Our Own Hall of Fame

 

WRIGHT BROTHERS

‘Which Way to Kitty Hawk?’ Wilbur Asked.

FISHERMAN SHOWED HIM

 

DAYTON DAILY NEWS, FEB. 5. 1961

 

EDITOR’S NOTE:  This is the first of a series of work and pen portraits of Dayton men and women whose vision and achievements brought them---and their city—world fame.

 

By MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

     The two bicycle repairmen who dreamed that man could fly—and then proved it on the wind-swept dunes of North Carolina 57 years ago—called themselves conservatives.

 

     “We are too conservative for successful business men.” Wilbur Wright once wrote.

     Yet on Dec. 17, 1903, an odd machine made out of spruce, cloth, wire, bicycle chains and a crude 12-horsepower engine wobbled above Kill Devil Hill at Kitty Hawk, N. C., with Orville Wright at the controls.

     That first flight lasted 12 seconds and was 120 feet long.  But the air age had dawned.

     THE WRIGHTS were not in the cast of the dashing, seat-of-the–pants pilots who were to come.  Shy, self-effacing sons of a United Brethren bishop, they were reared to live simply, work hard and respect the Sabbath.

     In later years Wilbur once refused to stage an exhibition flight for the King of Spain on a Sunday—so the king came on Friday.

     When they became the first men to fly, Wilbur was 36, Orville 32.  They were slightly built, Wilbur the bigger at 5’6” and 150 pounds.  Neither ever married and they did not drink, smoke or make speeches.

     “The only bird I know that speaks is the parrot,” Orville once said.  “And he can’t fly.”

     Wilbur was born in Millville, Ind., in 1867, and Orville four years later in Dayton.

     Neither was formally graduated from high school and Wilbur lived as a near-invalid during much of his youth as the result of a hockey accident.

     First they were newspaper publishers.  The product: a four-page paper called the West Side News which sold for 80 cents a year and ran editorials crusading against the lack of shoe and clothing stores on the West Side.

     On the other hand, the Wrights said, there were too many drug stores.

     WHEN THIS venture collapsed, they opened a bicycle repair shop at 1127 W. Third St., but both were voracious readers and reports of experiments with gliders fascinated them.

     The Wrights began to study and tinker and watch birds and slowly, out of their untutored genius, crude attempts at a flying machine began to emerge.

     The Wrights had an intuitive way with machinery that surprised even them and they greeted each new discovery with a kind of bashful awe.

     “ISN’T IT astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them?”

     In 1900 the annual trips to Kitty Hawk--chosen because it was windy--began.

     The first time, Wilbur had a hard time finding it.

     He got off at the nearest railway stop some 35 miles away and wrote home that: “Nobody seemed to know anything about the place or even where it was.”

     Finally he found a fisherman who took him to Kitty Hawk in a leaky sailboat.

     First tests were with gliders. The Wrights lived in a tent, existed mainly on unbuttered biscuits, battled squalls, mice and mosquitoes, that came in cloud-like swarms.  And they learned.

     Back in the bicycle shop in 1903 they started work on their engine-powered plane.  The bicycle business suffered—but that winter the Wrights flew.

     RECOGNITION was slow.  It was five years before the U. S. government bought its first airplane.  Meanwhile, the brothers worked on at Huffman prairie here, experimenting, perfecting, attracting little attention.

     In 1909 they formed the Wright Co. to manufacture airplanes.

     But in 1912 Wilbur contracted typhoid fever and died three weeks later.  His grief-stricken brother, with little taste for business, dissolved the company to devote his full time to research.

     Orville opened a laboratory at 15 N. Broadway and worked there almost daily until his death at 77.

     ALTHOUGH HONORS flooded in over the years, the Smithsonian Institution refused to recognize the Wright brothers as inventors of the airplane until 1942.

     On Dec. 17, 1948, the original Wright Flyer—which had been housed in a museum in London—was re-dedicated to the Wrights in ceremonies at the Smithsonian.

     But it was too late for Orville to see the first airplane returned to its native land.  He had died 11 months earlier.

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