The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

But then Wilbur learned that the chaos and damage had not been caused at Dayton, but at Le Havre by careless French customs inspectors, and he apologized to Orville at once. Orville, knowing the stress his brother was under, made no issue of the matter.

Bad as it was, the press, as usual, made the accident sound still worse, and for the family at home Wilbur, as usual, made light of it, spending much of a letter, written three days later, describing how the local physician went about tending the wounds as would a horse doctor. Nonetheless, Wilbur insisted, all was practically healed, the pain gone, when in fact it would be a month before he could use his left arm and the stress he was under had been greatly compounded.

Reporters on the scene were becoming increasingly impatient and, to Wilbur, increasingly annoying. A correspondent for the London Daily Mail, Joseph Brandreth, would write, “We voted him ‘mule-headed,’ ‘eccentric,’ ‘unnecessarily surly,’ in his manner toward us, for it was impossible to discover from such a Sphinx what he intended to do or when he intended to do it.”

Bollée talked happily to reporters about Wilbur and his ways, describing how he would not let anyone touch his machine or handle so much as a piece of wire. He even refused to allow mechanics to pour oil into the engine, Bollée said, so sure was he that “they don’t do it the correct way.” Their nickname for him was Vieille Burette, “Old Oilcan.”

He takes his baths from a hosepipe attached to a well sixty feet away. He sleeps practically under the wings of his aeroplane. And early in the day he starts to work, whistling the while.

Here and there among the crowd could be seen several notables not from Le Mans. There were two Russian officers in uniform and Ernest Archdeacon of the Aéro-Club de France, noted for his skeptical opinion of the Wrights, and, of greatest interest to the others gathered, the celebrated French aviator-hero Louis Blériot. What Blériot may have been thinking as he sat waiting is unknown, but Archdeacon was busy proclaiming his confidence that Wilbur Wright would fail and was happy to explain to those close by in the grandstand all that was “wrong” with the Wright plane.

Wilbur, who had been up early as usual, showed no sign of nervous tension or excitement. Such “quiet self-confidence” was reassuring, said Hart Berg afterward: One thing that, to me at least, made his appearance all the more dramatic, was that he was not dressed as if about to do something daring or unusual. He, of course, had no special pilot’s helmet or jacket, since no such garb yet existed, but appeared in the ordinary gray suit he usually wore, and a cap. And he had on, as he nearly always did when not in overalls, a high, starched collar.

Inside the shed he proceeded to work on preparations, checking everything with total concentration. As would be said by one observer from the press, “Neither the impatience of waiting crowds, nor the sneers of rivals, nor the pressure of financial conditions not always easy, could induce him to hurry over any difficulty before he had done everything in his power to understand and overcome it.”

About noon Hart Berg walked out onto the field to announce over a loudspeaker that no photographs would be permitted. After much show of despair, the press photographers, who had been waiting day and night, held a brief meeting, after which they gave their word that if Mr. Wright agreed to allow photographs on Monday, they would take none until then. To be sure that no photographs were taken by amateurs, one press photographer would patrol the field on a bicycle.

Finally, at six-thirty, with dusk settling, Wilbur turned his cap backward, and to Berg, Bollée, and the others said quietly, “Gentlemen, I’m going to fly.”

He took the seat on the left. Two men started the engine, each pulling down a blade on the two propellers. Not satisfied with something he heard as the motor was warmed up, Wilbur called to a mechanic who was standing at the back of the machine to ask if some small, last-minute adjustment had been made on the motor. The man said it had. According to an eyewitness, “Wilbur sat silent for a moment. Then, slowly leaving his pilot’s seat, he walked around the machine just to make sure, with his own eyes, that this particular adjustment had, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, been well and truly made.”

There were shouts of “C’est l’homme qui a conquis l’air!” “This man has conquered the air,” and “Il n’est pas bluffeur!” “He is not a bluffer.”

“We are children compared to the Wrights,” said another pilot, René Gasnier, and Louis Blériot declared outright, “I consider that for us in France, and everywhere, a new era in mechanical flight has commenced.” Then, catching his breath, Blériot said he was not yet sufficiently calm to express all that he felt, except to say, “C’est merveilleux!”

Then, “very calmly,” his face beaming with a smile, he put his hands in his pockets and walked off whistling. That night, while the normally sleepy town of Le Mans celebrated, the hero retired early to his shed.

Perhaps it was the heat, or the stress he was under, or a combination of both that caused Wilbur to do what he did. Quite upset afterward, he said he was not in the habit of making trouble, but it had been too much for him when he saw the man deliberately break his word.

A writer for Le Figaro, Franz Reichel, fascinated with the flecks of gold in Wilbur’s eyes, came to much the same conclusion. “The flecks of gold,” wrote Reichel, “ignite a passionate flame because Wilbur Wright is a zealot.

He and his brother made the conquest of the sky their existence. They needed this ambition and profound, almost religious, faith in order to deliberately accept their exile to the country of the dunes, far away from all. . . . Wilbur is phlegmatic but only in appearance. He is driven by a will of iron which animates him and drives him in his work.

“Even if this man sometimes deigns to smile, one can say with certainty that he has never known the douceur [sweetness] of tears. Has he a heart? Has he loved? Has he suffered? An enigma, a mystery.”

Though Camp d’Auvours was “lost in the middle of the woods,” as said and less convenient to town than the racecourse of Hunaudières, the crowds came in numbers greater than ever. “They flock from miles,” their “curiosity too strong,” reported Le Figaro, only to find that Wilbur, for some reason or other, was not flying that day. “Never mind,” was the response. “We’ll come back.” It was almost as though the less he flew the greater the curiosity of the crowd.

Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready.

Still, with it all, Orville was frank to tell Katharine, “I am meeting some very handsome young ladies!” The trouble was if he were to meet them again, he would have a hard time remembering their names.

As never before the two “bicycle mechanics” and their flying machines were causing simultaneous sensations on both sides of the Atlantic. They had become a transcontinental two-ring circus. Only now it was the younger, lesser known of the two whose turn had come to steal the show.

The day after Orville set yet another record with a flight of an hour and 10 minutes, during which he thrilled the crowd with two figure eights. He tried one maneuver after another, as if he were an acrobat performing, at times turning corners so sharply that the plane seemed nearly on edge.

On Saturday the 12th, five thousand people encircled the parade grounds. As they had never been able to do until now the American people were seeing with their own eyes one of their country’s greatest inventions in action. Among those who rushed to congratulate Orville was Octave Chanute, who, a bit out of breath, exclaimed, “Good for you, my boy!,” then asked him how it felt to be making history. “Pretty good,” Orville said, “but I’m more interested in making speed.” The remark made more headlines back in Dayton.

In his brief time thus far at Fort Myer, Orville had set seven world records.

At his upstairs desk in Dayton that same day, September 19, Bishop Wright wrote to Wilbur in much the same spirit. It is sad that Orville is hurt and unpleasant that his success is delayed. It is lamentable that Lieut. Selfridge lost his life. I am saddest over his death. But success to your invention is assured. The brighter day will come to you.

Will had his nerve with him sure enough [she wrote, knowing how her father must feel]. One hour, thirty-one minutes, twenty-five seconds! All the newspapermen began calling up the hospital to tell me. Orville did a great deal of smiling over it. That did him an immense amount of good.

Until now both of the Wright brothers had had close scrapes with death. Wilbur had crashed two times with slight injuries, Orville four times, twice at Kitty Hawk and twice at Huffman Prairie. But as Wilbur wrote to their father, this was “the only time anything has broken on any of our machines while in flight, in nine years experience.” Nor had either of them ever plunged “head foremost” straight to the ground from an elevation of about 75 feet. For Katharine especially, the one member of the family there at Orville’s side seeing the condition he was in, it was truly a miracle he had escaped with his life.

Wilbur’s days at Le Mans had never been so full. In the months since Orville’s accident, he had become an even bigger sensation. Not since Benjamin Franklin had any American been so overwhelmingly popular in France. As said by the Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, it was not just his feats in the air that aroused such interest but his strong “individuality.” He was seen as a personification of “the Plymouth Rock spirit,” to which French students of the United States, from the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, had attributed “the grit and indomitable perseverance that characterize American efforts in every department of activity.”

Never had it been more important that Wilbur perform to perfection, for any mishap now, coming after Orville’s crash, would be seen in a very different light, and so, as much as he was enjoying himself, the pressure on him was greater than ever. Only by escaping out into the countryside on his bicycle could he have time to himself. “How I long for Kitty Hawk!” he wrote to Octave Chanute.

The Aéro-Club de France’s banquet took place in Paris the evening of November 5, 1908, in the salle de théâtre of the Automobile Club on the Place de la Concorde. As reported, the “brilliantly illuminated” room had been “transformed” by plants and flowers “in profusion.” The 250 guests, nearly all men in full dress, included almost every major figure in French aviation—Léon Delagrange, Louis Blériot, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Ernest Archdeacon—in addition to Léon Bollée, Hart Berg, and Comte Charles de Lambert. Conspicuous, too, was the great structural engineer Gustave Eiffel. Among the few women present was Edith Berg.

Scarcely ten years ago, all hope of flying had almost been abandoned; even the most convinced had become doubtful, and I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for fifty years. Two years later, we ourselves were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction—as my friends of the press, especially, well know. But it is not really necessary to look too far into the future; we see enough already to be certain that it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and open the roads.

In Le Mans, despite increasingly cold days, Wilbur, having switched to wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket, was busy practicing takeoffs without the use of a catapult. He had decided to compete for the Michelin Cup, a prize newly established by the French tire company, and in the competition such launching devices were not allowed.

On the day of the event, December 31, the last day of the year and Wilbur’s last big event at Camp d’Auvours, in spite of rain and cold he was barely able to endure, he put on his most astonishing performance yet, flying longer and farther than anyone ever had—2 hours, 20 minutes, and 23 and one fifth seconds during which he covered a distance of 77 miles. He won the Cup.

On another occasion, they were with Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, and his wife. “We all liked them very much,” wrote Katharine.

She was most happily surprised by how smoothly they sailed along and how easily she could recognize faces below. She thought they were flying at about 30 feet, but found out later it was 60 feet, and they were moving at 42 miles per hour. Yet she had a feeling of complete tranquillity and forgot completely about the cold. The flight lasted seven minutes. To show her the ease with which he could maneuver the machine, Wilbur made several sharp turns, but again she experienced no ill effects and never showed the least sign of fear. Asked later if she had felt like a bird when flying with her brother, Katharine responded, “I don’t know exactly how a bird feels. Birds sing, I suppose, because they are happy. I sang, I know, and I was very happy indeed. But like the birds, I sang best after the flight was over.”

Orville had told the press he would do no flying while in France. Nor did he plan to go up with Wilbur. But only days later Wilbur took Katharine for another ride, this time for a thirteen-mile flight cross-country. “It was great,” she told her father. Not long after that she would take off in a balloon with a French count, and this time Orville went, too, sailing some thirty miles to land at Ossun in the Pyrénées. That accomplished, Katharine gave out. Close to collapse from “too much excitement,” she stayed in her hotel room for two days.

Edward VII was in his sixty-eighth year, a stout, white-bearded, affable figure whose enjoyment of life, whose manner of dress—the homburg hats, tweed suits, the habit of never buttoning the bottom button on his vests—along with his love of fast automobiles and unmasked enthusiasm for beautiful women, had led to his being taken as a kind of emblem for the years since 1900, the Edwardian Era. The oldest son of Queen Victoria, he was an altogether refreshing personification of escape from the Victorian Age. That he was also keenly interested in aviation and had come in person to witness for himself the wonder of Wilbur Wright seemed entirely in keeping. The crowd at the airfield was large, the excitement great. Katharine was presented to the king, who, as noticed, was wearing a small bunch of shamrock in his buttonhole in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

But for all the attention being paid to the Wrights, there was at the same time increasing realization of how much else was happening in aviation in France. Six months earlier the number of builders of airplanes in Paris and vicinity amounted to less than a half dozen. On April 25, the New York Times reported that no fewer than fifteen factories were now in full operation. If the Wrights were front and center in the show of inventive change, the cast onstage in France was filling rapidly.

I esteem it a great honor and an opportunity to present these medals to you as an evidence of what you have done. I am so glad—perhaps at a delayed hour—to show that in America it is not true that “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country.” It is especially gratifying thus to note a great step in human discovery by paying honor to men who bear it so modestly. You made this discovery by a course that we of America like to feel is distinctly American—by keeping your noses right at the job until you had accomplished what you had determined to do.

At about this point Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph, appeared on the scene and was so thrilled to meet Wilbur he insisted on shaking his hand, greasy or not. It had been arranged that whenever Wilbur or Curtiss was about to take flight, Marconi would send a wireless message from Governors Island to the warships in the harbor and they in turn would raise flags as a signal to other ships and all on land.

One day the reporters who hung about as close as permitted hoping for a chance to talk to Wilbur saw some small boys from the garrison approaching the guards and expected to see the children rebuffed as they had been. Instead they saw Wilbur, “a kindly smile” on his face, welcome them, then through the open doors watched as he “explained every detail on the machine.”

Soon after landing, Wilbur announced he would fly again. Wireless signals went out, signal flags went up, and off he went. Instead of heading toward the mouth of the Hudson, as expected, he swung to the west into the wind and, flying over two ferryboats, headed straight for the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, circled the statue, and sailed low over the Lusitania, which was then heading down the harbor, outward bound to Liverpool. Thousands of people were watching. Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan was thick with spectators, and passengers on deck on the Lusitania frantically waved hats, scarfs, handkerchiefs as Wilbur passed over their heads. He maneuvered his plane with perfect control through a whole series of dips and turns. But it was the spectacle of Wilbur Wright and his flying machine circling the Statue of Liberty that made the most powerful impression, which would be talked about, written about, and remembered more than anything, as a writer for the New York Evening Sun tried to express in a front-page account: Once his great aeroplane, so near the horizon that it seemed one with the ocean gulls among which it flew . . . [was] just above the level of the feet of the Statue of Liberty. An instant later it appeared at the level of the statue’s breast and then passed in front on an even keel. In the air Wright seemed to pause for a moment to pay the homage of an American aviator to the lady who attests his country’s destinies. Then suddenly turning eastward ...

“A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.”

We must get up clear of the belt of disturbed air which results from the irregularities of the earth’s surface. From now on you will see a great increase in the average elevation at which aviators will take their flights; for not only will they find in the higher strata more favorable atmospheric conditions, but in case of motor trouble, they will have more time and distance in which to recover control or make a safe glide to earth.

Of the immediate family of 7 Hawthorn Street, only Bishop Wright had yet to fly. Nor had anyone of his age ever flown anywhere on earth. He had been with the brothers from the start, helping in every way he could, never losing faith in them or their aspirations. Now, at eighty-two, with the crowd cheering, he walked out to the starting point, where Orville, without hesitation, asked him to climb aboard. They took off, soaring over Huffman Prairie at about 350 feet for a good six minutes, during which the Bishop’s only words were, “Higher, Orville, higher!”

Wilbur wrote to a friend in France, “we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.”

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.

A short life, full of consequences [the Bishop wrote]. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died.

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