The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

In 1927 young Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to land in Paris, a feat once thought impossible by the Wrights. On his return to America, Lindbergh made a point of coming to Dayton to pay his respects to Orville at Hawthorn Hill, an event that caused excitement in Dayton of a kind not seen since the brothers had made their celebrated return from Europe eighteen years before. Orville lived to see, too, the horrific death and destruction wrought by the giant bombers of World War II and in several interviews tried as best he could to speak both for himself and for Wilbur. We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . . . No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses.

“polite almost to a fault,” as said, always neatly dressed, his shoes always shined, Orville was also known to drive his automobile at such high speed that the police of Oakwood would close their eyes and hold their breath until he passed by on the way to his laboratory downtown.

On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in western Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer.