This is good what PBS is doing in teaching us about the Wright
brothers history. One almost wonders whether being bicycle mechanics
was the prefered mechanical route to becoming the first builders of
airplanes. I would hazard the guess that in the cosmos where and if
intelligent life exists say 100 such exoplanets that all 100 built
their first airplanes from the individuals who built bicycles or had
bicycle training. And that all 100 exoplanets had to have bicycle
technology in existence before they could build their first airplane.
Further, I would speculate that all 100 such exoplanets when they
built their first airplane such as the Wright's on Earth that all 100
were within 50 years of their first big war which we call WW1. In
other words all 100 planets had to have a population large enough to
build bicycles and to build their first airplane such that they were
overpopulated and would soon have to engage in a World War on their
planet to relieve their overpopulations. But I stray too far. Such is
the trouble with a man who has so many theories that the minute I talk
about one theory I soon am obliged to romp into other theories.

I wanted to talk about spruce wood and how important it was in the
Wright aircraft.

Question: were the planes in WW1 made of wood? Was it spruce wood? Was
the German ace of Red Baron a wooden plane?

I love the superiority list of woods. Some say that hickory has the
highest tensile strength and some say ash, as per baseball bats. I
seem to think that ash beats hickory but am not set up to prove it.

I did notice one means of testing in the growth of trees themselves.
Because oak trees can throw a limb, a big limb at that to nearly
parallel the ground so the wood has to be extraordinarily tough to
hold a massive limb parallel to the ground. So oak must be strong and
tough. But Hickory or Ash seem not able to parallel the ground
indicating to me that oak is superior in strength than Hickory or Ash.
Perhaps not tensile-strength but some sort of other strength.

I suppose if Oak were lighther than Spruce that the Wright Brothers
would have prefered oak. I know that spruce has a dense foliage and so
its root and wood system must be special in order to stand upright in
those Colorado wind gales. So the Spruce wood must be strong to
withstand the wind but must be light because it is a soft wood. And
the canopy needle cover of spruce is so dense that you cannot see
through it so the wood must be strong to hold the tree upright and
stronger than pines.

I believe the science of botany should appoint a team of experts on
wood with the collobaration of physicists and engineers to make a
encyclopedic analysis of all the world's woods as to their
superlatives and characteristics. Their density, their strengths and
many other characteristics. So much of wood knowledge is folklore and
myths and not really the full truths. So we need experts to go into
this and to reveal the best science on "Wood Characteristics".

Archimedes Plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies