The Wright Stuff

David McCullough, in The Wright Brothers, puts Wilbur and Orville directly in the center of the turn-of-the-century tapestry. There are threads tying them to the King of Spain, Roanoke Island, the first step on the moon, and the most notorious serial killer in Ohio. They nearly killed Theodore Roosevelt; Alexander Graham Bell personally spied on them. They were mocked as cranks, yet celebrated in France as the most welcome Americans since Benjamin Franklin.

 

I would like to drop the most delectable of little-known crumbs in a trail that leads back to the delicious feast that is The Wright Brothers.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were eventually recognized for their genius and held up as Americans who advanced in the world with no special advantages. “It isn’t true,” Orville replied, “to say that we had no special advantages…the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.” 

 

 The Wright family home in Dayton, Ohio

Orville, as a high school student, built his own printing press from a discarded tombstone, a buggy spring, and scrap metal. He went on to become a successful printer, for a time.

Wilbur, intelligent and introverted, was preparing to attend Yale University. At 18, as he was playing hockey, the neighborhood bully hit him in the face with a hockey stick, knocking out most of his front teeth. For weeks Wilbur suffered excruciating pain and became a recluse. He never did attend Yale. The bully, Oliver Crook Haugh, later was executed for murdering his mother, father, and brother. He was believed to have killed up to a dozen others.

 Haugh, Ohio's notorious serial killer

The Wright brothers and their sister, Katherine, were caught up in the bicycling craze of the time. They declared, “For physical exercise for both men and women, the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions of the 19^th century.” Many held that bicycles were “morally hazardous,” what with students spending time cycling that could have been spent with books and “country bicycle tours that were not infrequently accompanied by seductions.”  Despite the moral perils, the brothers opened the Wright Brothers Cycle Exchange in 1895.

 

 One of the original Wright bicycles

Though the cycle shop was successful, Wilbur felt ill-suited to business ownership: “In business, it is the aggressive man who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds. No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive, and even a little bit selfish.”

 

 original cycle shop in Dayton, Ohio

The Wrights were always inventive and mechanical. Their nieces and nephews remembered “Uncle Orr and Uncle Will had a habit of playing with (our new toys) until they were broken, then would repair them so that they were better than when they were bought.”

A singular event : When Wilbur wrote the Smithsonian in 1899, asking for information they had on flying machines. “I wish to avail myself of all that is already known.”

 

Inventors of flying machines suffered heavy losses. They risked financial ruin, failure, injury, and death. Popular songs were written about the ridiculous hubris of man wanting to fly. The Washington Post, in an unfavorable article about early flight inventors, declared,” It is a fact that man cannot fly.” Despite public opinion, Wilbur was enraptured. He called one of the early inventors “one of the missionaries of the cause, like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight.”

Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, was chosen as the best spot for trying the Wright’s kite-like flying apparatus, after they consulted the National Weather Bureau for the best place with steady, strong wind and plenty of sandy beaches to soften crash landings. The brothers had never traveled beyond Chicago in their lives. They arrived at the beach by a rusted, leaking boat, during a violent storm. They camped and conducted experiments in the dunes three hours’ walk from the town, with Roanoke Island visible off-shore. 

The inhabitants of the isolated village were almost exclusively descendants of ship-wrecked sailors. The first flying apparatus consisted of two fixed wings, 5 by 17 feet, and weighing 50 pounds. Even as they were just flying it as a kite, in the beginning, the wind would gust, pulling the operator off his feet and slamming him down many yards away. Orville said "learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician."

Wilbur brought his camera and set it up to record the events taking place. He knew they were making history. Much of the time, they just sat and observed the birds in flight.

Local would often come to visit and find the brothers running up and down the beach, flapping their wings in imitations. One local said, “We couldn’t help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts.” They camped in the sand, living on local fish and eggs, constantly rebuilding their shelter because of the strong winds. Despite the adversities, they would later remember it as the happiest time they had ever known.

After many weeks conducting their flight experiments, the Wright brothers returned home, leaving their glider behind to be salvaged by the residents. Several girls’ dresses were made from the sateen fabric of the wing coverings. A friend of theirs claimed, “It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and all their energy into an idea and they had the faith.” He called them the “workingest boys” he ever knew.

Their nephew, who was often around as they built the pieces for their machines said, 

 “History was being made in their bicycle shop and in their home, but the making was so obscured by the commonplace that I did not recognize it until many years later."

Orville and Wilbur decided to never fly together, so that if one were killed, the other could carry on their work. They also decided they would never fly or work on the Sabbath, even for an exhibition.

Once the brothers had proved their flying machine and added an engine, they offered it to the U.S. government, who declined. The French government was excited at the prospect and hired the brother to build more airplanes. Wilbur traveled to France and stayed there many months. 

He was admired for his daring feats and for his strong “individuality” Not since Benjamin Franklin had an American been as popular in France. The press wrote admiringly of, “the grit and indomitable perseverance that characterizes American efforts in every department of activity.” Tens of thousands came to see hi fly, often waiting hours or days until weather conditions were right. He was visited by royalty and heads of state. The king of Spain was tempted to go up in the plane, but admitted he had promised his wife that he would not. Shouts went up, “C’est l’homme qui a conquis l’air!” (“This man has conquered the air.)

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Orville was doing well-received exhibitions of his own. Thursday, September 17th, 1908, he was involved in the first fatal airplane crash. At Fort Meyer, near Arlington National Cemetery, Orville was preparing to take off in front of 2300 people. Two days before, he had been alerted that President Teddy Roosevelt was interested in accompanying him on a flight. Orville had replied he would nor deny the President, but he felt no president should take such a risk. So, on that day, he was taking Lt. Thomas Selfridge up instead.  

 

 Wright and Selfridge before their ill-fated flight

 Midway through the flight, a piece of the propeller fell off. Moments later, the entire plane plunged, “like a bird shot dead in full flight,” as Orville later described. They hit the ground with great force, sending up a dust cloud. Both passengers were pinned under the wreckage, Selfridge unconscious. Orville was terribly injured and Selfridge died later of a fractured skull, never having regained consciousness.

 

It was never mentioned that Orvilles’s passenger that day could have been the president of the United States. 

 

In the ensuing chaos, Alexander Graham Bell and two members of his Aerial Experiment Association, were able to gain access to the shed and measure parts of the wreckage. 

Alexander Graham Bell, looking very Cheeky

Bishop Wright, father to Wilbur and Orville, wrote that it was “very Cheeky” of Bell, but “a very little piece of business, anyway.” He felt it was more important for the family to remember, “We learn much by tribulation any by adversity our hearts are made better.”

Accidents happened even in more reliable forms of transportation.  In early 1909, Orville and sister Katharine were traveling to join Wilbur in France. Unbelievably, their passenger train collided head-on with a freight train, killing two fellow passengers and injuring many. The Wrights were not among them.

Feted upon their return to the United States in summer of that year, the Wrights renewed their flight exhibitions at Fort Meyer. One particular day, the Senate adjourned so its members could see the flight. Four thousand people, many dignitaries among them, waited for the spectacle. Wilbur went to the airplane shed, measured the wind, and canceled he exhibition because the wind was not right. 

One senator was heard to say, “I’m damned if I don’t admire their independence. We don’t mean anything to them, and there are a lot of reasons why we shouldn’t.” 

In September, Wilbur made plans to fly above the harbor in New York City. As more people were testing airplanes, crashes and injuries were increasing. As a safety measure, Wilbur flew with a red canoe strapped below the plane. “I reached the battleships,” Wilbur reported. “Then I skimmed over their funnels that I could smell the smoke from them.” Asked later if he noticed the British battleships firing salutes in his honor, he said he had not known what it was, but something made an “awful noise.” He flew around the Statue of Liberty. His plane circling the Statue of Liberty would appear on a magazine cover, with the caption, “A New Kind of Gull in New York Harbor.”

 

On May 25, 1910, Orville and Wilbur went up in their airplane together, with Orville at the controls, breaking their rule that they would never fly together, in order to preserve the work. Many interpreted this as a statement that they had accomplished all that they set out to do.

Their sister Katharine had been able to fly as a passenger several times, her skirts tied at the ankles with a rope, for modesty’s sake (New skirt fashions, gathered at the ankles in imitation of female flight passengers, became immediately popular.)

 

The 82-year-old Bishop was the only member of the family who had yet to take flight. With a cheering crowd looking on, the Bishop walked out to the plane and climbed aboard with Orville. Together they flew for 6 minutes. The Bishop’s only words were, “Higher, Orville! Higher!”

 

On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer. They flew so that he could take that step.