The Wright Brothers Read online

  With Katharine away at college by this time, they had no choice but to get by domestically as best they could and in this they succeeded in good, even high spirits, to judge by a letter from Wilbur to Katharine.

  We have been living fine since you left. Orville cooks one week and I cook the next. Orville’s week we have bread and butter and meat and gravy and coffee three times a day. My week I give him more variety. You see that by the end of his week there is a big lot of cold meat stored up, so the first half of my week we have bread and butter and “hash” and coffee, and the last half we have bread and butter and eggs and sweet potatoes and coffee. We don’t fuss a bit about whose week it is to cook. Perhaps the reason is evident. If Mrs. Jack Sprat had undertaken to cook all fat, I guess Jack wouldn’t have kicked on cooking every other week either.

  About this time, too, they decided to proceed with major changes in the house, building the spacious wraparound porch. They installed new larger windows downstairs, shutters for the windows upstairs, doing all of it themselves.

  Importantly, like much of the country, they had also taken up bicycling, and as Wilbur reported, they had lately headed off on a “run” to the south, down the Cincinnati Pike, stopping at the County Fair Grounds to pump around the track several times. From there they continued on to Miamisburg up and over numerous steep hills to see the famous prehistoric Adena Miamisburg Mound, largest of Ohio’s famous conical-shaped reminders of a vanished Native American civilization dating back more than two thousand years. In all they covered thirty-one miles.

  Bicycles had become the sensation of the time, a craze everywhere. (These were no longer the “high wheelers” of the 1870s and ’80s, but the so-called “safety bicycles,” with two wheels the same size.) The bicycle was proclaimed a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality, indeed one’s whole outlook on life. Doctors enthusiastically approved. One Philadelphia physician, writing in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, concluded from his observations that “for physical exercise for both men and women, the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century.”

  Voices were raised in protest. Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.”

  Such concerns had little effect. Everybody was riding bicycles, men, women, all ages and from all walks of life. Bicycling clubs sprouted on college campuses and in countless cities and towns, including Dayton. At Oberlin College, Katharine and a group of her fellow co-eds would pose for a memorable photograph with their new bicycles. Each looked highly pleased, but Katharine beamed with the biggest smile.

  In the spring of 1893 Wilbur and Orville opened their own small bicycle business, the Wright Cycle Exchange, selling and repairing bicycles only a short walk from the house at 1005 West Third Street. In no time, such was business, they moved to larger quarters down the street to Number 1034 and renamed the enterprise the Wright Cycle Company.

  Of the two brothers, Orville loved bicycles the most. As an admirer who knew him in later years would say, “Bring up the subject of the shapes of handlebars or types of pedals on early ‘safety bicycles’ and his whole face lights up.”

  Ever enterprising, incapable of remaining idle, the brothers now turned their off-hours to redoing the interior of 7 Hawthorn Street. They built a new gas fireplace and mantelpiece for the sitting room, redesigned and rebuilt the stairway, refinished all the trim, dressed up rooms with bright new wallpaper, ceilings included, laid new carpets, and with Katharine helping whenever she was home from college. Wilbur’s particularly distinctive contribution was the decorative carving on a new cherry newel post at the foot of the stairs.

  The work was just about finished in time for the arrival of spring in 1894. On Saturday, March 31, Bishop Wright recorded in his diary:

  Cloudy day, but moderate. At home. Orville and C[K]atharine arrange the house. First time for months, we had a room to sit in, all being torn up.

  Business remained good, but with the opening of more bicycle shops in town, competition kept growing. When sales grew slack, Wilbur turned conspicuously restless, uncertain of what to make of his life. He had long thought he would like to be a teacher, “an honorable pursuit,” but that required a college education. He had no knack for business, he decided. He felt ill suited for it and, as he explained to his father, was now weighing the “advisability” of taking a college course.

  I do not think I am specially fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had proper personal and business influences to assist me. I might make a living, but I doubt whether I would ever do much more than this. Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would [be] better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business.

  In another letter, this to brother Lorin, Wilbur had still more to say. He was one who not only devoted much of his time to reading, but to thinking, and he had given a great deal of thought to the subject of business and reached a number of his own conclusions.

  In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds [he wrote]. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has. No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition, so long as it is not carried to excess, for such men make the world and its affairs move. . . . I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen. We have all done reasonably well, better in fact than the average man perhaps, but not one of us has as yet made particular use of the talent in which he excels other men. That is why our success has been only moderate. We ought not to have been businessmen. . . .

  There is always a danger that a person of this disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life struggling for bare existence (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location), where if put on the right path with proper special equipment, he would advance far. Many men are better fitted for improving chances offered them than in turning up the chances themselves.

  But if not a “first corner” to fall into for the rest of life, what was “the right path”? As it was he felt trapped.

  Bishop Wright offered to help with the cost of a college course. “I do not think a commercial life will suit you well,” he wrote in agreement. Then sales at the Wright Cycle Company picked up again, to the point where they were selling about 150 bicycles a year, and Wilbur stayed with it.

  In 1895, their third year in business, they moved to a corner building at 22 South Williams Street, with a showroom on the street level and space for a machine shop upstairs. There, on the second floor, the brothers began making their own model bicycles, available to order. The announcement of the new product read in part as follows:

  It will have large tubing, high frame, tool steel bearings, needle wire spokes, narrow tread and every feature of an up-to-date bicycle. Its weight will be about 20 pounds. We are very certain that no wheel on the market will run easier or wear longer than this one, and we will guarantee it in the most unqualified manner.

  It sold for $60 to $65 and was called the Van Cleve, in honor of their great-great-grandmother on their father’s side, who was the first white woman to settle in Dayton. With the Van Cleve in production, and available in all colors, a second, less-expensive model was introduced called the St. Cla
ir, in tribute to the first governor of the old Northwest Territory, of which Ohio was part. Their income grew to the point where they were earning a handsome $2,000 to $3,000 per year.

  “Van Cleves get there First,” proclaimed one of their advertisements. And in the Van Cleve catalogue, the brothers declared:

  Through fair and liberal dealing we have built up a large and successful business, and we are proud to number among Van Cleve riders the best judges of bicycles and bicycle construction in the city. Without their assistance in spreading the fame and praise of the Van Cleve, we could not have hoped to have pressed it to its present high position in popular estimation. Through their testimonies the name Van Cleve has become the synonym of excellence in bicycle construction.

  At home, the enjoyment of Lorin’s children coming in and out grew only greater for both Wilbur and Orville. Their niece Ivonette would say of Orville in particular that he never seemed to tire of playing with them, and that if he ran out of games, he would make candy for them. Wilbur, too, would amuse them in equally wholehearted fashion, though not for long. “If we happened to be sitting on his lap, he would straighten out his long legs and we would slide off. That was a signal to us to find something else to do.

  When we were old enough to get toys, Uncle Orv and Uncle Will had a habit of playing with them until they were broken, then repair them so that they were better than when they were bought.

  Perhaps it was because he was away so much of the time that Bishop Wright put such abiding emphasis on the importance of family life at 7 Hawthorn—“the home circle,” as he said—and why it played so large a part in all of their lives however far those lives reached.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Dream Takes Hold

  I wish to avail myself of all that is already known. . . .

  WILBUR WRIGHT, IN A LETTER TO THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1899

  I.

  As Katharine Wright said of her father, the habit of worry was strong in him. For as long as she and her brothers could remember, he had warned of the dire threat of contaminated water, and articles in the papers confirmed time after time that every case of typhoid fever was an instance of water poisoning.

  In the late summer of 1896, twenty-five-year-old Orville was struck by the dreaded typhoid. For days he lay in a delirium, close to death, his fever at 105 degrees. The family doctor, Levi Spitler, who had nursed Susan Wright through her final illness, said little could be done. Wilbur and Katharine took turns keeping watch at the bedside. Bishop Wright, then on the road, wrote at once on hearing the news, dreadfully worried about Orville, but also Katharine and Wilbur. “Put him in the best room for air and comfort. Sponge him off gently and quickly. . . . Let no one use the well water at the store henceforth. Boil the water you all drink.”

  It was a month before Orville could sit up in bed, another two weeks before he could get out of bed, and during this time Wilbur had begun reading about the German glider enthusiast Otto Lilienthal who had recently been killed in an accident. Much that he read he read aloud to Orville.

  A manufacturer of small steam engines and a mining engineer by training, Lilienthal had started gliding as early as 1869, and from the start he had been joined in his aviation experiments by a younger brother, which could only have given Wilbur and Orville a feeling of something in common.

  He took his lessons from the birds, Lilienthal said, and he saw, as many “prominent investigators” had not, that the secret of “the art of flight” was to be found in the arched or vaulted wings of birds, by which they could ride the wind. He had no use for gas balloons as a means of flight, as they had nothing in common with the birds. “What we are seeking is the means of free motion in the air, in any direction.” And only by flying oneself could one achieve “proper insight” into all that was involved. To do this, one had to be on “intimate” terms with the wind.

  Over the years Lilienthal had designed and built more than a dozen different gliders, his normal segel apparat (sailing machines). One he particularly favored had wings shaped like the “fly-fans” to be seen at the tables of restaurants and men’s clubs of the day, and a big vertical rudder shaped like a palm leaf. All but a few of these different models were monoplanes, the wings arched like a bird’s and made of white muslin tightly stretched over a frame of willow. As pilot, he would hang by his arms below the wings. The setting for Lilienthal’s flights, Wilbur learned, was a range of barren hills known as the Rhinow Mountains, a two-hour train ride north of Berlin.

  A squarely built figure with red hair and a beard who dressed for his flights in knickers with heavily padded knees, Lilienthal would position himself on a steep slope, the wings held above his head. As one American eyewitness described the scene, he “stood like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol.” Then he would run down the slope and into the wind. Hanging on as the wind lifted him from the ground, he would swing his body and legs this way or that—as his means of balancing and steering—glide as far as possible and land on his feet.

  Lilienthal also had himself repeatedly photographed in action, something no gliding enthusiast had yet done. With advances in the technology of photography, the dry-plate camera had come into use. Reproduction of photographic half-tones had also been achieved, and thus unprecedented photographs of the daring “Flying Man” and his gliders appeared the world over. In the United States, his fame was greater than anywhere. A long article in the popular McClure’s Magazine, illustrated with seven photographs of Lilienthal in flight, reached the largest audience of all.

  In 1894 Lilienthal had crashed and lived to tell the tale. On August 9, 1896, flying a favorite “No. 11” glider, he crashed again, falling from an altitude of fifty feet. He died of a broken spine in a Berlin hospital the following day at age forty-eight.

  “It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird,” Lilienthal had written. “It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight.”

  News of Lilienthal’s death, Wilbur later wrote, aroused in him as nothing had an interest that had remained passive from childhood. His reading on the flight of birds became intense. On the shelves of the family library was an English translation of a famous illustrated volume, Animal Mechanism, written by a French physician, Etienne-Jules Marey, more than thirty years before. Birds were also an interest of Bishop Wright, hence the book’s presence in the house, and Wilbur had already read it. Now he read it anew.

  “Aerial locomotion has always excited the strongest curiosity among mankind,” the author said by way of introduction.

  How frequently has the question been raised, whether man must always continue to envy the bird and the insect their wings; whether he, too, may not one day travel through the air, as he now sails across the ocean. Authorities in science have declared at different periods, as the result of lengthy calculations, that this is a chimerical dream, but how many intentions have we seen realized which have been pronounced impossible.

  Marey’s serious, largely technical study led Wilbur to read more of the kind, including such treatises as J. Bell Pettigrew’s Animal Locomotion; or Walking, Swimming, and Flying, with a Dissertation on Aeronautics. For most readers the title alone would have been too daunting. For Wilbur the book was exactly what was needed.

  Those authors who regard artificial flight as impracticable [wrote Pettigrew] sagely remark that the land supports the quadruped and the water the fish. This is quite true, but it is equally true that the air supports the bird, and that the evolutions of the bird on the wing are quite as safe and infinitely more rapid and beautiful than the movements of either the quadruped on the land or the fish in the water.

  But, the book stressed, “the way of ‘an eagle in the air’ must of necessity remain a mystery,” until the structure and uses of wings were understood.

  Of all animal movements, flight is indisputably the finest. . . . The fact that a creature as heavy, bulk for bulk, as many solid substances, can by the una
ided movements of its wings urge itself through the air with a speed little short of a cannonball, fills the mind with wonder.

  Wilbur was to draw upon and quote Pettigrew for years. Like the inspiring lectures of a great professor, the book had opened his eyes and started him thinking in ways he never had.

  Once fully recovered from his illness, Orville proceeded with the same reading list. They “read up on aeronautics as a physician would read his books,” Bishop Wright would attest proudly.

  Work at the bicycle shop went on with business better than ever. In 1897 the brothers moved the enterprise to a still larger and final location at 1127 West Third, which, like their previous business locations was only a few blocks from home. The building was a two-story, red-brick duplex, with the adjoining half occupied by Fetters & Shank, Undertakers and Embalmers. After considerable remodeling, the Wright Cycle Company had a front showroom, backed by a small office, and a machine shop to the rear with ample space for a drill press, metal lathe, and band saw, all powered by a gas engine, with room, too, for a workbench. Upstairs there was still more workspace.

  Less than a year later, in the spring of 1898, Dayton suffered the worst flood in forty years. On the north side of town, two thousand people had to abandon their homes. For days it looked as if the West End, too, would be inundated. “We had a very narrow escape,” Orville reported to his father. “By putting 500 men at work with teams they succeeded in building the levee high enough to keep the water out.” Had the river risen another four inches, both 7 Hawthorn and the new shop would have been under three or four feet of water.

  Years later, a hardware dealer in the neighborhood, Frank Hamberger, recalled how, at the time of the flood, he had been struggling to get started in his new business. Much of his stock consisted of nails stored in great quantity in the cellar and would have been ruined had the high water struck. When the Wright brothers heard of his troubles, he said, they came immediately, “pulled off their coats,” and helped carry the kegs of nails out of the cellar, “without seeking or accepting remuneration.”