Authors: Tom D. Crouch
Dayton’s pride in all these achievements was wrapped up in the great Centennial Celebration, which opened at Van Cleve Park on September 14, 1896. As one observer noted, the three days of
speeches, pageantry, and parades “outdid anything that Dayton, or even some larger and older cities, had ever witnessed.”
Orville missed the entire event. Milton kept his room supplied with fresh flowers, while Wilbur and Katharine read to him. He was unconscious most of the time, and the reading was, as much as anything, a means of helping them to pass the time while they nursed their brother.
Wilbur welcomed the opportunity for some quiet thinking. Late in August he had run across a short item in the paper that startled and intrigued him: Otto Lilienthal was dead.
Wilbur had thought a great deal about Lilienthal over the past several years. It had begun with the helicopter toy. Neither he nor his brother had ever forgotten the sense of awe and wonder inspired by the sight of the little thing bobbing up and down against the ceiling. Thereafter, they paid particular attention to bits of aeronautical news in the papers.
They had first run across Lilienthal’s name when they were producing
The Evening Item
. In July 1890, the news service to which they subscribed had included an item on him. Will recast it in humorous terms and carried the article in the issue of July 26:
“Needs More Wings”
A German named Lilienthal, after experimenting for 23 years with artificial wings, has succeeded in raising himself, weighing 160 pounds, with the aid of a counter weight, lifting 80 pounds. How to raise the other 80 pounds is still beyond him.
They did not forget Lilienthal. One account of his exploits, an article entitled “The Flying Man” that appeared in the September 1894 issue of
McClure’s Magazine
, was especially intriguing. Now he was gone.
For Wilbur, it was a turning point. “My own active interest in aeronautical problems dates back to the death of Lilienthal in 1896,” he reported a few years later. “The brief notice of his death which appeared in the telegraphic news at that time aroused a passive interest which had existed from my childhood, and led me to take down from the shelves of our home library a book on
Animal Mechanism
by Prof. Marey, which I had already read several times.”
2
Wilbur must have leafed through that book as he sat by Orville’s bed. It was a disappointment. Etienne Jules Marey, a French physician and photographer, had included a few photographs of birds in the air, but provided no clues as to the basic mechanism of flight.
Orville’s fever broke early the next month. On October 8 he sat up
in bed for the first time in six weeks. Tapioca and other soft foods replaced the milk and beef broth. Everyone in the house could begin to relax. Katharine, already late for the fall term, left for Oberlin the next morning. Milton caught a train for Marion, Ohio, where he met with the local Brethren and attended an enthusiastic Bryan meeting at the fairground. The bishop noted laconically that “a man jumped onto my head off the Fairground fence, but did not kill me.”
3
Orville was still too weak to return to the bicycle shop. As he lay in bed, Wilbur brought him up to date on what had happened during his illness. They spent some time discussing Lilienthal’s death. Wilbur may also have mentioned the other bits of aeronautical news. Langley, back at work at the Smithsonian after a summer vacation, had flown another of his Aerodromes. Augustus Herring had returned alone to the Indiana Dunes in the early fall and flown his own copy of the Chanute-Herring two-surface glider that had proven so successful earlier in the summer.
The questions were obvious. What sort of catastrophe could have taken the life of Lilienthal, a man with two thousand glides to his credit? Who would replace him? What of Langley and Chanute? Would their successes lead to continued efforts to develop a full-scale powered machine? What did the future hold for those who sought to fly?
The spark of curiosity flickered over the next two years, but it did not die. “In the early spring of 1899,” Orville recalled two decades later, “our interest in the subject was again aroused through the reading of a book on ornithology.” The book was probably James Bell Pettigrew’s
Animal Locomotion, or Walking, Swimming and Flying, With a Dissertation on Aeronautics
. Wilbur once told Octave Chanute that he had read Pettigrew’s work. It is the only other book either of them mentioned as having been among their earliest research.
In any event, the study of flight in nature was important to them at the outset. “We could not understand that there was anything about a bird that could not be built on a larger scale and used by man,” Orville explained. “If the bird’s wings would sustain it in the air without the use of any muscular effort, we did not see why man could not be sustained by the same means.”
4
Much later, Wilbur would corroborate Orville’s belief:
My brother and I became seriously interested in the problem of human flight in 1899…. We knew that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, “It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly,” he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility. Our own growing belief that man might nevertheless learn to fly was based on the idea that while thousands of the most dissimilar body structures, such as insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, were flying every day at pleasure, it was reasonable to suppose that man might also fly…. We accordingly decided to write to the Smithsonian Institution and inquire for the best books relating to the subject.
5
Richard Rathbun, assistant to Samuel Pierpont Langley, received that letter on the morning of June 2, 1899. The letterhead indicated that the correspondent, Wilbur Wright, was, with his brother Orville, the proprietor of the Wright Cycle Company at 1127 West Third Street in Dayton, Ohio. The fellow came straight to the point: “I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes after the style of Cayley’s and Pénaud’s machines. My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable.” It was “only a question of knowledge and skill.” The final success, when it came, would not be the work of any single individual. Rather, he believed, “the experiments and investigations of a large number of independent workers will result in the accumulation of information and knowledge and skill which will finally lead to accomplished flight.”
Wilbur assured the officials of the Smithsonian that he was serious. “I am an enthusiast,” he admitted, “but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.” He wished only to avail himself “of all that is already known and then if possible to add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success.” To achieve that goal, he requested copies of “such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.”
6
Rathbun scarcely gave Wilbur’s letter a second thought. Since Langley’s success with the small Aerodromes in 1896, the Institution had been flooded with a steady stream of letters from would-be aviators. The announcement in 1898 that the secretary had received a grant of $50,000 from the U.S. Army Board of Ordnance and Fortification for the construction of a full-scale, man-carrying version of the
Aerodrome flown at Quantico did little to improve the situation. Every aeronautical crank in the nation was now aware that the Smithsonian Institution had money to spend on flying-machine experiments. At least this latest enthusiast had not included the usual plea for government funding.
Rathbun prepared a quick answer to the letter, and passed it on to a clerk who gathered together the handful of pamphlets to be enclosed. They were reprints of articles originally published in the
Smithsonian Annual Report:
Louis-Pierre Mouillard’s “Empire of the Air”; Otto Lilienthal’s “The Problem of Flying and Practical Experiments in Soaring”; Samuel P. Langley’s “The Story of Experiments in Mechanical Flight”; and E.C. Huffaker’s “On Soaring Flight.”
In addition, Rathbun included a few suggestions for further reading: Octave Chanute,
Progress in Flying Machines;
Samuel Pierpont Langley,
Experiments in Aerodynamics;
and James Howard Means,
The Aeronautical Annual
. The Langley, he noted, could be purchased from the Smithsonian for one dollar, postage included. The entire package was in the mail to Dayton the next morning. Wilbur wrote back the following week, offering his thanks for the prompt service and placing an order for
Experiments in Aerodynamics
.
It was the most important exchange of correspondence in the history of the Smithsonian. The receipt of those pamphlets set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in the invention of the airplane.
Wilbur’s letter deserves close attention, for it contains a number of important clues suggesting how the brothers were drawn into the flying-machine problem. Consider, for example, the fact that the letter is written in the first person singular. There is no indication that Orville was also interested in flight.
In later years the brothers would claim that Wilbur had simply written “I” when he meant “we,” but Wilbur was well aware of Orville’s touchiness on the subject of an equal division of labor, profits, and credit. Had aeronautics been a joint interest in 1899, Wilbur would have spoken in the plural.
When Wilbur wrote to his father on September 3, 1900, admitting for the first time that he was actually going to fly a glider at a place called Kitty Hawk, he did not mention Orville’s involvement. In her own letter to Milton, Katharine said that, “If they can arrange it, Orv will go down as soon as Will gets the machine [the glider] ready.” That statement alone indicates how secondary Orville was at the outset. He
was never one to remain behind tending the store when there was work to be done on a project that really interested him.
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Small wonder that Milton would always believe Wilbur had “drawn” Orville into “the flying machine problem.”
8
It is true that the bishop’s assessments must be accepted with caution. As a father, he made every effort to avoid favoring one son over the other, always insisting that “they are equal in their inventions, neither claiming any superiority over the other.” At the same time, he found it impossible to disguise his belief that Wilbur was the more talented of the two, and the senior partner in their joint enterprises. A decade later he wrote to Wilbur, then flying in France,
I think that, aside from the value of your life to yourself and to ourselves, you owe it to the world, that you should avoid all unnecessary personal risks. Your death, or even becoming an invalid, would seriously affect the progress of aeronautical science…. Outside of your contacts and your aviations, you have much that no one else can do so well. And, alone, Orville would be crippled and burdened.
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Orville, who was seriously injured while flying at Fort Myer, Virginia, during this period, did not receive a similar letter. The following year Milton told Katharine, who was traveling with her brothers in Europe, “It does not make much difference about you, but Wilbur ought to keep out of all balloon rides. Success seems to hang on him….”
10
And at the time of Wilbur’s death in 1912, Milton noted: “In memory and intellect there was none like him.”
11
The best he could say of Orville was that his “mind grew steadily, and in invention, he was fully the equal of his brother.”
12
Any impression of Wilbur’s dominance vanished abruptly after the fall of 1900. From that time forward, the brothers made a concerted effort to present a corporate personality to the world. Regardless of which one generated a piece of “official” correspondence, it was invariably written in the first person plural. They held all funds in a joint account. Checks were signed “The Wright Brothers,” with a small “OW” or “WW” to indicate which of the two had written the check.
In order to understand why the Wrights attempted to disguise Wilbur’s initial leadership, one must recall how all the members of this family defined their relationships through formal and informal covenants and agreements. It was a lesson learned from their father. From Milton’s point of view, the Liberal attempt to breach an existing agreement, the Church Constitution of 1841, had necessitated the
United Brethren schism. The mock trial over the division of labor at the print shop indicates the extent to which adherence to agreed conditions was essential for good relations within the family. The strength of the lifelong bond between Milton, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine suggests an unspoken but no less binding agreement to remain together as a mutually supporting family unit.
The strongest of all the ties within the family, those binding Wilbur and Orville, can only be understood within this context. Once Orville had fully committed himself to the flying-machine experiments, there was a firm understanding between them that Wilbur’s initial leadership would be ignored. Otherwise, no matter how significant Orville’s later contribution, he would always appear to have been in some sense the lesser member of the team.
The sequence of events seems clear. Memories of a childhood toy, coupled with a few books and some newspaper articles, set in motion a process that would end with the development of the first practical airplane. The reality was far more complex. Thousands of Pénaud helicopter toys had been sold in America, and millions of people around the globe were sufficiently fascinated by flight in nature to read an occasional book on the subject. Very few of them attempted to build their own wings.
Wilbur’s peculiarly receptive frame of mind had set the Wrights apart. As he explained to his sister-in-law Lulu, he was much troubled by the fact that he had not been able to take advantage of those talents in which he “excelled other men.” He had made a detached assessment of his own personality and knew his strengths and weaknesses. But he had never tried to put that knowledge to work for himself.