Even the Wright Brothers Could Have Used Public Relations

According to many published accounts, the first coverage of the Wright Brothers' initial flights was recorded in Gleanings in Bee Culture, a publication focused on beekeeping.

In David McCullough’s wonderful book on the Wright Brothers, the general public was extremely skeptical about human flight, and this attitude filtered into the lack of media reporting on the subject. When asked how the local newspaper missed one of humankind’s greatest achievements, an editor at the Dayton Daily News noted, “I guess the truth is that we were just plain dumb.”

Imagine being Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1904, soaring through the sky on a plane you built, and the general public at the time didn’t believe you and didn’t want to know about your magical machine.

One would imagine that a media miss of that magnitude couldn’t happen today with our 24/7 news cycle, but it certainly can. Reporters today are under tremendous pressure to publish stories that satisfy public demands, which is measured by, among other things, clicks into the story.

This modern pressure and time crunch on newsrooms across the world make it necessary to proactively get your story in front of journalists so they can examine it for themselves. The expectation that great work will draw an audience may even be less true today than it was in Orville and Wilbur’s days.

Companies and organizations may believe that continued focus on groundbreaking work attracts attention, and that does happen for a few. But under normal circumstances, there isn’t such a thing as an overnight success, and it may take the media and public decades to appreciate the work.

This chapter in the Wright Brothers' story serves as a powerful reminder to those endeavoring to do great things: If you build it, they may not come unless you hire a public relations firm.