blue hill weather observatory he was known even as a boy in germany as the bird obsessed with flight now being obsessed with flight in the late eight hundred says not being obsessed with airplanes because of course they don't exist yet but he was obsessed with it meant building ever more complicated gliders it meant building ever more complicated been large scale kites big enough to for somebody to ride on one and by the time you reach the late eighteenth hundreds in one thousand eight hundred it means one thing it means trying to become the first in flight now the first thing i found out when i researched whitehead is that i think i think i think i speak for myself i bet most of you will agree i remember whe rumor learning about the wright brothers and the way the wright brothers and first flight is taught is that if somebody want to get that is that either that or the fries are up i don't know  know the wright brothers were exactly how they've always been presented there's nothing there's nothing false about that they were two brothers bicycle builders from dayton ohio that's what they did they built bicycles and they became also like whitehead obsessed with flying and this was something that was a dream this was something that had eluded humankind and it was at a point in the late hundreds when technology was beginning to sort of veer toward the possibility of manned flight and it's true that the wright brothers went back and forth from dayton kittyhawk over ten years but i think we have the sense that somehow they're single minded determination all by themselves and then it culminates in this one morning in december nine hundred three and first flight happens i refer to it as immaculate aviation but here's the thing it was a lot more like the space race of the fifty's and sixty's there were many people who were trying to be first in flight their names are lost to history and that's the way it goes let me not is this other wrong with that that's the way it goes history records the winners not the losers not unless this is a stupendous fail like fulton's folly you know ben generally it just records the winners so there's names that you've never heard i've never heard of but they were also also racing to be first in flight get to newt lilly involved langley and whitehead but the wright brothers one was so we always believed but white had moved to bridgeport a one he is already built his twenty first flying machine and this is it the number twenty one every one of the others has crashed and burned number twenty one into the side of a building in a park in pittsburgh and he's lucky he wasn't killed burst into flames so this is the twenty first flying machine the good stuff whitehead made now he's holding an engine and this is key to the race to be first in fl because just like with space flight the key was you had to come up with a boost right that would break the earth's gravitational pull with first flight you had to come up with a fuel for an engine people have been able to write brothers were very good at framing steel and metal and they had been able to come up with a plane like a biplane that was very light that wasn't a problem the problem was every fuel source that had been tried was heavy including water this guy langley tried to use steam power water is very heavy why it was an engine builder the wright brothers were bicycle builders so they were great at building the frame and they built a beautiful frame based on a bird skeleton but they had to outsource building the engine which was key to first flight a man flight why it was an engine builder that was his genius and he settled on a fuel source that had never been tried before acetylene it burns extremely hot for a short period of time gives us an intense amount of heat and light for a short period of time burns very quickly but that's perfect for a flight so he settled on this engine and acetylene nobody knew how it would work and in the summer of one thousand or one he and his crew feel that they're ready to attempt a flight and that's not something they would you would take until you were absolutely r because all of these guys have no money they're working odd jobs to put all the money back into this project if the plane cracks up ben it's another year or two and again this is a race now the wright brothers knew about white hair white had knows about the wright brothers they're racing they're all racing to get into the air first and make this work so summer one thousand one it's hot it's hot in bridgeport connecticut and it is  early dawn his crew and whitehead have been over the line the city line into fairfield for the last week and they've been rolling out with heavy rollers a road dirt road very straight part a dirt road unlike the wright brothers there's two wheels under way his number twenty one that he plans to take off just like planes do today he's going to taxi and take off and he was getting fresh you might wonder how come you never heard of him well again it wasn't that people who were racing to be first in flight weren't getting a lot of media attention they were this was of intense fascination to the general public so anybody who was involved in this was getting press coverage and why did he was on the cover of american inventor forerunner popular mechanics in one thousand and one so wasn't that he wasn't getting attention but in august they're ready to try this so they have a horse drawn cart they cart the number twenty one a few miles over the line into fairfield it's dark it's about five o'clock in the morning about five fifteen by the time they've powered up there's no brakes there's no choke so soon as they fueled up the other guys run away and whitehead takes  off he is airborne he's flying at a height of about fifty feet he flies over a section of long island sound this is what it might have looked like as he flew over long island sound he came over bridgeport about fifty feet in the air flew over many buildings so did he do it did he do it did he did he get between and actually before the wright brothers well if he did this is how the numbers would stack up so the wright brothers flew for about it said eighteen to twenty one seconds nobody has an exact read on that about six to eight feet in the air about one hundred twenty feet whitehead would have flown for just under half an hour fifty feet in the air  so the question is was my first question why was the no photograph why you knew you were going to need that kind of proof right the wright brothers because the very lucky they had three people with cameras all set up and they're very lucky that the one person because of the two guys didn't get a picture now eventually they would have got a picture white had never flew again so why was there a picture well i think one of the keys is what whitehead is holding in his hand his engine is on the foreground in front he's he's holding in his arms his year old daughter rose he's starting a family in bridgeport  he's a german immigrant speaks almost no english it's ninety no one there is already very low an anti german sentiment that's rising within just over a decade world war one will begin in europe he spoke very little english and he had what we would call today uncertain immigration status so familiar so the only thing that frightened gustav whitehead more than missing out on being first in flight was being deported so he had made the calculation i want to see if i can do this but i don't want to attract the nuff attention to be sent back to germany so he did not want attention it's why i did it in the dark and that's why there's no photograph now he never flew again in short order he had he had this family now to take care of so we went back to doing the one thing that he knew we could do to support his family which was making engines and now ten years later after the wright brothers commercial aviation is a going commercial concern now and companies like curtis aviation are employing good stuff whitehead to make engines for them which he did he also made a prototype for a helicopter and in one thousand twenty seven he died almost penniless pretty much on known outside of bridgeport connecticut and that might have been it that might have been it for g waited we might never have known anything about him but this is where the good stuff whitehead story is fascinating because for the next seven decades more right up till today somebody comes along like clockwork almost every day care who not only becomes fascinated with the white head story but in each case as you'll see has a particular skill set that allows them to advance the story and also advance what we know that lends credibility to the story and the first person who does this is an extraordinary woman named stellar end of i wished i had been able to meet her because she was light years ahead of her time in the one nine hundred thirty s she's an attorney she's a journalist and she's a teacher  is she only wanted to admit to being a teacher and an aide an attorney but she was a brilliant woman brilliant woman she realized in hearing about the white hood story from her father that by the one nine hundred thirty s there was something that had never been done that soon would not be able to be done and that was there were eyewitnesses there was no photograph but there were dozens of eyewitnesses to whitehead's flight that day both people who saw something and more people who heard something in the air and so she went to bridgeport and she spent several months getting signed legal testimony from these eyewitnesses and they became the basis of the first two books about gustav whitehead written by stellar indo and now for the first time people outside of connecticut are hearing about this story and the first vague counter claim to who might have been first in flight again she gets attention to her story was in the nine hundred thirty five edition of popular aviation huge subscription and so now by the one nine hundred forty s the state of connecticut is fielding questions almost daily media aquarius both from around connecticut new england nationally and all over the world and people who are asking what can you tell us about this stuff why did he fly didn't fly give us some facts and connecticut had none the plane was long gone there were very few records there was nothing except the eyewitness testimony that stella randolph had put together and this frustrated connecticut because they wanted to be able to say with greater certainty than they were able to what was up with this guy so they approached i think reasonably the one institution in america that was in a position in terms of its expertise to carry out an investigation over the claims of whether or not this stuff would have flew the smithsonian institution and connecticut's first request went to the smithsonian in one thousand nine hundred six and the smithsonian said no no we have no interest in carrying out an investigation from everything we know this would be without carrying out an investigation gustav whitehead it did not fly two years before the wright brothers well what you looking at here is the the wright flyer the most prized possession of this is sewn into this day and this is the day and on which the wright flyer was bequeath officially from the right family to the smithsonian this was the day it was  and this is where the story takes an interesting turn because when the right family donated the right flyer to the smithsonian they entered into an agreement a legal agreement which is not unusual but from the first there were murmurings that there was an odd clause in this agreement but the smithsonian denied that there was anything untoward adda peculiar about  them said it was a standard legal agreement on the disposition of the wright flyer here you're looking at stella randolph and the next person who has come along and become obsessed with the white hat story so the gentleman on the far left is a retired air force major name below dwyer who also is from connecticut also grew up hearing about good stuff whitehead he had heard about this odd agreement as well and he had a friend who was in position to find out a little something more this is former senator former governor lowell weicker republican of connecticut served on the watergate commission you may recall so low weicker for most of his political life has  questions about stuff whitehead and like everybody else in connecticut has had to say simply from what everything i've read of stellar randolph's it certainly seems plausible but i have no i have nothing more definitive to tell you about  he's also begin to hear about this weird clause and lowell weicker became the becomes the first person to successfully on this level of an investigation to use what is at this point a relatively new piece of legislation the freedom of information act he uses it to make public this odd clause so this is the clause when the wright brothers donated the right family donated the plan blah from ever acknowledging that anyone but the wright brothers is first in flight if they do we take the plane back so now now this becomes for connecticut for the first time they feel that maybe there's some sense to why the the smithsonian has steadfastly refused to investigate this cl and the clause becomes the basis of a book that comes out in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight that was co written by stella randolph and major billowed wire called history by contract and it details the secret clause now the smithsonian of course at this point is asked to comment on it and by now they have built the air and space museum and the wright flyer as you may know and i've seen it is is the centerpiece of the air and space museum still is their most prized possession but they're asked about this and their answer about the secret clause is simply it wasn't a secret we just hadn't been asked about it would've been perfectly happy for nobody  and they went on to say that there's no compelling evidence that anybody but the wright brothers flew before the wright brothers period tom crouch tom crouches the aviation curator emeritus at the smithsonian i interviewed him he's a brilliant guy knows more about aviation history in america than anybody on earth the thing that jumps out in the sense of the word evidence because they didn't look at any evidence to this day they never have but for connecticut this was oddly beside the point because they felt that tom crouch may not be the best person to have been refusing to investigate the claim that they've been asking the smithsonian to carry out for forty five years  crouches born in dayton ohio not in itself disqualifying not itself disqualifying what bothers connecticut more is that he was also the first official biographer of the wright brothers who connecticut felt maybe it would have been good for you to recuse yourself from so we get to the one nine hundred eighty s and the next person who becomes obsessed with the white hood story and his also has a skill set that allows him to do something significant so any kosher is a fascinating guy he's a world class adventure he's hiked mountains all over the world scuba dive parachuted over the world he's also a wonderful teacher still teaching today in his late seventy's in fairfield connecticut also a master craftsman so in the early one nine hundred eighty s he goes to a lecture given by bill and wire about way and he goes up to him at the end of the lecture and he says look i know that the number twenty one doesn't exist anymore but what if we could fly in authentic replica would we get a better sense of how airworthy it might have been and he says well that'd be great but we don't have a replica and cowshed says well i'm going to build one so he spends the next three years building and when i say painstakingly painstakingly recreated down to the of the almost microscopic thread that was used in the white muslin that forms the fuselage of the number twenty one from the same village in india in madrassas where whitehead had gotten the white muslin from so he builds first the three eights replica and it passes muster by the aviation engineers at sikorsky aviation we're looking at it with him here and then he builds a full size replica and then he's going to fly now any coach was not a pilot and where and because the white had flu he didn't need a pilot's license mainly because there was no such thing as a pilot so but now in nine hundred eighty six in connecticut you need a pilot's license to fly something like this so when he coached mines five thousand bucks of his own money and he becomes a pilot now when i interviewed andy you know him you know with a certain amount of you know journalist skepticism is look you know nobody doubts that what you created was a slavish lee recreated painstakingly recreated replica there's no question but i said there are so many other variables that we don't know about we don't know for instance we know that it was you know summer and it was clear the day that white had flew in one thousand one but we don't know anything about cross winds that day and how it might have favored you fueled up with him in it it weighed two hundred one pounds in coast small guys when they were finished it weighed one hundred ninety seven pounds so lighter than white it they didn't want to be accused of now it was easier for them so they threw in one hundred pound sand bag and he said all i can tell you is that when we were about to take off he said i powered up they moved the trucks away from the wheels i started to roll he had turned to put his hand on the side of the fuselage to look behind him and he said is my watch fell off now the watch was no ordinary watch the watch had an altimeter on it which was key to being able to validate getting up to fifty feet so he said the watch fell off i'm looking for the watch and as i'm looking i think the only thing worse than not being able to know my altitude is if this thing veers off the runway and cracks up so he said i brought myself into my upright position and i was already thirty five feet off the ground he said all that thing wanted to do was get into the air and did and he flew it whitehead flew for just under half an hour so for good measure and he coached flew for an hour and five minutes until he was just about run out of the settle in fuel he landed got a hero's welcome in bridgeport and now the story gets wider to advancing this story now john browne had never heard of this stuff point i'm not sure he ever heard of connecticut but he had a good excuse he grew up in melbourne australia and in a bizarre irony in the early two thousand john brown who is an aviation not only an aviation curator he's an aviation investigator so this is what he does he investigates various aviation phenomena this smithsonian institution in the early two thousand hired john browne to produce a series of television pieces about american aviation history he's hired by tom crouch who will regret this the rest of his life because john brown has basically made the last ten years of time crunches life a living hell so the first thing that john brown does he comes over he has a meeting has a meeting at the smithsonian which i'm crouch and at this point john brown who i've talked to several times brilliant guy photographic memory which will come in handy he probably knows almost as much as tom crouch about american aviation history so you know it in flight right john brown is not just an aviation curator he's an investigator he's been in the tech tive so to him what tom crouch has just said is  the tect of would call to tell he's just volunteered something that wasn't asked and to him it made him immediately think one thing i think of stuff what it might  flown so he sets himself for the next year of his life investigating like no one ever has good stuff waiting and he comes up with results almost immediately he finds something that people have been told didn't exist he found the contemporaneous newspaper account next day bridgeport herald of gustav whitehead having flown over bridgeport then he goes over to lloyd's shelves in germany he spends two months in white his hometown spends about a week combing through the attic of the whitehead museum and he finds this photograph that he was looking at this photograph but that little circle of red is what caught his eye so he went to the local police station and asked them if they can blow up that photograph they did almost three hundred times and now john browne because again he has digested every single piece of eyewitness testimony that stella randolph recorded and one of them one of them was of a custodian of a bank who was on his way to work early in the morning that morning and the sun was just coming up and it was light enough for him to have said two things first he thought he a lawnmower in the sky which is exactly what it would sound and think how weird that must have been because at that time you didn't hear noises in the sky so he thought he heard a lawnmower in the sky and then he said as he turned to his building the bank building he thought he saw someone on the roof with a camera on a tripod and what john brown thought he might be looking at is number twenty one as it landed on a vacant lot on pine street just across from that bank this missoni and calls this photograph the smudge and john brown doesn't consider it a smoking gun but it begins to add to the circumstantial evidence so now john brown goes around speaking about this stuff why then he doesn't say that he's first in flight he said there is much more to the flight the the race to be first in flight than we ever knew that's his point and his exhibit a is good stuff waited so now the story gets more attention again and in twenty thirteen john brown has a fateful meeting with the editorial staff of jane's all the world's aircraft which is considered to be sort of the bible of aviation he meets with them in frankfurt germany where there's an air show he meets with them for about an hour and a half percent everything that is found he's trying to get some sort of reality check on what aviation experts think about readers that they now believe that there is a very good chance that gustav whitehead not the wright brothers was first in play that's all connecticut had to he so this elevates their feud with north carolina to a whole new levels and in june twenty third team the connecticut legislature passes a bill with no dissenting votes try doing that anywhere today  and connecticut becomes the only state in america that recognizes someone other than the wright brothers as first in flight does it change anything i don't i don't think so i think that the wright brothers have the photograph and whitehead didn't and that's a ball game that's the ball game if you go to kitty hawk today if you have you know that there's a beautiful national park property there with this stunning soaring monument to the wright brothers if you go to bridgeport and there's so much i can tell you if you want to see the white head monument in bridgeport connecticut and you reach this intersection pray for a red light so i know it goes by very very fast it took them a year and a half just to come up with the money for the inscription on the bottom but connecticut will tell you this is a bumper sticker you might see something but that this is the license plate the connecticut firmly believes that north carolina should have and that's the white hood story thank you very much so i'd like to ask when i when i when i tell the story so how many people had ever heard of gustav when it nobody yeah i had neither i knew him so we're we're one in ignorance on that  how many people think that based on what you've heard about this stuff whitehead that there is some credibility no credibility doesn't change your mind at all about first inflight who thinks that you consider it in a new way now yeah well that's how i felt i mean that's how i feel but i don't feel that it will change i don't you know what i disagree with jane's in that i don't think it should change because i think that the wright brothers have the photograph and that's the breaks you know that's the breaks but listen thank you very much for for sitting through that the food was more fun any questions i'll be happy to take any question doesn't have to be about  knows we've talked about weight enough but any questions at all could be about anything yeah was let me read that to you because it's very very brief which is part of what many people wonder about one paragraph one power this is david mccullough of further aggravation are stories of others who had supposedly achieved flight before the rights the most annoying being that of a german american who was said to a flown a plane of his own in connecticut in one thousand or one in one thousand nine hundred two the story was entirely without evidence and wholly untrue but keeps drawing attention as the years  i have the world of respect for david mccullough i do i've read i think almost everything he's written i have the world of respect however i find it i find it apart i don't i think that's fine if you want to lay out the case that you don't think there's anything to it but to dismiss the evidence that has been amassed as wholly without evidence nobody nobody makes the case that the wright brothers do not deserve all the all the all the all the fame the hero status that they have no the only question is whether or not they were first other than that aviation as we know it today goes directly to the wright brothers actually not what it but yeah i just think that you mean there are those you know it gets on the grassy knoll ish there are actually some people who believe that  the wright brothers because this was coming to a head in two thousand and thirteen the white house stuff there are some who think that the right family contracted with david mccullough to write this book i want to get all grass you know like that you know like that was a second writer in any way i'm glad us i got tired of people asking that and i got to have the book at home so this is the first time i brought it with me thank you anyone else any non white had question thank you very much thank you