DR: Their father is a traveling minister. The mother dies relatively young. There are a number of children. Wilbur is four years older than Orville.
What is it that made them interested in flight? What is it about flight that made the Wright brothers interested in devoting their entire life to it?
DM: Reading. Wilbur Wright was hit in the face with a hockey stick as a teenage boy playing hockey with some of the neighborhood fellows. It knocked out all his upper front teeth. He was badly beat up and in extreme pain for weeks. He also slipped into what we today would call a depression and went into a self-imposed seclusion in this little house they grew up in.
He wanted to go to college, he wanted to go to Yale, and he almost certainly would have. But all talk of college ended, and it was a swerve in his life that caused him to start reading about, among other things, ornithology and aviation.
While it was the most painful and demoralizing blow in his life, and the swerve was something totally unexpected, it was what set him on the path to what he did with his life. Their father raised them to have purpose in life, have a mission, a quest, to accomplish something worthy, to make the world a little better than it was before you came along. This was all heading in that direction.
Now, the question was, who hit him in the face and did he do it intentionally or was it accidental? The boy later became one of the most notorious murderers in the history of Ohio, who killed his mother, his father, his brother, and an estimated twelve other people. He grew up right around the corner. He was known as a neighborhood bully. Whether he did it intentionally or accidentally, we still don’t know.
But we do know it changed Wilbur’s life, changed history consequently, and it reminds us that this wonderful neighborhood that the Wright brothers grew up in, small houses on a little back street in Dayton, Ohio, wasn’t just a Norman Rockwell setting for a Saturday Evening Post cover. You had great genius, great ambition to excel, in the same neighborhood with outright evil.
History reminds us of that very often. Just as the plane they invent will go on to be used as one of the deadliest weapons of all time, as demonstrated in World War II. The devastation was unimaginable to anybody, let alone the Wright brothers. Wilbur never lived to see that happen. He died in 1912.
DR: Wilbur and Orville decided to work together to see if they could actually make something fly, but there were people who tried to make things fly before the Wright brothers. They didn’t invent the idea of trying to get off the ground, right?
DM: No. We could go back to Leonardo da Vinci. Earlier, people were jumping off of towers, covering themselves with feathers and jumping to their deaths. There were a number of crackpots still, proclaiming that their device would take them into the sky. The Wrights were thought of as very nice fellows, gentlemanly, well-dressed, polite, but weird, and maybe a little off their rocker. Nobody took them seriously, not in Dayton, not in the federal government.
DR: There was a man who was the secretary of the Smithsonian, Mr. Langley, after whom Langley Field [in Virginia] is named. He was an early pioneer. What happened to his efforts?
DM: There are two very important things to understand about the Wright brothers. They invented the plane. But also they invented how to fly it. They were the first test pilots, if you will.
Wilbur gave a perfect analogy. He said, “There are two ways to tame a wild horse. One is to sit on the fence and study its every motion and write notes about it, then retire to a comfortable chair at home and write a thesis on how to tame a wild horse. The other way, which is our way, is get on a horse and ride it.”
Now, Samuel Langley invented what he called his aerodrome. It looked like a giant insect. It was launched from the top of a houseboat on the Potomac River.
DR: How far did it fly?
DM: It had cost $70,000, which doesn’t sound like much today but was a fortune then. Fifty thousand was public money, Smithsonian Institution money. Twenty thousand was donated by some of his wealthy friends, including Alexander Graham Bell.
It took off from the top of the houseboat, went straight up and straight down into the river. Twice. It was a humiliating thing, to say the least, and embarrassing because of all the public money spent. But Langley never ever considered flying it. He had somebody else do it, a man who barely got away with his life.
DR: The Wright brothers, knowing of Mr. Langley’s interest in flight, wrote a letter to the Smithsonian, saying, “Can you send us all the information you have?”
DM: That’s where it really began, when Wilbur sat down at his sister Katharine’s little slant-top desk in the front parlor of the house at 7 Hawthorn Street and wrote a letter to the Smithsonian, saying, “I’m very interested in the possibilities of flight, and I think it can be accomplished.”
He added a kind of P.S., saying, “I’m not a crank. Take me seriously.” He was serious, all the way along. Always. They sent him volumes of material, including a bibliography, a reading list of material there that they printed.
DR: He read a lot of this material, and then they did some experiments. They decided they needed to find a place to actually do the testing of a glider. Why did they pick Kitty Hawk?
DM: Because of the presence of strong winds. They had figured out, by studying soaring birds, that birds could get up into the air and hang up there without flapping their wings. The notebooks of their observations of soaring birds are extraordinary. One of the great lines in Wilbur’s book is, “No bird ever soared in a calm.”
In other words, you need that wind. You don’t want, in the old Irish saying, to have the wind at your back. You want to head into the wind. That’s how you get up. The wind will lift you, just as they felt that adversity will lift you. No bird ever soared in a calm. They faced adversity of a kind that would make all of us give up not very far into the project.
DR: They had a bicycle store. They’re making bicycles, but they decided to pick up, both of them, and go to Kitty Hawk. Were there any hotels there?
DM: Nothing. There were no roads, no bridges, very few people. But they got the wind and then some. They also got sand to land on, soft landings. Very, very advantageous, to say the least, because they would crash many times. And there were very few people to be coming around all the time bothering them with questions and curiosity.
DR: How did it work the first year they went there?
DM: They were working with gliders, not a powered airplane yet. They’re trying to learn how to glide, and they invented what they call “wing warping,” which was their version of what soaring birds do with their wings. They would go up and down on the beaches, doing this and imitating the birds.
They’re wearing their suits as if they were back in Dayton, Ohio, starched shirts and neckties, and the local people thought, “Are they crazy?”
Until they saw how hard they worked. One of the men who became very helpful and instrumental in their work on Kitty Hawk, John T. Daniels, said, “They’re the workingest boys I ever knew in my life.”
DR: They had some experiments the first summer. They made some mistakes, they came back another summer. Eventually they started to do motorized flight. How did they know how to make an engine?
DM: They found out that all the data accumulated and published and taken as gospel by people like Langley was all wrong. As Orville said, “It was worthless.”
What were they to do? They weren’t learned scholars at MIT or Rensselaer Polytechnic. They said, “We’ll make our own data.” So they built their own wind tunnel, models of which are in the Wright Cycle Shop, which is in the wonderful Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, as is the house with all its possessions.
They built a wind tunnel, with a regular fan on one end, and they made all different shapes of wings and the camber or the upper curvature of the wing out of little hacksaw blades. They spent hours and hours, for months, making all this new data, which was right because it was based on their experiences flying, none of which their predecessors had had. That alone was a huge a
ccomplishment.
Then they realized they wanted to put a motor on the glider, but there were no motors available from any of the automobile motor manufacturers that were light enough in weight or strong enough for their purposes. So they thought, “We’ll have to build a motor.” They’d never built a motor before in their lives. They had a wonderful machinist, Charlie Taylor, who worked with them, and he’d never built a motor in his life.
They built it out of aluminum. First time anybody had thought of building an engine out of aluminum, which they obtained from a tiny little start-up company in Pittsburgh called the Aluminum Company of America, Alcoa.
The first one they built cracked. Instead of saying, “Well, I guess it won’t work,” they said to Alcoa, “Another one.” And the other one did work, and not only did it work, it supplied more horsepower even than they expected. That’s what made possible the first flight, on December 17, 1903.
DR: They went back to Kitty Hawk, and they flew the first time with a motor flight and a pilot? And that was the first time man had controlled flight ever?
DM: Yes. If you read how long the flight was and how much time it consumed, you’ll think, “Oh, come on”—120 feet in twelve seconds. But they knew they’d done it. It was a bitterly cold day, December 17, wind blowing. Langley had just done the nose dives of his machine into the Potomac River, so it was up to them to show they could do it.
Langley had spent, as I said, $70,000 on his machine. They had spent, in total, less than a thousand dollars, because they’d built and done everything themselves in their spare time with what little money they had from the profits of their bicycle shop.
Before the day ended, Wilbur had flown [a distance of] 800 feet. So they absolutely had done it. But they also knew that their wing warping wasn’t as good as it could be, because they couldn’t bank and turn sufficiently to claim that they had a practical airplane yet.
One of the scenes that I dearly love is, here they’ve done this thing nobody in the history of the world had ever done, and done it under the most adverse conditions imaginable. They’re four miles out from Kitty Hawk, four miles out from any civilization at all. They’re out in the middle of a sand desert all by themselves.
They went back into their shed to get warm and made themselves some lunch, probably Campbell’s soup. They did the dishes before walking the four miles into town to send a telegram back home that said, “We’ve been successful.”
They knew they would be successful, and they also knew they had much more work to do, because they had to create a practical plane. That took them two more years. It wasn’t really until 1905 that they had a plane that could take off, land, bank, turn, fly in a circle, fly in a figure eight, skim along eighteen inches or two feet above the grass, with perfect control.
They were brilliant pilots. They were like acrobats or star athletes, and could perform with that machine as nobody on earth could perform.
Still, our government here took no interest. None. They wouldn’t send anybody out to see what they were doing. This was all going on in a cow pasture outside of Dayton. It’s still there, by the way, exactly as it was.
DR: They went three summers to Kitty Hawk. Then they went back to Dayton. They found a pasture that somebody let them fly on, but they didn’t want people knowing much about it. Why was that?
DM: They didn’t want people that would come out and disturb them, distract them. Because, as I said, they were gentlemen, and if somebody wanted to ask them a question, they’d stop and answer the question. It wasn’t like they were hiding things. Anybody that took a serious interest was perfectly welcome to come out and watch.
DR: And did the U.S. government come along and say, “We now have a great plane, let’s buy one”?
DM: No. The U.S. government took no interest whatsoever in coming to Dayton to see this phenomenon, and when the Wrights offered to bring the plane [to Washington, D.C.] to demonstrate it, the government slammed the door in their faces about three or four times. They got sick of that, understandably.
When a French delegation showed up in Dayton, keenly interested in what they were doing, and told them, “If you come over to France and show us there, there’ll be a big market for your airplane,” they didn’t want to do that because they were devout patriots. But they decided, “Let’s do it.”
So Wilbur crossed the Atlantic. The plane was shipped over. And on August 8, 1908, the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year, the world saw, for the first time, that human beings can fly. At Le Mans, the racetrack town southwest of Paris. There were only about two or three hundred people, maybe not even that many, in the little grandstand at the racetrack that day. But within a very few days thousands of people were coming from all over France and all over Europe, and Wilbur became the hero of the day.
In fact, he became the most popular American in France ever until then, except Benjamin Franklin. Just as Franklin insisted on wearing his fur hat around Paris and remaining an American, the Wright brothers and their sister Katharine, when she came over, were absolutely 100 percent Middle West Americans, and the French loved it. They adored her, in particular, because she had opinions and would express them, as they said, in a good midwestern American way.
She took France by storm. They adored her. And because she had pretty good Latin in the Dayton high school, she picked up French just like that, whereas the brothers spoke hardly a word.
DR: When Wilbur made the successful flights, people in France who thought initially the Americans were lying or bluffing were convinced. What did the U.S. government decide to do?
DM: They suddenly woke up and said, “Hmm, maybe we ought to have a look.”
Orville brings the plane down to Fort Myer, across the river [in Arlington]. Half of Washington poured across the river to go see. All of Congress went over there. The cabinet, the Supreme Court, the president of the United States, all went across to see this miracle.
And Orville continued to break records. He was breaking records here at the very time that Wilbur was in France breaking records there—the two of them, these unknown brothers, in the two great capitals of the civilized world, the stars of the moment, the most famous people on earth at that time.
And then, tragically, Orville had a very serious mishap and crashed at Fort Myer. His passenger that day was a young army lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge, and he was killed—the first fatality in the history of aviation. Orville was nearly killed. Broken bones in one leg, ribs sprained. But even more, his spirit had been absolutely crushed.
Katharine got a telegram that same day [in Dayton]. She called the principal of her high school [where she taught] and said she was taking an indefinite leave of absence. She packed, she was on the next train that same day, arrived the next morning, went over to Fort Myer, and stayed with her brother for the next six weeks, living with him right in the hospital, to be sure that he got proper care from everybody involved, and doing everything she could to lift his spirits.
They were worried he was going to die. They were worried that he’d never walk again and that he’d never fly again.
She got him through it. He said later he wouldn’t have made it if it hadn’t been for her. She got him home, which was no small task, because he was in terrible pain all the time, walking on a cane—hardly walking at all.
She stayed with him for the next months there in Dayton, looking after him every single day, and then took him on a ship over to France to join Wilbur, and he not only started walking again, he later came back to Fort Myer and flew again.
Now, Katharine and Wilbur insisted that he not do that. There was the psychological burden of going to the place where this terrible accident had happened. It would be too much for him. But he said, “No. I have to go back and do it where that happened.”
He arrived, he flew again, and he again broke all kinds of world records. It’s one of the most phenomenal comebacks in our American story that I know of.
DR: Their father had said, “I don�
��t want Wilbur and Orville to fly at the same time.” But what happened at one point after this accident?
DM: In May of 1910, the brothers announced a hometown air show. By the way, they never changed. They never got full of themselves. That wasn’t how they were raised. You don’t get too big for your britches. They remained exactly as they’d always been all their lives, no matter how famous or how wealthy they became.
But when they knew they had achieved this high purpose they’d set out to achieve, they decided to stage a hometown air show, and invited anybody in Dayton that wanted to come out to Huffman Prairie to come see them fly. Thousands came out to witness it. Beautiful day.
And then, for the first time, Orville and Wilbur went up together. They’d never done that, because they knew that they could get killed any time and every time they went up.
They went up fifty to a hundred times in a year. Their courage, their plain bravery, was extraordinary. But they were also very careful. They weren’t daredevils. They weren’t showing off. They were trying to achieve something and not get killed in the process. So they went up together only once.
DR: And they took their father up?
DM: Katharine had gone up with them in France, and she was a sensation. In order to keep her long skirts from blowing up and embarrassing her, they tied a rope around that part of the skirt, and one of the famous Paris designers saw that and quickly adapted it and caused a fashion sensation throughout Paris.
The only one who hadn’t gone up was their father, and so Orville said to him, “Would you like to go up?” Now, he’s eighty-two years old. No one even close to that age had ever gone up in an airplane.
He said, “Sure.” This wonderful old minister went out, climbed aboard—there are no seat belts or anything, they’re sitting in little upright camp chairs—and took off. The whole flight around the field, the father kept saying, “Higher, Orville, higher.”
DR: Orville Wright was the younger brother, but Wilbur Wright got ill at one point. And what happened?
The American Experiment Page 25
