Wright Brothers, Wrong Story Read online

  ALSO BY WILLIAM HAZELGROVE

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  Published 2018 by Prometheus Books

  Wright Brothers, Wrong Story: How Wilbur Wright Solved the Problem of Manned Flight. Copyright © 2018 by William Hazelgrove. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht

  Cover image of glider © Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo

  Cover image of Orville (left) and Wilbur (right) © Bettmann / Getty Images

  Cover design © Prometheus Books

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hazelgrove, William Elliott, 1959- author.

  Title: Wright brothers, wrong story : how Wilbur Wright solved the problem of manned flight / by William Hazelgrove.

  Description: Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018031181 (print) | LCCN 2018033863 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884595 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884588 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wright, Orville, 1871-1948. | Wright, Wilbur, 1867-1912. | Haskell, Katharine Wright, 1874-1929. | Aeronautics—United States—History—20th century. | Inventors—United States—History—20th century. | Aeronautics—United States—Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

  Classification: LCC TL540.W7 (ebook) | LCC TL540.W7 H392 2018 (print) | DDC 629.130092/273 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031181

  Printed in the United States of America

  “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will cost me an increased amount of money if not my life.”

  —Wilbur Wright to Octave Chanute, 1900

  Preface: The Wright Myth

  PART 1: PREFLIGHT

  1. The Biographer—1942

  2. The Letter—1948

  3. The Murderer—1884

  4. Steam Bugs—1896

  5. Typhoid—1896

  6. Inventors—1900

  7. School of One—1900

  PART 2: FLIGHT

  8. The Pilgrim—1900

  9. The Wright Sister—1900

  10. Kill Devil Hills—October 18, 1900

  11. The Mentor—1901

  12. Dangerous Times—1901

  13. Return to Kitty Hawk—1901

  14. Wilbur Unleashed—1901

  15. Tunnel Vision—1901

  16. The Smithsonian—1902

  17. The Movable Rudder—1902

  18. United States Patent Office—1903

  19. The Western Society of Engineers—1903

  20. The Great Embarrassment—1903

  21. Great Things—September 23, 1903

  22. The Photograph—December 17, 1903

  PART 3: LANDINGS

  23. Fliers or Liars—1906

  24. Death in the Sky—September 17, 1908

  25. Return to Eden—1908

  26. The Injunction—1910

  27. Warped by the Desire for Great Wealth—1911

  28. Final Flight—1912

  29. The Great Flood—1914

  30. To Fly Again—1914

  31. Hammondsport, New York—1914

  32. Middle of the Atlantic Ocean—1928

  33. A Test of Wills—1930

  34. The Lone Eagle—1934

  35. The Battle of Britain—1940

  36. The Authorized Biography—1943

  37. Washington, DC—1943

  38. Mabel Beck—1948

  39. Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  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.”1 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.”2

  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.”3

  Milton knew who the real intellectual force was, the silent genius who solved the head-scratching physics of riding invisible air cur
rents 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.4 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.”5 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…”6 Kelly then throws Wilbur a bone with the line, “What will those Wright boys be doing next?”7 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.”8 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.”9 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.”10

  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?”11

  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!”12 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. The latest and most popular biography is David McCullough's, and he sets up the relationship right in the beginning: “As others in Dayton knew, the two were remarkably self-contained, ever industrious, and virtually inseparable…. They lived in the same house, worked together, kept their money in a joint bank account, even thought together.”13

  So, the die is cast and the Wright story is told of two cardboard men who had no foibles, no strange passions—two men who lived with their father and sister their whole lives until Wilber passed and Orville bought a mansion for the three of them to live in. The brothers were not gay, or at least we have no evidence that they were, yet they eschewed all women because of shyness, supposedly, or because it would interfere with solving the problem of manned flight. This is taken as part of the Wright mythology. “In one significant respect, the three youngest Wright children set themselves apart from their contemporaries. Wilbur was twenty-nine in 1896, Orville twenty-five, and Katherine twenty-two. They were ripe for marriage yet none of them showed any interest in the opposite sex. They seemed bound by an unspoken agreement to remain together and to let no one come between them.”14

  This mythology protects the brothers from being gay, the sister from being a lesbian, and the father from being an overbearing ogre who only wanted his children home and who
turned his daughter into his dead wife and foisted upon her the role of servant in waiting while admonishing his three children that the world was evil and only the family could be trusted. As Tom Crouch wrote in The Bishop's Boys, “Sex was a subject on which the entire family maintained silence. This was expected in any late Victorian American household.”15

  Still, one must wonder why three healthy adults would eschew any sexual relations or any known relationship outside the family. Charlie Taylor, the mechanic who would build the engine for the Wright Flyer in 1903, would later say that Wilbur “would get awfully nervous when young women were around…if an older woman sat down beside him before you know it he would be talking…but if a younger woman sat next to him he would get fidgety and pretty soon would get up.”16

  Charlie Taylor would finally surmise that Wilbur was “woman shy.”17 Katherine would get engaged at college and keep it from her father until she broke it off, and even then she would not tell him. When she did marry, finally, in her fifties, Milton was gone and Orville would never forgive her.18 Orville's only known courtship was with a friend of his sister's, Agnes Osborn. “There were evenings of chess and romantic boat rides on the old canal. Agnes's younger brother, Glenn, the proud owner of a Wright bicycle, remembered that Orville came calling dressed in his best suit, and loved to play practical jokes on his sister.”19 It would come to nothing, but this at least gives us a glimmer of a man with desires like anyone else. Orville even went to a party that a high school friend later described: “Orville sat in a straight-backed chair just inside the parlor door all evening, genially aloof from our games of Kiss the Pillow, Post Office, Forfeits and other stimulating enterprises.”20

  You can imagine everyone having fun while the bishop's son sits. His strongest known relationship will be with his brother and his sister, until she marries. Freud would have a field day. This information at least pumps some blood into these historical characters who have not changed in history since Kelly's biography in 1943. If we were to keep score, Wilbur came the closest to living up to his father's implied wish of asexual children, with Orville a close second and then Katherine. Bishop Wright held up the two older sons in the family as evidence of what happened to those who ventured out into the world and married. Reuchlin and Lorin, the older Wright brothers, had married and had children and entered into a depressed economy. In The Bishop's Boys, Crouch points out that “Wilbur watched his two older brothers with interest and a great deal of sympathy. Reuchlin and Lorin were talented men with more formal education than most of their contemporaries, yet both gave the impression of being constantly overwhelmed by responsibility and circumstance. They suffered from chronic poor health and seemed to be perpetually on the brink of failure.”21