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PREFACE: THE WRIGHT MYTH

It is hard to get flesh and bones on these two men. They come to us as stick figures in vests and white shirts, with their hard shoes hanging off the back of their flyers. They seem to not be of the earth and have few worldly desires after the desire to fly. Historians tramp from the Outer Banks to Dayton, Ohio, then to the Smithsonian in Washington or to the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, to see the Wrights’ bicycle shop. And after seeing the Wright Flyer in Washington or the markers in Kitty Hawk, they sit down to write the “Wright story.”
 
It is a fact that the two men in the derbies have eluded historians and the rest of us for a long time. They were elusive men, after all, and so the questions linger behind the legend and the façade of the two Arrow collar young men who dazzled the world in 1903. History would have us believe that the Wright brothers were one in the same: Somehow, they both invented manned flight. They both had the same epiphanic moments while working on their gliders in Kitty Hawk. They both studied birds and deduced that wing warping was the key to controlled flight. They both worked out the complex aeronautical data that went into determining the amount of lift, the shape, the very design of a wing that would enable them to ascend to the heavens.
 
Their father, Milton Wright, set the bar early on by declaring to a reporter they were as “inseparable as twins.” Wilbur and Orville have been treated as two sides of the same card, and that card solved all the problems men had been wrestling with for at least the last century in their effort to leave the surly bonds of Earth. The mantra of shared responsibility, shared credit, shared genius, shared effort, and shared eureka moments begins with their father. After clashing with his own church and losing a pivotal legal battle, the bishop saw the world as evil and the family as good, and he believed that the family must be united. As Lawrence Goldstone, author of Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies, described, “They [Wilbur, Orville, Katherine] came to believe in the essential depravity of mankind. The world beyond the front of their home was filled with men and women who were not to be trusted.”
 
In the eyes of their father, there must be no fissures between the siblings, especially the boys; the brothers, Wilbur and Orville, were to be equal. Period. But the old, crafty man of God let it slip toward the end that Wilbur was the man who was the real force behind the evolving science and art of flying. In a letter to Wilbur, he wrote, “Outside of your contacts and your aviations, you have much that no one else can do so well. And alone. Orville would be crippled and burdened.”
 
Milton knew who the real intellectual force was, the silent genius who solved the head-scratching physics of riding invisible air currents into the sky. It was Wilbur. But this was lost quickly under the bishop’s philosophy, which colored his sons’ view of the world. His beliefs that the world was inherently evil and untrustworthy, and that all must be unified against it, meant no one would be singled out. There could be no division apparent to the outside world.
 
This philosophy was the guiding light of the Wright brothers as they lived, and death would cement the Wright myth. Wilbur’s early death from typhoid fever in 1912 ensured an obfuscation of the truth by leaving behind Orville to scatter the breadcrumbs for others to follow. These breadcrumbs begin with Fred C. Kelly in 1943. A journalist who had written many articles on the Wright brothers, he had become a close friend of Orville. He was the one man who would explain to the world how the Wright brothers flew.
 
The very title of Kelly’s biography of the Wright brothers throws up a red flag: The Wright Brothers: A Biography Authorized by Orville Wright. This lets us know right away that this is Orville’s version of events and not Wilbur’s. The biography is a picture of perfect 50 percent partners. Orville would approve every word of the Kelly biography, ensuring the mantra that they equally broke the code of flight. They were to be the two men in derbies walking side by side with their brains adjoined. No man was smarter than the other. No man solved what the other could not. Kelly set the bar for all historians to follow—from every children’s book to David McCullough’s latest effort aptly titled The Wright Brothers.
 
But it gets worse. When reading the Fred Kelly biography, one quickly realizes it is not a biography of the Wright brothers but of Orville Wright. Orville is on every page in spirit, and many times he is literally dictating large swaths of prose in first-person narration. Orville’s name appears 337 times in Kelly’s biography while Wilbur’s name appears 269 times. Almost a quarter less than his brother. Biographical information is given as if there is one Wright brother: “At the age of twelve, while living in Richmond, Indiana, Orville Wright became interested in wood engravings.” So begins chapter 3, in which we are given the biography of Orville, with Wilbur often referred to only within the plural Wright brothers. The entire tone of the Kelly biography is one that pays tribute to Orville with fuzzy references to Wilbur.
 
Orville is painted throughout as the nascent genius inventor, with Wilbur in the background: “Orville even found time during this period for experiments having nothing to do with bicycles. . . . He made a new kind of calculating machine for multiplying as well as adding . . .” Kelly then throws Wilbur a bone with the line, “What will those Wright boys be doing next?” This is Kelly pleasing Orville in the worst way, with a bit of Capraesque Americana.
 
The Kelly story goes like this. The brothers’ interest in flight begins with a toy helicopter Milton brought home. Orville would cement this fact in a deposition six years after his brother died: “Our first interest began when we were children. Father brought home to us a small toy activated by a rubber spring which would lift itself into the air. We built several copies of this toy, which flew successfully. By ‘we’ I refer to my brother Wilbur and myself.” The “we” became gospel with Orville Wright—Thou shall not use the singular when the plural will do. Kelly took it to high art by submerging Wilbur into “the Wright brothers” or referring to him as “they.” Great pains were made to obliterate Wilbur’s use of the singular “I” for the plural “we” in his early letters. We invented the airplane. We called the Smithsonian for information. We cracked the code of aeronautics. We wrote Octave Chanute. We are equal in the eyes of the world. This is the beginning and the core of the Wright myth.
 
So, as children, they became fascinated with the toy helicopter and the way it would fly to the ceiling. Orville would say he had equal interest in the toy and wondered how man might fly one day. They both lost their mother. They both had a father, Bishop Milton Wright, who was rarely home. They both had a sister, Katherine, who had strong relationships with other women and looked after the brothers their entire adult lives. No one ever moved out of the original family house. Neither brother had a sexual relationship the world knew of. This would be explained by Wilbur, who said, “I don’t have time for both a wife and an airplane.” Kelly laid cover for both by saying neither brother had time for marriage. Neither did their sister have time for a husband; and when she did care about sex and finally married in her midfifties, Orville would punish her for marrying by refusing to see his sister until she was on her deathbed.
 
They both dropped out of high school. They both became interested in printing and started a newspaper. Then they both got into the business of making and fixing bicycles. They both became interested in flying and requested information from the Smithsonian. You can feel Orville looking over Kelly’s shoulder as he writes, “Knowing that the Smithsonian Institution, at Washington, was interested in the subject of human flight, they decided to send a letter to the Smithsonian, asking for suggestions of reading material.”
 
The most egregious example of Orville’s heavy editorial hand is evident in the invention of wing warping by Wilbur. In Kelly’s biography, this breakthrough is given a fifty-fifty status, with Orville having an equally inventive moment: “Why, he [Orville] asked himself, wouldn’t it be possible for the operator to vary the inclination of sections of wings at the tips and thus obtain force for restoring balance from the difference in the lifts of the two opposite wing tips?”
 
They both then built a glider. They both went to Kitty Hawk four times and built a wind tunnel. In the Kelly biography, Orville is purported to have built an early wind tunnel to check facts given by Wilbur at the Society of Engineers in Chicago. Then, in 1901, Kelly has Orville encouraging Wilbur to continue with his experiments when he declares, “Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!” Then, on December 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville flew a plane under its own power for twelve seconds. Done.
 
The Orville Wright version of how powered flight was invented is there for all time, with all its strictures, obfuscations, and creations. Our main ruler for comparison to the Kelly biography are The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Including the Chanute-Wright Papers, 1899–1948. In their own words lies the truth of what really happened at Kitty Hawk and afterward. It is not really Kelly’s fault. Wilbur had been dead for thirty years, and Kelly was working with essentially one source, one voice: Orville Wright. And Orville had the power to censor anything or cancel the whole project. Kelly had no access to the letters of the brothers or the correspondence between the engineer, Octave Chanute, and Wilbur Wright that lies at the very heart of the invention of the airplane.
 
Historians generally lead with the Kelly thesis, and the Wright brothers are left alone to leak sawdust like the mannequins in the museum in Kitty Hawk. 

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Here are the facts we know.

The United States in 1900 was on the edge of greatness when Wilbur went searching for the perfect place with the perfect wind flow to begin experiments toward a final goal of manned flight. The Gilded Age had ended but left a nation crisscrossed by railroads, with a national market in place and an industrial economy just warming up. People were leaving the family farms and heading for the cities to make their fortunes. Men like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan made enormous untaxed fortunes and proclaimed what was good for business was good for America. William Jennings Bryan had lost the presidential election to William McKinley but had shown that populism was a force to be reckoned with. Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt had returned from the Wild West twenty years before and became president in 1901 after President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist.
 
Henry Ford was getting ready to churn out cars like boxes of cereal. Inventions on every front were the news of the day, with wireless telegraph connecting remote ships to the shore. America was in an amazing spot. The West had been declared closed in 1890. The US Industrial Revolution was producing goods on a scale that was unthinkable. Everyone all over the world wanted to go to America, and in New York Ellis Island had become the revolving door to new opportunities in the new land.
 
Against this heady backdrop, a moody and depressed young man named Wilbur Wright had grown bored with making bicycles and started to read about attempts to fly. He had gone so far as to write to the Smithsonian for all information regarding flight and then asked the National Weather Service where he might find the most suitable winds for testing airplanes. The reply came at once, a remote fishing village that wasn’t even a village, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, called Kitty Hawk. Wilbur had never heard of this strange place seven hundred miles due east of Ohio. But he decided then and there that he must go to Kitty Hawk and immediately begin testing a kite glider he had been working on above the bicycle shop.
 
Kitty Hawk was the wilderness in 1900. Wilbur Wright would go to this remote fishing village once in 1901, twice in 1902, and once in 1903. A final return to Kitty Hawk for testing in 1908 was more of a victory lap to get ready for a flight test for the United States Army. But it was those first four visits, with the resulting laboratory for testing the planes that were built and the answers found there, that hold the secret to why a man in a high collar was able to do what up until then only the winged creatures of the earth could accomplish.
 
The Outer Banks and Kitty Hawk in particular were inaccessible except by boat. There were seasons to deal with, and Wilbur had no patience for such things, so he set out at once to go by himself to inspect this strange, windswept land of sand dunes and the few fishermen eking out a living. Isolation is what most men who had been to Kitty Hawk talked about. This didn’t matter. Wilbur would crate up the glider he had been building and ship it to this remote fishing village. Then he would go to Kitty Hawk to check out this strange enclave on the eastern seaboard. Wilbur Wright was thirty-three, and his pursuit of flight would be the ultimate young man’s adventure.
 
This is what we know. Now let’s turn the Wright story upside down, crack the myth open, and see what falls out.