The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

  There is always an open space as big as a city square in front of each building. . . . And in addition there is nearly always a broad avenue leading directly to it, giving a view from a long distance. It is this, as much as the buildings and monuments themselves, that makes Paris such a magnificent city.

  If only a city like New York were arranged the same way. Even New York’s skyscrapers, like the Belmont and Knickerbocker hotels, if properly set, would be “wonderful.”

  He seems to have soaked up everything in view. And whatever he looked at, he looked at closely. Some of the landmarks were “a little shabby.” Half the gilding was gone from the dome of Les Invalides, where Napoleon was buried. The same was true of the pedestal of the Egyptian obelisk in the Place Vendôme and he was sorry to see so much of the statuary marred by black streaks.

  He spent considerable time at the Panthéon, which, he explained to Katharine, was not used as a church but as commemoration of the great men of France. The dome seen from inside was “not much,” he decided—too high in proportion to its diameter, like looking into an inverted well—but the interior was “very grand.”

  He took architecture seriously, thoughtfully, and made up his own mind, irrespective of whatever was said in his red Baedeker’s guidebook. Notre Dame was a disappointment. “My imagination pictures things more vividly than my eyes.” He thought the nave too narrow, the clerestory windows too high, the interior far too dark. “The pillars are so heavy and close together that the double aisles on each side form no part of the room when you stand in the nave.”

  How amazing it was, he wrote in another letter, to see thousands of people dining on the sidewalks up and down the avenues, sitting at little tables outside restaurants, sipping wine and eating in the open air “right on the sidewalks.”

  Often, as the time passed, he was himself dining handsomely, as the guest of Hart Berg. There was Boivins on the avenue de Clichy in Montmartre, Henri’s on the rue Volney, and the famous Café Anglais, where Wilbur enjoyed lunch with both Berg and Mrs. Berg.

  He would fill his free time in Paris to advantage and with the same level of intensity he brought to nearly everything, making the most of every waking hour in what, for all he knew, might be his one and only chance for such an opportunity.

  Of all that Paris offered, it was the Louvre that he kept going back to again and again, spending hours there and logging still more miles walking the long galleries. His description of the paintings he saw could go on for pages, a sign, it would seem, of how much interest in art there was at home as well, and with Katharine in particular.

  He preferred the Rembrandts, Holbeins, and Van Dycks, “as a whole,” better than the Rubenses, Titians, Raphaels, and Murillos. His disappointment in the Mona Lisa was as great as it had been in Notre Dame. “I must confess that the pictures by celebrated masters that impressed me most were not the ones that are best known.” He much preferred Leonardo’s John the Baptist to the Mona Lisa. Above all, he was taken with the work of the seventeenth-century Flemish master Anthony Van Dyck.

  In a letter written after a full afternoon at the Louvre, he moved on to a collection of nineteenth-century French masters, including Delacroix, Corot, Millet, and Courbet. “While I do not pretend to be much of a judge, I am inclined to think that in five hundred years it [the collection] will be recognized as some of the greatest work ever done.” What appealed especially about Corot was the way he painted the sky. The sky was his source of light.

  Such keen interest as he had in art was not only remarkable in someone so committed to technical innovation, but a measure of a truly exceptional capacity of mind. As weeks, then months passed, Wilbur, of his own choice, visited the Louvre fifteen or more times.

  What he did not report to those at home was the extent to which he was being scrutinized by the press, and the stir he caused at public occasions. Any hope of anonymity was already gone. To a reporter for the Washington Post who stopped him in the lobby of the Hôtel Meurice, Wilbur refused to say anything about his machine or his plans. When the subject turned to the difference between flying and going up in a balloon, Wilbur said he had yet to go up in a balloon, but that it was “entirely another thing from flying which affects one with intoxication. After having once flown it is almost impossible to turn to anything else.”

  In mid-June he went with Hart Berg to see the balloon races at St. Cloud. Amid a particularly elegant crowd in which were to be seen Gustave Eiffel and the American ambassador, Henry White, Wilbur drew more attention than anyone. A reporter for the Paris Herald asked, “You are over here on pleasure, are you not, Mr. Wright?”

  “To some extent,” Wilbur said. “I am enjoying myself splendidly and seeing all manner of new things.”

  “You like Paris?”

  “It is a marvelous city.”

  “Mr. Wright talked carefully,” the reporter wrote.

  It was obvious that he feared to be caught in a trap concerning his remarkable machine and what he wants to do with it. At the end of each question his clean-shaven face relapsed into a broad sphinx-like smile.

  That this same American bicycle mechanic from Ohio was spending hours with the masterpieces of the Louvre was apparently not of interest to the press.

  The business sessions arranged by Berg had begun their first full day in Paris. Wilbur had been taken to meet an active patron of ballooning with a strong interest in aviation, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, whom Wilbur described for Orville as “the Standard Oil King of France.” There were sessions with Arnold Fordyce, Commandant Bonel, and officials of the French government. Berg was a “pretty slick hand,” Wilbur told Orville, and things were going well. Berg was “very practical,” and Wilbur liked the way he was always at hand to explain what was being said in French and said so often at an extremely high speed. Berg could be depended upon to do his utmost. Besides, he was “about as enthusiastic now as a man could be, and he really has a remarkable faculty for reaching people.”

  The business talks often seemed endless, but thus far the prospects for an agreement looked encouraging. In general outline, the Wrights were to receive $350,000 for their Flyer, once a public demonstration was made in France, before any agreement was struck. The French insisted on seeing the plane and seeing it operate, which was clearly their right.

  “The pot is beginning to boil pretty lively,” Wilbur reported. But then one French faction tangled with another, political intrigue intervened, progress slowed.

  Not so many years before, Wilbur had decided he was unsuited for “commercial pursuits.” Now he found himself in the thick of extremely complex commercial dealings, playing for extremely high stakes with highly experienced entrepreneurs, politicians, and bureaucrats, and in a language he neither spoke nor understood. The whole game, the players, the setting, the language were all new to him. Yet he was more than holding his own, and in good spirits, aware as he was of the derision to be found behind the scenes. At the war ministry it was being said the Wrights were “bluffers like all Americans,” “worthless people” trying to sell to France “an object of no value” that even the Americans did not believe in.

  Alert, patient, closely attentive, Wilbur “never rattled,” as his father would say, never lost his confidence. He could be firm without being dictatorial, disagree without causing offense. Nor was there ever a doubt that when he spoke he knew what he was talking about.

  Most importantly, he remained entirely himself, never straying from his direct, unpretentious way, and with good effect. If anything, his lack of French, his lack of sophistication, seemed to work to his advantage. He was, indeed, as Hart Berg had anticipated, a capital Exhibit A and more.

  That Wilbur neither drank or smoked or showed the least interest in women remained, of course, a puzzlement to the French.

  The whole while he was keeping those at home, and Orville in particular, fully abreast of all that was happening, by mail and by cable, often in lengthy detail, describing the various configurations of how they were t
o profit financially depending on who put in what money. An experienced financial reporter could hardly have provided clearer coverage.

  For occasional relief, Hart Berg would treat Wilbur to a pleasant chauffeur-driven drive with him and Mrs. Berg in their grand automobile through the Bois de Boulogne or out to Fontainebleau or Versailles.

  One Monday morning, while Wilbur was lying in bed, a hotel clerk knocked at the door to say a dirigible, known as La Patrie, was flying over Paris. La Patrie, as Wilbur knew, was the first “airship” ordered by the French army. He dressed at once and went up to the roof garden.

  La Patrie (The Homeland), was a giant, sausage-shaped gas bag with an open gondola for the crew hanging below. It passed over the Arc de Triomphe and almost directly over the Meurice at what Wilbur estimated to be 15 miles per hour. He judged it a “very successful trial.” But as he was shortly to write, the cost of such an airship was ten times that of a Flyer, and a Flyer moved at twice the speed. The flying machine was in its infancy while the airship had “reached its limit and must soon become a thing of the past.” Still, the spectacle of the airship over Paris was a grand way to begin a day.

  Most mornings only meant more meetings.

  The primary question at issue had become whether to sell to the French government or set up a commercial company with Henri Deutsch. The possibility of a contract with the government seemed all but certain, until the French army insisted the Flyer trial be conducted in winds too strong and demanded an exclusive agreement for three years, neither of which Wilbur would agree to.

  Then, for the first time, it became clear that Flint & Company was expecting a commission of 20 percent not only on what they sold, as had been agreed on, but also on what the brothers retained. (“Don’t worry over Flint’s commission,” he told Orville. “We can hold them level.”)

  Next thing, Wilbur was informed confidentially that if he, Orville, and their associates were to raise the price to the French government by $50,000, this sum could be “distributed among persons who had the power to put the deal through.” In other words, those in power would need to be bribed substantially. This Wilbur refused even to discuss.

  The longer the talk dragged on, the more obvious it became that little would ever be decided until a demonstration was staged, and Wilbur kept urging Orville to speed up progress at home. “I presume you will have everything packed and ready before this letter arrives,” he wrote. “Be sure to bring everything needed in the way of spare parts. . . . Bring Charlie Taylor along, of course, when you come. . . . It will pay to have enough trustworthy assistance when we come to experiment.”

  This was written on June 28. Wilbur had had no word from Orville for nearly a month.

  In a letter from Katharine, dated June 30, he was to learn that things were not going at all well at home, that she and Orville felt left out of what was happening in Paris. “Orv can’t work any,” Orv was quite “uneasy,” Orv was “unsettled,” “really crazy to know what is going on,” “wroth” over how things were being handled in Paris without him. Clearly she was, too.

  She and Orville had lost all patience with Flint & Company and questioned whether they could be trusted. She had had little or no experience with Jews, but having seen a photograph of Hart Berg, she wondered if he might be one. “I can’t stand Berg’s looks,” she wrote. “It has just dawned on me that the whole company is composed of Jews. Berg certainly looks it.”

  A few days later, she let Wilbur know the situation at home had become even worse. She was nearing a crack-up, and it was largely his doing. “What on earth is happening to your letters?”

  Her letter became a storm of anger, blame, self-pity, and desperation far beyond her “wrathy” nature. She had had more than enough of the “whole business.” “We are all so nervous and worn out with the suspense that we can’t any of us keep from being cross. Orv and I regularly fight every time we get together for five minutes. And poor Daddy does nothing but advise us to ‘be calm, Bessie, be calm,’ while he is so excited that he can’t hear anything we say.” She had never been so tired in all her life. “I want to cry if anybody looks at me.”

  Some of their letters to him were being returned because of the wrong address. “Why couldn’t you tell us sooner that you weren’t getting your mail?

  It makes us desperate to sit here and be perfectly helpless while they [Flint & Company] are working every scheme they can to get advantage of you. What business had they getting you into that French business? You could have done better there by yourselves. . . . I despise the whole lot of them. . . . Orv is so worried and excited and tired out that I feel some concern about him. He can’t stand this forever—neither can you, for that matter.

  The problem, Wilbur would later explain privately in a letter to his father, knowing the Bishop would understand, was that Orville appeared to be “in one of his peculiar spells” and “not really himself.”

  The morning of July 17, from his room at the Meurice, Wilbur wrote a long reply to Katharine setting straight for her and Orville the situation in Paris, how he was going about his part in it, his concern for them, how he had tried to spare them aggravation, and why they need not worry. It was noticeably candid and entirely confident in tone, and as revealing of his own estimate of himself as almost anything Wilbur ever wrote, his message being that he was the one on the scene in Paris, he was in command, knew what he was about, knew the people with whom he was dealing, and there was no call for those at home to get worked up.

  “In view of the fact that I have written, alone, three or four times as many letters home as I have received from all of you together,” he began, “it is a little amusing to read your continual complaints that you get so few from me.” In the two and a half months he had been away, he had received, on average, a letter a week from home, whereas he had been writing to them three to four times a week, except for a ten-day stretch when things were in such an unresolved state that there was nothing to report.

  He had felt from the start, he continued, that anything he wrote to Orville would unsettle him, but he felt Orville had a right to know what was going on. As for Flint & Company, he did not remind Katharine and Orville, as he could have, that it was Orville who had most wanted to get involved with them in the first place.

  “I have done what I know he would have done if he had been here and understood all the facts. In such cases the man at a distance only does harm by trying to give instructions which do not fit the case.”

  Within days after reaching Europe, he had felt confident he could handle the situation. His only worry was whether Orville would be ready to follow as quickly as possible with the machine. “It is not my custom to voice my complaints, but this business of never being ready has been a nightmare to me for more than a year.”

  As for Berg and Cordley, they had at first considered him “merely sort of an exhibit.”

  But their eyes have gradually opened, and now they realize that I see into situations deeper than they do, that my judgment is often more sound, and that I intend to run them rather than have them run me. . . . Now I control everything and they give advice and assistance. In this role they can be of great service to us and I see no reason for breaking with them.

  He was very sorry those at home were so worn down by excitement. He himself, he assured them, was feeling better than he had in several years.

  They must stop worrying. There was no need.

  In closing, he reported, arrangements had been made by some Americans for him to go that afternoon on his first balloon flight.

  They took off from the Aéro-Club grounds at St. Cloud, eventually sailing into the clouds to emerge at about 3,000 feet out into bright sunshine and blue sky. It was higher into the sky by far than Wilbur had ever been, and the view was utterly spectacular. They were fifty miles from Paris by then, crossing open country. “The alterations of rich brown newly plowed soil, with green fields of grass, and grains of different shades and the light brown and yellow fields ready for h
arvest made a wonderful picture,” he wrote. He loved seeing the little towns with their red tile roofs and the white roads reaching off in every direction.

  They flew nearly eighty miles in just over three hours and landed in a wheat field about ten miles west of Orléans. But beautiful as it had been, ballooning was not for him any more than it had been for Otto Lilienthal. Once on the ground you had to hike to a nearby village, find somewhere to spend the night, then, because of the prevailing winds, go back to where you started by a slow local train. (“What we are seeking is the means of free motion in the air, in any direction,” Lilienthal had written.)

  On the evening of the same day that Wilbur was heading back to Paris by train, Orville left Dayton on an overnight express for New York, also on his way to Paris. The Flyer III had at last been finished, packed, and shipped off to France, to be stored in the customs house at Le Havre until needed. Orville, as Katharine said, had gone off looking “pretty well fizzled out.” He had also, as he discovered en route, forgotten to bring Wilbur’s hotel address in Paris.

  III.

  Early on a Sunday morning in late July, the brothers were reunited. Having enjoyed an uneventful crossing on the steamer Philadelphia, Orville succeeded in finding his way to the Meurice, where he discovered Wilbur looking better than he had in years.

  Following breakfast at the hotel, they went for a long walk together, talking the whole time. They lunched at the Café Alcazar on the Champs-Elysées, after which they spent most of a sultry afternoon sitting and talking in the park along that boulevard. And by all signs they succeeded in clearing the air between them.

  The following day they met with Hart Berg and Frank Cordley for what Wilbur described as “a rather warm heart-to-heart talk,” meaning it was extremely heated. They took up the matter of patents, Wilbur making it clear from the start that Flint & Company was in no way entering into a partnership with them. “We are, and intend to be, the sole owners of the patents,” he said, according to his own notes on the conversation. They talked of expenses, and of stock in the enterprise. “The point is this,” Wilbur told Berg. “We do not intend you to own twenty percent of any stock. We intend to own the stock. You are the selling agents.” And so it went back and forth, Berg making his case, Wilbur and Orville holding firm.