The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

Like the father and their sister Katharine, the brothers had tremendous energy, and working hard every day but Sunday was a way of life, and if not on the job then at home on “improvements.” Hard work was a conviction, and they were at their best and happiest working together on their own projects at the same waist-high bench, wearing shop aprons to protect their suits and ties.

Not that things always went smoothly. They could be highly demanding and critical of each other, disagree to the point of shouting “something terrible.” At times, after an hour or more of heated argument, they would find themselves as far from agreement as when they started, except that each had changed to the other’s original position.

What the two had in common above all was unity of purpose and unyielding determination. They had set themselves on a “mission.”

He was an unyielding abstainer, which was rare on the frontier, a man of rectitude and purpose—all of which could have served as a description of Milton himself and Wilbur and Orville as well.

the United Brethren Church was adamant about certain causes—the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and opposition to Freemasonry and its secretive ways—and so Milton Wright remained

Wilbur would remark that if he were to give a young man advice on how to get ahead in life, he would say, “Pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.”

From wide reading and observations of life, he had acquired what seemed an inexhaustible supply of advice on behavior, habits good and bad, things to beware of in life, goals to strive for. He lectured on dress, cleanliness, economy. At home he preached courage and good character—“good

All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden on others.

strongly believed in the importance of family, he could not know enough about those from whom he and his children were descended.

He wanted to make them aware of that, too, just as he wanted them to have open and receptive minds and to think for themselves. As said, his was a mind that never slowed down. “He talked very freely to his children on all subjects,” Orville would say, “except money making, a matter to which he gave little consideration.”

“Every mind should be true to itself—should think, investigate and conclude for itself,” wrote Ingersoll. It was the influence of Ingersoll apparently that led the brothers to give up regular attendance at church, a change the Bishop seems to have accepted without protest.

Orville responded emphatically, “to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

Orville had worked for two summers as an apprentice at a local print shop. He designed and built his own press using a discarded tombstone, a buggy spring, and scrap metal.

Do not wait for the boy to grow up before you begin to treat him as an equal. A proper amount of confidence, and words of encouragement and advice . . . give him to understand that you trust him in many ways, helps to make a man of him long before he is a man in either stature or years. . . . If a boy finds he can make a few articles with his hands, it tends to make him rely on himself. And the planning that is necessary for the execution of the work is a discipline

and an education of great value to him.

Perhaps it was because he was away so much of the time that Bishop Wright put such abiding emphasis on the importance of family life at 7 Hawthorn—“the home circle,” as he said—and why it played so large a part in all of their lives however far those lives reached.

Wilbur had begun reading about the German glider enthusiast Otto Lilienthal who had recently been killed in an accident. Much that he read he read aloud to Orville.

Of all animal movements, flight is indisputably the finest. . . . The fact that a creature as heavy, bulk for bulk, as many solid substances, can by the unaided movements of its wings urge itself through the air with a speed little short of a cannonball, fills the mind with wonder.

Wilbur was to draw upon and quote Pettigrew for years.

In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had

no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Otto Lilienthal, they could be killed.

He knows how to rise, how to float . . . to sail upon the wind without

effort . . . he sails and spends no force . . . he uses the wind, instead of his muscles.

Lift came from air moving faster over the arched top of a wing, thereby making the pressure there less than that under the wing.

With “wing warping,” or “wing twisting,” as it was sometimes referred to, Wilbur had already made an immensely important and altogether original advance toward their goal.

In answer to an inquiry Wilbur sent to the United States Weather Bureau in Washington about prevailing winds around the country, they were provided extensive records of monthly wind velocities at more than a hundred Weather Bureau stations, enough for them to take particular interest in a remote spot on the Outer Banks of North Carolina called Kitty Hawk,

Wilbur stressed

“The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.”

“Learning the secret of flight from a bird,” Orville would say, “was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician.”

able to return home “without having our pet theories completely knocked in the head by the hard logic of experience, and our own brains dashed out in the bargain.” He said nothing of the fact that for the first time he had experienced the thrill of flying.

Of all those who were to enter the lives of the brothers, few were to prove of such

value and none was to so aggravate sister Katharine.

a big part of which at that location required driving a pipe 10 to 12 feet into the ground to serve as a well, there being no source of fresh water within a mile.

When they saw a problem , they fixed it

Bill Tate who told them how to get “good water” and who arranged permission from the owners of the land at Kill Devil Hills to establish themselves there.

being the great aim in life.

the problem solved when these difficulties . . . are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretic nature which must be met by new mechanical designs.

We had to go ahead and discover everything ourselves.

ORVILLE WRIGHT

“We knew that it would take considerable time and funds to obtain data of our own,” Orville later recounted, “but there was some spirit that carried us through . . .”

Meanwhile, an article in the September issue of the popular McClure’s Magazine written by Simon Newcomb, a distinguished astronomer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, dismissed the dream of flight as no more than a myth. And were such a machine devised, he

asked, what useful purpose could it possibly serve? “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.”

Of primary importance was to find a way to achieve accurate measurements of the “lift” and “drag” of a wing’s surface, and the ingenuity, as well as patience, they brought to their experiments were like nothing done by anyone until then.

Although a wind tunnel had been used by an English experimenter, Francis Herbert Wenham, as early as the 1870s, and by several others since, including Hiram Maxim, their tests were nothing like those of the brothers, who proceeded entirely on their own and in their own way.

more dishonest than Keiter’s stealing, and so far as church interests are concerned, the penalty will be greater.

Integrity is a very important issue

With strong encouragement from Wilbur, the Bishop decided to do something on his own. He and Wilbur spent a full day preparing “an exposé of Keiter’s defalcations,” as the Bishop wrote in his diary, and the day after, Orville finished typewriting the final tract.

Whenever there was an important family issue the brothers have it there all

She also wanted her father to know she was in the fight with him every bit as much as the brothers. “We’ll never stop fighting now, Pop, until we’ve shown those rascals up.”

The entire family rallied behind the father

In all, the continuing worry and frustrations involved in defending the Bishop’s honor, the countless hours consumed, had brought the family closer together than ever, resolved to be ever wary of those of “unworthy character.”

They had sunk a deeper well that produced better water. Best of all, they had devised a bicycle that ran far better over sand than they could have hoped for, so a round-trip to Kitty Hawk now took only one hour, instead of three on foot.

So practical so innovative

Little if any of what the brothers did went unnoticed by the local residents, who by now, as John T. Daniels said, had “learned to love ’em,” and in no small part because they “could do anything they put their hands to.

Orville, too, was now gliding for the first time, and proudly so. Then only days later, he suddenly lost control and crashed. Luckily, he got out “without a bruise or a scratch,” but it was a clear reminder of just how dangerous it all was, and how suddenly things could go wrong.