The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

German glider enthusiast Otto Lilienthal who had recently been killed in an accident.

Most enjoyable to her was a rendition from Orville of an all-out pursuit of an uncommonly resourceful mouse that kept prowling about the kitchen and thereby provided the only excitement of the moment. “He met with a rather warm reception the other night when he undertook to promenade on Will’s bed,” Orville began, “[and] got tossed a good deal . . . in a blanket, until finally he escaped. We found him snugly wrapped up in our carpet this afternoon. We had a merry chase all about the building, inside and out. The large cracks in the floor making it easy for him to get in or out in a hurry when necessary. But as there were two of us, one with a stick and one with a gun, one above and one below the floor, his chances of escape were beginning to look rather shaky. Finally, he nestled up in a corner below the floor to take time to get a breath, when I blazed away at him with the gun. The mark of the bullet is in the corner right back of where he stood, nevertheless the little beastie turned around and calmly walked away and I in my astonishment just stood there and watched him go.

The only comment on record, in a letter Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute, was largely an expression of sympathy for Langley: Professor Langley seems to be having rather more than his fair share of trouble just now with the pestiferous reporters and windstorms. But as the mosquitoes are reported to be very bad along the banks where the reporters are encamped he has some consolation.

The driving wind and rain continued through the night, Wilbur wrote, “but we took the advice of the Oberlin coach, ‘Cheer up, boys, there is no hope.’ ”

They proceeded on the Flyer much as if they were building a truss bridge, only with the attention to detail of watchmakers,

At exactly 4:45 he gave the signal to release the catapult. Instantly the machine roared down the track and leaped 60 feet straight up into the air, only to stop and with a grinding, whirring sound, hang suspended momentarily, nose up, then, its wings crumbling, flipped backward and plunged into the river no more than 20 feet from the houseboat. Manly, who had disappeared into the river, found himself trapped underwater, his jacket snared by part of the wreckage. Tearing free, he fought his way up through tangled wires only to hit a sheet of ice before at last breaking through to the surface. He was pulled from the water, uninjured but nearly frozen. After being quickly wrapped in blankets and administered a shot of whiskey, he broke into what one of the Smithsonian staff would describe as “the most voluble series of blasphemies” he had ever heard in his life.

Being the kind of men they were, neither ever said the stunning contrast between their success and Samuel Langley’s full-scale failure just days before made what they had done on their own all the more remarkable. 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.

Wilbur and Orville wondered why the reporters remained at such a distance. Only later were they told that it had been said the brothers kept rifles and shotguns at the ready to guard their machine. Asked what he and Wilbur would have done had the correspondents come into camp and sat there to watch, Orville replied, “We couldn’t have delayed our work. There was too much to do and our time was short.”

Early the morning of May 14 the onlookers were treated to a sight never before seen anywhere—two men in a motor-powered flying machine—when Wilbur took Charlie Furnas up for a short ride. To the newsmen from their distant vantage point, it appeared Wilbur and Orville had taken flight together and so some of their dispatches reported. But 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.

On September 23, Alexander Graham Bell and two members of his Aerial Experiment Association came to the hospital to see Orville, but learned he was not yet ready for visitors. The group then crossed the parade field toward Arlington Cemetery to view Lieutenant Selfridge’s casket still awaiting burial. On the way they stopped at the shed. Charlie Taylor, who had not as yet shipped the wreckage of the Flyer back to Dayton, had taken a break for lunch. The only one on duty was the guard, who agreed to let the visitors into the building where the crate containing the Flyer stood open, the wreckage on display. Bell took a tape measure from his pocket and made at least one measurement of the width of a wing. Word of this was not to reach Katharine or Orville for another week, but when it did they were extremely annoyed. Katharine asked Octave Chanute for his view on the matter and after talking to the soldier who had witnessed the incident, Chanute felt it was not something to be overly concerned about. When Charlie Taylor, on his return to Dayton, told Bishop Wright what had happened, the Bishop, in a letter to Katharine, allowed it was “very cheeky” of Bell, but “a very little piece of business anyway.” No more was said of the matter and exactly what Bell’s intentions were was never made clear.

“Take her back to the shed,” he said. “There is always an element of uncertainty in aviation as far as it has advanced,” Wilbur explained to a writer for the Washington Post. “People must remember that this machine has never been flown before, and also that my brother has not been up in the air since his accident last year. They can’t blame me for wanting the first flight to be made under conditions as nearly ideal as possible.” No one with a keen sense of dramatic effect, wrote the Washington Herald, could have created a better scene to demonstrate the “utter immunity of the two brothers from the fumes of importunity and the intoxication of an august assemblage.” Uniformed army signalmen gathered “like pallbearers” and wheeled the plane away, and four thousand spectators departed, many expressing opinions, including one senator, who was heard to say of the brothers, “I’m damned if I don’t admire their independence. We don’t mean anything to them, and there are a whole lot of reasons why we shouldn’t.”

Plainly wishing the dispute to be resolved, Wilbur closed on a warmer note. “If anything can be done to straighten matters out to the satisfaction of both you and us, we are not only willing but anxious to do our part. . . . We have no wish to quarrel with a man toward whom we ought to preserve a feeling for gratitude.” When nearly three months passed with no response from Chanute, Wilbur wrote again to say, “My brother and I do not form many intimate friendships, and do not lightly give them up. I believed that unless we could understand exactly how you felt, and you could understand how we felt, our friendship would tend to grow weaker instead of stronger. Through ignorance or thoughtlessness, each would be touching the other’s sore spots and causing unnecessary pain. We prize too highly the friendship which meant so much in the years of our early struggles to willingly see it worn away by uncorrected misunderstandings, which might be corrected by a frank discussion.