Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  Orville then makes an interesting observation, connecting their quest to fly with the age of exploration: “Trying to camp down here reminds me constantly of those poor Artic explorers. We are living nearly the whole time on reduced rations…. We have appointed the Kitty Hawk storekeeper our agent to buy us anything he can get hold for, in any quantities he can get in the line of fish, eggs, wild geese or ducks. We have had biscuits [with] molasses, coffee and rice today. Tomorrow morning, we will have biscuits, coffee, and rice.”37

  Tommy Tate, the sixteen-year-old nephew of William Tate, took to hanging around the camp while the brothers readied their glider. He told the brothers that the richest man in town was the druggist, Doc Cogswell, a man owed $15,000 by his brother. The arrival of the freight ship from Elizabeth City was eagerly looked for by Kitty Hawkers, and the Wright brothers, as they could then “have a blowout” with “canned tomatoes, peaches, condensed milk, flour and bacon and butter.”38 But it would usually only last a day, and they were back to existing on subsistence fare. “Will is most starved,” Orville would write their sister when rations were low.39

  The mosquitoes, chiggers, and ticks, and the sand blowing constantly, did not diminish their love for their newfound oasis. Both Wrights came to believe in time that the fresh air, beauty, and stress-free environment of Kitty Hawk could cure all ills. Orville would write Katherine, “The sunsets here are the prettiest I have seen. The clouds light up in all colors in the background, with deep blue clouds of various shapes fringed with gold before. The moon rises in much the same style and lights up this pile of sand almost like day.”40

  Wilbur, on the other hand, also saw Kitty Hawk as nothing short of his laboratory, an unencumbered space where he would not be bothered by the world to get his work done. This was harder and harder in Dayton, where the bicycle business demanded attention and, increasingly, so did his father. Milton was in a legal tussle with his church that would require Wilbur to veer away from his work on aeronautics and all things related to flying. But in Kitty Hawk all cares were distant. The isolation provided a wall that would later be recognized by people who would make it their once-a-year vacation spot and would swear to the beauty, the climate, and the wide-open beaches.

  But it was roughing it for the two men in high collars and ties in a tent at the bottom of a giant sand dune. As Orville would write his sister, “The sand is the greatest thing in Kitty Hawk and soon will be the only thing.”41 The days were brutally hot, and the nights cold. “A cold nor'easter is blowing tonight and I have seen warmer places than it is in this tent. We each of us have two blankets, but almost freeze every night,” Orville wrote his sister.42 “The wind blows in on my head, and I pull the blankets up over my head, when my feet freeze and I reverse the process. I keep this up all night and in the morning am hardly able to tell where I'm at in the bedclothes.”

  One month after arriving in Kitty Hawk, the glider was finally ready and the storms had abated. “With everything in place, it consisted of two fixed wings, one above the other, each measuring 5 feet by 17 feet. In addition, it had warping controls and a movable forward rudder—the horizontal rudder or elevator—of twelve square feet. There were no wheels for takeoffs or landings. Later models would have wooden skids, far better suited for sand…. The whole apparatus weight slightly less than 50 pounds…. With Wilbur aboard as ‘operator’ it would total approximately 190 pounds…. He would lie flat on his stomach, head first, in the middle of the lower wing and maintain fore-and-aft balance by means of the forward rudder.”43

  The problem was even though the storms had passed, the winds still clocked in around 30 miles per hour. Orville wrote his sister, Katherine, “Monday night and all-day Tuesday we had a terrific wind blowing 36 miles an hour. Wednesday morning the Kitty Hawkers were out early peering around the edge of the woods and out their upstairs windows to see whether our camp was still in existence.”44 Wilbur decided then to fly the machine like a kite and steer it by remote control with strings to the ground. He put chains on the kite to see how it would perform with an operator. Orville reported to Katherine: “Well after erecting a derrick from which to swing our rope with which we fly the machine, we sent it up about 20 feet, at which height we attempt to keep it up by the manipulation of the strings to the rudder. The greatest difficulty is in keeping it down. It naturally wants to go higher and higher. When it gets too high we give it a strong pull on the ducking string, to which it responds by making a terrific dart to the ground.”45

  They then sent it back up and took some pictures. The kite experiments came to a stop with a wind that “quicker than thought”46 caught the kite on the ground and lifted it in to the air, sending it cartwheeling for twenty feet. The damage was extensive, and at first glance Wilbur deduced that the experiments at Kitty Hawk had come to an end; then he decided it might be repairable. They photographed the wreckage and then dragged it back to camp, where for three days they repaired the damage.

  Wilbur wanted to fly now. He had heard of a place where the wind was strong and the dunes even larger. Orville, in the close of one his letters, tipped his sister off to the name of some hills that would live in history: “We will probably go down to the Kill Devil Hills tomorrow, where we will try gliding on the machine.”47

  Wilbur left behind a pressure cooker of work and family obligations. Katherine was twenty-six in 1900. The sister of the Wright family would be the primary female relationship in Orville's and Wilbur's lives. Her mother had died when she was fifteen, and she stepped into the role of mother with Milton's approval, if not his demand. She had an offer of marriage while in college, but that never came to fruition. When she was in college, a friend gave her a book titled Middle Aged Love Stories. With her bun, pince-nez, and plain demeanor, she was already the spinster in waiting.

  Wilbur and Orville, as well as their father, were in Katherine's charge. The bishop was already a task master of feminine decorum: “I am especially anxious that you cultivate modest feminine manners and control your temper, for temper is a hard master.”1 This was written while Milton was out on the circuit, gone as he habitually was. He had entered a fight with his own church, United Brethren, that was perfectly suited for the old reprobate. The younger members or the more progressive ones wanted to allow members to join secret societies such as the Masons. Milton saw this as dangerous and thought it smacked of exclusion. He put it in the same well as vanity, drinking, and smoking, all of which was the work of the devil. The church split over the issue in 1899, with Milton starting a new sect in alliance with the old policies of the church. He was a holy warrior, and the fight was one that eventually would drag in Wilbur, with lawsuits and recrimination.2

  But the bishop needed a stable home warm with people, food, and beds still folded back from a woman's hand. He needed his daughter to step into the role of his dead wife: “Home…seems lonesome without you,” he wrote when Katherine dared to go see some relatives.3 “But for you, we should feel like we had no home.” Guilt upon guilt, it would be thirty years before his daughter could escape the home of men.

  But she had escaped once before, to Oberlin College. Between caring for Milton, her brothers, and her brother's wife who just had a new baby, she did not have time to graduate from high school. The younger Wright children just couldn't seem to get a diploma. Oberlin required her to take a preparatory program to compensate for lack of a degree. The college was not segregated; men and women were in the same classes. Few people attended college in the 1890s, and fewer women. Bishop Wright saw Katherine as a teacher, and Oberlin was well suited for the avocation and had a strict code of discipline. Students were up at six, went to bed at ten, and had daily prayers, and wrote reports on their moral conduct. Professor Woodrow Wilson visited the college from Princeton and gave a lecture on democracy. Jane Addams also spoke on the plight of the poor in Chicago. It was, despite the asceticism of a daily life, a liberal education.

  Katherine Wright went from a house full of men to a house full of women. Her
roommate, Margaret Goodwin, became her best friend for life. In a picture of the time, Margaret and Katherine look like a modern couple in Victorian garb. Margaret was a minister's daughter from Chicago, and she had the same sense of release Katherine felt. They spent all their time together and sometimes ditched their studies to go ice-skating. “Margaret was such good company always—never a bore,” Katherine later wrote.4 A teacher once asked her why she and Margaret always had so much to talk about, and Margaret replied quickly that “they just covered the same subjects over and over without realizing it.”5

  Clearly the pleasure of each other's company was enough, and they joined the Ladies Literary Society together. The LLS sounded too formal to Katherine, so they changed it to Litterae Laborum Solamen in Latin.6 The translation was “literature is solace from troubles.” It was basically a club for public speaking. Margaret apparently was a charismatic speaker. She was asked to speak on peace, and “at first there was a frown and a look of dismay on Miss. Goodwins’ face…then a vacant expression followed by a smile, which finally developed into a giggle. Having thus relieved herself, the ideas came readily and she discoursed at some length on peace among nations, parties, and individuals.”7

  Debates were also held, and Katherine triumphed in a debate on deception. Richard Maurer, in The Wright Sister, explains that “her assignment was to argue that deception is sometimes justified. She won by citing examples, probably the white lie variety from her own experience.”8 Of course, she would take this to high art when Arthur Cunningham, captain of the baseball team and a young scholar, proposed to her. Their engagement drifted for two years until Katherine broke it off. Arthur was apparently relieved, and Katherine was, too, as she had not told her father. The fact that she didn't tell her own father speaks volumes about their relationship. To marry would betray the bishop, who had made her his own unofficial housekeeper, if not wife. He would never know, and Katherine would later refer to her “narrow escape,”9 but she said she was “unhappy for several years all the time glad [at] what I had done but brokenhearted over a great ideal with me.”10

  Marriage was an ideal she carried, but the reality was not for her. Upon graduation, Margaret took a teaching position in Canal Dover, Ohio, while Katherine began substitute teaching at Steele High School and moved back in the family home. The two friends would keep up with each other through letters, and in 1904 Katherine would travel to the World's Fair and stay several weeks with Margaret. Margaret's husband seems to have not been around. Outside of her father and brothers, Katherine Wright's primary relationships were with women, and one cannot help but think that Margaret might have been more than a friend.

  The account of this trip is one of weeks of exploration: “We walked through the Transportation and Machinery buildings and through one corner of the varied industries,” Katherine wrote her father.11 They sampled “German, Italian, and other foreign foods along with several new dishes developed especially for the fair: iced tea, ice cream cones, hot dogs, and a spun sugar confection called fairy floss later known as cotton candy.”12

  Katherine eventually returned to Dayton and her part-time teaching duties. This intrigued Wilbur and filled him with more angst at the time. Katherine had taken the road he had missed in his three-year depression, and now she was going to take up the vocation he had held out for himself. This must have made the drifting young man more unsure of himself. His younger sister had eclipsed him while he worked on bicycles and mooned about building a flying machine. Wilbur desperately wanted to make his way in the world, and getting on the train to Kitty Hawk must have been a great relief in one sense. At the very least, he had a sense of purpose.

  Even at the juncture where Wilbur had left for Kitty Hawk, one could make a case that he was still drifting. Here was a man who had gone into business with his brother, built a glider over their store, and then went down to a godforsaken stretch of land on the coast to fly it. This would be akin to someone building a rocket today to fly to the moon. It was a fantastical ambition to which few, if anyone, could relate. Only a true loner, a misanthrope with extraordinary powers of concentration, could wall out the dissenting voices. Was he not just wasting his time? He still lived at home in his thirties with his father, and he had not even graduated high school. He had no formal training in anything except for being able to build a bicycle. He did not date and didn't look to have any interest in women. From the outside, it would look like Wilbur Wright was on the verge of becoming a failure in the basic game of life. If he did not solve the problem of flight, it would be another failure in a list of failures. And though the bicycle business was still going along, Wilbur had already moved on intellectually. For him there was only one way out, and that was to crack the code of flight down in the hot sands of Kitty Hawk. Orville would happily return to the bike shop and be satisfied if their experiment failed. Wilbur would return to intellectual exile and face the fate of a man who could not find his place in the world. The only way out for Wilbur Wright was to fly.

  But to Katherine they were her brothers to serve, and even as she took a job at the Steele High School, she also had to run the bicycle business and act as intermediary between the brothers and their father. Later historians would refer to her as “the third Wright brother” for her support function. It is hard to know to what degree she was a third Wright brother, but she did serve as a conduit between Milton and his sons, keeping him up on what they were doing. “Orv went south Monday evening to join Will,” she wrote Milton on September 26, 1900.13 “They got a tent and will camp after Orv gets there which will be tomorrow morning. They can't even buy tea or sugar at Kitty Hawk, so Orv took a supply along. They also took cots and Orv took your trunk. We put your things all in the old trunk. I loaned my trunk to Will. I was glad to get Orv off. He had worked so hard was so run down. They never had a trip since the World's Fair…. They had a hard time getting anyone to look after the shop and do the repairing…. Lorin and I are the managers.”

  So, while starting out in her first job as a teacher, Katherine now had to run her brothers’ bicycle business and navigate a garrulous father who had just learned that his two sons had gone down to the ends of the earth to fly a machine Wilbur built over the bicycle shop. Milton was just enough of a misanthrope himself to take it all in stride. Nineteenth-century people were used to the paradigm of starting businesses and failing. It was part of a growing economy, and, besides, he was not home to tell his sons they were crazy. He received letters from Wilbur and little reports from Katherine: “I have not heard from the boys since last Friday which was before Orv had got to Kitty Hawk. Probably the mail goes out but once a week. I never did hear of such an out of the way place.”14

  These were the letters Milton was getting as he warred with his own church while his daughter ran his sons’ business, taught school, and fulfilled her role as matriarch of the household. Orville instructed her from afar in Kitty Hawk: “I got your telegram yesterday announcing the dismissal of Dillon. I rather expected he would not do. I telegraphed you in reply to the sundries of the E. H. Hall Co., Rochester, N.Y. The catalogue is at the store and the price list at home in the bureau drawer. When you get the bill of goods you order, remit at once by draft, deducting 5% for cash…. If there is anything needed which you cannot wait for, go to Forrer and Schaeffer 22 E. Second.”15

  Katherine had her hands full. In time, people would point to the Wright sister as a support person who made the invention of flight possible by taking care of the home, running their business, and keeping their father occupied. Orville Wright in 1924 would nip that one in the bud as well: “Katherine was a loyal sister who had great confidence in her brothers, and [when] we said we would fly she believed we would. But she never contributed anything either in money or mathematics.”16

  Orville was a man of his time, and he had the view that women could not do much more than teach or nurse. Complicating this was his own bizarre, complex relationship with the opposite sex, which at the time, in public at least, did
not seem to exist. It is still curious that historians have taken the absolute lack of a sex life for either brother as perfectly normal. But certainly, they were men with normal sex drives, and the total lack of relationships of any kind is odd, if not improbable.

  Add to this Orville's rage at his sister marrying twenty years down the line, and there are more questions than answers. To even hint that the Wright brothers or their sister were gay seems blasphemous against the biblical account of three individuals who seemed to operate in an asexual world deemed by their father as the only type of existence worth having. Of course, the bishop enjoyed a sex life with his own wife, but what was good for the bishop was not good for his children.

  And so, we circle back around to Orville's reply to people who saw Katherine as having a role in the development of flight, if only a supporting one. Some even suggested she had funded the brothers. Orville was firm in saying that they never took any funds from their sister and she had nothing to do with the science of flying. One could make the case in 1900 that neither did Orville.

  It was damn hot walking along the beach road with their glider. Almost 100 degrees, with high humidity. Two men in dark wool coats sweated silently, making their way down the sandy road toward the large dunes. They had to get their kite to a higher point, and that meant walking the four miles to Kill Devil Hills with their glider in tow, along with William Tate. Wilbur Wright was suffering for his dream, but it had been that way ever since he boarded Israel Perry's schooner and headed into the unknown.