Authors: Tom D. Crouch
The Bishop's Boys (71 page)
Lieutenant Foulois had been ordered to transport the aircraft to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, before his own training at College Park was completed. Foulois, who would rise to command the U.S. Army Air Corps during the years prior to World War II, liked to describe himself as the world’s first correspondence-school pilot. Arriving at his assigned post without having soloed, he taught himself to fly, writing to Orville for advice when he ran into problems.
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Army brass took little interest in their only active pilot and airplane—during the first year, Foulois and his enlisted mechanics paid for some repairs to the machine out of their own pockets. After two years of service, Foulois received permission to ship the dilapidated Flyer back to the factory in Dayton for a complete refitting. Orville took one look and advised against it. The War Department relented, purchasing a new machine and offering the Wrights a contract to restore the world’s first military airplane for presentation to the Smithsonian.
Wilbur’s writing was taking a historical turn as well. Anxious to correct the false claims put forward by members of the Ligue Aérienne, he published articles assessing the contributions of Ader and Mouillard. Having demonstrated that neither deserved as much credit as was claimed for them, it seemed only fair to identify the more substantial contributors. When the brothers discovered that Otto Lilienthal’s widow and children were in financial distress, they sent the family a check for $1,000 in recognition of the extent to which the pioneer had influenced their own early work.
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All too often, potential buyers regarded the Wrights as historic figures rather than suppliers of up-to-date machines. By the end of 1911 even the U.S. War Department was convinced that the inventors of the airplane could no longer compete with European manufacturers. Orville fought that notion. “If the American government will make purchases equal to those of the French government,” he wrote to Captain Charles DeForest Chandler, “American manufacturers can easily meet all of the conditions required of foreign machines.”
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In Europe, government subsidies to aircraft builders had fueled a rapid advance since 1906: “You are, no doubt, aware that in France whenever a manufacturer turns out a new type of machine which is not a flat failure, the government takes over the machine and, if it is specially good, orders several additional ones.” The French Ministry of War had spent over $1,250,000 to purchase 250 French-built machines during the past two years. Orville argued that while government
subsidies had enabled the French to close the technological gap quickly, American machines remained competitive.
We believe that at the present time the foreign machines excel the American only in one particular—that of speed. Contests … have clearly demonstrated the superior development of the American machines in ability to fly in high winds and in strength and safety of construction…. In the matter of weight-carrying, we would call your attention to the flights made at Detroit with the Alger brothers’ Wright machine in which three men, weighing nearly 500 pounds, in addition to hydroplane pontoons, were carried with a four cylinder motor of 30 horsepower…. We do not think that any foreign machine has ever approached this performance.
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It was a weak sales pitch. By the winter of 1911 all interested observers could see that the cutting edge of flight technology had overtaken and passed the Wright Company. The reasons were clear enough, as Wilbur explained to his French friend, M. Hévésy:
We had hoped in 1906 to sell our invention to governments for enough money to satisfy our needs and devote our time to science, but the jealousy of certain persons blocked this plan, and compelled us to rely on our patents and commercial exploitation. We wished to be free from business cares so that we could give all our own time to advancing the science and art of aviation, but we have been compelled to spend our time on business matters instead during the past five years. When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments, we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.
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The patent suits remained the biggest drain on their time, particularly Wilbur’s. He was constantly on the move from mid-December 1911 through the early spring of 1912, shuttling back and forth between New York and Dayton in an attempt to deal with the Grahame-White, Lamson, Winkley, and Herring-Curtiss suits, all of which seemed to be coming to a head.
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The constant travel and the pressure of court appearances took its toll. Orville recalled that his brother would “come home white” following a visit with the lawyers. In late April, Wilbur fell seriously ill while on a trip to Boston. Newspapers speculated that the original indisposition was a result of eating contaminated shellfish. He felt better by the time he arrived home on May 2, but it was obvious that he was not himself.
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That afternoon the four of them—Milton, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine—packed a picnic lunch and drove across town to Hawthorn Hill. Wilbur and Orville had purchased seventeen acres near the corner of Park Drive and Harmon Avenue in the affluent suburb of Oakwood in February, and the local architectural firm of Schenck & Williams was already at work on plans for the house that they would build there.
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When they got home, Wilbur complained of a temperature. Milton summoned Dr. D. B. Conklin, who diagnosed malarial fever. The patient’s temperature was noticeably higher the next morning, although he did not feel particularly ill.
The lingering fever did not keep him from work. He made a trip to Huffman Prairie on May 4, then sat down to write an angry letter to Frederick Fish, a Wright Company attorney, who had suggested postponing hearings in the Herring-Curtiss case until the fall. Wilbur had asked Toulmin to insist on a speedy disposition. Convinced that he had not made the point sufficiently clear, Wilbur wrote in terms Fish could not possibly misunderstand:
Unnecessary delays by stipulation of counsel have already destroyed fully three fourths of the value of our patent. The opportunities of the last two years will never return again. At the present moment almost innumerable competitors are entering the field, and for the first time are producing machines which will really fly. These machines are being put on the market at one half less than the price which we have been selling our machines for.
The real season for flying as far as money-making is concerned extends from September to the middle of November. If the case goes over to fall, it will be practically the same thing as delaying a whole year. The bare fact that the case is before the Court during the summer would have great value, even though the decision is not rendered until September.
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It was Wilbur’s last letter. By the afternoon of May 8 he was noticeably weaker. Dr. Conklin, back for a second look, was no longer certain that this was malaria. “There seems to be a sort of typhoidal fever prevailing,” Milton wrote in his diary. For the members of this family, there could have been nothing worse. All of them remembered Orville’s bout with typhoid in 1896. It was particularly ironic that Wilbur, always so careful to avoid contaminated food and water, should be stricken.
Wilbur knew that he was failing. On May 10 he sent for Ezra
Kuhns, a lawyer who had gone to high school with Orv. With Kuhns as a witness, he dictated his will to Mabel Beck, his own secretary.
The other members of the family could only wait and hope. Assured by the doctors that his brother was in no immediate danger, Orville left for Washington to deliver a new airplane on May 16. Wilbur lapsed into unconsciousness two days later. Orville caught the first train back to Dayton and was at his brother’s bedside once again on May 20.
Dr. Conklin and old Dr. Spitler, the physician who had pulled Orv through his bout with the disease twelve years before, prescribed opiates. When there was no apparent improvement by May 22, the two local men called in Dr. Bushiemer, a Cincinnati specialist. Reuchlin arrived from Kansas on May 24.
Conklin and Spitler came at 7:00
A
.
M
. on May 27 and stayed for most of the day. Wilbur’s bladder was failing and he seemed to be having difficulty with digestion. The bishop, certain that his son was near death, slept that night with his clothes on.
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Wilbur lingered for two more days, dying “without a struggle,” as his father reported, at 3:15 on the morning of May 30. With his usual meticulous care, Milton noted that his son was forty-five years, one month, and fourteen days old. The loving father reserved his deeper feelings for the privacy of his diary:
A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadfastly, he lived and died.
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Milton estimated that the family had received a thousand telegrams of condolence by the afternoon of May 30. They came from the President, the heads of Europe, men of industry like Lord Northcliffe (“Deepest sympathy dear Katharine and Orville Wright. Very great grief in England at World’s loss”), and from hundreds of ordinary citizens, including Glenn Hammond Curtiss. “Flowers come from individuals and societies,” Milton noted, “most beautiful….”
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One newspaper reported that by the time of the funeral there were enough flowers to fill a boxcar.
Wilbur was front-page news for the last time. Newspapers across the nation and around the globe offered glowing tributes, calling him the “Inventor of the Airplane,” the “Father of Flight,” “Conqueror of the Air,” and “the man who made flying possible.”
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The family would have preferred a quiet funeral, but public pressure
was too great to ignore. Wilbur’s body was transported to the First Presbyterian Church on Saturday morning, June 1. Twenty-five thousand people had filed past the coffin by the time the funeral began at three o’clock. The service lasted only twenty minutes, and was conducted without music.
The Reverend Dr. Maurice Wilson, pastor of the church, quoted from the Bible, and read an account of Wilbur’s career prepared by Reuchlin. Then a United Brethren preacher from Huntington, Indiana, who had remained a family friend through all the church crises, read the words of Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
The graveside services were limited to family members and the eight pallbearers. At 3:30
P.M.
all activity in the city stopped: church bells tolled, automobiles pulled to the curb, streetcars halted in their tracks, and the switchboards refused to accept calls as Wilbur Wright was laid to rest next to his mother in Woodland Cemetery.
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Ezra Kuhns came to the house to read the will on June 3. Wilbur had left an estate that was eventually valued by the probate court at $279,298.40. Milton, the first beneficiary, received his son’s “earnest thanks for his example of a courageous, upright life and for his earnest sympathy with everything tending to my true welfare,” and the sum of $ 1,000, to be used for such “little unusual expenditures as might add to his comfort and pleasure.”
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The great bulk of the estate—$ 150,000 in cash—was to be divided equally between Reuch, Lorin, and Katharine. The remainder, including all of the patents and jointly held shares in the various Wright companies, went to Orville, “who I am sure will use the property in very much the same manner as we would use it together in case we would both survive to old age.”
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As executor, Orville was determined to treat his brother’s will as sacrosanct. Reuch presented the only real problem. Having distanced himself from the other members of the family years before, he felt guilty about accepting a share of the estate equal to Lorin and Katharine’s. After some struggle with his conscience, he returned $ 1,000 to the bishop. But Milton sent back the money with the comment that he and Orville were determined to carry out every provision of the will in exact detail.
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“Probably Orville and Katharine felt the loss most,” Milton suggested in his diary. “They say little.”
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Both of them found it difficult to conceive of life without Wilbur. Orville would later say that there
were times when he suddenly awoke to the fact that Wilbur had not simply stepped into the next room for a few minutes.
Brother and sister were drawn closer together by shared grief and a touch of bitterness. They did not regard Will’s death as pure providence—other factors had been at work. He had been worn out by the patent fight, his energy drained and his resistance lowered. The men who had forced them into court time after time bore a share of the responsibility. Together, they rededicated themselves to carrying on the fight their brother had begun.
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Less than two weeks after Wilbur’s death, Orville and Katharine left for Washington to attend the funerals of Art Welsh and Lieutenant Leighton Hazelhurst, killed while flying a new Wright Model C-1 at College Park, Maryland, on June 11. Welsh, anxious to complete the Army acceptance tests required for the purchase of the machine, had nosed down into a shallow dive, then pulled sharply up as he prepared to climb to the altitude stipulated by the contract. Nosing up too steeply, he stalled and crashed.
Orv and Katharine left for the annual pilgrimage to Europe on February 12, 1913. In London on February 21 they presided, at long last, over the formation of a British Wright Company. Orville, who was now president of the American Wright Company, became chairman of the board of the new English firm.
The arrangement with Short Brothers had already enabled the Wrights to make what money they could from the sale of their machines in England. The new company would not produce many airplanes, but it did play an important role in persuading the English government to make a lump-sum payment of £15,000 for all unauthorized use of the Wright patent in England.
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