The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.

In a speech years later 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.”

Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded.

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

He designed and built his own press using a discarded tombstone, a buggy spring, and scrap metal.

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.

One ship drives east and another drives west With the self-same winds that blow. ’Tis the set of the sails And not the gales Which tells us the way to go. ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, “WINDS OF FATE”

“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.”

He was not only one of the world’s leading authorities on aviation, and on gliders in particular, but enjoyed an international reputation as an engineer, builder of railroads and major bridges, including the Kansas City Bridge, the first span over the Missouri River.

Although the brothers did not necessarily agree with Chanute’s philosophy that progress in science was always best served by everyone working openly together, they accepted Chanute’s suggestion if only out of respect.

So far as I can figure out, Will and Orv hired me to worry about their bicycle business so they could concentrate on their flying studies and experiments. . . . And I must have satisfied them for they didn’t hire anyone else for eight years.”

What was so troubling was that the ratio they had gone by was exactly what Lilienthal had recommended, about 1 to 12, whereas for their glider of the year before, Machine No. 1, the brothers had used a ratio of 1 to 22.

It was not just that their machine had performed so poorly, or that so much still remained to be solved, but that so many of the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations and tables

prepared by the likes of Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute—data the brothers had taken as gospel—had proven to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly those esteemed authorities had been guessing, “groping in the dark.” The accepted tables were, in a word, “worthless.”

“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 . . .”

This was the kind of horse, he said, that men had to learn to manage in order to fly, and there were two ways: One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders.

By late December, their experiments finished and feeling the pressure of economic necessity, the brothers turned to the production of the next season’s bicycles. As Charlie Taylor liked to stress, they had to keep the business going to pay for the experiments. Octave Chanute wrote to say how greatly he regretted their decision.

For some time Chanute had been offering to provide financial help to the brothers, which they greatly appreciated but were unwilling to accept. “Practically all the expense of our aeronautical experiments lies in the time consumed and we do not wish to increase the temptation to neglect our regular business for it,” Wilbur wrote to him. What if some rich man were to provide $10,000 a year, Chanute asked, adding that he happened to know Andrew Carnegie. “Would you like for me to write to him?” Again Wilbur tactfully declined. Besides, he added, it seemed likely Carnegie was “too hardheaded a Scotchman to become interested in such a visionary pursuit as flying.”

done it together on their own, paying their own way, as they did everything, and they intended to keep going on their own.

It had taken four years. They had endured violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes. To get to and from their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from Dayton (counting Orville’s return home to see about stronger propeller shafts), a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than half a mile. No matter. They had done it.

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.

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

was at last issued on the Wright Flying Machine, patent number 821,393,

“I have done what I know he would have done if he had been here and understood all the facts. In such cases the man at a distance only does harm by trying to give instructions which do not fit the case.”

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.

Don’t go out even for all the officers of the government unless you would go equally if they were absent. Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready.

Then, in the way of a fatherly sermon, he added, “We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.”

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.

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.

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

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.

He died of a heart attack at age seventy-seven in Dayton’s Miami Valley Hospital at ten-thirty the evening of January 30, 1948, and was laid to rest at Woodland Cemetery with his mother, father, Wilbur, and Katharine.

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.

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.