Wilbur Samuel Jackman

Wilbur Samuel Jackman 1855-1907, American educator, b. Mechanicstown, Ohio, grad. Harvard, 1884. Jackman was a leader of the nature study movement in elementary schools. He taught (after 1889) at the Cook County Normal School in Chicago and, beginning with Nature Study for the Common Schools (1891), wrote texts and manuals. He was appointed dean of the new college of education in the Univ. of Chicago in 1901, but resigned in 1904 to become principal of the University Elementary School and to edit the Elementary School Teacher.

Wright, Wilbur(1867–1912) and Orville(1871–1948), inventors of the airplane.The Wright brothers operated a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1890s. As expert mechanics, they became avidly interested in the problem of human flight. They designed and flew three gliders in the years 1900–1902. In the course of these gliding experiments, they perfected (and in 1906 patented) the most efficient method of controlling an aircraft in the air. In 1903, using data derived from a series of model airfoil tests in their bicycle‐shop wind tunnel, they constructed a propeller‐driven flying machine, powered by a homemade motor.

In this machine, the Wright brothers made the world's first man‐carrying airplane flights on 17 December 1903, above the sands of the Outer Banks near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

They continued experimenting in relative secrecy until October 1905, when their long circling flights over a pasture near Dayton attracted attention. Afraid that others might copy their invention, they dismantled their flying machine and spent two years trying to interest the governments of the United States, England, France, and Germany in purchasing a Wright airplane.

In February 1908, the U.S. War Department finally agreed to consider a purchase. In March the Wrights signed a contract with the French. By that summer, French aviators were making flights of up to twenty minutes. Europe seemed poised to take the lead in aviation development, but when Wilbur made his first flights in France in August 1908, they created a sensation. Wilbur's smooth banked turns convinced the world that the Wrights were far ahead of their competitors. In September, Orville astounded Americans with flights of more than an hour near Washington, D.C.

In November 1909, the brothers established the Wright Company and went into business. They could now afford to sue infringers of their basic 1906 patent, which was not for the airplane itself, but for the means of controlling an airplane—any airplane—in flight. They therefore felt justified in suing anyone who manufactured or flew airplanes for profit and refused to pay royalties to the Wright Company. Warned that the patent suits were hampering the development of aviation, they protested that they merely sought a fair return for having spent their own money and risked their lives while inventing the airplane and learning to fly it.

Wilbur died in 1912. In 1914, Orville locked horns with the Smithsonian Institution over former Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley's unflyable airplane, the Aerodrome, which had crashed into the Potomac River on 8 December 1903. The new Secretary authorized the rebuilding of the Aerodrome with many modifications. After the plane made a few brief hops, the Smithsonian claimed that had it been properly launched in 1903, it would have flown, nine days before the Wrights' airplane, the Kitty Hawk. The Aerodrome was later displayed in the Smithsonian's National Museum, as the first airplane “capable of sustained free flight.” Orville retaliated by exiling the Kitty Hawk to England for display in London's Science Museum. The feud was settled in 1942, but not until December 1948—eleven months after Orville's death—was the Kitty Hawk installed as the National Museum's prized centerpiece.
See also Airplanes and Air Transport; Aviation Industry.

Bibliography

Fred Howard , Wilbur and Orville, 1987.
Tom D. Crouch , The Bishop's Boys, 1989.

Fred Howard

Mental Retardation, a term adopted by educators and physicians to explain intellectual disabilities.From the Colonial Era to the Civil War, Americans distinguished between two types of mental limitations: “idiocy” and “imbecility.” Idiocy identified people who appeared to function with very low intellectual ability. Imbecility labeled individuals who seemed to have higher abilities than idiots, but still appeared disabled.

Beginning in the 1840s, American physicians Samuel Gridley Howe, Hervey Wilbur, and others read reports of the techniques of the French educator Edouard Séguin in training idiots. Encouraged by Séguin's success, these reformers founded private schools and public asylums for people with intellectual disability. Established for education, these facilities by the 1850s were housing graduates who had failed to find employment in their communities. By the 1870s, many states were transforming such schools into custodial institutions for the “feebleminded.” Although they continued to provide classroom instruction, by 1900 most institutions had become fully custodial.

The new century marked the beginning of special education and the eugenics movement. Special education provided schooling to “mentally defectives.” Henry H. Goddard's 1905 adaptation of the Binet intelligence tests launched a movement to identify intellectual disability among American grade schoolers and other groups such as World War I draftees. Paralleling the introduction of testing, the eugenics movement linked intellectual limitations with heredity and “bad breeding.” In 1914, the Committee on Provision for the Feebleminded launched a nationwide campaign against the “menace of the feebleminded.” Invoking the authority of eugenics, the committee promoted involuntary sterilization, institutional segregation, and laws to restrict marriage.

The Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II marked a period of underfunding and overcrowding of public institutions. Exposés that appeared during and after the war focused attention on the inhuman conditions of institutions housing the “mentally deficient.” Nevertheless, these facilities continued to grow until the mid‐1960s, when their populations reached over 190,000 residents. Beginning in the later 1960s, the efforts of two groups led to the rapid depopulation of the state institutions. These groups comprised civil libertarians critical of overcrowded institutions and state governments interested in transferring the costs of care to the federal Medicaid system. Both the civil libertarians and the funding provisions of the Medicaid program encouraged states to reduce the populations of their facilities. Policy‐makers called the strategy deinstitutionalization. The populations of state institutions steadily declined from the 1970s on, and by the end of the century most people labeled intellectually disabled lived independently, in group homes, or in community facilities.
See also Civil Liberties; Intelligence, Concepts of; Medicare and Medicaid; Mental Health Institutions.

Bibliography

Philip M. Ferguson , Abandoned to Their Fate: Social Policy and Practice toward Severely Retarded People in America, 1820–1920, 1994.
James W. Trent Jr. , Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States, 1994.

James W. Trent Jr.