Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  The world was not to be trusted. No wonder Orville and Wilbur would spend most of their life after their historic flight in litigation, proving to the world they had flown first and they should be rewarded handsomely. Bishop Wright's grown children were there to serve him when he returned from his travels, which consumed him to the point that he would not alter his schedule even for his dying wife. It was especially unfair to Katherine: “The dutiful daughter who devoted her life to caring for the widowed father was the epitome of female virtue in the life and literature of the period. Yet it is safe to assume that few widowed fathers were as demanding as Milton Wright.”22

  It is as if a child's book is the bible of the Wright brothers’ story and all characters must remain one-dimensional, misanthropic, and stunted, if not emotionally incestuous. But this is all brushed under the Wright rug and has remained the inconvenient dust under the clean tabula rasa of the Wrights’ story; it is to be retold and accepted with the same blind faith that George Washington did cut down a cherry tree and that Ben Franklin flew a kite with a key and discovered electricity.

  Wilbur and Orville Wright are portrayed as perfect men, and, in that perfection, we are given characters who think and act as one. They are given to us as men who have little flesh and blood. “Like their father, they were always perfect gentlemen, naturally courteous to all. They neither drank hard liquor nor smoked nor gambled and both remained, as their father liked to say, ‘independently republican.’ They were both bachelors and by all signs intended to remain so.”23 They seem to be men devoid of bodily functions. No one uses a bathroom. No one secretes anything. Sister Katherine is treated the same way: “Younger than Orville by three years, she was bright, personable, highly opinionated, the only college graduate in the family and of the three still at home, much the most sociable.”24

  In short, she was the perfect post-Victorian spinster. The famous picture in Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, only complicates matters. In this photo we see the Wright Flyer leave Earth for twelve seconds, with Orville Wright at the controls and Wilbur looking on. It was a coin toss and a bad maneuver that handed this historic moment to Orville. This is what history has delivered to us.

  It goes against the gospel of Wright to say that Wilbur Wright invented the mechanical system of control for manned flight and rewrote the science of aeronautics that was required to produce a wing capable of enough lift and an airplane with enough control to carry a human being into the air; in short, Wilbur Wright invented the plane that would carry his brother for the first twelve seconds of human-powered flight on December 17, 1903. And yet Orville was his partner. He did join Wilbur in this great adventure and did help him physically build the airplane. He helped him build the wind tunnel that reset the basic data of manned flight. He did fly the plane for twelve seconds on December 17, 1903. In a way, that was fitting. Wilbur could observe his plane leaving Earth under its own power; and, in that moment, he has the satisfaction that his vision, his theories, his calculations, his years of work produced a machine that could lift a man and fly like the birds he studied so intensely.

  Now if we go with that supposition, then we must turn the Wright myth on its head and shake out the falsehoods. The first one is that these two men, separated by five years at birth, were the same. As Lawrence Goldstone wrote in Birdmen, “They may have been alike, but they were not the same. Wilbur is one of the greatest intuitive scientists this nation has ever produced. Completely self-taught, he made spectacular intellectual leaps to solve a series of intractable problems that had eluded some of history's most brilliant minds…. Many subsequent accounts have treated the brothers as indistinguishable equals, but Orville viscerally as well as chronologically never ceased being the little brother.”25 Author James Tobin takes it one step further: “It is impossible to imagine Orville, bright as he was, supplying the driving force that started their work and kept it going from the back room of their store in Ohio to conferences with capitalists, presidents, and kings. Will did that. He was the leader, from beginning to end.”26

  Then there are the personal differences. In Birdmen, Lawrence Goldstone points out that “as family correspondence makes clear, Orville's relationship with Wilbur was a good deal more complex than is generally assumed and after his brother's death, Orville was never able to muster the will to pursue their mutual obsessions with the necessary zeal.”27 The strange, insular relationship of the three children, and Katherine's strong relationships with other women her whole life, screams out some sort of androgyny that historians have chosen to ignore. Orville was fastidious, if not obsessive, about his appearance. A niece, Ivonette, recalled that he always knew what clothes to wear. “I don't believe there was ever a man who could do the work he did in all sorts of dirt, oil, and grime and come out it looking immaculate.”28 Argyle socks and low-topped shoes were a favorite among the brother who always wore a dapper suit, with his shoes shined to a high gloss.

  As Tom Crouch wrote in The Bishop's Boys, “His pale complexion was a matter of choice—and some pride. During the three years 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 Kaylor Grumbach, the housekeeper, remembered that Orville would have gone pale again weeks before his brother.”29 Further suggesting that Orville was effeminate, George Burba, a Dayton reporter, described Orville's hands as “small and uncallused.”30

  The impression of Wilbur is very different, he seemingly had little regard for his appearance besides the basic uniform of high collar, tie, and coat. Katharine spoke of having to watch him to make sure his clothes were clean. Wilbur had a darker complexion with a strong jaw. A French journalist wrote of Wilbur, “The face is smooth shaven and tanned by the wind and country sun. The eye is a superb blue-grey with tints of gold that bespeak an ardent flame.”31 An English reporter would observe his “fine drawn weather-beaten face, strongly marked features, and keen observant hawk like eyes.”32 So it would seem that Orville resembled an early century metrosexual; Wilbur was the silent, masculine type; and Katherine was androgynous, if not a lesbian. One thing is clear: they were not asexual.

  If there is a smoking gun in the Wright myth, it is Wilbur's voluminous correspondence with the aeronautical scientist Octave Chanute that is so technical it gives the lay person a headache. Chanute was Wilbur Wright's mentor, though Wilbur would fight against that impression all his life. But it was Wilbur who went to the symposiums of the day in Chicago and related theory and the progress in Kitty Hawk with a lantern-light slide presentation at Chanute's invitation. It was Wilbur who wrote the first articles for aeronautical journals of his experiments at Kitty Hawk. Wilbur was viewed early on as the pioneer breaking the boundaries of known aeronautical science. Wilbur and Orville both participated in the building of the Wright Flyer, but Orville was the mechanic while Wilbur was the designer. It is telling that three years after Wilbur's death in 1912, Orville sold his interest in the company they had formed.33 Without Wilbur the Wright brothers ceased as an entity driving the science of powered flight forward.

  This is not the story we want to hear. Pluralism bespeaks of combined effort. We like to believe that two brothers were behind our ascent to the sky. The artist is a quirk of nature. The genius, an aberration. Most live in the terrestrial world where people work together to solve problems. Wilbur Wright as the lone inventor of flight has little appeal versus the mechanical mannequins side by side in the sheds at the Wright Memorial. This appeals to our national team approach. America is a team. We will solve our problems together. But there is always the visionary: from Jefferson to Edison to Bell to Oppenheim. There is a force behind that moves like a savant in a dark room. Every great movement or advancement in human history has the force of one man or woman behind it. Others may help; they may codify; they may construct; but it is the magician who creates something out of nothing. Destiny is but a singular tap on the shoulder.

  This great work was Wi
lbur's invention of controlled flight. “The first U.S. patent, 821,393, did not claim invention of a flying machine, but rather the invention of a system of aerodynamic control that manipulated a flying machine's surfaces.”34 The visionary of this control system was Wilbur Wright. The story of flight in Kitty Hawk is the final arbiter.

  But it gets worse for the historian trying to decipher fact from fiction. In 1912, Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever and Orville did not die until 1948, which gave him a very long time to shape history. The younger brother is torn by conflicting interests. He wants to protect the legacy of Wilbur and himself as the inventors of powered flight, but he also wants history to know that he was an equal partner. He gets into a fight with the Smithsonian Institution, and this leads to the strangest unknown episode of the Wright story: the holding for ransom of the 1903 Wright Flyer by the British for twenty years. The epic fight of Glenn Curtiss and the Smithsonian Institute versus the Wright brothers is part of the drama and subterfuge that is the real history of the Wright brothers.

  Here are the facts we know.

  The United States in 1900 was on the edge of greatness when Wilbur went searching for the perfect place with the perfect wind flow to begin experiments toward a final goal of manned flight. The Gilded Age had ended but left a nation crisscrossed by railroads, with a national market in place and an industrial economy just warming up. People were leaving the family farms and heading for the cities to make their fortunes. Men like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan made enormous untaxed fortunes and proclaimed what was good for business was good for America. William Jennings Bryan had lost the presidential election to William McKinley but had shown that populism was a force to be reckoned with. Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt had returned from the Wild West twenty years before and became president in 1901 after President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist.

  Henry Ford was getting ready to churn out cars like boxes of cereal. Inventions on every front were the news of the day, with wireless telegraph connecting remote ships to the shore. America was in an amazing spot. The West had been declared closed in 1890. The US Industrial Revolution was producing goods on a scale that was unthinkable. Everyone all over the world wanted to go to America, and in New York Ellis Island had become the revolving door to new opportunities in the new land.

  Against this heady backdrop, a moody and depressed young man named Wilbur Wright had grown bored with making bicycles and started to read about attempts to fly. He had gone so far as to write to the Smithsonian for all information regarding flight and then asked the National Weather Service where he might find the most suitable winds for testing airplanes. The reply came at once, a remote fishing village that wasn't even a village, on the outer banks of North Carolina, called Kitty Hawk. Wilbur had never heard of this strange place seven hundred miles due east of Ohio. But he decided then and there that he must go to Kitty Hawk and immediately begin testing a kite glider he had been working on above the bicycle shop.

  Kitty Hawk was the wilderness in 1900. Wilbur Wright would go to this remote fishing village once in 1901, twice in 1902, and once in 1903. A final return to Kitty Hawk for testing in 1908 was more of a victory lap to get ready for a flight test for the United States Army. But it was those first four visits, with the resulting laboratory for testing the planes that were built and the answers found there, that hold the secret to why a man in a high collar was able to do what up until then only the winged creatures of the earth could accomplish.

  The Outer Banks and Kitty Hawk in particular were inaccessible except by boat. There were seasons to deal with, and Wilbur had no patience for such things, so he set out at once to go by himself to inspect this strange, windswept land of sand dunes and the few fishermen eking out a living. Isolation is what most men who had been to Kitty Hawk talked about. This didn't matter. Wilbur would crate up the glider he had been building and ship it to this remote fishing village. Then he would go to Kitty Hawk to check out this strange enclave on the eastern seaboard. Wilbur Wright was thirty-three, and his pursuit of flight would be the ultimate young man's adventure.

  This is what we know. Now let's turn the Wright story upside down, crack the myth open, and see what falls out. We should start with author John C. Kelly, the man who is the architect of all that follows. The real story is more fascinating than the myth, but, after all, truth is often stranger than fiction.

  “No bird soars in a calm.”

  —Wilbur Wright, 1901

  1914

  The Great Flood

  The 1903 flyer had been dismantled and packed away. The wooden crates stored in Dayton, Ohio, behind the bike shop in the shed looked like nothing. The crates were not marked and had been there for eleven years. The shed held bicycle parts, bicycles, wheels, tires, tools. The large wooden crates were an imposition, really. They were bulky and took up a lot of the space. The floor of the shed offered no real protection against the elements. Rain leaked down onto the crates occasionally from the roof. The men who had put the crates in the shed had long since forgotten them. Wilbur had died in 1912, and Orville was busy and traveling. So the crates with sand in the bottom from 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, remained silently moldering.

  The rain began on Easter Sunday, March 23, 1914. Dayton, Ohio, was a sitting duck positioned between the intersection of the Miami, Stillwater, and Mad Rivers, along with Wolf Creek, which was always flooding. Already six times before, waters had rampaged through the streets of Dayton. This would be the worst, with torrential rains blanketing the area, swelling the rivers and creeks, and meeting in downtown Dayton. Then the earthen dam of the Laramie Reservoir in Shelby County collapsed, sending a wall of water surging toward Dayton. A levee along Stratford Avenue breached at four o'clock on Monday, with more breaks along East Second and Fifth Avenues.1 The Wright home and bike shop were in the crosshairs, and so was the shed. So was the flyer.

  Fred C. Kelly smoked and drank his cold coffee. Awful. Cigarettes and coffee kept him going usually, but he felt a fatigue that even nicotine and caffeine couldn't mitigate. He lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out, tiredly watching the blue undulations float over his typewriter. He parked the cigarette and bent over his typewriter, his notes surrounding him. Man had flown thirty-nine years ago, and there was not one diary, not one book written by anyone to explain how it had happened. No one had written a biography of the Wright brothers.

  Kelly picked up his cigarette and read over what he had written that day. He had known the man a long time. He had published his first interview with Orville, “Flying Machines and the War,”1 in an issue of Collier's in 1915. His sense of humor had won over the inventor of the airplane, and he had published many interviews and articles on Orville Wright, as long as they didn't dig too deep. He had been thinking of a biography for a long time, and the 1939 article for Harper's, “How the Wright Brothers Began,”2 gave him an opening.

  Kelly used that as a basis and got Orville to sign on with one stipulation: he would approve every single word. Kelly began sending pages to Orville and getting back crossed-out sections. It was going to be a long process. As one family member said, “writing a book with Orville Wright looking over your shoulder would not be an easy task.”3 It wasn't. He had to nudge Orville every step of the way just to respond to the pages. But it was all worth it. It would put Kelly's name on the map and maybe make him a rich man, or at least able to pay the mortgage.

  Kelly leaned back in his chair. He had written a humor column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer for five years and then a column for the Statesman in Washington, DC, for eight years. That's when his career took off with his “Real and Near” column that ran for eight years and was the first column ever to be syndicated. He had done a little bit of everything and even served as a special agent for the FBI in World War I. Then he bought a farm in Peninsula, Ohio, and took whatever came his way.4 Kelly saw himself as a journalist first, but he was open to other things, one of those other things was to write the only account of how the Wright
brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

  Kelly wasn't a historian, and writing anyone's history was tricky, but writing someone's history who insisted on reviewing every page was almost a sleight of hand. He had to be very careful. Anything personal was out. Orville Wright wanted it to be technical, but Kelly was a writer, and he knew nothing about aeronautical science. So, it was touch-and-go. Orville was moody, and Kelly was walking a tightrope every day. Still, he couldn't believe his luck. He alone was writing the definitive biography of the two men who had cracked the Rubik's Cube of flight thirty-nine years before.

  It was hard to deal with Orville, but even harder to deal with his secretary, Mabel Beck. She was “fiercely devoted to him…acting as a buffer between Orville and the rest of the world. Anybody—whether business associates or family members—who wished to speak with Orville at his office had to go through Mabel first, and her attitude made it difficult, particularly for many of his business associates.”5

  She had given the journalist Earl Findley the kiss of death years before and fired him when he really needed the money and had put in a lot of work. He had been a good friend of both Wilbur and Orville, and Katherine Wright, the sister, had been on Finley's side initially: “I've been talking to Orville about it and he says that he would only be interested in a carefully written, accurate account of their work…. We are now of the opinion that you could write such a book, if you had time enough to devote to the work.”6 Findley and another reporter had worked for six months on the first draft of the book and sent it to Orville for his approval. At the time Orville read the manuscript, he was in bed with severe back pains. “This manuscript is too personal and chatty,” he told Mabel. “Send it back. I would rather have the sciatica.”7 Mabel told Findley exactly that.