Of course, there was a price to be paid. Lieutenants Frank Stuart Patterson and Leroy Swann were killed in a DH-4 crash on June 19, 1918. Lieutenant Alexander Bliss II died while practicing for the 1924 Pulitzer Race. The wooden propeller of Captain Burt Skeel’s Curtiss racer shattered as he dived toward the starting line a few days later. Horrified spectators saw the machine burst apart in the air and fall to earth just outside the boundary of what had once been Huffman Prairie.
Most of the test flying was transferred to nearby Wright Field when that facility replaced old McCook in 1927. In an effort to avoid confusion, Wilbur Wright was renamed Patterson Field in 1931. The two bases were finally merged to form Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in January 1948.20
Like the previous owners, the U.S. Air Force has been hardpressed to find a use for the old Prairie. For many years it served as a safety zone beyond the officers’ club skeet range. Occasional proposals to turn the area into a bomb dump or an emergency pull-off ramp for aircraft that run into trouble out on the main runway have not been pursued.
They used to mow the Prairie regularly each summer. Local ecologists have convinced base officials to put a stop to that, and the area has gradually resumed its former appearance. There are plans to burn the field periodically, a process that will drive out intruding plant species and encourage the growth of indigenous native flora.
In the end, Huffman Prairie is the most appropriate of all monuments to the memory of Wilbur and Orville Wright—the spot where they first flew, preserved inviolate and surrounded by a giant research complex dedicated to the advancement of flight technology. A visit to the imposing granite shaft up on Wright Hill seems uninspiring compared with the opportunity to retrace their footsteps down here in the tall grass where it all began.
chapter 37
THE FINAL CHAPTER
1940~1948
For thirty years Orville Wright’s place of business was the plain brick building he had constructed on North Broadway. Visiting reporters found it quite ordinary. There was a reception area for Miss Beck; an inner office with Orville’s desk, files, and drawing table; and a large work area that ran across the back of the building. Orville referred to this room as his laboratory. In fact, with the exception of a large wind tunnel capable of testing models at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour, there was little to distinguish it from any other well-equipped machine shop.
Still, it was difficult to believe that the inventor of the airplane was not at work in his lab on some project that would eventually yield wonders for a grateful humanity. Orville summed it up in a story he told to his friend, Dayton clergyman Charles Seasholes. One morning while puttering around the shop he noticed two small boys peeking through an open window. One boy asked his companion what in the world Orville was doing. The other replied, with a note of derision in his voice: “Why, he’s inventing!”1
Orville had a great deal in common with those two boys. He did not pursue technology to make a fortune, improve the world, or earn immortal fame, although the airplane had accomplished all those things for him. The psychological complexity of Wilbur’s motives or the meticulous care with which Edison analyzed the market for a new device before launching into the development process were entirely foreign to him.
His interest in technological problem solving was that of a small boy blessed with insatiable curiosity and a childlike enthusiasm for all things mechanical. How did it work? What could be learned by taking it apart and putting it back together? How could it be improved? His choice of mechanical problems was inspired by that curiosity, and had little to do with social utility or corporate balance sheets.
Free of the necessity of earning a living or pleasing anyone but himself, Orville spent most of his time in the laboratory doing exactly what he wanted—tinkering. His forays with screwdriver and pliers occasionally led him astray. Having purchased a brand-new IBM electric typewriter for Miss Beck, nothing would do but to take it apart and see what made it tick. When Miss Beck looked in, she found him surrounded by a bewildering array of parts. An IBM serviceman summoned to the scene commented that he was paid to fix the machines, not to build them. He scooped up the parts and told Orville a new machine would be delivered from the factory.2
Ivonette Miller recalled another occasion on which he disassembled the regulator of a brand-new gas stove—“After that, it never did work right.” But for every failure there were a great many successes. Orville took particular pride in having repaired a complicated ship’s clock, a present from Griffith Brewer, after several leading Dayton jewelers told him the job was impossible.3
His reputation as a driver was not the best. “It was said that the police of Oakwood closed their eyes and held their breath until O.W. and another prominent Daytonian passed through on their way to their offices,” one relative noted. “The police didn’t feel they could arrest either one because of their prominence, so they kept their fingers crossed.”4
He customized his cars as carefully as he did his homes. Because of the old back injury, the bounce and jolt of travel caused him excruciating pain, so he had his automobiles fitted with a special system of heavy-duty shock absorbers. Grandnephew George Russell recalled the long drives from Dayton to Lambert Island in the comfort of Orville’s 1929 Pierce Arrow. “With everything loaded in the car, including Wilbur [sic-Orville] and myself, the car was steady as a rock. We never felt a bump.”5
Orville put in his share of time under the hood. Convinced that the carburetor of that same Pierce Arrow was malfunctioning, he drilled a series of holes. Then, discovering that he had only made the problem worse, he carefully filled each of the holes with a wooden plug.6
Orville Wright—the cobbler at his last—c. 1947.
He worked on a number of small-scale inventions, some of which, like an automatic transmission system, were intended to help the motorist. But for the most part there seems to have been little rhyme or reason to his inventive projects. He worked on whatever interested him at the moment.
For a time, he focused on the development of an automatic record changer. As one relative recalled:
He didn’t like the radio, but he wanted his phonograph to change records automatically. He’d pile up a lot of records and, consulting the chart with the names of the selections, he’d press a button to select one and eject another. I don’t remember whether he ever got it working right, but I do remember he came to our house asking us if we had any old records—he was breaking so many he was running out of supplies!7
The failure of the record changer provided members of the family with an opportunity to pay Orville back for some of the teasing they had endured over the years. Lorin’s nephew, Alfred “Peek” Andrews, remembers that “The whole family was having fun teasing him about the records he was breaking in attempting to perfect the apparatus. He enjoyed so much teasing all of us we were happy to have a chance to reciprocate.”8
The youngsters growing up in the house recalled that Wilbur and Orville had always been fascinated by toys. In telling the story of the invention of the airplane, Orville seldom failed to mention the toy helicopter that had sparked their curiosity in the first place.
When the nieces and nephews, now grown and with families of their own, gathered for Christmas at Hawthorn Hill in 1923, Orville had a new gadget to show them—a toy he remembered from his own childhood and thought a new generation of Wrights would enjoy.
“It was a contraption with a narrow base board about eighteen inches long,” Ivonette recalled.
On one end it had a spring board that could be put under tension and then be released by a trigger. It had a launching seat on it and a little wooden clown with wire hooks for arms. On the other end of the base was a revolving double trapeze with a counter balancing clown holding to the bottom side. When a similar clown was released from the spring board, it flew through the air and caught the top side of the trapeze to revolve.9
Adult members of the family were also intrigued by the Flips and Flops, as Orville called
his clowns. Ivonette’s husband, Harold Miller, saw them as a business opportunity. The president of a local savings and loan institution, Miller had recently invested in the Miami Wood Specialty Company, a small firm manufacturing novelty items. He asked Orville if he would consider allowing the company to manufacture the toy clowns.
That was all the encouragement Orville needed. He launched into a series of tests to determine the best angle for the seat, the ideal spring tension, and other details. He presented the results to Harold Miller and applied for a patent, the last he would ever be granted.
Miami Wood Specialties prospered. Lorin Wright eventually bought into the firm, making it something of a family venture. When the sales of Flips and Flops began to decline, the partners turned to advertising specialties, including small wooden gliders with the name of the client printed on them. Orville not only designed and built the small printing press used to apply the advertising, but produced the specialized equipment that cut the parts out of thin sheets of wood.
Such attention to small-scale projects might be considered an enormous step down for the man who had been a full partner in the invention of the airplane. But Orville was simply giving free rein to his unbounded mechanical curiosity. The carburetor, record changer, and Flips and Flops all help to clarify the working relationship that had existed between the two brothers.
Wilbur had been interested in systems, in the big picture. Orville was the one who could make it work. He thought in terms of particular mechanisms—the bits and pieces that went together to form the big picture. He was the one who had developed the printing press that surprised professional printers. The self-oiling bike hub had been his pride and joy. More significant, he had played a leading role in developing the wind tunnel and designing the all-important balances. He was a born inventor, whose fingers itched for a screwdriver and pliers.
There were those who thought that Orville should channel his efforts in more useful directions. Charles Lindbergh urged him to write an autobiography. Lindbergh, like others before him, found it “strange to look at this quiet, mild, gray-headed man and to realize that he is the one who flew the plane at Kitty Hawk on the December day….”10 The two men, who much admired one another, were frequently thrown together at NACA meetings. Lindbergh seldom lost an opportunity to encourage Orville to go to work on a book.
“He has talked of doing this for years,” he noted in his diary after a meeting with Orville in Washington in October 1939,
… but he has never started, as far as anyone knows, and he shows no indication of starting now. It is a tragedy, for Wright is getting well on in years, and no one else is able to tell the story as he can. It seems that Wright does not trust anyone else to tell it properly. The words and phrases people use in telling of the achievements of Orville Wright and his brother are never quite satisfactory and never of sufficiently comprehensive accuracy. Wright tells me that “no one else quite understands the spirit and conditions of those times.” What people say about them in articles is never “quite accurate.”11
Orville told Lindbergh that he might write such a book himself someday, but added that
he does not like to write and that he has not the ability to do it well. There are many writers who would be glad to do a book in co-operation with him, but the writers do not understand aviation well enough to suit him; he prefers a technical person. But when Ed Warner [a well-known aeronautical engineer and writer] once offered to take six months off from his work, to do a book with Wright, the offer was never accepted. And I am afraid the book will never be written, although I intend to talk to Wright about it again.12
At an NACA conference in Dayton only a month later, in November 1939, Lindbergh sat between Orville and Edward Warner at dinner. His attempts to raise the subject met “with no more success than before.”
Lindbergh tried to enlist others, including Vannevar Bush of MIT. Aware that Earl Findley was one of Orville’s oldest and closest friends, Lindbergh visited him in September 1940. Findley surprised Lindbergh by admitting that once, a quarter of a century before, he had written a biography of the Wright brothers. He fetched the manuscript out, explaining that Orville had rejected it as being too personal.
He had spent six months in the writing at a time when his finances were in a condition which made it very difficult to put the manuscript aside without publication. I could see that he had been badly hurt by the whole affair—so badly hurt that it was still somewhat painful to discuss the matter, even after the lapse of a quarter century. I think he was hurt even more by Wright’s feeling that the manuscript was unsatisfactory than by the loss of six months’ work.13
Lindbergh asked Findley if he would mind his raising the issue with Orville once more. Findley, with some reluctance, agreed.
Neither Lindbergh nor Findley was aware just how much Orville had disliked the manuscript when it was first submitted to him in 1915. It had been the occasion of his comment to Mabel Beck: “I would rather have the sciatica.”
Nor had Findley told Lindbergh the entire story. In preparing the manuscript, he had taken on a young partner, John R. McMahon. The two of them had traveled to Dayton, spent considerable time with the family, and been given limited access to the Wright papers. McMahon, who had more interest in publishing than in preserving a friendly relationship with Orville, stewed over the rebuff for fourteen years. Finally, in 1929, he submitted a rewritten version as a series of articles, “The Real Fathers of Flight,” to Popular Science Monthly. The following year he brought out a slightly altered version as a book, The Wright Brothers: Fathers of Flight.
Orville was outraged by what he regarded as McMahon’s treachery. Only a year before those articles appeared in Popular Science, Mitchell Charnley had published The Boys’ Life of the Wright Brothers, first as a series in the magazine American Boy, then as a book. Charnley had not contacted Orville, basing his account on the published writings of the brothers and news and magazine stories that had appeared over the years.
Both Charnley and McMahon steered away from any serious discussion of the technology, concentrating instead on the personalities of the brothers and their family life. Orville saw this as an unwarranted intrusion into his private life. In addition, he was appalled by what he regarded as an extraordinary number of errors in both books. Ever the technician, he insisted that a proper book on the work of the Wright brothers should focus only on the technology, and be absolutely free of error.
Following the appearance of McMahon’s articles, Orville pressured Findley to halt publication of the book. Findley, badly bruised by the rejection of the original manuscript, did his best to stop his one-time partner, but to no avail. Orville then contacted the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, and negotiated some changes. The most significant involved the relative importance of Wilbur’s hockey accident.
In Popular Science, McMahon had written:
… his athletic activity led to an accident without which the world would have no airplane today.
Orville’s negotiations resulted in an alteration that read:
… his athletic activity led to an accident that was not less than fateful, at least this is a statement of high probability.14
One subsequent biographer, John Evangelist Walsh, has argued that Orville feared the original passage would reveal that the invention of the airplane was rooted in Wilbur’s state of mind, thus reducing his own role. It is far more likely that Orville simply refused to probe the psychological forces that had driven his brother. What they had accomplished was important. Why they had done it was beyond knowing.
In spite of the changes, Orville’s disgust with the book was deep and unrelenting. Soon after publication he received a copy from a distant relative asking him to autograph it as a souvenir for her daughter. He refused, keeping the book and sending an autographed photo of the first flight instead, along with an impassioned letter on the evils of John McMahon and his book.
Lindbergh eventually gave up on Orville and the autobiography.
He encouraged Findley to give his manuscript to a library where it could remain sealed until the principals were dead.
Fred C. Kelly was not so easily discouraged. Like Findley, he had first met Orville as a young reporter a quarter of a century before. Kelly had actually been working as a newsman in Xenia at the time of the flights at Huffman Prairie in 1904–05, although he did not then know the Wrights. A free-lance writer and columnist, he published his first interview with Orville, “Flying Machines and the War,” in the July 5, 1915, issue of Collier’s.
Kelly’s sense of humor and way with words impressed Orville, and the two became fast friends. Over the years, Kelly would publish one article after another, many of them humorous, based on interviews and comments from the inventor of the airplane.
The idea of writing a biography of the Wrights emerged slowly. By 1939, Kelly was determined to move ahead, aware that handling Orville would be a difficult and delicate task. He first convinced his friend to cooperate in preparing a long article, “How the Wright Brothers Began,” for a 1939 issue of Harper’s.
As Kelly had feared, Orville was demanding, and never fully satisfied with the finished product. As with Findley’s manuscript, he found it too personal and not sufficiently technical. Kelly persevered, arguing that while he might not be able to describe the technical details of invention, he could give the world an accurate depiction of the life and times of the brothers.
The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright Page 60