Two Men and a Dream
	The Wright Brothers & the Birth of Flight
	by James S. Rockefeller, Jr.
Reprinted from the Spring 2003 issue of the "Strut & Axle" Vol. XXIV, No. 1	In a letter dated September 3, 1900 Wilbur Wright wrote this to his father, Bishop Milton Wright: “I am intending to start in a few days for a trip to the coast of North Carolina in the vicinity of Roanoke Island, for the purpose of making some experiments with a flying machine. It is my belief that flight is possible and while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit, I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it. It is almost the only great problem, which has not been pursued by a multitude of investigators, and therefore carried to a point where further progress is very difficult. I am certain I can reach a point much in advance of any previous workers in this field even if complete success is not attained at present.” Thus began a three-year quest soon to be heralded around the world—one more major leap in technology arising at the century’s end, offering yet another corridor for man’s innovative mind to follow. Why does the story of the Wrights and their aeronautical achievements stick in our memories rather than those other inventors whose inventions also strongly affected our lives? Is it because the electric light, the electric motor and combustion engine were too mundane, but the desire to fly goes back thousands of years? Is it that the other great advances in technology don’t hold the same romance? Wilbur himself said, “I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.” Some years after the successful 1903 flight, Mary Parker wrote on seeing the first plane fly over Chicago, “We bowed our heads before the mystery of it and then lifted our eyes with a new feeling in our souls that seemed to link us all, and hope sprang eternal for the great new future of the world.” The Wrights more than any other inventors caused man’s ability to fly to enter the human psyche. It has never left. Perhaps another reason we are so taken by those early aviators is that they were great athletes—“high-wire” walkers balancing with constant movement to save falling to their death in their primitive flying machines. Look at the film-strips of the Wrights flying and you will see the pilot performing an uninterrupted stream of little movements. Those early planes were so unstable that unless constant corrections were made it meant death or serious injury. They were masters of a balancing act akin to the acrobats of the circus.
	The December 17, 1903 photograph with Orville lifting off and older brother Wilbur running alongside at Kitty Hawk is one of the most compelling images of all time, showing the first of four flights that day. The fourth lasted fifty-nine seconds and covered a distance of almost three football fields. Powered, controlled flight was now a reality. What kind of men were these two brothers to pull off such a feat? Their father, Bishop Wright offers some insight when he said, “Neither could have mastered the problem alone. As inseparable as twins, they are indispensable to each other.” In school they did well in scholarship and athletics. Then in 1885 Wilbur was severely hit in the mouth with a block of wood playing “shinny,” a form of hockey. His mouth was disfigured, teeth destroyed and the pain was ongoing and terrible. He went into a deep four-year depression not venturing far from the house and burying himself in books. It was his mother’s failing health that changed his focus from his own state to that of his mother’s. His attention turned to caring for her. Bishop Wright spoke several times of how the last two years of his wife’s life were a living gift from her son, Wilbur. Had he not risen from his own pain and despair she would likely have died soon after her confinement to bed with pulmonary complications. During this time, brother Orville, four years younger, had developed an intense interest in printing that soon evolved from a hobby into a business. He brilliantly altered his printing press and pushed out flyers, posters, pamphlets and eventually started several newspapers. Moving from the familyhouse he rented larger quarters. After their mother died, Wilbur came to work for him, helping with the editing. Not happy with the accounting tools of the times Orville invented a new calculator and improved his typewriter. People remarked how his energy was phenomenal. The business developed a mental harmony between the brothers to the point where they had a joint bank account from which each would withdraw without informing the other. With the advent of new presses on the printing scene the brothers were pushed out of the business whereupon they turned to bicycles, a popular sport of the time, forming the Wright Cycle Co. They were the first to bring out full pressure balloon tires using a wider fork and frame. It was a seasonal business that would play a part in what was to come. The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place. The plaque erected by the Garden Club of Charlottesville, Virginia, Susan Wright’s birthplace, is worth mentioning as it brings further insight into the closeness of their family bond. It reads: This is the birthplace of Susan Koerner Wright April 30,1831-July 4, 1889 Mother Of Wilbur and Orville Wright Inventors of the Airplane A Notable Woman Who Largely Guided and Wisely Inspired Her Sons To Their Immortal Discovery She Was The Mother Also Of Katherine Wright Haskell August 19,1874-March 3, 1929 Whose Sisterly Devotion Aided In Giving Mankind Access To The Unlimited Aerial Highway
	The Wright family—one member helping the other in a harmony of effort and mind—should be given significant weight in the story of the Wrights’ success. The father of Susan Wright was a successful carriage maker and she inherited that mechanical talent, no doubt passing it on to her sons. The Wrights’ father was seldom home with all his church business. They desired his approbation but it was their mother and sister who nurtured the boys, inspiring them onward. Once interested in the flying problem they became focused, almost fanatical in their research like they did with every new interest. Orville once said, “Wilbur and I could hardly wait for morning to come to get at something that interested us. That is happiness.” It used to be printing, then bicycles, now it was flying.” They read all the available literature: Lillienthal on his gliding experiments, Cayley the father of aeronautics, Penaud with his flying models powered by a rubber band, Langley and his Experiments in Aerodynamics, even Mouillard with his study of buzzards. There was also Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, who had built a crazy flying contraption that failed. They corresponded with Octave Chanute, the great disseminator of information and read his classic Progress in Flying Machines. After digesting this body of work they came to the conclusion that some of the pioneers were right and others wrong. In many instances they had to start from scratch and were sometimes thrown off by the errors of others. But by the summer of 1899 they made the decision to tackle the project themselves. It was perhaps provident that about this time Orville developed typhoid fever and during his long recovery the two brothers discussed all they had read and what had to be done. After their extensive perusal of all available aeronautical literature, Wilbur summed it up, “. . . there was no flying art . . ., but only a flying problem. Thousands of men had thought about flying machines, and a few had even built machines they called flying machines, but these machines were guilty of almost everything but flying. Thousands of words had been written on the so-called science of flying, but for the most part the ideas set forth, like the designs for the machines, were mere speculations and probably ninety percent false.” Of all the experimenters they put Lillienthal at the top of the list. On the otherhand, they must have chuckled over an early “experiment” by Thomas Edison, who, as a young boy, once fed birdseed to a friend and encouraged him to jump from a window to see if he could fly. The brothers reasoned there were six problems to overcome. First, while watching birds they noticed two different methods of flying: wing flapping and soaring. Man wasn’t athletic enough to be a flapper, so it had to be a soaring mode. Second, they needed to understand the secret of lift. Third, they’d have to develop a three-dimensional control system. Fourth would be to design a machine strong enough to hold a man but light enough to fly. Concurrent to that, they needed to calculate the correct power-to-weight ratio. Lastly, they would need to train a pilot in the skills necessary to operate the machine. They broke each problem down into simple parts and went about solving them one by one. They experimented with airfoils, even outfitted a bicycle with an instrument to assess lift coefficients. They constructed a wind tunnel. They built gliders and perfected a controlling method by warping the wings and using an elevator to control pitch. They constructed a strong, lightweight airplane by using the Pratt truss employed by Octave Chanute and others in bridge construction. The wings, struts and wire rigging were arranged to make the truss. Finally they employed Charley Taylor to build an engine that had the right power to weight ratio for their machine. It took them four years to solve these problems and on December 17, 1903, they sent a telegram home as proof of their efforts: “Success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas.” The next question was what to do with their invention. From the purely scientific challenge they turned entrepreneurial, even though Wilbur had stated that it hadn’t been their aim when they undertook the project. At first it wasn’t an issue because few people believed they had actually flown, including the press. Nevertheless they became obsessively secretive, afraid that someone might copy their machine and steal their patents. By September of 1905 they had made a flight of forty minutes—more than twenty-four miles—in a back pasture near Dayton. On December 15 of that year Wilbur wrote, “There is no sport in all the world equal to that which aviators enjoy while being carried through the air on great white wings.”
	The brothers first offered to sell their invention to the U.S. government. They were told, however, the government had no intention of financing “devices for mechanical flight that had not been brought to the stage of practical operation.” Having made their patriotic overtures, they turned to Europe. Here again negotiations met with failure. Their offer to sell the French government patents and rights to build their plane was laughed at. But the Wrights were convinced they were far ahead of their competitors and that no one could achieve what they had done within the next five years. They refused requests for public demonstrations and sat tight until the work of Santos Dumont in France prompted them to change their minds. Even though they knew he was far behind technologically, they felt his efforts might diminish the worth of their invention. They entered into negotiations with arms dealer, Charles Flint, whom they soon saw was a hustler. Breaking off contact, they took up with a syndicate of French investors headed by Henri Letellier. Wilbur went off to France to demonstrate their machine while Orville remained behind to deal with the U.S. Signal Corps, who had put out offers for a heavier-than-air machine with specs that closely matched those of their Flyer. At the time Wilbur arrived in Europe, the French believed they were at the forefront of aviation technology. This changed on August 8, 1908 when Wilbur flew for the Aero Club of France. One of the spectators remarked in awe, “We are children compared to the Wrights.” The next day Wilbur flew for a crowd of several thousand. For five months Wibur flew in France, breaking records, winning gold medals, and acquiring monetary prizes. He became, in effect, a cult figure. Europe was a class society and here was a man who looked like a frontiersman of the fabled American west who did his own work, made his own repairs, slept in the hangar with his airplane, cooked his own meals and washed at the end of a hose. The renowned aeronautical figure, Léon Delagrange, marveled at how the man could postpone flights up to ten hours—with thousands waiting impatiently—until he considered the weather and the plane safe. A leading aeronautical journalist wrote of Wilbur, “Those large clear eyes were the crystal-clear mirror of his beautiful soul,” and remarked at his isolation in the midst of a crowd. Words such as self-reliance, determination, attention to detail, patience, dedication to work, loneliness, genius, indifference, were all attributed to him. The historian Robert Wohl has added, “He acknowledged no god and no master.” Wilbur was an exceedingly prudent pilot. He did not take risks when they could be avoided. If he had to delay a flight ten hours for weather or mechanical reasons, so be it. In fact he remarked about the death of Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge, killed while flying with Orville during the demonstration test to sell the machine to the U.S. government, “It wouldn’t have happened if I had been there.” He berated himself for leaving Orville alone in the States. “It was not right to leave Orville to undertake such a task himself. I do not mean Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people with the most friendly intentions in the world [who] would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from having proper rest. When a man is in this condition he tends to trust more to the carefulness of others instead of doing everything and examining everything himself.” Later, after careful diagnosis, Wilbur decided the propeller had failed and caused a series of events that made the plane uncontrollable. While Orville was recovering from his injuries, Wilbur flew every chance he could get to show the world that their plane was practical and safe. He progressively increased his time aloft and distances flown. Of one hundred flights at Camp d’Avours in France, he carried passengers sixty times. Among them was 240-pound Léon Bollée, automobile pioneer, who had opened his factory to Wilbur. He also carried aloft the first American woman ever to fly in an aeroplane, Mrs. Edith Berg, wife of his agent. (He tied a rope around her ankles to hold her skirt in place. This started a new fashion, the hobbled skirt.) Grahame-White the aeronautical historian said about Wilbur, “Rather than the fanatic of flight, he should be known as the fanatic of pre-flight because of the care with which he examined his airplane before undertaking an ascent.” The contract with the French syndicate required the brothers train three pilots. So in 1909, at Pau, Wilbur started what was essentially the first flying school. Orville was recovering from his injuries and came over with their sister Katharine to visit. Enroute he endured a train wreck and suffered further pain before he reached his brother in Pau. But things looked up after that. England’s Edward VII, along with his entourage, came to watch Wilbur fly. Prime ministers and other dignitaries helped pull on the derrick catapult to hoist the weights for launching. The King of Spain was another visitor. The Wright name was on the lips of the world. They trained pilots, sold airplanes, conducted business all the while engaged in legal battles to preserve their patents. The money rolled in. They moved on to Italy and continued their program entertaining that country’s king. On the same occassion Wilbur took up a cameraman from Universal Studios producing the first moving pictures ever taken from an airplane.
	Arriving back in Dayton in May of 1909, they were met by ten thousand people. But there was no time to bask in glory. Quickly they went back to work on a machine they would demonstrate at Fort Myer, VA for the government. The old plane had been campaigned hard. It was worn out. The brothers built a new machine and installed a 32 hp engine. It was agreed that Orville would fly since he was the one who had begun the tests. Three weeks of testing ensued and twenty practice flights. The Congress had adjourned and members of both the House and Senate came to witness the test. President Taft was also present. On the afternoon of July 27 Lt. Frank P. Lahm took his seat alongside Orville and for one hour and nine minutes they flew around the field 79 1/2 times and reaching an altitude of 150 feet. This met the army’s requirements and broke new records. The speed trial was next. The ten mile course from Fort Myer to Alexandria and back was completed at a speed of 42.9 miles an hour. The army not only paid $25,000 for the machine but added another $2,500 for the speed over their required 40 mph. Next Orville went to Germany where he met the Kaiser and took aloft his son the crown prince—the first member of a royal family to fly. So thrilled by his adventure, the prince handed Orville a jewel-encrusted stick pin in the shape of a W and said, “It stands for Wilhelm but it works for Wright as well.” The Wright Company was organized in November of 1909. A decade had passed since the summer of 1899 when the brothers decided to conquer the problems of powered flight. Wilbur was the company’s first president. In 1910 after having obtained not only fame but a sizable fortune, Wilbur Wright happily gave up flying. The risks were no longer needed. But before doing so he flew for an estimated one million cheering people in New York for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Cautious to the last, he strapped a canoe under the aircraft so if forced to land in the water he would have an escape route. This hinted at the flying boats of the future. His audience was the single largest ever assembled to see an aircraft fly. Unhappily, Wilbur’s final years were taken up with litigation protecting the brother’s invention from other flyers and aircraft builders. He died in 1912 of nothing having to do with aviation. Typhoid fever ended his life at age 45. Orville Wright took over the company’s affairs upon his brother’s death. Pioneer aircraft designer Glenn Curtiss would eventually become the central player on the U.S. aeronautical scene while Europe took over as the world center of aviation up through World War II. But it was the Wrights Brothers who reinvigorated European aviation and showed the way to the future of the flying machine.