The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

  “I will acknowledge the notes and telegrams,” she said. “There is a desk in the room, and I can sit there and write. After a bit I can read to him.” How long she would be staying was impossible to say. He was not dangerously injured, she stressed, but she was sure it would be weeks before he would be able to leave.

  At first she lived with a couple named Shearer, relatives of a Dayton friend. To get to the hospital from their home in Washington by trolley required three transfers and took fully an hour. Still, she was at Orville’s bedside every day without fail. Some nights, too tired for the return trip to town, she slept at the hospital.

  Orville’s progress was not steady. “Last night was a rather bad time for little brother and this morning, too,” she wrote to her father. His leg was broken in two places, she explained, but the breaks were “clean and in as favorable places as they could be,” in the thigh bone of the left leg. The doctors were making a great effort not to let the leg be shortened and apparently they were succeeding. The broken ribs made it necessary to bandage him tightly and that made his breathing hard.

  “Tonight I am staying all night with him. After I came today he quieted down and was so much easier that I made up my mind to see him through the night. It is after eleven now and he has been asleep nearly an hour. Last night codeine had no effect. Tonight it has.”

  Her letter was written September 21, the same day Wilbur made his record-breaking flight at Camp d’Auvours.

  Will had his nerve with him sure enough [she wrote, knowing how her father must feel]. One hour, thirty-one minutes, twenty-five seconds! All the newspapermen began calling up the hospital to tell me. Orville did a great deal of smiling over it. That did him an immense amount of good.

  “It’s midnight now and I am very tired,” she wrote at last. “Orville is still sleeping. The night nurse has gone down to get a sandwich and some tea for me.”

  Meanwhile, the army’s Aeronautical Board had begun a formal investigation to determine the cause of the crash. “Orville thinks that the propeller caught in one of the wires connecting the tail to the main part,” Katharine wrote. “That also gave a pull on the wings and upset the machine.”

  As would eventually be determined, Orville was correct. One of the blades of the right propeller had cracked; the propeller began to vibrate; the vibration tore loose a stay wire, which wrapped around the blade, and the broken blade had flown off into the air. Because the stay wire had served to brace the rear rudders, they began swerving this way and that and the machine went out of control.

  Until now both of the Wright brothers had had close scrapes with death. Wilbur had crashed two times with slight injuries, Orville four times, twice at Kitty Hawk and twice at Huffman Prairie. But as Wilbur wrote to their father, this was “the only time anything has broken on any of our machines while in flight, in nine years experience.” Nor had either of them ever plunged “head foremost” straight to the ground from an elevation of about 75 feet.

  For Katharine especially, the one member of the family there at Orville’s side seeing the condition he was in, it was truly a miracle he had escaped with his life.

  Charlie Taylor and Charlie Furnas—“the two Charlies” as they had become known at Fort Myer—came to the hospital to show Orville the piece of the propeller blade that had broken away. The wreckage of the machine, they assured him, was secure in the shed, where the windows and doors had been nailed shut, and a guard stationed. They were packing the plane’s engine and transmission parts that were undamaged to be shipped home. That accomplished, they, too, would be on their way.

  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.

  Everyone at the hospital continued to be extremely kind and helpful to Katharine, and while she did not find the military hospital quite up to standards, no other hospital would have permitted her to stay there and without a single restriction. The doctors and the day nurse were “splendid.” But having learned that the night duty nurse looked in on Orville only once every half hour and that he was stationed on the floor below, she felt she had to be on hand for Orville. She stayed day and night, which Orville greatly preferred. Often he was delirious at night and could not be left alone.

  The strain on Katharine was taking a toll. “Brother has been suffering so much . . . and I am so dead tired when morning comes that I can’t hold a pen,” she wrote to Wilbur in explanation of why he had heard so little from her.

  She fended off reporters and received visitors who were denied access to Orville. She continued to answer mail and telegrams, and it was she who represented Orville at the funeral ceremony on September 25 when Lieutenant Selfridge was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery with full military honors.

  The role she had taken upon herself did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. Some of the press concluded she had to be a nurse and so described her. “Your sister has been devotion itself,” wrote Octave Chanute to Wilbur. Most important by far, Orville told her he never could have gotten through the ordeal were it not for her.

  Others tried to show their empathy and respect in other ways. Alexander Graham Bell invited her to take a drive one evening along with Octave Chanute, after which they dined at the Bell home on 33rd Street in Washington. It was the only time she had been anywhere, she told her father.

  She was growing dreadfully homesick and worried over earning no income. “Have lost eighty-two and a half dollars already,” she reported to Wilbur on October 2, knowing she still had a long time to go before a return to Dayton would be possible. Orville seemed to be improving but was still in no shape to leave for home. The night of October 3, his temperature jumped to 101 degrees and for no apparent reason.

  Orville was thirty-seven, but in his present condition, lying there, he looked older by far. The chances that he might ever fly again—or ever want to fly again—seemed remote, if not out of the question.

  Letters from home and letters from Le Mans helped greatly. The postscript of one letter from Wilbur gave her and Orville both a particularly welcome lift. “I took Bollée (240 pounds) for a couple of rounds of the field,” he wrote. “It created more astonishment than anything I have done.”

  “We are both fairly wild to get home,” Katharine wrote to him. She had been thinking of going back for a week or so, if only to get some sleep. But then Orville would turn miserably uncomfortable, unable to get his breath. “I think I will have to stay until I bring him home,” she wrote to her father on October 17, a month to the day since the crash.

  Orville continued having his “ups and downs,” which the doctors attributed to indigestion. So she began cooking for him—broiled steak, beef broth, soft-boiled eggs. When Walter Berry, the American attorney who three years before had come to Dayton with the French delegation, invited her to dinner, she had to turn him down. She was refusing nearly all invitations
, she explained to her father, being “too tired to talk!”

  By the last week of October, it was decided Orville should be moved to Dayton, not because he was sufficiently recovered, but in the hope that being back in familiar surroundings might help alleviate his nervousness. Three days before he was to leave, two nurses helped him out of bed to try standing with crutches and the blood rushed down within his left leg as if the leg were about to burst and he nearly fainted.

  But on October 31, after five weeks and five days in the hospital and with Katharine still at his side, Orville was taken aboard a train at Washington’s Union Station.

  A good-sized crowd stood waiting at the Dayton station as the train pulled in the next morning. Katharine stepped out first onto the platform. Then Orville appeared on crutches, supported by two train officials. “Many had come there to cheer the return of the man who had been instrumental in placing the fair name of Dayton before the eyes of the civilized world,” wrote the Dayton Journal. But instead of cheers there was silence and murmurs of pity and sympathy, so drawn and wasted did the hero look. No one was allowed to speak to him except members of his family. Her brother was still a very sick man, Katharine explained.

  Brother Lorin had come to the station to meet them and a carriage stood waiting. But the vibrations on the train ride had been an agony for Orville and any more of that in the carriage, it was decided, should be avoided. So he was moved slowly along the twelve and a half blocks to Hawthorn Street in a wheelchair.

  Bishop Wright was at the house to greet them, and Carrie Kayler (who had been married and was now Carrie Grumbach) was on hand to prepare dinner. Orville’s mind was “good as ever,” the Bishop would record that night, “and his body promises to be in due time.” A bed had been set up for him in the front parlor. As for herself, Katharine allowed she was “tired to death.”

  In the days that followed Orville still required “a good deal of attention,” as Katharine recorded, but was “tolerably active,” able to stay up longer through the day, sometimes for several hours. A local surgeon who looked him over found his left leg had been shortened about an inch—not the one eighth of an inch he had been told at the Fort Myer hospital—but with proper padding in the heel of his shoe he should have no serious trouble.

  Neighbors, old school friends, came to call on Orville. By the second week in November, Charlie Taylor was pushing him in the wheelchair to the shop on Third Street, where the engine from the Fort Myer Flyer had been uncrated for inspection.

  “I have an awful accumulation of work on hand,” Orville told Wilbur on November 14, in the first letter he had written since the accident. Home and a little work seemed to do exactly what had been hoped. So improved was he in health and outlook, and such was his progress walking on crutches, that by late December he and Katharine were letting it be known they would soon be sailing together for France to join Wilbur, Wilbur having told them they were needed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Time Like No Other

  Every time we make a move, the people on the street stop and stare at us.

  KATHARINE WRIGHT

  I.

  Wilbur’s days at Le Mans had never been so full. In the months since Orville’s accident, he had become an even bigger sensation. Not since Benjamin Franklin had any American been so overwhelmingly popular in France. As said by the Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, 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.”

  The crowds kept coming to Le Mans by train and automobile and from increasingly farther distances. “Every day there is a crowd of people not only from the neighborhood,” Wilbur reported to Orville, “but also from almost every country in Europe.”

  During the six months Wilbur was flying at Le Mans 200,000 people came to see him. The thrill of beholding the American wonder in action, the possibility, perhaps, even to shake his hand or be photographed with him, the constant fuss made over him by young and old, men and women, were all part of the excitement, as was the sight of prominent figures daring to ride with him in the sky.

  First there had been the rotund Léon Bollée, then Hart Berg, and after that Berg’s wife, Edith, who was the first American woman to go up in a plane. To avoid the embarrassment of having her long skirts lifted aloft by the winds, she tied them around her ankles with a rope. On her return she said she had felt no nervous strain or “the least bit of fear.” Her admiration for “Mr. Wright,” strong as it already was, had increased tenfold by his master-working of the machine. She would be ready anytime, she said, to fly the English Channel with him.

  A photograph of Madame Berg seated on the Flyer at Wilbur Wright’s side, beaming with pleasure in advance of takeoff, made an unprecedented magazine cover, and the famous Paris dress designer Paul Poiret, quick to see the possibilities in the rope about the ankles, produced a hobble skirt that became a fashion sensation.

  Arnold Fordyce, who had led the French delegation to Dayton in 1906, took a turn to ride with Wilbur for a full hour, and for the chief of the French army’s aeronautical department, a Colonel Boutioux, Wilbur made several rounds at only 18 inches or so above the ground, which astounded everyone.

  Another passenger, like Edith Berg, marveled at how “steady” was the entire time in the air. It seemed as if Wilbur and he were “progressing along an elevated track,” wrote an English officer and aeronautical enthusiast, Major Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell, brother of the founder of the Boy Scouts. But he was astonished, too, by the noise.

  Mr. Wright, with both hands grasping the levers, watches every move, but his movements are so slight as to be almost imperceptible. . . . All the time the engine is buzzing so loudly and the propellers humming so that after the trip one is almost deaf.

  A reporter from the Paris Herald took a turn, then another reporter from Le Figaro, then several Russian officers. The “accommodating attitude of this man that we took great pleasure in depicting as a recluse, is inexhaustible,” wrote the reporter from Le Figaro. Clearly Wilbur was having a grand time.

  “Queen Margherita of Italy was in the crowd yesterday,” he wrote on October 9. “You have let me witness the most astonishing spectacle I have ever seen,” she told him. “Princes and millionaires are as thick as fleas on the ‘Flyer,’ ” he added, knowing Katharine would love hearing that.

  That women found him increasingly appealing became quite evident. One highly attractive Parisian lady, the wife of a prominent politician, spoke freely and at some length to a reporter on the matter, with the understanding that her name would not be mentioned.

  Her first impression was not altogether favorable, she admitted. “M. Wright appeared a bit too rough and rugged. His expression was fixed and terribly stern.

  But the moment he opened his lips to speak, the veil of severity vanished. His voice is warm, sympathetic and vibrating. There is a kindly look that imparts exceptional charm and refinement to his bright intelligent eyes. . . . The frank honest way in which he looks straight in the eyes of the person to whom he speaks, and the firm grip of his wiry, muscular hand seem to give true insight into his character and temperament. . . .

  He impressed me as one of the most remarkable men I have ever met.

  Having finished the number of test flights required by the French syndicate, Wilbur began training the first of three French aviators, as was also required. He was Comte Charles de Lambert, a slim, blond-haired Russian-born aristocrat, age forty-three, who spoke English and to whom Wilbur took an immediate liking. With the plane fitted out with a second set of levers, he would ride to Wilbur’s right. For his part Wilbur would sit with his hands between his knees, ready if necessary to take control.

  Never had it been more important that
Wilbur perform to perfection, for any mishap now, coming after Orville’s crash, would be seen in a very different light, and so, as much as he was enjoying himself, the pressure on him was greater than ever. Only by escaping out into the countryside on his bicycle could he have time to himself. “How I long for Kitty Hawk!” he wrote to Octave Chanute.

  In his honor the Aéro-Club de France was planning its biggest banquet ever at which Wilbur was to receive the club’s Gold Medal and a prize of 5,000 francs ($1,000) and in addition a gold medal from the Académie des Sports. “I will have quite a collection of bric-a-brac by the time I return home,” he wrote to brother Reuchlin. What he valued still more, he said, was the friendship of so many of the good people of Le Mans.

  When he had arrived a few months earlier he had known no one. Now he counted some of his warmest friends among those he had come to know. It seemed all the children within a dozen-mile radius would greet him as he rode by on his bicycle. They would politely take off their caps and smile and say, “Bonjour! Monsieur Wright.”

  “They are really almost the only ones except close friends who know how to pronounce my name,” he told Reuchlin. “People in general pronounce my name, ‘Vreecht’ with a terrible rattle of the ‘r.’ In many places I am called by my first name, ‘Veelbare’ almost entirely.”

  The Aéro-Club de France’s banquet took place in Paris the evening of November 5, 1908, in the salle de théâtre of the Automobile Club on the Place de la Concorde. As reported, the “brilliantly illuminated” room had been “transformed” by plants and flowers “in profusion.” The 250 guests, nearly all men in full dress, included almost every major figure in French aviation—Léon Delagrange, Louis Blériot, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Ernest Archdeacon—in addition to Léon Bollée, Hart Berg, and Comte Charles de Lambert. Conspicuous, too, was the great structural engineer Gustave Eiffel. Among the few women present was Edith Berg.