The Wright Brothers

In France, Wilbur had become a star. Not only his feats in the air but his unadorned Midwestern demeanor made him the most popular American there “since Benjamin Franklin” (203). People streamed into Le Mans to see him fly: Over the six months of his demonstrations, 200,000 onlookers watched in person. Once he completed the required trials, to fulfill the contract with the French buyers, Wilbur began training three French aviators, starting with Comte Charles de Lambert. On November 5, 1908, Aéro-Club de France celebrated Wilbur at a large banquet in Paris. The club’s president alluded to the earlier scorn and skepticism with which the French press had treated the brothers, saying that Wilbur had won their respect and admiration. Wilbur, in his speech, mentioned the trust and friendship that had developed between him and the French people now that they’d had a chance to meet each other in person.

On New Year’s Eve, Wilbur won the Michelin Cup, a newly established aviation competition, flying for over two hours and 77 miles and winning $4,000. Orville and Katharine set sail in early January 1909 and arrived in Cherbourg, where Wilbur and the Bergs greeted them. They stayed in Paris briefly before traveling on to Pau, a southern resort town where Wilbur had moved for winter demonstrations. Pau was a winter destination for royalty and famous people, and over the following weeks, Wilbur performed for the likes of Joseph Pulitzer, Arthur Balfour (the former prime minister of England), and the King of Spain. That March, even King Edward VII of England came for a look.

Orville and Katharine stayed at the Grand Hôtel Gassion, while Wilbur stayed several miles away at the airfield housing the Flyer. Katharine had a grand time. As introverted as her brothers were, she was extroverted, so she enjoyed the socializing and public functions. In addition, as a Latin teacher, she picked up French in no time and could converse freely with their hosts. (Wilbur, who had spent much more time in France, never learned the language.) Both the French public and the press adored her, and she received much attention.

After they completed the demonstrations in March, Wilbur finished training the three French pilots to ensure that each could fly successfully alone. After a farewell banquet for the three Wrights in Le Mans, Wilbur left for Rome to give more demonstrations. Orville and Katharine joined him a week later, after attending a congratulatory dinner in Paris at the Aéro-Club de France (where Katharine was the first woman ever invited). In Rome, Wilbur flew more than 50 times and trained Italian military officers as pilots, and the Wrights’ trip to Europe ended as an unqualified success. In early May, they returned to the US.

After a day in New York City, the three took the train home to Dayton, where they received a raucous welcome. Close to a dozen horse-drawn carriages waited at the station to take them, their family members, and various officials back to their home on Hawthorn Street. Later that month, Orville announced that he would complete the trials he’d begun at Fort Myer before his accident. Though both Wilbur and Katharine thought it would be too emotionally difficult and he should give it some time, he was adamant. The brothers had to construct a new plane to replace the one destroyed in the crash the previous September.

On June 10, 1909, the brothers and Katharine traveled to the White House, where Wilbur and Orville received a medal from President Howard Taft. In his speech, Taft acknowledged the “delayed hour” (230) in recognizing their accomplishments. A week later, the city of Dayton threw a massive two-day, formal celebration for their hometown heroes, which included a parade, speeches, concerts, bestowing of medals, fireworks, and more. The brothers showed up when necessary but kept working at the bike shop as much as they could.

At the end of the month, they were back at Fort Myer. On June 26, they kept a crowd of 4,000 waiting as they made final preparations and gauged the wind. A crowd had gathered by three o’ clock that afternoon, including important political figures. At 6:30, however, Wilbur decided that the wind was too strong to try a plane that had never flown before and called it off. Three days later, the conditions were right, and they went ahead with a trial. However, this and other flights in the following days were not great successes: All were low to the ground, were short, or resulted in minor mishaps. On July 2, as Orville flew near the same place as his accident the previous year, the engine died; he glided down safely but ripped part of a wing’s fabric and broke both skids. They attributed it to the machine being new, which Wilbur compared to a horse that needed breaking in.

After they repaired the wing and resumed flights at the end of July, things finally fell into place. For the army’s endurance test, Orville took up a passenger for over an hour and “flew around the field 79 times, at an altitude of 150 feet, not only passing the test but breaking a world record that Wilbur had set at Le Mans the year before” (238). This successful trial helped them fulfill their $30,000 contract with the War Department.

Meanwhile, aviation took off rapidly. Just before Orville completed his trials, a French pilot named Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel. In August, 22 pilots took park in a competition in Reims, France; just a year earlier, nobody but Wilbur and Orville Wright had successfully flown a powered plane. The Reims competition crowned a new American aviation hero: Glenn Curtiss, who won top honors in the speed contest.

He and Wilbur were asked to fly in the New York celebration in September to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s first trip up the river that would bear his name and the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s first steamboat ride on the same river. It was the first time New Yorkers would see an airplane and was a huge affair. Twenty US battleships were there, along with ships from many other countries’ navies and the luxury liner Lusitania.

On September 29, Wilbur made his first public flight in New York Harbor, circling the Statue of Liberty and flying low past the Lusitania’s cheering passengers as it departed. Five days later, he flew up the Hudson to 122nd Street and back as many watched from Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Due to weather, Curtiss was unable to fly before he had to leave for another engagement, and Wilbur made no further flights after a piston head broke in the engine. All he wrote to his father about these historic New York flights was, “It was an interesting trip and at times rather exciting” (247).

During the last months of 1909 and the first part of 1910, business occupied much of the brothers’ time: They set up a company headquartered on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and Wilbur took on the challenge of fighting patent infringements, including a lawsuit filed against Glenn Curtiss’s company. On May 25, 1910, the brothers invited the public to watch Orville fly at Huffman Prairie, their old testing grounds. He put on quite a show, flying up to 2,720 feet and performing figure eights and other aerial acrobatics. Until then, the brothers had never flown together because if a bad crash killed them both, their work would cease. However, on this day, Wilbur climbed into the seat next to Orville and they enjoyed the same flight for the first time ever. Next, it was Bishop Wright’s turn, who had never been up and now became the oldest person to fly at age 82. His only words during the six-minute flight were, “Higher, Orville, higher!” (253).

The Epilogue briefly summarizes the remaining years of Wilbur, Orville, Katharine, and Bishop after 1910. Wilbur lived the shortest life of them all. He flew only once more, as the business of the Wright Company and the lawsuits the brothers filed to protect their patent was full-time work. In May 1912, he came down with typhoid fever and died at the end of the month, only 45 years old.

Bishop Wright lived to be 88, dying in 1917, after living for three years with Orville and Katharine in a large new house they’d built just outside Dayton. Katharine stopped teaching and devoted herself to family business and several causes. She sat on the board of Oberlin College, her alma mater, and there fell in love with a fellow board member, a widower and former classmate. They married in 1926, when she was 52. Orville felt betrayed and stopped speaking to her. Three years later, Katharine died of pneumonia, and they reconciled only at the last minute.

Orville continued flying until he was 46, when pain and other physical issues from his accident at Fort Myer became too much. He followed up on the remaining lawsuits after Wilbur died and fought to give the Wright name its proper place in history. The Smithsonian Institution proved a surprising barrier to the latter when it declared that Samuel Langley, its former head, was the first to fly. With the help of Glenn Curtiss, the institution retested Langley’s old machine in 1914—but Curtiss secretly made changes, allowing it to perform better than it had. In 1928, the Smithsonian reversed course and bestowed the proper credit on Wilbur and Orville.

Over time, Orville withdrew from the public eye but kept up some obligations to honor his brother. He died in early 1948, at age 76, but lived long enough to see aviation advance to using jet engines and breaking the sound barrier. McCullough notes that when Neil Armstrong became the first person to step on the moon, about 100 years after the Wright brothers were born, he carried with him a piece of fabric from the wing of one of their early Flyers.