Hi, today we're going to be talking about man's early flight. And that is your area of Expertise. Spelled wrong? Naturally. You're listening to Expertise, spelled wrong. The podcast where the world's most expert experts discuss their areas of expertise expertly. Expert comedy writer Clare Sera and expert comedy writer Danno Sullivan bring their expertise to other unrelated expertises. Welcome to the podcast of the evening. Clare, I am on the wings of love when it comes to talking about early flight. So Danno, first of all, I'm sure that we would all like to find out what first brought you to this fascination.
Many folks are drawn to the world of flight due to an experience with a paper airplane, let's say, or an exciting flight with a friendly family pilot. For me, it was just the opposite. I was earth-based by necessity. I was born with what doctors call a heavy bottom. For the first 20 years of my life, I was not even able to stand up. So your doctor pioneered the study of specific gravity around your bottom. Yes. In some ways, my bottom was so heavy that it was like a planet. Which planet you might ask? I think the reason the Americans get credited for the invention of flight is that the gravity in North America is so much more surmountable.
Gravity in Europe, first of all, it's metric. Second of all, you've heard of like the Loire Valley in France? Yes. They had no business trying to do flight experiments. They were easily a hundred feet closer to the center of the earth at that point. My goodness. They were being sucked down as they were trying to springboard off. Yeah. So here we are now on American soil, much less gravitas than our European cousins. And you have the first folks who were attempting to get that machinery up and above the ground. What, what did they use? What did they try? The very first attempt, Claire, was just someone falling over.
Right, right. After you fall over several times, every single time it hurts. Every single time you get a scrape. And after a while you think to yourself, if I could avoid that pain, I would do whatever it takes. And in the case of young Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio Bicycle Works, he did something about it. He got himself two pillows, one for each leg. And for the longest time, that was considered successful flight. Just walking around with pillows strapped to your legs. Isn't that interesting? And were those pillows made of feathers? Well, yes, they were. Imagine the scenario, Claire, young Wilbur Wright all of a sudden with legs lighter than air.
The rest of his body still exactly the same. So his lower appendages took flight before the rest of his body. So was he being sort of dragged around by the feet with his head on the ground? That's exactly what happened. And after a while he started to think, dang, this hurts. Put a pillow on my forehead. I'm telling you, imagine if there had been TikTok back then, Dano. Yeah. So after one bang up after another, eventually Wilbur and his brother Orville had no choice but to invent true flight as we know it today. Orville, Orville Wright. Yes. Who also invented popcorn, if I'm recalling correctly, which is a flight-driven vegetable.
It has nothing to do with airplanes. Popcorn actually presages rocket flight. Oh my goodness. Rocket flight is to airplane flight what popcorn is to corn. I don't know about flight, but that's taken me to heaven. I want to go to JPL jet popping labs. So, uh, not to make this too personal, you tried to recreate the first plane. Yeah. The Wright brothers flyer, it was called the Kitty Hawk seven, which is strange for their first model. I did try to recreate it with a couple of special accommodations for my situation with heavy bottom. We tried to make sure that everything was in place for a successful flight.
First of all, we did not do it in a valley in France. Second of all, we made sure that there was, it's called a saddle, which is where the pilot sits. And this was a low slung saddle so that upon a safe landing, I'd be able to slow down the skidding plane with my posterior. Third, we made sure that we had a solid tested wing structure, which we got from a modern Cessna plane and also a, a Boeing style engine with a big prop that runs off jet fuel. So we combined all of these things, including a first class seating section and a in-cabin service. If you're going to build a recreation like this, why not go for comfort clear?
So we did try to recreate the flight from atop the knoll at Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers had their successful flights. We all know that the Wright brothers invented flight at Kitty Hawk. And have you ever thought about Kitty Hawk, you know, like how propitious a name that was? What if it had been called Kitty, Kitty Octopus? They would have invented. Undersea flight. What a lot of folks don't know is that Kitty Hawk was Orville and Wilbur's daughter. I, a lot of people didn't know that they had a daughter together. Yeah, that's progressive. They were two brothers that had joined together to create an airplane and an offspring.
A lot of people don't know that young Kitty Hawk was one of the original test pilots because she was so lightweight. She was but a slip of a thing. Oh, she did not have a heavy bottom. She did not have a heavy anything. She could just get dashed about in a mild breeze all on her own. Was she born with the early osteoporosis, perhaps a degenerative? She had no bones at all. Oh my goodness. Nothing to degenerate. Well, that's because she was the offspring of two brothers. Yeah. So consequences, you know, for every, every plus there's a minus. So we're back to your early flight, your first flight in this Cessna Boeing.
The Kitty Hawk eight. We call it Kitty Hawk eight. Yeah. After the original plane, the Kitty Hawk seven, we really should have checked the weather. Oh, I don't know what you know about flying a plane, Claire, but basically it is a vehicle that rides the wind. Yes. If it's too light, the plane can't fly, but if it's too heavy, the plane will crash. What you want is what pilots call perfect air, which is just air that's perfect. I, again, did not realize that, that all early flights had to wait for this kind of atmosphere. I mean, today I'm suppose, I'm, I'm guessing they don't have to because of the jet fuel and the, the rockets that.
Yeah. Modern planes are so much more controllable. A lot of them actually are encased in a large glass dome where they create their own atmosphere and their own gravity. So they're in a state of constant flux between being sucked to the earth and being risen by the perfect air within. It almost makes the whole concept of travel needless because everything you have is right there. You've got your perfect air for quality breathing, quality flight. You've got gravity for keeping things safely on the ground or the floor. You've got cabin service for all the peanuts and ginger ale you might need.
Dano, I did not know that you were part of the perfect bubble movement. It's a bit controversial. People that are believing that we should all be living in little communities in perfect bubbles, bouncing around the atmosphere, but there's, there's, there's a lot of problems with that. All we're trying to do is say, let's make sure that everybody has a safe, equitable way to travel. But Dano, that's not what happened when you attempted to create one of these bubble communities. And your hoped for plan, as you put in your book, was that you would try one year and you created a bubble that could in perfect air be sustained.
For some reason, everybody was on a Boeing 747 within that bubble. Yeah, I was able to charge for tickets. That's the only reason there. So you're, you're going to have your community live on a Boeing 747 for a year in a plastic bubble. How long did this last? It only lasted for one month out of the intended one year. A month. You didn't, did you have a lavatory? We had a lavatory in first class and passenger class. We even had a smoking and non-smoking sections, like good old days on the airplanes. So you had smoking in the plane within your bubble. Yeah. Anybody who disapproved of the smoking can just step outside the plane.
The plane was not flying. The plane was on the ground within the bubble the entire time. By ground, you mean the bottom of the bubble? Because you did launch this bubble off of a cliff. That was at day 31 of our one month experience. I'm sorry, I didn't realize this. You lived for a month at the side of a cliff, in a plane, in a bubble. I'm sorry to be crude and, but you know, we're all human beings. How did you flush out those lavatories? Oh, it just squirts out the bottom, just like a person. Why do you think they call it a runway? If I may say, I feel like the stroke of marketing genius was that these were tickets that had a 30 day window for refunds.
And we were actually out there on the tarmac within the bubble for 31 days. So people not only could not get off the plane, but they couldn't ask for a refund at the end. You know, Dan, if you don't mind me saying that, it shows a little bit of the motivation there was not so much innovative world living, innovative flight, but how to get out of your refund policy. I guess when you put it like that, I, I didn't intend it to be that clear, but I think that's what it became. Why did you roll it off the cliff? Nobody, and you don't even really go into it in your book.
Everybody was safe. They could have, sure they would have been angry. You could have kept the money, but you, you started rolling that bubble towards the edge of that cliff. Claire, as someone dedicated to the early days of flight, so many of the theories that I espoused that I developed have been snickered at, and I have spent my whole life being snickered at. People don't understand. The thing that people talk to me about the most was my gravity theory, that the Loire Valley of France was closer to the center of the earth and therefore had stronger gravity.
So I thought by scooting the bubble with the airplane within it over toward that cliff and tumbling off with a gravitometer running to test the actual strength of the gravity as we went, I would finally be validated. I would finally not just be the boy with the heavy bottom. I would be a scientist, a doctor of flight, someone who really had a point to make and who made it. So just to, to paint the picture, day 31, the natives are restless within the plane. They're, they're ready to get out of this so-called experiment. Yeah, they'd had nothing but salted pretzels pretty much for a month.
We got a lot of dry mouths and you are scooting that bubble towards the edge of this. I mean, this cliff is 300 feet and with the sheer sea below. Yeah, the sheer sea is beautiful at that time of year too. What happened? At first we plummeted towards the earth's surface, stories beneath. What I've heard scientifically, there was a gust of perfect air. That came in at that very moment. It was a beautiful thing to see, Claire. Previous to that, all we'd been thinking about was latrine sloshing, pretzel breath, screams, and then all of a second, it was like God himself reached out with a ghostly hand and lifted the plane, lifted that bubble into the skies and we were at flight.
I mean, it's what saved you from being prosecuted as a murderer of over 40 people. Those people had all bought tickets, Claire, and they were there. They had signed a waiver and they had chosen to be there. So could I have been prosecuted as a perpetrator of mass suicide? Maybe. But that's not how the story ended amazingly. It was the most wonderful comeuppance you could imagine. Once we were in the air and at flight, we circled, we flew, we soared, we sang. There was great joyousness amongst the crew, myself, and the passengers. And Claire, where do you think we landed?
This I don't know because you've never actually been forthcoming in case any of these details could incriminate you. The Loire Valley. Oh my gosh, Dano. And we came down so fast and so hard. It validated my theory because of the fact that we descended quickly, that gravity there was super strong. And I believe the plane is still stuck there to this day. It's stuck to the earth as if by an electromagnet. It's not so much that you sort of emulated the flight of the Wright Brothers, but more that you reinforce the notion of different gravities. You could say that, Claire.
I think the biggest way that I emulated the Wright Brothers was simply by being right. Nice. The Expertise Spelldrom podcast is free and like the Amish, all are welcome. Be sure to sign up for our email announcements at funnypodcast.com. And follow us in your favorite podcast app like the expert podcast listener we know you are.
