Wilbur and Orville

A Biography of the Wright Brothers

Fred Howard

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486320151
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencia y tecnología

Definitive, highly regarded study tells the full story of the brothers' lives and work — before, during and after the historic flight at Kitty Hawk: early experiments and glider flights on Indiana sand dunes, exhilarating days on North Carolina's Outer Banks, the bitter patent fight that followed, Wilbur's untimely death, and more.

1

The House on Hawthorn Street

IN 1796, Catharine Van Cleve Thompson, whose first husband had been killed by Indians, boarded a flatboat on the Great Miami River near Cincinnati, Ohio, and after a trip of ten days or so distinguished herself by becoming the first white woman to set foot in Dayton, Ohio, an act that precipitated a whole string of family firsts. Benjamin Van Cleve, her son by her first husband, became Dayton’s first postmaster and the town’s first schoolteacher. His marriage was the first to be recorded in the county of which Dayton is the seat and of which he was the first county clerk. He was also Dayton’s first public librarian, fining library users two cents for each drop of grease found on a returned book. In the meantime, Benjamin’s sister Margaret Van Cleve, who had stayed behind in Cincinnati and married an innkeeper, upheld the family’s reputation for firsts by giving birth to a daughter, who, in turn, married Dan Wright and gave birth to Milton Wright, who was to become the father of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Dan Wright had settled in Centerville, Ohio, near Dayton in 1811. He worked in a distillery until he got religion and moved to Indiana, where he took up farming and lived with his wife in the log cabin where Milton was born in 1828. By the time he was eighteen, Milton got religion like his father before him and joined the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, a nonconformist Protestant sect that had flourished in the rural districts of the Midwest since 1800. He was ordained at the age of twenty-two but taught for two years at a church school in Oregon before returning to Indiana and taking up the ministry in earnest. In 1859 he married Susan Catherine Koerner, daughter of a German-born wheelwright who had a farm in Indiana close to the Ohio line where he manufactured wagons and carriages in a woodworking shop in one of the fourteen buildings on his farm.

Milton and Susan Wright were to spend the first twenty-five years of their marriage moving from farm to city to town through the rolling countryside of Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa. Milton’s income as an itinerant clergyman was small, and he eked it out with teaching and farming. His first son, Reuchlin, was born on a farm about fifty miles from Indianapolis in 1861. A second son, Lorin, was born in Fayette County not far from the Koerner homestead in 1862 and the third son, Wilbur, on a small farm near Millville in still another Indiana county in 1867. Two years later Milton became editor of the United Brethren weekly Religious Telescope. He moved his family to Dayton, where the magazine was published, and bought the house at 7 Hawthorn Street in which Orville Wright was born in 1871. Milton and Susan selected the names of their offspring with great care and considered middle names unnecessary. The last child was a girl, Katharine, born in 1874. Given the family history, it was inevitable that the girl should be a Catherine, but they spelled her name with two a's, as in Catharine Van Cleve, and with a K, for which there was no precedent on either side of the family.

In 1877 Milton Wright was made a bishop and moved his family to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Compared to his Catholic and Anglican counterparts, Milton was bishop in a very small pond, with a salary of less than $1,000 a year. He preached thrift, but knew the value of a gift. The year he moved to Cedar Rapids, he returned from one of his many trips into the hinterland with a gift for his two youngest sons. Coming into the house with the present partly concealed in his hands, he tossed it into the air before the boys could see what it was. It was a toy helicopter made of cork, bamboo, and paper. Toy helicopters in one form or another had been around for almost a century. Usually they were powered by bow and bowstring, but the twin propellers on this one were activated by a twisted rubber band, a type of propulsion popularized by a young Frenchman named Alphonse Pénaud. Pénaud made and flew several small rubber-powered, inherently stable airplanes. Lateral stability was accomplished by bending the wingtips upward to provide a dihedral angle. Longitudinal (fore and aft) stability was achieved by setting the tail plane at a negative angle relative to the wings, a configuration that serves as a model for nearly all rubber-powered toy airplanes to this day. Pénaud’s suicide in 1880 at the age of twenty-nine was to give his contribution to the flying art a faintly poetic air.

The flight of that toy helicopter in a Cedar Rapids living room was a baptism of sorts for Wilbur and Orville Wright. Later they built some toy helicopters for themselves and were astonished to find that the larger they made them, the more poorly they flew. Experiments were encouraged in the Wright household. The earliest surviving document in Orville’s handwriting includes this breathless message written on a postcard addressed to Bishop Wright, who was in Omaha on church business at the time:

The other day I took a machine can and filled it with water then I put it on the stove I waited a little while and the water came squirting out of the top about a foot.

The postcard is dated April I, 1881, when Orville was nine. In June that year the family moved again, this time to Richmond, Indiana, where Milton Wright took over the editorship of another church paper, the Richmond Star.

Richmond wasn’t far from Grandfather Koerner’s farm, where it was possible for the two youngest Wright boys to prowl about the outbuildings and investigate the foot-powered lathe in the carriage and wagon shop. Before long, Wilbur and Orville had built a lathe in the barn behind the house in Richmond, with a treadle wide enough to accommodate the feet of several neighborhood boys and with bearings made from marbles that revolved inside a pair of metal rings constructed from parts of harnesses found in the barn. The marbles were made of clay and disintegrated one day while a small cyclone was in progress, the boys at the treadle assuming it was the lathe rather than the wind that was shaking the barn.

It is often claimed that Wilbur and Orville inherited their mechanical aptitude from Grandfather Koerner by way of their mother, Susan Koerner Wright. Susan did have a way with tools. She once built a sled for Reuchlin and Lorin. This event has been retold and embellished with inspirational dialogue in almost every life of the Wright brothers written for young readers—with the names Wilbur and Orville slyly substituted for those of the older boys.

In Richmond, Orville came across some woodcut illustrations in the Century Magazine and was inspired to make a few woodcuts, using the spring of an old pocketknife as a carving tool. That Christmas, Wilbur gave him a set of engraving tools, and the resulting woodcuts were printed on their father’s letterpress, an occasion that marked the beginning of a love affair with printing that was to occupy Orville for almost a decade after the family moved back to Dayton.

The move to Dayton took place in June 1884, the month Wilbur was to have graduated from high school. Although his two older brothers had attended college and his father hoped someday to send him to the divinity school at Yale, Wilbur left Richmond without receiving his diploma. During the next school year, he took courses in Greek and trigonometry in Central High School and became business manager of The Christian Conservator, still another church paper edited by Bishop Wright.

Orville was twelve when the family returned to Dayton. He renewed a friendship with Ed Sines, who had been his playmate during the family’s earlier stay in Dayton, finding him a more satisfactory companion than Wilbur, who was seventeen. What firmly cemented the friendship of the two younger boys was the fact that Ed Sines owned a toy printing outfit consisting of an ink pad and a set of movable rubber type. It was a short step from the printing of wood engravings to printing with type. Orville had always been an enterprising boy. In Dayton he had collected bones and sold them for trifling sums to a fertilizer factory. In Richmond, he had trafficked in metal scrap. In 1886, two years after the return to Dayton, Milton Wright talked Wilbur and Lorin into trading a jointly owned but unused homemade boat for a small printing press, which was presented to Orville, together with twenty-five pounds of type contributed by the bishop.

With Ed Sines as partner, Orville was off to a flying start in the printing business. Their most notable venture was a four-page eighth-grade school paper called The Midget, appropriately enough, since the printing area of the press was not much larger than a playing card. Distribution of the first and only issue of The Midget, however, was blocked by Bishop Wright, who disapproved of the use of one whole page to advertise the embryonic firm of Sines & Wright. Orville’s next project was a larger press, which he built himself, using a gravestone as press bed. The boy printers moved their operations from the house to the Wright barn and invested two dollars in a set of display type. Soon orders for job printing began to dribble in from patronizing storekeepers.

The house in which Orville and Katharine had been born had been rented out during the family’s six-year sojourn in Cedar Rapids and Richmond. It was not vacated for more than a year after they returned to Dayton, but in October 1885 they moved back into the narrow white clapboard house on Hawthorn Street that was to be their home for the next twenty-nine years. It was a two-story house with a peaked roof and green shutters on a lot less than forty feet wide. The upstairs bedrooms were small, and in the midwestern summers they were hot. The only porch was a small one at the back. The sole source of water at the time was a pump at the back door.

There were two libraries. Books on theology were kept in the bishop’s cluttered study on the second floor. The downstairs library, with its fashionable sets of Irving, Hawthorne, The Spectator, Scott, and Gibbon, was more eclectic. It included multivolume histories of England and France, natural history books, Grimm, Andersen, Plutarch’s Lives—a favorite of Wilbur’s—and two sets of encyclopedias, whose scientific articles were staples of Orville’s earliest reading.

Bishop Wright was by no means the unsmiling patriarch of tradition, although he had the beard for it and believed in the therapeutic value of an occasional spanking. The Sabbath was observed in the bishop’s house, but Sunday reading and letter-writing were encouraged. Card-playing was forbidden, not as a sin but as a waste of time. Santa Claus was outlawed, but fairy tales were not, and inexpensive gifts made their appearance at the table on Christmas morning. The Wright children were familiar figures at the United Brethren Sunday school on Summit Street, but both Wilbur and Orville had read and been influenced by the writings of the agnostic Robert Ingersoll, whose works were part of the leavening of anticlerical literature in the bishop’s library.

Family rapport was reflected in the choice of nicknames. The eldest son, Reuchlin, was Roosh. Lorin seems to have had no nickname, but his son Milton, born in 1892, had two, Toujours and Whackers. Orville was Bubo to his sister, and Wilbur was Ullam. Since Grandfather Koerner came from Germany, it was logical that Katharine’s nickname should be Schwesterchen (German for “Little Sister”) but it was usually split into Schwes (or Swes) and Sterchens, which were used interchangeably.

The well-being of the household was mirrored in the remembered storybook expressions and fossilized baby talk that crop up in the correspondence over the years and that even out of context are redolent of family life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: “time to be abed,” “afer soon,” “a little waucus,” “You ought to seen it! Great big sing!” “Ah! them is fine,” “that chawin’ gum corporation” (a reference to Orville’s attempt to manufacture chewing gum from sugar and tar), “is me,” and “I’ll squall” (a threat of young Wilbur’s). It was Wilbur who made up stories for Orville’s consumption, all of which ended “and then the boiler bust.” And it was Wilbur who circumvented a prohibition against teasing his sister by crooking a finger in her direction when no one else was looking, a maneuver that conveyed an insult more terrible than words and drove the young Katharine to tears.

The family was not without its quota of misfortune. Ever since the move to Richmond, Susan Wright had suffered from an ailment variously described as pleurisy and consumption. When the family settled in Dayton in 1884, her condition became worse. Two years later Wilbur was hit in the face with a bat while playing an ice-skating game called shinny and for the next four years suffered from a vaguely defined heart disorder. Homebound during those years, he seems to have done little except read and take care of his ailing mother, a situation that alarmed brother Lorin. Lorin had left home to seek his fortune in 1887. “What does Will do?” he wrote Katharine from Kansas. “He ought to do something. Is he still cook and chambermaid?” Reuchlin was married and had not lived at home for several years. With Bishop Wright sometimes away on church business, Wilbur and his mother were alone in the house during the hours when Katharine and Orville were in school, and a close relationship grew up between the two semi-invalids. Susan Wright walked downstairs each morning when she was able. Wilbur is said to have carried her upstairs each night, a touching but unlikely practice for a young man suffering from a heart disorder. Wilbur was twenty-two when his mother died on the Fourth of July 1889, and the years he might have spent in college were already behind him.

Orville turned eighteen that year. By working long hours for a Dayton printer during summer vacations, he had developed into an expert typesetter. With Wilbur’s help he built a new and larger press, using the hinged bars of an abandoned buggy top to maintain pressure between paper and type. During his last year in high school, Orville took courses in Latin to meet college entrance requirements, but before the school year was over he gave up all thought of college and with Ed Sines as employee opened a print shop on a street of small stores not far from his home.

For twenty years the editing and publishing of church papers had been a part of Bishop Wright’s life. Orville now decided to publish a weekly paper of his own. The first issue of West Side News (10¢ for six weeks, 20¢ for three months) appeared on March 1,1889, in an edition of five hundred copies. Ed Sines’s job was to gather news in the largely residential district on the west side of the Miami River, opposite the prosperous business district on the east side, and to solicit ads in the process. In addition to neighborhood news, the paper printed items of a folksy nature contributed by Wilbur or lifted bodily from The Youth's Companion. Before long the name Wilbur Wright appeared on the masthead as editor over that of Orville. Orville was listed as publisher.

The West Side News ran for a year before being converted to The Evening Item, a daily devoted to the interests of the West Side. The Item was printed for three months in a rented room on West Third Street, but it was no match for the large Dayton papers and expired in August 1890. That fall Wilbur and Orville set themselves up as Wright and Wright, Job Printers, and moved into larger quarters down the street. With Ed Sines’s help, they produced such miscellaneous items as the minutes of the United Brethren Church, calling cards, advertising broadsides, and The Tattler; a four-page weekly for black readers written and edited by eighteen-year-old Paul Laurence Dunbar, a school friend of Orville’s and the only black student in Central High School. Four lines of pre-Ogden Nash doggerel, scribbled on the wall of the printing establishment by young Dunbar, testify to his high regard for Orville’s mental abilities:

Orville Wright is out of sight
In the printing business.
No other mind is half so bright
As his’n is.

The Tattler expired after six weeks from lack of advertising, but Dunbar continued to write poems. In 1892 he took fifty-six of his dialect verses to Orville to see if they could be printed in book form. The printshop had no binding facilities, so Orville referred Dunbar to the United Brethren publishing house in Dayton, and for $125, payable in advance, the house agreed to print five hundred copies of Oak and Ivy, the book that turned the four-dollar-a-week elevator operator into a literary celebrity.

By 1892 the Wright brothers’ interest in printing had about run its course and they were on to something new. In his Richmond, Indiana, days, Orville had borrowed three dollars from Wilbur and bought his first bicycle. The only bicycles available then had huge front wheels, and the rider perched precariously on a saddle four to five feet above the ground. By 1890 a new type of bicycle was seen on the streets of Dayton: Both front and rear wheels were the same size. Because there was less distance to fall if the rider lost his balance, it was dubbed the “safety bicycle.” Direct pedaling had been replaced by a sprocket-chain drive. Air-filled tires, ball bearings, comfortable saddles, and coaster brakes put the finishing touches to the evolutionary process, and the modified V-frame made cycling the ultimate in exercise for females, the more daring of whom donned bloomers for greater comfort in pedaling. During the early 1890s cycling became a national obsession.

Orville caught the fever first. He went in for racing after paying $160 for a safety bicycle. Wilbur waited six months, then purchased a machine at auction for half that amount. Shortly thereafter the brothers put Ed Sines in charge of their printing business and opened a shop across the street, where they became purveyors of one of the most popular forms of personal transportation ever invented. There were more than a dozen bicycle shops on the other side of the Miami River in downtown Dayton, but theirs was the only shop selling and repairing bicycles on the West Side. In 1893 they moved into a larger store on the south side of Third Street, half a block from their printing establishment. That summer they took time off to visit the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. If 1893 was a banner year for Chicago, it was a depression year for the rest of the country, but the bicycle business was hardly affected. The Wrights welcomed sales on the weekly installment plan. They repaired and rented bicycles as well as sold them, and their business, slow at first, eventually prospered.

Now that they were successfully launched in business, Wilbur and Orville established a joint bank account on which each drew for his own use without consulting the other. There was no need to consult. Since boyhood the brothers had been partners in a relationship more binding than most marriages. Wilbur was not exaggerating when he wrote the month before he died, “My brother Orville and myself lived together, played together, worked together, and in fact thought together.” Although both brothers were skeptics when it came to psychic phenomena, it was not unusual for them to begin whistling or humming the same tune at the same instant while working in the bicycle shop, as if there were a psychic bond between them—a phenomenon they themselves attributed to an association of ideas stored in a common memory.

The difference in their ages was no longer so apparent. In 1894 Wilbur was twenty-seven, Orville twenty-three. In many ways they were remarkably alike. Neither drank. Neither used tobacco, although Orville had tried it in his teens. Wilbur weighed around a hundred forty pounds and stood five feet ten. Orville was an inch or two shorter and a few pounds heavier. Their voices were similar—high-pitched and hard to tell apart if the listener was in an adjoining room.

Both had gray-blue eyes, but there was little facial resemblance. Orville had undistinguished features, more difficult to recall when he was clean-shaven than after he had grown a mustache. He had thick, curly dark brown hair. Wilbur had prominent ears, a cleft chin, and an open, firm face, stronger for the loss of his thin brown hair, which had all but disappeared by 1894. There were pronounced lines from the wings of his nostrils to the corners of his wide, expressive mouth. Wilbur was hard to rattle. Orville was more excitable, a constant talker at home or among friends. Compared to Wilbur, he was a dandy, always well groomed, even in the bicycle shop, where he wore sleeve cuffs and an apron of blue-and-white ticking to protect his clothing. He had always been the playful one, the prankster who dropped red pepper down the heat register in school and who grew up to play the guitar and go on camping trips with Katharine and her friends. Wilbur was more withdrawn. “The strongest impression one gets of Wilbur Wright is of a man who lives largely in a world of his own,” wrote a former schoolmate in describing a Fourth of July picnic at which Wilbur put up the swings for the children and then stood aloof from the crowd for much of the day. At the same picnic, Katharine Wright made the laughing remark that Wilbur was the girl of the family—“not an effeminate man of course,” the former schoolmate hastened to add, “(one needs only to glance at his strong face to see that), but kind and tender and ‘handy’ about the house.”

Handy about the house both brothers certainly were. During the 1890s they added front and side porches to the house on Hawthorn Street, giving the narrow structure an air of spaciousness it had lacked before. They turned the posts themselves on a neighbor’s lathe. They built a fireplace in the parlor and took a photograph of their work in which the gas-burning fireplace is the piéce de résistance among several items of middle-class elegance—mirrored mantel, floor-length lace curtains, potted palm, figured carpet, Katharine’s spindly-legged writing desk, and Orville’s guitar leaning rakishly against the new fireplace. They developed their own glass-plate negatives and made their own prints in the darkroom in the shed behind the house. Over the years they had developed a feeling for wood and metal, for machinery and tools. If tools were not re...