But the Wrights, with their stubborn independence, would never be rigid adherents of any party. They argued that the time had come to forget the old war-related issues on which the Republicans had first come to power, to “bury the bloody shirt,” cease “eulogizing the war,” and face the future. Wilbur wrote some of his strongest editorials in support of issues that would eventually be espoused by the Democrats. He argued the cause of woman suffrage, and opposed the jingoists who favored the expansion of American power and influence overseas. The Mexican War remained a great stain on the American escutcheon—“Another such blot shall not soil her fair name.”
In gauging the fitness of a politician for office, the Wrights believed that honesty and personal morality were far more important than a man’s party, or his stand on any particular issue. By that measure, James G. Blaine, the “plumed knight” who had been the Republican standardbearer in 1884, was not “a Presidential possibility.” Blaine, as one contemporary noted, “had wallowed in spoils like a rhinoceros in an African pool.”
The brothers had an opportunity to examine two leading Republican candidates in the fall of 1891, when Joseph Benson (“Fire Alarm Joe”) Foraker (two-term governor of Ohio and future U.S. senator) and William McKinley (Ohio governor and future President) visited Dayton. They disagreed with almost every aspect of McKinley’s program. Still, as twenty-year-old Orville remarked to his father, he “looks like an honest man.” It was the highest compliment they could pay a politician, and overrode any compunction they might have about his platform.
Foraker’s speech was humorous, “and enjoyed more by the crowd than McKinley’s,” but the brothers were not impressed. “A few minutes look at Foraker and I left,” Orville wrote to his father. “If he is an honest man he ought to sue his face.”9
By any standard, The Evening Item was a good local paper. Unfortunately, the Wrights were financially ill-prepared to battle for a niche in the highly competitive city newspaper market. In the spring of 1890, Dayton boasted twelve newspapers, the largest of which, the Herald and the Journal, had invested in the new high-speed presses that enabled them to produce thick, illustrated editions complete with advertising supplements, special features for Mom and the kids, and a sports section for Dad.
Wilbur and Orville did not expect to make their fortunes in journalism, but neither could they afford to lose their shirts. They had launched the Item with very little capital, and had no savings to invest. Their father, living on a reduced salary until the new church was functioning properly, could not offer much help. Any loss would mean going into debt, a prospect that was anathema to the Wrights. They had lost their gamble. The last issue of The Evening Item appeared in August 1890, less than four months after start of publication.
The brothers returned to the far less risky business of operating a job printing plant. The firm of Wright & Wright prospered to a modest extent, catering to the printing needs of West Side merchants. They gave up their office at 1210 West Third, transferring operations to a second-floor room in the Hoover Block, a building on the corner of Third and Williams only a block and a half from Hawthorn Street.
Wright & Wright published a wide variety of materials, ranging from church, club, and association directories to the annual reports that state agencies required of local savings and loans, programs for school and YMCA functions, posters, and the usual line of business cards and letterhead. Several times a year they put together special holiday shoppers for local merchants. “Thanksgiving Tid-Bits,” issued in October 1891, was typical, containing announcements of various sales and specials “enlivened” with a string of feeble jokes and riddles.
“What animal falls from the clouds? Rain Deer.”
“What is worse than raining pitchforks? Hailing Omnibuses.”10
The brothers were involved in one other failed newspaper venture. Late in 1890, Paul Laurence Dunbar, an old classmate of Orville’s at Central High, launched a paper aimed at Dayton’s black community, The Tattler. Born in Dayton on June 27, 1872, the son of freed slaves, Dunbar was the only black member of the class. He became class poet, editor of the High School Times, and president of the Philomatheon Society, the school debating club. Like Orville, Dunbar dropped out of school during 1889–90, but returned the following year to graduate. He had always been far more a leader than Orville.
Dunbar, who had grown up on the West Side, had known Orville since childhood. Many years later Orville said that they had been “close friends in our school days and in the years immediately following.” Dunbar had contributed poetry to the West Side News as early as March 1889, and continued to publish in that paper and its successor until the summer of 1890. Legend has it that he was working in the back room of the print shop with Orville one day and scratched four lines of doggerel on the wall:
Orville Wright is out of sight
In the printing business.
No other mind is half as bright
As his’n is.11
Dunbar’s idea of a paper for the black community was almost certainly inspired by the fact that he had a friend in the printing business. Wilbur and Orville published the early issues on credit, obviously hoping that the black community would prove more receptive to Dunbar than West Dayton had to them. “We published it as long as our financial resources permitted,” Orville later recalled. “Which was not very long.” Only three issues of The Tattler are known to have been printed. The most interesting thing about the short-lived paper was an article in the first issue. Headlined “Airship Soon to Fly,” it dealt with the efforts of a Chicagoan, E. J. Pennington, to fly a dirigible airship.
Two young bachelors still living at home did not require a great deal of money. As they scrambled to establish themselves as printers and publishers, they were also working out the boundaries of their own relationship. It was not always an easy task. Orville, who had drawn his brother into the printing business, occasionally sensed that he was being treated more as a younger brother than as full partner. There were times, as in the summer of 1892, when he felt the need to assert himself.
That July, Wilbur and Orville had agreed to design and build a new Wright press for another printing firm, Matthews & Light. Then Lorin presented the brothers with a rush contract for a United Brethren printing job. They decided that Wilbur should continue work on the press while Orville returned to the shop to fulfill the church contract. All proceeds were to be evenly divided.
A few weeks later, Orville felt that his half of the bargain involved more work, and insisted that Wilbur set construction of the press aside and join him in printing and binding the church pamphlets. Anxious to appease his brother, Wilbur agreed. Still dissatisfied, Orville then insisted on a complete renegotiation of their agreement. Exasperated, Wilbur drew up a mock “brief” for presentation to the “Circuit Court of 7 Hawthorn St.”
The complaint was couched as a broad, humorous parody of a legal document, but the depth of ill-feeling on both sides was apparent. The plaintiff, Wilbur, alleged that his brother had “exhausted his vocabulary … in order to insult the plaintiff.” To please him, Wilbur had stopped working on the press and performed “girls work” at the shop, “although said defendant [Orville] well knew that the pay for such work was but small and that said plaintiff, being unfamiliar with such work, would be able to accomplish little.” Orville was aware that time away from the press would mean a financial loss to the firm, and had intended the arrangement solely “as an insult.” Wilbur had humored his brother only “for the sake of peace in said firm.” The demand for a new split of the profits was the last straw.
Plaintiff further states that while, as a member of said firm, he is willing to stand his share of the expense entailed upon said firm for the gratification of the pleasure of said defendant alone, nevertheless, he is not willing that the defendant should have all the fun and said plaintiff all the expense.
Plaintiff further says that he was first insulted, then cheated, and then accused of having a dishonest and tricky busin
ess character….
Wilbur petitioned the “court” for a decision as to an equitable distribution of the money earned on both jobs, as well as an order directing Orville to “apologize for his insulting conduct, and requesting him to keep his mouth shut in future, lest he should again be guilty of befouling the spotless and innocent character of others.”12
No record of the results has survived, but the episode offers fascinating insight into the relationship between the two brothers.
The use of humor to defuse a potentially difficult situation was a family characteristic. Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine each possessed an extraordinary sense of humor. Laughter, particularly if it was the result of an “inside joke,” would offer a release from a great many personal disagreements over the years.
There is no escaping the fact that the Wrights were a litigious family. The children had grown up in the midst of an extended debate over the central meaning of the frame of church government. Their father was a superb parliamentarian who enjoyed nothing more than a good argument. From 1889 to 1900 the conduct of a series of intricate church-related lawsuits became a part of their daily lives. Wilbur, in particular, was heavily involved in the preparation of real legal briefs supporting the Old Constitution position. After 1902, Milton—and through him his children—was to become embroiled in yet another church legal controversy that would ultimately lead to the bishop’s retirement.
The Wrights were firm believers in the rule of law. The courts existed to protect the rights of the innocent. Small wonder that Wilbur later received high marks as an effective witness during the airplane patent suits of 1910–12; he was drawing on a lifelong familiarity with the law.
Finally, Wilbur and Orville were men who took great delight in arguing with one another. “I love to scrap with Orv,” Wilbur once remarked. “Orv is such a good scrapper.”13 In time, they would learn to argue in a more effective way, tossing ideas back and forth in a kind of verbal shorthand until a kernel of truth began to emerge. Their ability to argue through to the solution of a problem would prove very useful to them. It was but one of the important elements of an enormously successful partnership that was fully launched by the late summer of 1892.
chapter 8
BICYCLES BUILT BY TWO
1892~1896
Wilbur and Orville had the house to themselves for most of September and October 1892. The bishop was on the road, and Katharine, who had graduated from Central High School in June, was enjoying an extended visit with Reuch, Lulu, and the children in Kansas City.
“We have been living fine since you left,” Wilbur assured his sister on September 18.
Orville cooks one week and I cook the next. Orville’s week we have bread and butter and meat and gravy and coffee three times a day. My week I give him more variety. You see that by the end of his week there is a big lot of cold meat stored up, so the first half of my week we have bread and butter and “hash” and coffee, and the last half we have bread and butter and eggs and sweet potatoes and coffee. We don’t fuss a bit about whose week it is to cook. Perhaps the reason is evident. If Mrs. Jack Spratt had undertaken to cook all fat, I guess Jack wouldn’t have kicked on cooking every other week either.1
The time alone gave the brothers an opportunity to resolve their recent squabble and to discuss business in general. Wilbur had little interest in the print shop. With the collapse of his editorial responsibility for The West Side News and The Evening Item, there was not much work for him to do. That was the root cause of their disagreement that summer.
Orville, too, was discovering that a printer’s life was not all he had hoped. With the job printing facility up and running, Ed Sines handled most of the day-to-day work. Like his brother, Orville was bored and looking for a new challenge. They began to cast about for a business enterprise that could be run in addition to the print shop—something that would provide a supplementary income, hold their interest, and allow them to exercise their joint talents.
The talk between them flowed most easily when they were peddling along one of the back roads leading out of Dayton. Orville had splurged and bought a new Columbia “safety” bicycle for $160 early that spring. A few weeks later, Wilbur, ever the more cautious of the two, invested $80 in a used Columbia. By fall, cycling had become a shared passion.
“We had a good rain Tuesday,” Wilbur told Katharine in his same letter of September 18, “and the roads were good for bicycling.” That Thursday, unable to resist temptation any longer, they locked up the print shop at four-fifteen in the afternoon and rode south out of town on the Cincinnati Pike, bound for the great Indian mound at Miamisburg, 25 miles away. In no particular hurry, they indulged in several quick laps around the dirt track at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds.2
By five o’clock they were back on the Pike, struggling up a hill that seemed to go on forever. “We climbed and then we ‘dumb’ and then we climbed again,” as Wilbur put it. He asked a farmer mowing hay in a neighboring field if they were not “getting nearly to the top of the world.” The man responded by pointing to the summit of a “mountain” three quarters of a mile farther on. “Centerville,” he told them, “is the highest point in the county.”
Riding into Centerville, the Wrights confronted a bit of their own heritage—the lovely two-story brick dwelling where their great-uncle Asahel had run a store from 1816 until 1826. By the time they reached the mound and started for home, “it was so dark we could hardly see the road.” Undeterred, they raced along through the night, “more by feeling than seeing,” following the two light streaks on the road where wagon wheels had rolled the gravel smooth. Disaster was narrowly averted when a loaded farm cart suddenly appeared in their path. “This experience set Orville’s imagination (always active, as you know) to work,” commented Wilbur. “Pretty soon he clapped on brakes and nearly threw himself from his ‘bike’ to keep himself from running down a hill into a wagon just crossing a little bridge. When he came to the place he found no hill, no bridge, and no wagon, only a little damp place in the road which showed up black in the night.”3
By 1892, the “merry wheel” had become a national craze. Journalists touted the bicycle as a “boon to all mankind,” a “national necessity,” and a “force that has within it almost the power of a social revolution.” The Smithsonian scientist WJ McGee, assessing “Fifty Years of American Science” for the readers of The Atlantic Monthly in 1896, termed the bicycle “one of the world’s great inventions.” The Detroit Tribune went a step further, predicting history would prove that “the invention of the bicycle was the greatest event of the nineteenth century.”4 And the authorities who prepared the Census of 1890 insisted: “Few articles created by man have created so great a revolution in social conditions.”5
The invention that was to exercise such influence on American society and technology was launched as a business in 1878, when Colonel Albert Pope began producing high-wheel “ordinaries” in the corner of a Hartford, Connecticut, sewing-machine factory. Sales were encouraging, but the appeal of such cycles was limited to athletic young men willing to risk life and limb in erratic flight through crowded city streets and down rutted country lanes. Wilbur had owned such a machine when he was in high school back in Richmond.
The introduction of the “safety” bicycle to the American market in 1887 marked the beginning of the genuine cycle era. With its two wheels of equal size, sturdy triangular frame, and trustworthy chain-drive system, the safety enabled an entire nation to taste the freedom of the road.
The industry enjoyed phenomenal growth. The number of manufacturers in the field climbed from 27 to 312 in only seven years; total production, estimated at 40,000 machines a year in 1890, reached a peak of 1.2 million by 1895. As the historian David Hounshell has noted, these figures add new meaning to the term “mass production.”6
The bicycle bridged the gap between the age of the horse and that of the automobile. It marked the first convergence of technologies crucial to automobile production, ranging from
electrical welding and work on ball-bearings to experience with chain and shaft transmission systems, metal-stamping technology, and the manufacture of rubber tires.
The millions of bicycles pouring out of American factories created an insatiable appetite for personal transportation. A young fellow could ride his bicycle back and forth to work six days a week quicker than the horse cars could carry him, then peddle out into the countryside for a Sunday outing with his best girl. He went where and when he pleased, under his own power and at his own speed.
The sheer exhilaration of cycling captivated a generation of Americans accustomed to the restraint of high, tight collars, ankle-length skirts, and corsets. Nothing in their experience could compare with the thrill of racing down a steep hill into the wind, and the newfound sense of personal independence was irresistible.
The bicycle craze swept through West Dayton in the fall of 1892. Ed Sines and some other neighborhood men bought the stock of a bicycle manufacturer who was going out of business. They organized a local cycle club, held races, and sponsored group excursions. Most of them also joined the YMCA Wheelmen, one of the great national cycling associations that sanctioned local races.
Wilbur preferred long country rides to track racing, but Orville fancied himself something of a “scorcher.” He won at least three races during this period; in later years, however, he would admit that his racing career had been less than spectacular. “You’ll never know how I used to envy you and some of the other fellows in those days,” he once said to his old friend and rival Peter Klinger. Why, Klinger asked, should the inventor of the airplane envy anyone? “If you’d eaten as much dust as I did,” Orville responded, “you’d know!”7
The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright Page 11