The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

Prominent, too, in the pose, appropriately, are the hands, the highly skilled hands that, by the time the picture was taken, had played a substantial part in bringing miraculous change to the world.

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

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

He flew one hour, 31 minutes, and 25 seconds, over a distance of 40 miles establishing another sensational world record.

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.”

Besides, wrote one correspondent, “Like most American girls, the aviators’ sister has very decided views of her own.”

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.

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. 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.

Katharine died on March 3, 1929. Her body was brought back to Dayton and buried with her father, mother, and Wilbur at Woodland Cemetery.

The financial rewards for their efforts and accomplishments had been considerable for the Wright brothers, though not as excessive as many imagined. In his will, Wilbur had left $50,000 each to brothers Reuchlin and Lorin, and to Katharine. The rest of his estate, an estimated $126,000, went to Orville.

With the success of the Wright Company and its sale, Orville prospered far more. His total wealth at the time of his death was $1,067,105, or in present-day dollars $10,300,000. Though a fortune then, it hardly compared to that of any number of multimillionaires of the time.

He thought it fair to say he was well-to-do, rather than wealthy, and loved to quote his father: “All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden to others.”

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.

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.

There, hanging overhead at the National Air and Space Museum, is the original 1903 Flyer.