The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Dear Father,—I got your letter today. My teacher said I was a good boy today. We have 45 in our room. The other day I took a machine can and filled it with water then I put it on the stove I waited a little while and the water came squirting out of the top about a foot…. The old cat is dead.21

  It was the first of hundreds of letters that would tie Milton to his children over the next two decades. The Wright youngsters learned to write good, clear letters at an early age—their father insisted on it.

  chapter 4

  MOVING ON

  1881~1885

  Milton had become a professional traveler in the service of his God. He was absent from home for months at a time, crisscrossing the West to visit the far-flung Brethren congregations in his charge. It was not a life a loving husband and father would much enjoy. Susan and the children were inundated with letters demanding news of home, and informing them of his health, progress at work, and the sights, sounds, and wonders that came his way.

  Those letters were a part of the children’s education, enabling them to see the larger world with greater clarity than any lesson in a geography or history book. They traveled vicariously through the Dakotas and Montana only five years after Custer’s Last Stand:

  This is the region of the Flathead and of the Blackfeet Indians. These vallies are of considerable consequence, the tribes were ever friendly to the Whites and easily civilized. Missoula is a town about the size of Dublin, Indiana. The tunnel over the mountains is not in repair and we went up the steepest grades I ever saw cars climb. We had two locomotives before, and one behind, and all their strength moved us very slowly. The ascent was in the midst of the wildest mountain scenery, and the track had a horse-shoe bend and some very short curves. The descent was more gentle, but the scenery wild all the way to Missoula, and indeed to Clark’s Fork of the Columbia.1

  St. Paul was more than just a spot on a map for young Katharine. Her father had been there:

  St. Paul is a very pretty city at the head of navigation on the Mississippi, and eight miles below St. Anthony’s Falls at Minneapolis. It is almost three times as large as Dayton, and Minneapolis is larger than St. Paul. They, like Chicago, are cities of marvelous growth, in a wonderful wheat-producing Country.2

  Milton’s description of a fair that he attended in Los Angeles confirmed that California was an agricultural paradise.

  I saw a great quantity of apples, pears, peaches, oranges, quinces, persimmons, etc. Saw a cabbage 45 inches around, a sweet potato 36 inches, a beet 56 inches, two pumpkins as big as boulders. One weighed 182 pounds, the other 203 pounds. Some fine plates-full of pomegranates as large as big apples. Among the vegetables were onions 20 inches around, squashes 4 feet long and 38 inches around—breakfast squashes understand, and a mess for a small family. One was three feet long and 56 inches round. Peanuts, grapes as big as plums etc. etc.3

  Of course Orville and Kate would want to hear about the sea serpent rumored to frequent the waters around Santa Monica.

  Eight witnesses testify. It was from 60 to 120 feet long—its head from three to six feet in diameter—It roared like a dying horse—it spouted water like a whale—it had a bright crest on its head—it stuck out its tongue above its head—it had black bright eyes—it lashed the sea into foam.4

  It was “probably a fish story,” Milton admitted, adding that he was going to Santa Monica the next day to see for himself.

  In later years Orville spoke with pride of the advantages they had enjoyed growing up in the Wright household: “We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity. In a different kind of environment, our curiosity might have been nipped long before it could have borne fruit.”5

  Milton’s letters to his children, designed to stimulate curiosity and portray new people and places, were a part of that environment. So were the presents he brought back from his trips. Milton recognized the importance of a gift as a means of ensuring that a child felt needed, and specially remembered. Birthdays were always an occasion in this household, and, while the bishop and Susan regarded Christmas trees and Santa Claus as unnecessary pagan survivals, there were always presents by the children’s breakfast plates on Christmas morning.

  Milton was a firm believer in the educational value of toys, and took genuine delight in selecting things that would stimulate the imagination of his children and inspire their curiosity. One such gift, purchased during the course of a church trip and presented to Wilbur, then eleven, and Orville, seven, soon after the family’s move to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, would prove particularly significant. It was a toy helicopter designed by the French aeronautical experimenter Alphonse Pénaud.

  Milton paid perhaps 50 cents for this variant of Europe’s oldest mechanical toy—and the world’s first powered flying machine. In its earliest form, dating to the fourteenth century, the idea was simple enough. A stick with a four-bladed rotor fixed to the top was set in a hollow spindle held by hand. When a string wrapped around the stick was pulled, the rotor rose out of the spindle and into the air.

  The toy is a perfect illustration of play as the inspiration for technological innovation. From the time of Leonardo, when portrait painters used the little helicopter to quiet fidgety young sitters, to that day in 1878 when Milton Wright presented the gadget to his sons, rotary-wing toys were to intrigue and inspire generations of children, a few of whom would, as adults, attempt to realize the dream of flight for themselves.

  Sir George Cayley (1773–1857), the English baronet who constructed the first man-carrying gliders, was just such a child. His early notebooks include sketches of the toy, and suggestions for its improvement. In 1784, Launoy, a French naturalist, and Bienvenu, a mechanic, flew a new, self-propelled version before the members of the French Academy of Sciences. Twin rotors were fixed to the top and bottom of a shaft that ran through the center of a small wooden bow. Holding the bow in one hand and turning the rotors with the other, the bowstring twisted around the shaft, flexing the bow. When released, the little craft bumped up against the ceiling, to the great delight of the assembled savants.

  It remained for Pénaud to substitute skeins of rubber for the cumbersome bow. Octave Chanute, a civil engineer who was to play an important role in the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright, regarded Alphonse Pénaud’s helicopter as “the best of its kind.” “These models, when built in varying proportions, would either rise like a dart to a height of some fifty ft., and then fall down, or sail obliquely in great circles, or, after rising some 20 or 25 ft., hover in the same spot for fifteen or twenty seconds, and sometimes as many as 26 seconds, which was a much longer flight than had ever been obtained before with screws.”6

  Obviously, a single toy cannot shape the course of a life. Still, the little helicopter that Milton Wright brought home to Cedar Rapids in the fall of 1878 made a very big impression on his two youngest sons. Orville described the result in court testimony offered in 1912: “Our first interest [in flight] began when we were children. Father brought home to us a small toy actuated by a rubber spring which would lift itself into the air. We built a number of copies of this toy, which flew successfully…. But when we undertook to build the toy on a much larger scale it failed to work so well.”7

  Orville’s first teacher remembered the incident as well. One day in 1878, Miss Ida Palmer, of the Jefferson School in Cedar Rapids, noticed the boy hunched over his desk fiddling with two pieces of wood. When she asked what he was doing, he explained that he was assembling the parts of a flying machine, a larger version of which might enable him to fly with his brother. It can only have been one of the small copies of the Pénaud model that the brothers had constructed. To her credit, Miss Palmer reprimanded Orville but did not confiscate the craft.8

  A quarter of a century later young Milton Wright, Lorin’s son, reported that his uncles were still making helicopters “out of bamboo, paper, corks, and rubber bands and
allowed us to run after them when they flew them.”9 There can be no doubt that Orville regarded his father’s gift as a major event in his life. In 1929, at the height of his feud with officials of the Smithsonian Institution, Orville became incensed when a Smithsonian curator confused the Pénaud helicopter with the Dandrieux butterfly, another flying toy of the period. He wanted the details of the incident to be recorded accurately, and was determined that Pénaud, one of the two or three early aeronautical experimenters the brothers most admired, should receive full credit.

  The credit was all Milton’s—he knew a great deal about children in general and his sons in particular. The time he took out from a hectic schedule to select a stimulating gift had been very well spent.

  Both parents were great believers in formal and informal education alike. Their home was filled with books, and the children were encouraged to read at an early age. But Milton, himself an ex-teacher, had some strong ideas on education that occasionally conflicted with school policy. Miss Esther Wheeler, who taught several of the Wright children at the Seventh Street School in Dayton, had clearer memories of the father than his sons. “Bishop Wright did not believe in ten month school,” she recalled in 1909,

  and would tell his boys to take half a day off now and then. The Bishop and I have clashed over that proposition many times, but he was set in his ways and could not be won over by any sort of argument. He had much faith in his children and believed that they could keep up with their classes and miss a few days also. Whether he was right in allowing them to remain away, I will not try to answer, but his boys were excellent scholars, just as he argued they would be.10

  Like his older brothers, Orville started school late. Susan had intended otherwise, enrolling him in kindergarten back in Dayton at the age of five. She walked him to school on the first day, then saw him off, neatly dressed, each morning. Weeks later she discovered that he had stopped attending after that first day. He walked down the block to his friend Ed Sine’s house each morning and returned home on time each afternoon. Home tutoring began shortly after that, and continued until the family moved to Cedar Rapids, where he finally started school in the second grade.11

  Orville was a good student. That first year in Cedar Rapids he won first prize—a picture of Miss Palmer—for best penmanship in class; he was also moved on to the third reader before the end of the year. To do so, he had to read out a passage from the second reader for visiting school officials. They were amused when Orville literally raced through the required passage, holding the book upside down. Any child who had memorized the text, they decided, deserved promotion.12

  Eleven-year-old Wilbur was a sixth grader at the Washington School in Cedar Rapids that year. Emma Fordyce, his teacher, who knew Orville as well, remembered Wilbur as being “less communicative” than his little brother and “too dreamy” to get into trouble. Then, as later, history and geography were his favorite subjects.13

  If Wilbur was quiet, and tended not to volunteer information in class, he was nonetheless already very sure of himself. Back at Garfield School in Dayton he had once been severely reprimanded by a teacher for failing to arrive at the correct answer to an arithmetic problem on the blackboard. A young girl was instructed to help him with the problem; several minutes later the students returned. Wilbur had convinced the girl that he was correct, and together the two of them then convinced the teacher. (Thirty years later, the young girl, now Mrs. D. L. Lorenz, greeted Wilbur when he came to New York to fly for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.)14

  Orville Wright was eight in 1878….

  Orville and Reuchlin were on the opposite ends of the educational scale when the family moved to Iowa. Reuch graduated from Coe’s Collegiate Academy in Cedar Rapids in 1878, the year Orv began school. There is some suggestion that he intended to enter the clergy—his high school graduation speech was entitled “The Evidences of Christianity,” and in the fall of 1879 he enrolled at Western College, a Brethren school only ten miles south of Cedar Rapids that turned out many ministers over the years. The next summer Reuch assisted his father in teaching a special Fourth of July Sunday School class at a local church.15

  Reuchlin did not return to college in the fall of 1880. Instead, he took the state teaching examination on November 2, and taught one term at an elementary school a few miles south of Cedar Rapids. It seems clear that this break in the pattern of his life marked the beginning of a serious rebellion against parental authority.

  Many years later, in 1907, Reuchlin’s nineteen-year-old daughter Helen “declared independence” in a similar fashion and took a job in town. In describing the situation to Wilbur and Orville, Bishop Wright remarked that Reuch was having “about the same experience with her [Helen] that I had with him when he was about the same age, only I managed not to let him break away. After a year or two he became and remains most dutiful.”16

  Reuchlin’s “rebellion” almost certainly involved the natural desire of a young man to achieve some measure of detachment from the family. Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine’s experience would prove that Milton, on the other hand, was a possessive father reluctant to allow his children to leave home and explore life on their own. Reuch did return home, although time would show that the reconciliation was by no means as happy or complete as Milton suggested.

  By the spring of 1881, Milton Wright was weighed down by the burdens of his office. Ironically, he had lost a great deal of political ground while serving as one of the five highest officers of his church. He had relinquished control of the all-important weekly church newspaper, isolated himself from the center of church activity in Ohio and Indiana, and spent four difficult and exhausting years serving the needs of small, scattered congregations in the Far West.

  Milton was not adept at the skills required to win friends and influence people. As an administrator he had “personally offended” a number of presiding elders. His limitations as a politician were apparent. Reconciliation, negotiation, and compromise, the tools of the effective vote-getter, were foreign to him. Moreover, he would never trust men who possesed those skills. His written descriptions of various Dayton political contests over the years are studded with words like “scheming,” “malicious,” and “treacherous.” There were no moral gray areas in his world. Right was right. Wrong was wrong. No amount of under the table negotiating would ever change that.

  … his brother Wilbur was twelve …

  and sister Katharine was four.

  But if Milton refused to make back room deals, others would. “In one conference,” a church historian reported, “an evil man had the ascendancy and used all his arts, not only to hold his friends, but to injure the bishop’s influence, when he found it could not be made to implicitly serve his purposes.”17

  As a result, Milton Wright was in a very weak position when the eighteenth General Conference of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ met at Lisbon, Iowa, in 1881. “Of course he could not expect much support from the Liberals,” a fellow churchman remarked. “Then, he had alienated some persons on the Radical side, because in certain cases he was not compliant to their wishes.”18 He was neither reelected a bishop nor reinstated to his old editorial post.

  Without strong leadership at the conference, the Radicals could no longer hold off the Liberal drive for pro-rata representation. While the major issues—membership in secret societies and lay representation at the General Conference—remained in abeyance, that victory virtually guaranteed that the forces of change would ultimately triumph within the church. It was only a matter of time.

  Milton returned to the Whitewater District as a presiding elder, riding the circuit as he had done at the outset of his career. The family relocated once again, this time to a farm in Henry County, near Richmond, Indiana, not far from Wilbur’s birthplace.

  The return to Indiana represented a political defeat for Milton, but he was not entirely unhappy with the situation. After four years of almost constant travel and the pressure of high church office, he was anxious
to spend more time with his family. Susan’s health was failing—by 1883 she was exhibiting the unmistakable early symptoms of tuberculosis. She welcomed the move back to Richmond, where she would be close to her widowed mother and childhood friends.

  Milton had by no means given up the Radical cause, however. Free of the administrative burdens he had shouldered during his years as editor and bishop, he could concentrate on attempts to generate fresh support for the conservatives.

  In addition to his normal clerical duties, Milton set himself up as a writer, editor, and publisher in defense of church Radicalism. In October 1881, he issued the first in a series of Reform Leaflets, small pamphlets “intended to be laid between the leaves of some oft-used book for preservation and future reference.” The first issue listed fifty reasons for opposing secret societies; subsequent numbers continued to hammer away at the Liberal arguments for modernization of the church.19

  Late in 1881, Milton founded a monthly newspaper, the Richmond Star, dedicated to building support for the conservative cause. In spite of the fact that “every effort was made by some officials to suppress it,” the Star became self-supporting after its first year. While never a moneymaking proposition, the paper served as a rallying point for Radical sentiment in the church, and enabled Milton to mend a few fences within his dwindling ranks.20

  In spite of Milton’s reduced salary and the expenses related to his publications, the family budget was large enough to enable the two eldest sons to continue their education. Reuchlin, having returned to the family circle, entered Hartsville College, his parents’ alma mater, as a sophomore in the fall of 1881. Lorin enrolled as a freshman.

  The boys spent two academic years rooming together. Perhaps significantly, it was Lorin who remained in closest touch with their mother by mail. “I and Reuchlin are clean out of money again,” he wrote to Susan on October 31, 1882.