The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough is a delightful story of two self-educated, industrious brothers from Dayton Ohio who at the turn of the twentieth century changed life as we know it by inventing, building, and flying the first airplane.  McCullough is fastidious about publishing only the facts which primarily are based on hand written correspondence by Wilbur and Orville Wright to and from their father, their sister, each other and numerous parties they found interested in their quest… this was the age of avid letter writing.

Wilbur and Orville Wright grew up in Dayton, Ohio in a modest six room house with no indoor plumbing or electricity.  Their father was a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren and traveled widely on church business.  The bishop’s only splurge in life was his vast book collection which he strongly encouraged his five children to read.  His collection was diverse for its time and included many classics as well as history, travel, birds, and encyclopedias.  Wilbur and Orville read everything.

Upon graduation from high school, the boys briefly dabbled in the printing and publishing business before opening a bicycle shop near their home in 1893.  Cycling was popular at the time and the boys designed some new models (both wheels the same size), constructed them in their shop and soon were selling about 150 bikes each year.  But the notion of flight intrigued them. They learned much by reading about the German glider enthusiast, Otto Lilienthal who studied birds for clues on how to fly.  Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and requested all that was published about flying machines.  After intense study the boys concluded that controlling the equilibrium of lift, yaw, pitch and roll were essential to safe flying.  

So in 1899 they constructed their first glider to learn first-hand how to put into practice what they had learned in books.  But they needed a better setting to conduct their experiments… someplace isolated with steady winds and sand to soften the landing.  After extensive research, they concluded the outer banks of North Carolina best fit their needs.  So in August of 1900, the brothers built a full sized glider with an eighteen foot wing span and packed and shipped it to the then nearly uninhabited Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  They built a small workshop where they also lived and from there conducted numerous flights with their glider.  They returned to Dayton in October to tend to their bicycle business and to prepare for subsequent fall visits to Kitty Hawk.  

By the end of 1902 after three trips to the Outer Banks, they felt they had developed the knowledge and flying skill to add a motor to their glider.  After a search for the proper small engine to power their flyer, the boys asked Charlie Taylor, their only employee at the bicycle shop to build an engine.  That fall they made a fourth journey to Kitty Hawk to assemble yet another new and improved flyer complete with the engine.  This machine like all the others was solely financed by the Wrights from proceeds of their bicycle business.  On December 17, 1903 Orville won the toss for piloting the flyer and made the first manned flight of 120 feet in twelve seconds.  Wilbur and Orville took turns and made three more flights that day, the longest being 852 feet in 59 seconds.  Only five people, all local residents witnessed history in the making that day.

So did the newspapers explode with the news and crowds of people turn out to congratulate the Wright Brothers?  No.  Most were skeptical and simply didn’t believe flight was possible.  Even the U.S. government did not seem interested since the war department had spent thousands of dollars in public money to develop flight only to fail.  So after a couple years of demonstrations at Huffman Prairie, an open meadow near Dayton, the Wrights took their invention to France.  A group of French investors were willing to pay $200,000 for one of the Wright Brother’s flyers if some performance criteria could be met and some pilots trained.  Wilbur set off for France where he was met with open arms.  He found a setting near Lemans, built a flyer and held several demonstration flights.  Crowds turned out to watch including kings and military generals from all over Europe.  Much to Wilbur’s dismay, he became a celebrity and all the news media wanted to interview him and write about him.

 

Meanwhile, back in the states, the U.S. government finally offered the Wrights a similar deal as France.  Orville set off to Washington, D.C. and established an air field at Fort Myer just west of Arlington National Cemetery.  Orville flew his flyer numerous times setting many aviation records with crowds of government officials and the general public in attendance.  Orville proved once and for all the Wright Brother’s flyer was the real deal.  It was here during one of his demonstrations that Orville’s plane crashed with a passenger on board who was killed in the accident.  Orville survived but suffered a broken leg and several broken ribs.  His sister Katherine devoted herself to his recovery which took more than a year.  In the meantime, Wilbur took the lead in forming an aviation company and spent precious time defending their patents.  Now everyone wanted credit for what they had accomplished.  Amazingly, the Wrights were not changed by their success and celebrity.  They remained the same mild mannered, hard-working, humble gentlemen they had always been.

I love this story as it resonates with me on so many levels.  I grew up in Ohio about sixty miles from Dayton and the culture of the time is so similar to that of my own ancestors, right down to the work ethic.  The Wright home from 7 Hawthorn Street in Dayton is now on display to the public in Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.  It is like so many other houses from that area in that time, humble and unremarkable.  While I was growing up, so much of what the Wright Brothers inspired was taken for granted.  The Dayton ‘Flyers’ basketball team, Wright-Patterson Air Force base, and Wright State University are all examples of the Wright Brother’s legacy.  Yet they were inspiring… proof the American dream was possible.  Success was not achieved by who you knew or inherited from your family but by hard-work, self-confidence, and unyielding resolve.  When another Ohio native, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, he carried with him a swatch of muslin from the wing of the Wright’s 1903 flyer, a tribute to what the Wright Brothers had begun only seven decades earlier.