The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

  Octave Chanute, who had not returned from his trip to Europe until October of 1910, died at his home on November 23, at age seventy-eight, before he and Wilbur had had an opportunity to see one another again. On hearing the news, Wilbur boarded a train to Chicago to attend the funeral and later wrote a long tribute to Chanute published in Aeronautics, leaving no doubt of how he felt.

  His writings were so lucid as to provide an intelligent understanding of the nature of the problems of flight to a vast number of persons who would probably never have given the matter study otherwise. . . . In patience and goodness of heart he has rarely been surpassed. Few men were more universally respected and loved.

  In 1911 Wilbur spent a full six months in Europe attending to business and legal matters. Otherwise, he was either on the move back and forth to New York or Washington, or tied down at board meetings in Dayton. And it all began to tell on him. In Orville’s words, he would “come home white.”

  Meanwhile, the family had decided to build a new and far grander house, very like an antebellum Old South mansion in the suburb of Oakwood, just southeast of Dayton. Virtually all the planning with the architect was overseen by Orville and Katharine during Wilbur’s time in Europe. Wilbur’s one known expression of interest in the project was to request a room and bathroom of his own.

  In the first week of May 1912, thoroughly worn down in body and spirit, Wilbur took ill, running a high fever day after day. It proved once again to be the dreaded typhoid fever. Conscious of the condition he was in, he sent for a lawyer and dictated his will.

  One or another of the family were faithfully at his bedside. “Wilbur is no better,” recorded Bishop Wright on May 18. Wilbur was “sinking,” he wrote May 28.

  Wilbur Wright died in his room at home at 7 Hawthorn Street at 3:15 in the morning, Thursday, May 30, 1912. He was forty-five years old.

  A short life, full of consequences [the Bishop wrote]. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died.

  Phone calls and telegrams of condolence poured in from friends and neighbors and all parts of the country and abroad—a thousand telegrams by that afternoon. Moving tributes were published in the days that followed. According to one Dayton paper, the quantity of flowers delivered to the house would have filled a railroad boxcar.

  Though the family would have preferred a private funeral, a public viewing of Wilbur’s wasted remains took place at the First Presbyterian Church during which an estimated 25,000 people passed by the coffin. At the conclusion of a brief service, burial followed at the family plot at Woodland Cemetery.

  Wilbur is dead and buried! [the Bishop wrote]. We are all stricken. It does not seem possible he is gone. Probably Orville and Katharine felt his loss most. They say little.

  For the next five years Bishop Wright continued to live with Orville and Katharine. Though no longer traveling on church work, he remained remarkably active, his life, like theirs, made notably different in a variety of ways as a result of the family’s greatly enhanced affluence. He delighted in long outings in Orville’s new automobile with Orville at the wheel, and in the spring of 1914, after forty-two years at 7 Hawthorn Street, the three of them moved into the newly completed, white-brick, pillared mansion in Oakwood, which they had proudly named Hawthorn Hill. In 1916, Orville treated them to a summer-long vacation in Canada in a rented house on an island in Georgian Bay. So enjoyable was the time that Orville bought an island of their own for further summers.

  The Bishop kept on reading, writing articles for religious publications, and enjoying his morning walks. One October Saturday he marched with Katharine and Orville in a Dayton Women’s Suffrage parade. As near as he could judge he was the oldest man in the march.

  Bishop Milton Wright died at age eighty-eight on April 3, 1917.

  Katharine, who never went back to teaching, devoted much of her time to Oberlin College, to causes like the suffragette movement, and to providing all the help she could to Orville. In 1913, she accompanied him on still another trip to Europe, on business to London, Berlin, and Paris.

  Attended by the faithful Carrie Grumbach, they lived at Hawthorn Hill, as comfortable with each other as always until 1926. It was then that Katharine, at age fifty-eight, announced she would marry an old Oberlin classmate, Henry J. Haskell, a widower and journalist with the Kansas City Star. As fellow Oberlin board members they had been seeing each other for some time and though Orville knew Haskell and considered him a friend of the family, he turned furious and inconsolable. When Katharine insisted on proceeding with the wedding, held at Oberlin, Orville refused to attend or even to speak to her, feeling he had been betrayed.

  Of all Orville’s “peculiar spells,” this was much the worst, the most regrettable, and for Katharine, painful in the extreme. She moved to Kansas City. Two years later when Orville received word she was dying of pneumonia, he refused to go see her. Only at the last did he change his mind, arriving in time to be with her at the end.

  Katharine died on March 3, 1929. Her body was brought back to Dayton and buried with her father, mother, and Wilbur at Woodland Cemetery.

  While Wilbur had virtually stopped flying after the flight he and Orville made together at Huffman Prairie in May of 1910, Orville continued piloting Wright planes for another seven years. In September of 1910 he flew over Dayton as no one had until then. A few weeks later, flying a new model Wright “Baby Grand,” he attained a speed of 80 miles an hour. As the years passed he began experimenting with a new Wright hydroplane, then returned to Kitty Hawk to conduct gliding experiments, during which he set a soaring record of nearly 10 minutes, a record that would stand for ten years. In 1913, within two months, he made some 100 flights and tried his hand at flying a single-propeller plane. In 1914 he barely escaped being killed when his hydroplane fell into the Miami River.

  Orville had hoped to fly for as long as he lived, but had to give it up in 1918 at age forty-six, due to still lingering pains and stiffness caused by the crash at Fort Myer nearly ten years before. By 1918 he had sold the Wright Company and established his own Wright Aeronautical Laboratory in a plain, one-story brick building downtown, where he intended to concentrate his energies on scientific research.

  The financial rewards for their efforts and accomplishments had been considerable for the Wright brothers, though not as excessive as many imagined. In his will, Wilbur had left $50,000 each to brothers Reuchlin and Lorin, and to Katharine. The rest of his estate, an estimated $126,000, went to Orville. With the success of the Wright Company and its sale, Orville prospered far more. His total wealth at the time of his death was $1,067,105, or in present-day dollars $10,300,000. Though a fortune then, it hardly compared to that of any number of multimillionaires of the time.

  If money had been his and Wilbur’s main objective, Orville insisted, they would have tried something in which the chances were brighter. He thought it fair to say he was well-to-do, rather than wealthy, and loved to quote his father: “All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden to others.”

  In the years following Wilbur’s death, Orville had to face alone the burdens and tedium of continuing lawsuits. Further, he was outraged by an effort of the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Charles D. Walcott, with the help of Glenn Curtiss, to rehabilitate the reputation of Samuel P. Langley and in so doing discredit the Wrights.

  Making the case that Langley’s failure had been the fault of the launching device for his aerodrome, not the machine itself, the aerodrome was taken out of storage to be tested again. But as was not disclosed, Curtiss oversaw major modifications of the aerodrome, so that when tested once more in 1914 it performed with reasonable success and the Smithsonian endorsed a statement saying, “Professor Samuel P. Langley had actually designed and built the first man-carrying flying machine capable of sustained flight.”

  Before the aerodrome was sent back to the Smithsonian to be pl
aced on exhibit, Walcott ordered that it be returned in its original 1903 condition.

  Orville’s fury on learning of what had been done was momentous and altogether justified. Earlier, when he and Wilbur had offered their 1903 Flyer to the Smithsonian, they had been turned down by Walcott. In 1928, Orville sent the 1903 Flyer to England on loan to the Science Museum in London. Only then did the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian at last pass a resolution declaring “to the Wrights belongs the credit of making the first successful flight with a power-propelled heavier-than-air machine carrying a man.” But it would be another twenty years before the Wrights’ 1903 Flyer was returned from London and presented to the Smithsonian for display, and by then Orville was no longer living.

  Of further aggravation were stories of others who had supposedly achieved flight before the Wrights, the most annoying being that of a German American named Gustave Whitehead, who was said to have flown a plane of his own creation in Connecticut in 1901 and 1902. The story was entirely without evidence and wholly untrue, but kept drawing attention as the years passed to the point where Orville finally felt obliged to denounce it himself. In an article titled, “The Mythical Whitehead Flight,” published in U.S. Air Services in 1945, he made plain that Whitehead was a man of delusions. Strangely, the story still draws attention, despite the fact that there is still no proof.

  Advances in aviation all the while had been accelerating faster than Orville or anyone of his generation had thought possible, and starting with World War I to a form of weaponry like nothing before in human experience.

  In 1927 young Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to land in Paris, a feat once thought impossible by the Wrights. On his return to America, Lindbergh made a point of coming to Dayton to pay his respects to Orville at Hawthorn Hill, an event that caused excitement in Dayton of a kind not seen since the brothers had made their celebrated return from Europe eighteen years before.

  Orville lived to see, too, the horrific death and destruction wrought by the giant bombers of World War II and in several interviews tried as best he could to speak both for himself and for Wilbur.

  We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . . . No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses.

  As time went on, Orville grew increasingly inclined to withdraw from society, yet felt obliged to participate in a continuing number of public occasions in his honor, doing so in large measure out of respect for Wilbur’s memory. He received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan, and Oberlin College. In 1919 he received an Honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale, the university where once, nearly forty years before, Wilbur had hoped he might enroll.

  Orville attended the dedication of the Wright Library in what had been named Katharine Wright Park in Oakwood, and having agreed to the removal of both the Wright bicycle shop and the family home at 7 Hawthorn Street from Dayton to the Henry Ford outdoor museum, Greenfield Village, at Dearborn, Michigan, he attended their formal opening on what would have been Wilbur’s seventy-first birthday.

  Of the numerous Wright monuments erected, the one dedicated to Wilbur at Le Mans in 1920 was the first. The largest, the Wright Memorial at Kitty Hawk at Kill Devil Hills, was dedicated in 1932 with Orville present to accept it on behalf of both Wilbur and himself. A Wilbur and Orville Wright memorial was created on Wright Brothers Hill overlooking Huffman Prairie, and in 1945 an aircraft carrier, the USS Wright, was launched.

  Orville remained at Hawthorn Hill, looked after by Carrie Grumbach, and outlived Wilbur by thirty-six years. He lived to see aviation transformed by jet propulsion, the introduction of the rocket, the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947.

  He died of a heart attack at age seventy-seven in Dayton’s Miami Valley Hospital at ten-thirty the evening of January 30, 1948, and was laid to rest at Woodland Cemetery with his mother, father, Wilbur, and Katharine.

  Ever the perfect gentleman to the end, “polite almost to a fault,” as said, always neatly dressed, his shoes always shined, Orville was also known to drive his automobile at such high speed that the police of Oakwood would close their eyes and hold their breath until he passed by on the way to his laboratory downtown.

  On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer.

  1. Bishop Milton Wright at age 60.

  2. Susan Koerner Wright at age 27.

  3. Reuchlin at age 11.

  4. Lorin at age 9.

  5. Wilbur at age 9.

  6. Orville at age 4.

  7. Katharine at age 4.

  8. The Wright home at 7 Hawthorn Street, with porch and bicycle built by Wilbur and Orville.

  9. detail map of Dayton showing (1) Wright Cycle Shop at 1127 West Third Street, (2) Wright home, (3) Steele High School, (4) Dayton Public Library, (5) Union Train Depot.

  10. Tree-lined Hawthorn Street, the Wright home with porch at right.

  11. Orville’s Dayton high school class of 1890. Orville is at center rear. His friend the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar is at left rear.

  12. Wilbur at age 17.

  13. Photograph of Oliver Crook Haugh taken sometime before his execution in 1906.

  14. Bishop Wright’s diary entry of May 27, 1913, declaring the notorious murderer Oliver Crook Haugh to have been the one who, in boyhood, struck the blow with a hockey stick that changed the direction of Wilbur’s life.

  15. Front page of the weekly West Side News, the brothers’ first joint enterprise.

  16. The Third Street Bridge over the Miami River, with the towered Steele High School on the right seen from Dayton’s West Side. The multitude of rising smoke was taken as a proud mark of a city of enterprise.

  17. The Wright Cycle shop at 1127 West Third Street. Showroom and backroom shop were on the left half of the building. The other half was occupied by an undertaker.

  18. Wilbur working with a metal lathe.

  19. Advertisement for the Wright brothers’ popular, hand-built Van Cleve bicycle, named in honor of their great-great-grandmother on their father’s side, who was the first white woman to settle in Dayton. The Van Cleve sold for $60 to $65 and was available in all colors.

  20. Katharine (second on the right) and four of her Oberlin College friends join in the bicycle craze.

  21. Part of a humorous letter from Wilbur to Katharine describing the 31-mile bicycle expedition he and Orville made to Miamisburg and back.

  22. Katharine in her Oberlin graduation gown, 1898.

  23. The only Wright to earn a college degree, Katharine returned home to teach Latin at Steele High School (above), where, as Orville later noted, she would flunk many of Dayton’s future leaders.

  24. Katharine (front right) and Orville (front left) pose at a party they gave at home in 1899. Her slant-top desk where Wilbur wrote his historic letter to the Smithsonian is at the right.

  25. Lilienthal in flight with one of his creations.

  26. Otto Lilienthal, the German glider pioneer whose influence on the Wright brothers was immense.

  27. Samuel Pierpont Langley, prominent American scientist and head of the Smithsonian Institution, who believed mechanical flight was possible and that he had the solution.

  28. Langley’s costly and much ridiculed “aerodrome” ready for launching from atop a gigantic houseboat on the Potomac River.

  29. Page one of the letter Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian that started the Wrights on their pilgrimage.

  30. Map
of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

  31. Bill Tate and family.

  32. Wilbur’s notes on the soaring birds of Kitty Hawk.

  33. The first Wright camp at Kitty Hawk, 1900.

  34. Wilbur (left) and Orville flying their 1901 glider as a kite.

  35. 1902 camp kitchen at Kill Devil Hills with all pots, pans, cups, saucers, and provisions in perfect order.

  36. Camp interior with Wilbur at rear and the 1902 glider at right foreground. Sleeping quarters were in the rafters overhead.

  37. Octave Chanute.