The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

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

Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has.

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.

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.

Its wingspan was 18 feet. The total cost of all the necessary pieces and parts—ribs of ash, wires, cloth to cover the wings—was not more than $15. The only thing missing were long spruce spars for the glider, which had proven impossible to find in Dayton. But Wilbur felt confident they could be picked up on the East Coast.

The whole apparatus weighed slightly less than 50 pounds. With Wilbur aboard as “operator,” it would total approximately 190 pounds. He would lie flat on his stomach, head first, in the middle of the lower wing and maintain fore-and-aft balance by means of the forward rudder.

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

Altogether in two months on the Outer Banks they had made nearly a thousand glides and resolved the last major control problem.

Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started.

Not incidentally, the Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money, whereas the brothers’ total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel to and from Kitty Hawk, came to a little less than $1,000, a sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.

It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and all their energy into an idea and they had the faith.

It was not the Dayton papers that finally broke the story—or the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times or Scientific American—but Amos Root’s own Gleanings in Bee Culture.

“The best dividends on the labor invested,” they said, “have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.”

the brothers, ever conscious of the risks involved, had already decided they must never fly together. That way, if one were to be killed, the other could still carry on with the work.

Orville was in critical condition, with a fractured leg and hip, and four broken ribs, but was expected to live. Lieutenant Selfridge, however, had died at 8:10 of a fractured skull without ever having regained consciousness. His was the first fatality in the history of powered flight.

Not since Benjamin Franklin had any American been so overwhelmingly popular in France.

To many then and later, it seemed their way of saying they had accomplished all they had set out to do and so at last saw no reason to postpone any longer enjoying together the thrill of flight.

Wilbur Wright died in his room at home at 7 Hawthorn Street at 3:15 in the morning, Thursday, May 30, 1912. He was forty-five years old.