The Bishop's Boys (2 page)

Even so, Orville had a reputation as the “swell” of the family. His niece Ivonette remembered that he always knew what clothes suited him. “I don’t believe there was ever a man who could do the work he
did in all kinds of dirt, oil and grime and come out of it looking immaculate.”
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His pale complexion was a matter of choice—and some pride. During the three years (1900–03) when they returned from Kitty Hawk each fall tanned by the wind and sun of the Outer Banks, Orville would immediately go to work bleaching his face with lemon juice. Carrie Kayler, the housekeeper, remembered that Orville would have gone pale again weeks before his brother.
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Wilbur was much less concerned about such things. Their sister Katharine made it a practice to inspect him periodically, ensuring that his clothes matched and were neat, clean, and pressed. He had given the most important speech of his career to a group of distinguished Chicago engineers in 1901 dressed in clothes borrowed from Orville.
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Orville had fine, regular features, and was the more conventionally handsome of the two. Wilbur was darker, and much more striking. A high domed forehead, together with his lean face and strong features, had made him the delight of caricaturists in Europe and America. “The countenance,” a French observer noted, “is remarkable, curious. The head [is that of] a bird, long and bony, and with a long nose. The face is smooth-shaven and tanned by the wind and the country sun. The eye is a superb blue-grey, with tints of gold that bespeak an ardent flame.”
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An English reporter mentioned his “fine-drawn, weather-beaten face, strongly marked features, and keen, observant, hawk-like eyes.”
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Another observer thought he had the look of “a man tempered like steel.”
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Their personalities were quite as different as their appearance. Orville was impulsive—“excitable” was the word his father used. “His thoughts,” Milton said, were “quick.”
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He was the enthusiast of the pair, ever on fire with new inventions, and the optimist as well, the one who always saw the brighter side. The airplane had been Wilbur’s idea, but Orville was the one who supplied the drive that carried them through the difficult times when a solution to the problems of flight seemed to recede too far.

Milton once remarked that Orville, “unlike his brother, whom fright could not rattle,” suffered from timidity. With family and intimate friends he was a charming and delightful conversationalist, with a reputation as a tease and an incorrigible practical joker. Among strangers, however, he was painfully, almost pathologically shy. He would outlive his brother by more than forty years, and attend hundreds of award ceremonies, yet he absolutely refused to speak in
public. He would not so much as offer an after-dinner thank you. One friend explained that “words simply failed him.”
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Orville, much more than Wilbur, fit the image most Americans had of a “born” inventor—a man who found his fullest expression in devising new mechanical solutions to the everyday problems of life and work. As a youth he built his own printing press, and helped to devise a new and improved bicycle wheel hub. In 1913, after Wilbur’s death, he received the prestigious Collier Trophy for the development of an automatic pilot system, and invented the split flap, an innovation employed on some U.S. dive bombers during World War II.

In later years, his inventive instincts frequently took a Jeffersonian turn. He would fill Hawthorn Hill, his home in Dayton, with a variety of “labor saving” gadgets of his own design, from an “efficient” circular shower bath to an intricate plumbing system and a special set of chains and rods that allowed him to control the furnace from the upstairs rooms. He designed and patented toys; modified his favorite easy chair with a special reading stand that could be shifted from arm to arm; developed tools to remove the damask wall coverings during spring cleaning; and produced a bread slicer and toaster designed to turn his morning toast a precise golden brown.

Wilbur, much more outgoing than his brother, was a gifted public speaker who never failed to delight an audience. “He is never rattled in thought or temper,” Milton noted. Cool, aloof, and controlled, he had struggled to overcome fits of severe depression in his young manhood, developing an enormous self-confidence in the process. At the same time, he had the capacity to isolate himself at will. “Ha could cut himself off from everyone,” a family member recalled. “At times he was unaware of what was going on around him.”
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He was a voracious reader with, as his father remarked, “an extraordinary memory.” His command of history, philosophy, science, and literature astounded Europeans who came to the flying field expecting to meet a rustic and untutored mechanic. Wilbur once told his father that he hoped to become a teacher. With his gift for devising simple illustrations to explain difficult concepts, he would have been a good one. A pasteboard inner-tube box enabled him to teach the fundamentals of three-axis control to a Patent Office examiner. He explained the real function of a rudder to officers of a federal court using nothing more than a string and a piece of chalk.

Yet, if the brothers were different in so many ways, they shared an extraordinary ability to analyze their experience. They were acute
observers, who moved beyond surface appearances to achieve an understanding of fundamental principles. Both of them understood the world in terms of graphic and concrete images; more important, they could apply these observations of physical and mechanical reality to new situations. It was the very core of their shared genius.

But such observations do not provide an answer to our most basic question: How were these two men, who had always seemed so ordinary to their friends and neighbors, able to achieve so much?

It was a question the Wrights themselves found difficult to answer. They had kept a meticulous record of the evolution of their technology in diaries, notebooks, letters, and photographs. They knew precisely what they had done, and when. As to why they had done it, and how they had succeeded where so many others had failed, they were far less certain. Once, when a friend suggested that sheer genius might be the only explanation, Wilbur remarked that he doubted that to be the case. “Do you not insist too strongly on the single point of mental ability?” he asked. “To me, it seems that a thousand other factors, each rather insignificant in itself, in the aggregate influence the event ten times more than mere mental ability or inventiveness…. If the wheels of time could be turned back … it is not at all probable that we would do again what we have done…. It was due to a peculiar combination of circumstances which might never occur again.
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It was typical of Wilbur to give a thoughtful, honest answer to a difficult question. Those who would understand the Wright brothers and their invention would do well to follow his advice. Turn back the clock and retrace the long chain of circumstance. The story begins with the extraordinary man who was their father.

M
ilton Wright first saw Huffman Prairie from the seat of a farm wagon on a late fall afternoon in the year 1848. It had been a long day. Samuel and John Quincy Wright had driven their visiting Indiana cousins, Milton and his brother William, fifty miles since sun-up. They had gone to Dayton to hear the Freesoil speakers on the courthouse steps. There was no fooling these boys. The Mexican War, just concluded that spring, had been the Devil’s work. The words of James Russell Lowell were ringing in their ears:

They just want this Californy,

So’s to bring new slave states in.

Then it was on to Xenia, to visit another cousin William, who was apprenticed to a chairmaker. They drove down the Yellow Springs Road late that afternoon, turning onto the Dayton-Springfield Pike just at the corner of William Huffman’s cow pasture. Cousin Samuel urged the team on through the little farm town of Fairfield, Ohio, toward his father’s homestead near the village of West Charleston on the National Pike.

For twenty-one-year-old Milton Wright, it had been a day full of unrecognized portents. It was the first time he had ever seen Dayton, the city where he would spend so many years of his adult life. And the first time he had seen Huffman Prairie, where he would one day fly with his sons.
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Extended family visits were to form a central element in the pattern of Milton Wright’s life. He was a man with a great sense of family, who sought to maintain contact with his most distant aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces either through personal visits in the course of his church travels or by letter. After his marriage to Susan
Koerner in 1859, he added her relatives to the list of family members with whom he wished to remain in touch.

Wilbur and Orville Wright inherited strength of character, firmness of purpose, and absolute confidence in their own abilities from their father, Milton Wright, seen here as a rising young churchman.

In later years all of this would find a natural expression in his hobby—genealogy. Milton Wright was conscious of his position as a single link in a long familial chain connecting the past, present, and future. He scoured the nation for books and manuscripts, church records, tombstone inscriptions, and anything else that would fill the gaps in his knowledge of the family tree.
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His surviving correspondence includes letters to historical societies, relatives, suspected relatives, local genealogists, and complete strangers who might be able to add to the store of minute details he had amassed on his background. Like all good historians, Milton Wright was aware that the “facts” he had gathered were a mixture of the “reliable,” the “uncertain,” and the “probably fictitious.”
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The experience taught him a lesson. He would document his own life with extraordinary care in half a century’s worth of pocket diaries and in his bulging correspondence files. The importance of documentation was a lesson that he passed on to his children, along with his enthusiasm for genealogical research, and so much else.

By the 1890s, Milton could take justifiable pride in his ability to trace “the genealogy of my foreparents on all sides for as far back as my great-grandfather’s great-grandparents, and some of them farther.” When asked for information on the family background, he could respond with a lineage that sounded like an American version of the “begats” of Noah:

That first American Wright, Samuel, was the great-great grandson of John Wrighte, who, with his wife Olive, had purchased Kelvedon Hall, Essex, in 1538. Samuel, a Puritan, was part of the “Great Migration” to Massachusetts, arriving in Boston in the early 1630s. He was among those who established Springfield Township in 1636. In the absence of an ordained Puritan minister for the local Congregational church, he was appointed to “dispense the word of God for the present.”
He moved to Northampton in 1656 and died there nine years later, asleep in his chair.

Samuel’s great-great grandson, Dan Wright (never Daniel, as Milton Wright was careful to point out), was born in Lebanon township, Connecticut, on April 7, 1757. A veteran of the Revolution who saw service at Bemis Heights and Saratoga, he worked as a carpenter and farmer following his discharge from the patriot army. He married Sarah Freeman in 1785 and settled in Thetford Township, Orange County, Vermont, where their third son, also Dan, was born on September 3, 1790.

Young Dan, Milton Wright’s father, was well educated in the country schools of Vermont, and taught a session himself before joining his older brother Porter and sister-in-law Lois on a farm in the Genesee Valley of New York in 1813. The following year, the entire Wright clan—the elder Dan, his wife Sarah, and their four children, Asahel, Porter, Dan, and Eliza—pulled up stakes and moved west. They traveled overland to Olean, Pennsylvania, then rode a flatboat down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers to Cincinnati. After a quick survey of available land, the family settled on a farm near Centerville, eight miles south of Dayton, in Montgomery County, Ohio.
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Dan, the youngest son, was the first to leave. He married a local Centerville girl, Catherine Reeder, not yet eighteen, on February 12, 1818. Milton Wright took great pride in the fact that his mother was the product of two first-generation Ohio families. Her maternal grandfather, John Van Cleve, had the dubious distinction of being the only white settler to be killed by Indians within the city limits of Cincinnati. Legend had it that her mother, Margaret Van Cleve, was the first white woman to set foot in what became Dayton.
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