“Fred Kelly had triumphed. Perhaps because of his assistance in settling the Smithsonian dispute, perhaps simply out of friendship.”2 The Wright Flyer had been in London for fifteen years. It was now in deep storage in the small town of Corsham. There was a fear that the 1903 Flyer might not survive the war, and Abbott had grown weary. Kelly said he would get the Flyer back. Just give him a statement that contained both a list of differences between the 1903 aerodrome and the 1914 machine flown at Hammondsport and a disavowal of the 1914 Zahm report. The statement appeared October 24, 1942, in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. An explanatory message preceded the statement:
This paper has been submitted to Orville Wright and under the date of October 8, 1942, he states that the paper as now prepared will be acceptable to him if given adequate publication.3
The fight was over. The Smithsonian had recognized that only one plane was capable of flying in 1903, and that was the Flyer that had left the sands of Kill Devil Hills. Orville quietly took steps to ensure that the plane would come back to the United States. In his new will, he wrote a letter in which he stated: “I give and bequeath to the U.S. National Museum of Washington DC; for exhibition in the national capitol only, the Wright airplane (now in the Science Museum, London, England) which flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on the 17th of December 1903.”4 Then he gave the letter to Mabel Beck.
Kelly looked at his typewriter. He and Orville had known each other for almost thirty years now, and it was time to get this book out there. He just had a few more questions for him. He wanted to make sure Orville came across as important as Wilbur did, and that was tricky. Wilbur was the power player and Orville was the little brother. He would never say that to Orville, of course. The man had done very well and was wealthy and respected worldwide. He was the Wright brothers. Wilbur had been dead for thirty years, so it had to be that Orville invented the plane as much as did Wilbur. It was fortuitous for the surviving brother. They were fifty-fifty on the invention of flight. Kelly knew there was no one around to say otherwise, and his book would set the record straight for all time. Orville was very smart, and he had a lot of inventions to his name, but this plane business was something else altogether.
Somebody had to have a vision, a drive that came from something other than sheer brilliance. No, this was not just some inventor who cracked flight. This was a man charged with destiny who saw things other men had not. Kelly had not seen the letters between Wilbur and Chanute. But he knew Wilbur was way beyond most people. But he was gone and, somehow, Kelly had to get Orville right in the middle of the whole thing.
Kelly wondered if there was something down at Kitty Hawk that had happened. Maybe some sort of epiphany, something only Orville could claim. Something to do with Kitty Hawk where the plane was invented. Something like: he woke up and, bam, he saw the light. That would make a good scene and would put him on equal footing with his brother. Orville did say something about the tail or rudder or whatever it was…he would ask him about that later.
Orville Wright finally approved Fred Kelly's manuscript. As Tom Crouch says in The Bishop's Boys, “It was not what Wilbur hoped for but it did tell the story in a relatively straightforward fashion.”5 On May 13, 1943, The Wright Brothers: A Biography Authorized by Orville Wright was released.6
Orville hated to speak publicly. He would let Wilbur do that, but his brother had been gone thirty-one years. The feud with the Smithsonian was now supposedly over, and the 1903 Flyer was coming back to the States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was to announce the Flyer's return. It was an American triumph in a year when the war was not going badly. Orville had been assured that the Flyer was perfectly safe down in underground storage. Orville had thought more than once about the irony of the Germans trying to destroy his plane with his planes. He viewed all planes as his. They all used his technology. It didn't matter what the courts or the government said, those bombers were flying with his rudders, his ailerons, his elevators.
And now they wanted him to speak after the president announced that the Flyer was to be returned; but the president couldn't come, and they had sent Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones to make the announcement. Orville waited patiently and looked at his watch. He listened to Jones drone on and talk about the return of his plane. Orville sat perfectly still and waited. He was to give the Collier Trophy to General Arnold. Jones finished up his message from the president: “In closing I can think of only one additional tribute to General Arnold. Will you please ask Orville Wright the great teacher, to act for me in handing the Collier Trophy to General Arnold the great pupil.”1 Orville stood up as Jones stepped aside and motioned him to the microphone. It was a national broadcast. People coast to coast leaned close to their radios to hear the voice of Orville Wright. He was a man of legend by now. Orville pressed his lips together and took the trophy from Secretary Jones. The room was silent. Everyone was waiting. Orville Wright was about to speak. The room waited. Secretary Jones waited. General Arnold waited. Orville stood with the trophy in front of the microphone. Control rooms all over the country checked their sound levels. Had the feed gone dead? This was dead air. A horror in radio. But, no, the feed was good. It was just that Orville Wright was standing in front of the microphone, not speaking.2
Orville then moved toward General Arnold. Better to be done with all of this. He hated dinners. He hated ceremonies. He did not like to be around people he did not know. The radio announcer who had been orchestrating the night swung into action. He told the radio audience that the great Orville Wright was now handing the trophy to General Arnold. Arnold took the trophy and then said to the radio audience that there was no one else he would rather receive a trophy from than Orville Wright. Orville nodded stiffly and took his seat. “Orville vowed he would never attend another official dinner in Washington.”3 He crossed his legs. He still hated the Smithsonian. He still hated Glenn Curtiss. Curtiss had killed his brother. The Flyer could stay in London, for all he cared. He knew they couldn't move it until the war was over anyway. He could be dead by then for all he knew.
He would be.
Mabel Beck read in her bed and looked over at her bed stand. The clock ticked. She was now fifty-eight years old, and she heard the freight train down by the station. It was almost nine at night. Mabel looked at the silver-framed picture. Orville Wright was there. He would be there when she went to sleep and when she first awoke. She had kept all his letters and would carefully hide them away in the nook over the stairwell. She had the memories of her life with the man she loved, and she had the letters he had written to her for safekeeping. The nephews who were the executors of the estate of Orville Wright kept calling, but she just hung up on them.
They wanted the letter. Well, she hoped they could find it. Mabel would never help those men. They had all turned against Orville when he was alive, and now they wanted to get their grubby, mendacious hands on his last bequest. She lived alone with her sister, and nobody moved anything.
Judge Love of the probate court would have none of this. He had ordered Harold Miller, executor of the Wright estate, to get the letter. The entire history of aviation now resided with this tight-lipped, brusque woman who since Orville's death had stayed in her home and saw no one. Mabel was used to turning people down. She had met Lindbergh when he had come to see Orville a month after he had flown across the Atlantic. She had been there in the laboratory when he told Orville about how his wings were icing up over the Atlantic when he was twenty-five and it was 1927 and his plane was whining in the fog. He went lower and lower until he was skimming the tops of the waves. The ice began to melt off the wings, but he could barely keep his eyes open. He said he was flying with a compass, heading due east and hoping to stumble onto Europe, if he didn't end up in the icy Atlantic. He said when he took off, he had barely cleared the telephone wires with his heavy, fuel-laden plane.
Mabel had wondered how Orville appeared to the Lone Eagle. Lindbergh had driven with Orville to his home. Lindbergh was just one year o
ld when these two brothers went to Kitty Hawk and solved the riddle of flight that allowed him to stretch man's grasp of the air across the ocean. People were already gathering on the lawn of Orville's mansion when they heard that Lindbergh had come to visit him. It was fitting that he should visit the surviving inventor of the plane. Mabel imagined that Orville seemed more like a lord to the young flier than merely a man who had stretched the boundaries of human existence by cracking the code of flight.
More people were on the lawn, and some had come up on the porch. Years later, Orville Wright's sister-in-law Ivonette recalled the pandemonium of Lindbergh's visit to her brother: “Soon the front lawn was crowded, then the side lawns and hillside at the back. It was not a crowd but a mob, pushing and shoving, trampling the flower beds and bushes, climbing trees, all clamoring for a look at Lindbergh. When the people came up on the porch, the occupants of the house took refuge on the second floor. But the mob persisted, demanding at least of a glimpse of their hero.”1
Orville approached Lindbergh and asked him if he would mind stepping out and waving to the crowd. Lindbergh had made a promise to financial backers for no more appearances, but he gave in when Orville expressed concern that the mob might enter the house. The two men stepped out on a portico and waved. People marveled at how tall and slim Lindbergh was, and how short Orville Wright was in comparison. The two men then stepped back inside, and Lindbergh left in a chauffeur-driven car.
The phone was ringing. Mabel put down her book. God. Who invented it, anyway? Alexander Graham Bell. Another man who would never get the time of day from her if he had been alive. One of the many who had turned against her lover, her totem, her raison d’être. And now the phone. The phone. So many had called after the death of Mr. Wright. It was ghastly. The family had come to pick his bones now that he was dead. She had made it her life's work to keep those selfish relations away from Orville. The family probably was working for the Smithsonian people who wanted the plane back, and they were the ones who had caused Mr. Wright's death with their duplicity, their lies, and their treachery. Mr. Wright had been correct in sending the Flyer to London. He had told her to ship it off, and she had made the arrangements. It was safe in a place where they respected what he and his brother had done. Not like these American men of greed and lies.
Ms. Beck hung up. She took pleasure in the squawk, and then the phone rang again. Boys and men were all the same to her. She picked up the receiver and dropped it again. Ms. Beck rubbed her hands together, sat down, and picked up her knitting. They wanted the letter. It was valuable. Just like the letter she had received from Teddy Roosevelt congratulating Orville on his plane after he had flown in a Wright plane in 1910 with pilot Arch Hoxsey. “Bully!” is what he said when he landed. “Bully!”2
Mabel smoothed the covers. The bedside clock ticked. Where did time go? She glanced at the picture of Orville Wright, then turned out the light. Mabel Beck pulled the covers up to her shoulders and looked at the picture. The silver frame glowed in the moonlight; the man with the bushy mustache smiled through the darkness.
“Goodnight, dear,” she murmured.
The story of the Wright brothers put forth by Fred Kelly in his authorized biography is in some ways much better than the real one. In Kelly's story, the brothers are one and the same. Both are creative, inventive men who took on the challenge of flight and in perfect synchronicity produced a synthesis of mechanical engineering, physics, aeronautical restructuring, testing, innovating, and inventing—all with equal input and equal epiphanies—and at the other end a plane emerged that was able to ascend to the sky. Manned flight was solved down in the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk.
As a writer, I appreciate a good story, and the mythology generated by this story is massive. The kids’ books alone are a cottage industry. The two brothers in their collars and ties and their Ohio values, executing the best of Yankee inventiveness, perseverance, stick-to-itiveness, grit, and tenacity, with a touch of genius sprinkled liberally. It is an American story, a team story. A team of brothers who put their heads together. And what emerged was American values we can all recognize. The bishop father and supportive sister fill out the perfect ensemble cast.
A psychopath knocking out Wilbur's teeth and sending him into a three-year-long spiraling depression does not go along with this story. Orville as a myopic man who was mechanically inclined and who was inventive in his own right but did not have the vision for tackling the problem of flight does not help the story either. A man who did not fit into the world of business, in a bike shop, in a print shop, in college, even in high school is more problematic for the plot line. Two men who never had a sexual encounter with the opposite sex for most of their lives and lived with their sister and father their whole adult lives—that doesn't fit either. None of this would have made it past the Orville Board of Censorship that Fred Kelly had to deal with on every page. Certainly, the real story of Mabel Beck and Orville would have been a deal killer.
The malcontent, the misanthrope, the silent, brooding genius who found a kindred spirt in a brilliant engineer named Octave Chanute and began to crack the science of aeronautics in long polemics going over the known data and then questioning everything also would not give us the same warm fuzzies as the image of the jolly brothers building planes in the bike shop with knowledge pulled out of thin air. The Octave Chanute letters that are in the papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright offered the homeschooling that Wilbur never had. It is the online crash course of 1900 that began with the literature received from the Smithsonian (which would provide great irony later on).
The lone wolf trying to decipher what no one else could is a modern story we are familiar with—whether it be Edison, Bell, Ford, or Mozart. These are all men of genius who blazed new trails and were later recognized. Yes, there are epiphanic moments in teamwork, but someone must lead, someone must have an eye on the bit of stardust that falls down through the heavens on the cold, dark night but inspires and enlightens. Vision is singular, and Orville did not have that vision until his brother pulled him in; and, as late as 1902, he had not flown any of the planes, and he was never pulled into the Wilbur/Chanute seminars.
It was no accident that Wilbur was the one who published his findings at Kitty Hawk and spoke to the engineers in Chicago. He did this twice. One would think the second go-round would belong to Orville, if we are to go with the Fred Kelly version of events. That would be only fair. But it was Wilbur who presented, Wilbur who was questioned, and Wilbur who was invited by Octave Chanute to give the presentation in the first place.
Orville was perfectly satisfied operating in the bicycle business. He would have been fine with never going to Kitty Hawk to fly a contraption like a kite and then watch his brother fly above him. In fact, he did not go the very first time—Wilbur did. Wilbur went down there alone; and he went alone to find out whether it would be suitable to fly. Wilbur flew the glider in Dayton, alone, before he left. It was never Orville's quest; it was Wilbur's quest to fly, and this makes all the difference. The difference between them was as much as between the pilot and the mechanic. Orville would not fly a glider until 1902; and, even then, it was infrequently, with several flights resulting in crashes and then eventually one fatality in 1906. Wilbur never had a serious crash.
The Wright family culture, as dictated by Bishop Wright, makes this all a blasphemy. He saw the world as evil and full of temptation. He pointed to his older sons as evidence of the difficulty and the duplicity of the world. He made sure Orville, Wilbur, and Katherine would be there when he returned from his travels. There must be a united front against the world, and this demanded plurality, lest one of the corrupted sneaks in. He would slip up and let his true feelings be known, such as when he pointed out the cruelty that Orville and Katherine were expendable but that Wilbur had the gift and he must take no risks.
The gift was simply vision. Somewhere in the three years of reading and nursing his mother as she slowly died, he had a vison that something else lay out there f
or him. Not business. Not college. Not art. But a unique destiny suited for him—and that dictated his drive and his unfailing focus. He would solve flight. No one else would do so. He would give his brother credit with his clumsy “we” that quickly began to appear in his writings after 1901, but he also would reveal what he really thought when Orville could not hit the mark and justify his part of that plurality.
Orville had two serious crashes: in one, he escaped injury; but in the other, he did not, and it resulted in a fatality. The first was at Kitty Hawk, and the second was in Washington. On both occasions, Wilbur conceded that it was not a mechanical problem but a fault of the operator. On the second serious crash, Wilbur even went so far to say that if he had flown with the army captain instead, the crash would not have occurred. We see his frustration, at times, with having to share his determined quest with his brother. On something like shipping the Flyer, he was so hard on his brother that their sister had to ask him to back off.
None of this would play well in the Kelly version of events that set the tone for all historians to follow. It is amazing how this narrative has survived intact, right up to the latest biographies. The truth is that Wilbur was the primary inventor and pilot. His brother assisted him in many steps, but it was Wilbur who set up the wind-tunnel tables, and it was Wilbur who gave this groundbreaking data to Chanute to catalog. It was Wilbur who developed the concept of wing warping and then showed it to his brother, which led to modern ailerons on planes. It was Wilbur who would finally break with his mentor, Octave Chanute.
The discrepancy between the two brothers was so clear that Kelly needed something to put Orville front and center in the “invention process.” The winged rudder was the perfect story to make him part of the holy creative process of the plane. The suspicion that Orville might have been just a glorified mechanic assisting his older, smarter, genius brother has haunted the history of the Wright brothers and nibbled at the edges of the kids’ books, biographies, movies, CDs, stories, and even Wikipedia. There is something there that seeps out between the Kelly story of the midnight, coffee-induced epiphany and the fact that Orville was on the plane when John Daniels snapped the picture.
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