Orville Wright—Shy Prankster, Inveterate Tinker, Always Dapper
“Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them!”
—Orville Wright
|
Shy prankster, inveterate tinker, always dapper —Orville Wright helped invent powered flight, then lived to see the supersonic age. After his brother Wilbur’s untimely death, Orville made significant contributions to aviation on his own. The quiet, reserved Wright Brother found lifelong peers at the Engineers Club. Orville Wright was a founding member of the Engineers Club of Dayton and served as its 4th president.
The Wright Brothers ~ In Flight includes 1908-1909 flights in the United States, France and Italy – as well as the first motion pictures taken from an airplane. Motion pictures helped convince early skeptics that human flight was real.
© 2009 Martel Art. Video Credits
© 2009 Martel Art. Video Credits
Edward Deeds, Charles Kettering, and Orville Wright: 1935 Film
Edward Deeds and “Boss Kett” chat in the Engineers Club, with a brief cameo by the reclusive Wright brother in this 1935 film clip. Courtesy of the NCR archive at Dayton History.
Orville Wright, the invisible flyer
Picture again that frozen moment of the first powered flight. Wilbur Wright runs alongside the flyer, giving a glimpse of his profile. His brother lies on the lower wing in silhouette. The man at the heart of one of the most famous photos in history is anonymous.
Wilbur’s death eight and a half years later forced him out of the shadows.
Behind his moustache, the shy Orville faced boardroom struggles over the Wright Company, finishing a nasty patent fight, cashing in before the patents expired, and enduring endless public functions. The capper was his fight to secure the Wright brothers’ place in history. The Smithsonian Institution preferred an inside favorite.
All in all he’d rather have been building the mansion or completing the duo’s unfinished work. A “hydroaeroplane” promised the ability to take off and land from any body of water. An automatic stabilizer might fly the plane by itself. And a key part of their patents, wing warping, was being outmoded. That couldn’t stand.
Orville’s intense shyness was a major liability, but perhaps his true Achilles heel was to trust only in family, who one by one began disappearing.
Susan and Milton Wright had instilled in their children the notion that family alone offered security. Only the black sheep of the clan, eldest son Reuchlin Wright, had ignored that by moving out west, and he seemed pretty hangdog about it. Second oldest Lorin had gone west early before boomeranging home to marry in Dayton. The younger trio consisted of Wilbur, born in 1867, Orville born on August 19, 1871, and Katharine three years later to the day.
From youth the youngest Wright brothers were as inseparable as twins, though not at all identical.
As a child, “Orv” had been sociable enough to play Napoleon to a small army of boys in schoolyard pranks. But he’d also quietly dodged the first weeks of preschool, preferring to watch Ed Sine’s mother operate her sewing machine. Some writers claim he grew “pathologically” shy as an adult, especially around women. (For a time he held a crush on one of Katharine’s friends, though he never had a date.) In small groups he functioned fine.
Wilbur’s drive and vision began their work in flight, but only after Orville’s incessant tinkering pulled his elder sibling out of a colossal funk caused by a hockey accident.
Orville’s printing hobby, begun with Ed Sines, had grown from play to work. He left high school early to start a print shop, partnering with Sines before buying him out. He built a printing press of his own design and started a short weekly paper. But he found he didn’t like to write, and Wilbur was drawn in and reengaged with life.
Thus Orville’s business initiative started the brothers working together. They got a taste of newspapering years before becoming media stars themselves.
The growing business let the duo tinker and transition to a new tech revolution: cycling.
The press moved to the back room with Sines as bike repairs and sales grew more profitable in their first year. Orville became a top area cyclist, helping promote their wares. This was the first generation to ride bicycles. Helping customers get started likely transferred to flight.
So it was Orville who won the toss for those famous twelve seconds on December 17, 1903. He was 32.
We’ll see just how the Wrights mastered flying at the end of this chapter.
Over the next two years they turned their barely functioning machine into one capable of practical, everyday flight. On October 4, 1905, Orville flew for 33 minutes, bested the next day an additional six minutes by Wilbur. They were ready to go public.
Since January, the pair had been trying to sell their invention. The bicycle shop remained their sole source of income. “They have fame, but not wealth, yet.” Milton wrote as news spread beyond Dayton.
When the world finally took notice in 1908, the press of events separated them across an ocean with near-fatal results. Flights to win a U.S. Army contract were scheduled just a month after Wilbur began his first public flights in France.
Europe went wild. But then as now, folks in the States didn’t really hold with stories from over there. It took Orville’s solo flights at Fort Myer outside Washington, D.C. to inflame the American public. That’s when he got his tail feathers singed.
Once word of his aviation triumph spread, droves of ecstatic spectators crossed the Potomac to see. It was a shy man’s nightmare. Overseas, Wilbur feared the stresses of overexposure might trigger another of Orville’s “peculiar spells.” Only the absorption of flying cleared it all away.
On one occasion that September, President Theodore Roosevelt, the vice president, senators, representatives and Supreme Court showed up. A small bomb would have dismantled the entire government. Other spectators included Alexander Graham Bell and Glenn Curtiss.
Curtiss, a motorcycle racer and manufacturer had set a world record of 136 mph the year before. He had tried to interest the Wrights in his engines; now he offered one for free. Other fledgling aviators loved his light, powerful motors but the brothers declined. Years later Orville admitted their engine was “one of the poorest parts of our plane.”
At Fort Myer, Orville set nine world records in four days, reaching an altitude of 310 feet and staying aloft for an hour and fourteen minutes. The incessant attention and demands mushroomed. Upwards of 100,000 people saw him fly. Viewers didn’t understand when Orville cancelled due to poor conditions.
On September 17, 1908 Army Lieutenant Tom Selfridge became one of aviation’s first passengers, and its first fatality when a propeller broke in mid-flight. The plane crashed in a tangle of wire bracing and splintered spruce. Selfridge was killed. Orville fractured a thigh and several ribs and sustained injuries to his scalp and back. He was in the hospital for six weeks, and in near-constant pain forever after.
Sister Katharine rushed to her brother’s side. She and Orv had always close, and she took a leave of absence from teaching to accompany him overseas to join Wilbur.
If shy, Orville nonetheless had grit. He had tumbled out of the sky before, once breaking a dozen ribs—on the plane, not himself. Danger was always there, one reason the brothers had promised their father never to fly together.
Wilbur had negotiated the Army contract so they could recoup their investment almost as soon as they flew. But the Ft. Myer crash delayed completion, required within a year. The public exposure meanwhile gave competitors valuable insights.
At the start the brothers had joined a free exchange of ideas with other would-be aviators. Things had changed after their string of breakthroughs. The Wright brothers felt they deserved to be compensated and recognized for their invention of powered flight. In 1906 their first patent was granted, valid for 17 years. Anyone who flew would have to pay a royalty. The highly collaborative aviation community was taken aback as the brothers initially sought $200,000 from buyers.
The Wrights knew they had been years ahead of others. But after 1908 all bets were off. French aviators soon reached the level of the Kitty Hawk glider, then that of the Huffman Prairie flyer. How long could two inventors stay ahead of the world?
In late June 1909, Orville tried to get back in the air at Fort Myers. Wilbur oversaw things on the ground. The plane didn’t cooperate, skidding around the field unbalanced, lifting for a few seconds before digging a wingtip into the ground or lurching to a stop against a tree. If the motor wasn’t acting up the winds were. Orville felt every bump up his spine.
Six weeks remained to meet the Army’s one-year deadline. In late July, affairs finally improved. On the 26th Orville flew for an hour with a passenger, before an audience that included the new President Taft. Four days later a ten-mile cross-country flight clinched the tests. Orville had earned the Wrights $30,000.
Their ten-year effort was beginning to be paid back. Money was coming in from Europe and patent royalties.
East coast investors such as Cornelius Vanderbilt took note, and in November 1909 the brothers formed the Wright Company to manufacture planes. As president, Wilbur soon focused on patent infringements. “Orville was (at the factory) all the time,” a worker noted, because “Wilbur was in New York, taking care of the lawsuits.” The brothers had learned litigation at their father’s knee, not business. Bishop Wright had traveled incessantly and led a church schism, leaving shy mother Susan to hold down the fort. The boys became their parents.
Next May the brothers risked one flight together. Afterwards Orv flew his father to make up for it. Milton’s only criticism was “higher, Orville. Higher.”
Soon Wright Company exhibition pilots were performing in air shows around the country. It proved to be their biggest profit center. In Edward Roach’s The Wright Company: from invention to industry, he tallies over a quarter million dollars grossed by Wright pilots in sixteen months from 1910 to 1911. To supply its pilots with vehicles to perform in, the company sold 21 Wright B Flyers to itself (list price: $5,000 each) before fatalities ended the team.
Meanwhile planes were cracking the skies open as far as Hawaii. The greatest amount of innovation was in Europe. In the States, Glenn Curtiss proved the unexpected newcomer, thanks to Alexander Graham Bell.
Before Lieutenant Selfridge died he had shared Wright designs with Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association. Bell planned to motorize his massive kite designs, and enlisted Curtiss for his engines. But the rest of the group had their own ideas, so Bell let each build their own plane. To get around the Wright patent, Curtiss used ailerons for lateral control.
A worried Bell recalled the lawsuits from his telephone patent. “There had never been in the world more litigations over an invention—but it will be as nothing should successful flying machines be the result of our efforts.”
He was right on both counts. Curtiss’ design was the best of the group, and his follow-on plane, the June Bug, flew over a mile to win a $2,500 Scientific American prize. Curtiss himself would prove to be a bug in the Wrights’ bonnet. As if to set the stage, the Aero Club of America awarded him U.S. Pilot’s License # 1. Orville received #5, alphabetically.
Curtiss then beat the Wrights to market, selling the first private airplane and establishing the first airplane factory (it made motorcycles earlier). The Wrights promptly sued in 1909, arguing their patent covered ailerons.
The courts upheld wing warping, but the aviation community adopted ailerons en masse.
Meanwhile the Wright brothers halted all apparent innovation as part of their patent strategy. While Curtiss replaced landing skids with motorcycle wheels and control levers with a steering wheel, the brothers stood pat. In a hostile world swarming with tinkerers, patent royalties seemed their best shot at financial security. But the legal battles were draining their bank account as well as Wilbur’s health.
In a way Curtiss was a mix of the Wrights—reticent almost to the point of shyness.
In other ways he was their opposite: collaborative, networking, generous, and a daredevil. The brothers focused on airframes, he excelled at engines. Wright vehicles were abstract 3D planar assemblages. Curtiss planes had snazz. The Wrights were micromanaging do-it-yourselfers; Curtiss delegated a one-man shop into a humming factory. His open-source approach collided with the proprietary Wrights. In court his tenacious competitiveness matched Wilbur’s obsession with the rule of law. The unstoppable force met the immovable object.
Wright loyalists (Daytonians) side with the brothers mostly. It’s distressing to one day discover their arch-adversary Killer Curtiss, curling his moustache in a villainous sneer, had a point. Many had helped bring flight to fruition. No one should have a monopoly on such a fundamental invention. Both positions were self-serving, yet also partly valid.
It grew harder to do R&D the quiet, protective Wright way. Planned work at Kitty Hawk in 1911 got derailed by nosey reporters. Instead Orville practiced flying a new glider. Soaring pioneer Otto Lilienthal had inspired the young brothers in the 1890s. Orville paid tribute, gliding for nine minutes, 45 seconds. His record stood for 10 years.
Before their fame the brothers had tested an amphibious aircraft on the Miami River. The U.S. Navy wanted to take off and land on water. Paved airfields didn’t exist, so the smoothest surfaces seemed to be rivers, lakes and perhaps calm seas.
The Wrights grew busy with other matters while their rival kept tinkering on his planes. In 1911 and 1912 Glenn Curtiss won the prestigious Collier Trophy for what he called “flying boats.”
In mid-1912 tragedy struck in Dayton. Wilbur came home with Typhoid fever, and died that May. Sister Katharine and older brother Lorin helped out. But the weight of the Wright Company fell on Orville’s shoulders.
Expertise from the city’s ‘thousand factories’ didn’t rub off on the Wright Company. As its new president, Orville procrastinated, resisted professional management advice from his more worldly investors, and spent most his time tinkering in the bike shop. Minor innovations occurred in new planes but the Wright Company fell far behind competitors.
Less than a year after Wilbur’s funeral came the Great 1913 Flood. For Milton, Katharine and Orville it turned their longtime West Dayton household upside down. The backyard shed was inundated, where the 1903 plane was stored alongside irreplaceable photographs of the world’s first flights at Kitty Hawk. It was weeks before Orville knew everything was salvageable.
Meanwhile Orville spread his tinkering energies. A built-in vacuum cleaner for the new Hawthorn Hill mansion allowed housekeeper Carrie Grumbach to plug her hose into any room. She never used it; from then on, Orville vacuumed the meticulous rug work he’d imported from Ireland. Legend has it that to soothe continual back pain, he designed the equivalent of a stand-up Jacuzzi shower with wraparound jets from knee to shoulder height. In truth, it was an American Standard fixture purchased off-the-shelf.
In May he resumed testing their Model CH hydroaeroplane at a secluded spot on the Miami River south of Dayton. In 100 flights he lofted up to 800 pounds of payload but not without another near-disaster.
On the thirtieth anniversary of flight, Edward Deeds explained to the Dayton Daily News. “Something went wrong and the whole machine plunged down under the deep water, taking with it Orville and Jim Jacobs, who was with him in the flying boat.”
“Orville scrambled to the surface, followed by Jim who excitedly said: “I’m glad you’re all right, Orville. I called out to you twice while we were under there and you didn’t answer.”” Jacobs had been one of two Wright Company pallbearers for Wilbur, and nearly became Orville’s that day.
Despite the effort, their competitor’s flying boats prevailed. The Curtiss 1914 Model H proved so influential almost 500 were built. The Curtiss CH-4 crossed the Atlantic first in 1919. Lindberg’s later achievement was to fly solo and non-stop.
Orville shied from experimental flights at Huffman Prairie due to the omnipresent press. Thus no one in the Wright Company knew a thing until, on the very last day of 1913, Lorin Wright called official witnesses to observe the “automatic stabilizer,” in development since 1905. Orville repeatedly demonstrated hands-off flying, culminating in seven circuits of the field with his hands held high.
Wilbur would have been proud. The world’s first aerial auto-pilot handily won the Collier Prize weeks later. But in six months the Sperry gyroscopic autopilot proved far superior. Another Wright patent fell to the cutting edge.
Innovation became a growing challenge. Whereas before the brothers had engaged in knock-down, drag-out “debate,” it was inconceivable that the shy, inward Orville would do so with an outside collaborator. But he would continue to collaborate, notably with Jacobs.
The Curtiss Aeroplane Company lawsuit dragged on until a January 1914 settlement gave the Wrights a legal monopoly in the United States, able to charge 20% of the profit from every plane made in the U.S.
What was good for the Wright Company was bad for the country. The patent fight cramped development in aviation stateside. Biographer Tom Crouch says that at least it didn’t cause lasting damage. When the nation entered WWI a patent pool was set up to get things moving.
As a result, Curtiss ultimately paid no penalty, though he almost went bankrupt from the battle. But Glenn Curtiss was still on his feet, and growing as an aircraft manufacturer. Perhaps his most unforgiveable sin was to out-innovate the brothers. Besides ailerons, tricycle landing gear and hydroplanes his company improved aviation through liquid-cooled engines and devised varied means of landing on or launching from ships. He appealed the legal judgment with the aid of the Smithsonian Institution.
Meanwhile, Orville proceeded to secure his finances.
By spring 1914 Orville was able to buy a controlling interest in the Wright Company, and in October 1915 put the company up for sale, in part from his “poor health.” He reportedly netted $500,000, or nearly $12 million in 2015 dollars. He was set for life.
But life remained difficult. Severe back pain while driving in December left him bedridden for eight weeks. At least he had the furnace wired for remote control from his bed.
~
Astronomer Samuel Langley served as secretary (CEO) of the Smithsonian Institution from 1887 until his death in 1906. He achieved early success flying smaller models of his “aerodrome” for nearly a mile in 1896. That led to a full-scale piloted vehicle funded by $50,000 from the U.S. Army plus $20,000 from Smithsonian sources. It all ended with two highly public crashes in December 1903, mere days before the Wrights’ quiet triumph. Langley never got over the failure and died in 1906.
The museum didn’t get over it either. Charles Wolcott, Langley’s successor, loaned the aerodrome to Curtiss in 1914. The Smithsonian hoped to rescue its reputation by proving the aerodrome could have flown earlier, with more experienced piloting. Curtiss sought once more to invalidate the Wright patents and made secret changes to engine and structure.
The museum turned a blind eye, and in August publicly described the Langley aerodrome as “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.” (Italics added.) That set off a fight lasting three decades.
Wright biographer Fred Howard wrote: “It was a lie pure and simple, but it bore the imprimatur of the venerable Smithsonian and over the years would find its way into magazines, history books, and encyclopedias…”
It didn’t help Curtiss. His appeal was rejected.
Orville fought back through quieter means. In 1916 he rebuilt the 1903 flyer. If anyone insinuated he, too had modified an earlier craft, the extensive photographic record proved otherwise. After several attempts to negotiate a “peace” with the Smithsonian failed he loaned it to the London Science Museum in 1928.
~
Orville hadn’t avoided outside collaborators entirely. In 1917, Dayton’s newly minted tech millionaires Deeds and Kettering put together the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company to supply planes as the U.S. entered World War I. Orville lent the power of the Wright name, served on the board, and consulted.
Now in his 50s, he tinkered in his new lab at 15 North Broadway with an automatic record changer that mostly broke records. He also sought to improve the typewriter and code machines. Did Orville have anything more to offer aviation?
Most of the work at Dayton-Wright involved mass-production like Henry Ford’s system. The former Wright Company had hand-built planes one at a time. Orville had little to offer there.
During the war the new company built 3400 planes based on outside European and American designs. Curtiss meanwhile produced 10,000 JN-4 “Jennies” from a design he commissioned. His aviation company was now the world’s largest, employing 21,000.
Orville focused on designing the propeller of what was effectively the first aerial drone. Kettering’s aerial torpedo, nicknamed the “bug,” never saw use in battle. But later Nazi Germany found its design valuable in the next war’s buzz bombs.
In 1918 Orville piloted his last flight, demonstrating the great advances in aviation between a Dh.4 biplane and a 1910 Wright B Flyer. He must have had mixed emotions.
After WWI ended, Orv consulted on other advanced projects at Dayton-Wright.
The R.B. Racer was a highly advanced design that included retractable wheels, a smooth sculpted body and a single high wing with adjustable camber (curvature). Tested at over 200 mph, it lost to a 168 mph biplane in Paris, proving the adage by racing expert Laurence Poeroy that “The first instance of novel principle is invariably defeated by the developed example of established practice.”
That held true for postwar aviation. It was still too new. Dayton-Wright tried all sorts of ways to repackage its surplus product.
Orville came up with one solution in 1919. Taking the DH.4 wings, he designed a 4-seat enclosed plane, the world’s first cabin cruiser. It flew swell. With four men aboard the OW-1 set an altitude record of 19,710 ft. Still no one was buying. (This is likely the plane that young Charlie Adams rode at age ten or twelve.)
The OW-1 became the final plane designed by a Wright. One last major aviation innovation remained.
In the first decade of powered flight it grew clear that wing warping was impractical. It weakened wings and gave less precise control. By 1915 virtually all planes used ailerons and flaps.
In the early 1920s Orville patented the split-wing flap with Jim Jacobs.
Ailerons move opposite one another for turning. Flaps on both wings move in unison to change lift and drag. Wright enthusiasts make a big hubbub about how advanced Orville’s split flaps were, enabling slower takeoffs, slower flight, or greater maneuvering in air combat. It was a decade or more before planes like the DC-3 sported them. Other sources argue split flaps were one of a dozen alternatives, and mostly disappeared by the 1940s.
Time was passing. Orville’s circle was shrinking. Father Milton had died in 1917 at age 88. In 1920 his eldest brother Reuchlin passed away. Only sister Katharine, Lorin, and Lorin’s family remained.
Orville was a beloved uncle and a prankster, especially at holiday dinners. Oakwood police turned a blind eye to his speedy driving. And of all things he once confessed a fear of heights while waiting for an elevator. In the air he’d always been too busy to be afraid. Guilt and sadness from Selfridge’s death preyed on him at times. He spent summers at a home at Lambert Island, 115 miles north of Toronto. He usually returned home through Buffalo, passing near the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company.
In 1920 Curtiss left the aviation business, pushed out by his company’s management. The industry was maturing. Orville, famous, wealthy and graying, also receded from the limelight to the mansion he and Katharine shared. She nicknamed him “His Criticalness.”
In May, 1925 she said, “I suppose none of us quite realize what a tremendous strain Orv has been under these last twenty years. It goes back of that really. But the severe shock to his whole nervous system in the accident at Fort Myer, the nerve-racking excitement of the years from 1908 to 1912, when Will died. The further strain of winning the law suits which Orv had to finish up. No lawyer could handle it all... The nervous shocks have reduced Orv’s vitality and energy beyond belief.”
The siblings were center stage at the April 1926 groundbreaking for Wright Field. It would be one of their last joint events.
That June she herself caused the worst shock to Orville’s system. At age 52 Katharine married an old college boyfriend and moved to Kansas City. He never forgave her, not speaking to her until she lay on her deathbed in 1929.
In his mid-50s, Orville Wright had to learn to live alone, rattling around in the mansion with just his housekeeper Carrie and her husband. At the lab his secretary Mabel Beck became a nearly impenetrable gatekeeper even to Lorin.
The sciatica worsened. Sometimes it was hard for Orville simply to stand up from a chair, let alone take to the air. The vibration of train travel was similarly uncomfortable.
In a grand irony the Curtiss and Wright companies, long since separated from their founders, merged in 1929. Curtiss died a year later at age 52, finally beating Wilbur by seven years. Orville far outlived both.
Charles Lindberg tried to assist with the Smithsonian debacle, to no avail. Then in the late 30’s Henry Ford lent credence to the Wrights’ legacy when he enshrined their West Side home and cycle shop in his historical park, Greenfield Village.
Orville continued consulting on aviation boards and making social appearances with the Dayton upper crust. But his days as an innovator were over.
He continued to make appearances with politicians, celebrities, and famous flyers but never spoke publicly. In 1940 Orville interacted with another U.S. president, and another Roosevelt, FDR, on a reelection tour through Dayton.
In 1942 the Smithsonian finally recanted and acknowledged the Wrights had been first in flight all along. Orville sent word to England but the 1903 flyer was in storage due to WWII. It would not return to the U. S. in his lifetime.
As the new war progressed, German aerial bombardment of London made clear the growing destructive power of airplanes. One day a reporter ran into Orville on the street and asked about his legacy. Despite the rise of military aviation in two world wars, Orville felt that the airplane would mainly prove a tool for peace.
In January 1948 Orville Wright passed away, nearly half a century after Wilbur had begun their quest for flight. Orville outlived his brother by 36 years, to witness the arrival of the supersonic jet age; just 20 years after his death, men circled the moon.
The invention of powered flight ranks as Dayton’s greatest innovation. As many have noted, the Wrights accomplished all of this in their spare time over the course of ten years and for under $1000 of their own money. It took Orville nearly three times as long and who knows how much money to defend the achievement, flying solo.
That December 1948, on the 45th anniversary of powered flight, the 1903 Flyer finally went on display at the Smithsonian, on the condition the museum never make claims of earlier flight success. Orville’s long quest to vindicate the Wright brothers was over. The invisible man in the famous photo continues to fly down through history.
A part of the club, yet apartWhen Deeds and Kettering created the Engineers Club of Dayton in 1914 they soon approached Orville Wright. Despite Orville’s intense shyness and dislike of public appearances, he quickly joined his peers. He stayed a member for over a third of a century, and served a term as President. Orville’s prestige helped the new club attract members and foster connections with military aviation in Dayton. But he always ate alone or with one other, at a small table in the dining room’s rear.
Deeds found Orville different in person than in public. He was “one of those great men who remain unspoiled by adulation. He is witty and has a keen sense of humor. While he never makes a public speech, he is an interesting and entertaining conversationalist, especially if the subject is a scientific one.”
Orville in fact did give a few speeches. At the Engineers Club he once introduced a presentation, and later received the keys to the new building in 1918. Amazingly, you can hear him speak briefly in a short film from 1935 at this book’s companion website, DaytonInnovationLegacy.org.
Orville was always a snappy dresser, so a frequent shave and haircut were required. One of his favorite haunts was the snug club barbershop off the upstairs porch. The window overlooked the Miami River to McCook Field. From his vantage point, Orville could keep up on the latest in aviation and rest his back. McCook, the predecessor to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, was the original research and development site for military aviation. In fact, the Engineers Club became an unofficial officers club for the aviators after the First World War.
Orv served as an official observer for many aviation record attempts at McCook and as chairman of the NAA Contests and Records Board.
A number of pieces of Wright memorabilia grace the Engineers Club. Wright Engine Number 3 is on permanent non-circulating display, bequeathed to the club in Orville’s will. Engine No. 3 powered the Wrights’ initial hydroplane tests on the Great Miami River near the Main Street Bridge in 1907. Other displays include framed pages from the Wright Airplane Co. catalog ($5000 bought an airplane), wind tunnel models and propeller designs.
Mounted behind the reception desk are model airplanes for children, allegedly designed by Orville. Lorin Wright’s company, Miami Wood Specialties produced the toys along with Flips and Flops, a circus toy that definitely was designed by Orville. It was his final patent, in 1923.
Downstairs, the Wright Room features historic photos and a copy of Pilot License Number One, presented to Orville Wright long after he had earned his wings, and pilot license #5, mentioned earlier.
Club members Chuck Dempsey, John Warlick, Hubie Miller, and other volunteers built a new Wright “B” Flyer in the 1970s. The aircraft continues to fly at Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport thanks to current members like John Bosch and Walt Hoy.
Just east of the Club stands a near-full size sculpture of the 1905 Wright Flyer. Perforated wings keep it from generating too much lift. But the most affecting sculpture stands on the front walkway. On a simple iron bench, two black bowler hats leave the impression the Wright brothers have just stepped away.
Wilbur’s death eight and a half years later forced him out of the shadows.
Behind his moustache, the shy Orville faced boardroom struggles over the Wright Company, finishing a nasty patent fight, cashing in before the patents expired, and enduring endless public functions. The capper was his fight to secure the Wright brothers’ place in history. The Smithsonian Institution preferred an inside favorite.
All in all he’d rather have been building the mansion or completing the duo’s unfinished work. A “hydroaeroplane” promised the ability to take off and land from any body of water. An automatic stabilizer might fly the plane by itself. And a key part of their patents, wing warping, was being outmoded. That couldn’t stand.
Orville’s intense shyness was a major liability, but perhaps his true Achilles heel was to trust only in family, who one by one began disappearing.
Susan and Milton Wright had instilled in their children the notion that family alone offered security. Only the black sheep of the clan, eldest son Reuchlin Wright, had ignored that by moving out west, and he seemed pretty hangdog about it. Second oldest Lorin had gone west early before boomeranging home to marry in Dayton. The younger trio consisted of Wilbur, born in 1867, Orville born on August 19, 1871, and Katharine three years later to the day.
From youth the youngest Wright brothers were as inseparable as twins, though not at all identical.
As a child, “Orv” had been sociable enough to play Napoleon to a small army of boys in schoolyard pranks. But he’d also quietly dodged the first weeks of preschool, preferring to watch Ed Sine’s mother operate her sewing machine. Some writers claim he grew “pathologically” shy as an adult, especially around women. (For a time he held a crush on one of Katharine’s friends, though he never had a date.) In small groups he functioned fine.
Wilbur’s drive and vision began their work in flight, but only after Orville’s incessant tinkering pulled his elder sibling out of a colossal funk caused by a hockey accident.
Orville’s printing hobby, begun with Ed Sines, had grown from play to work. He left high school early to start a print shop, partnering with Sines before buying him out. He built a printing press of his own design and started a short weekly paper. But he found he didn’t like to write, and Wilbur was drawn in and reengaged with life.
Thus Orville’s business initiative started the brothers working together. They got a taste of newspapering years before becoming media stars themselves.
The growing business let the duo tinker and transition to a new tech revolution: cycling.
The press moved to the back room with Sines as bike repairs and sales grew more profitable in their first year. Orville became a top area cyclist, helping promote their wares. This was the first generation to ride bicycles. Helping customers get started likely transferred to flight.
So it was Orville who won the toss for those famous twelve seconds on December 17, 1903. He was 32.
We’ll see just how the Wrights mastered flying at the end of this chapter.
Over the next two years they turned their barely functioning machine into one capable of practical, everyday flight. On October 4, 1905, Orville flew for 33 minutes, bested the next day an additional six minutes by Wilbur. They were ready to go public.
Since January, the pair had been trying to sell their invention. The bicycle shop remained their sole source of income. “They have fame, but not wealth, yet.” Milton wrote as news spread beyond Dayton.
When the world finally took notice in 1908, the press of events separated them across an ocean with near-fatal results. Flights to win a U.S. Army contract were scheduled just a month after Wilbur began his first public flights in France.
Europe went wild. But then as now, folks in the States didn’t really hold with stories from over there. It took Orville’s solo flights at Fort Myer outside Washington, D.C. to inflame the American public. That’s when he got his tail feathers singed.
Once word of his aviation triumph spread, droves of ecstatic spectators crossed the Potomac to see. It was a shy man’s nightmare. Overseas, Wilbur feared the stresses of overexposure might trigger another of Orville’s “peculiar spells.” Only the absorption of flying cleared it all away.
On one occasion that September, President Theodore Roosevelt, the vice president, senators, representatives and Supreme Court showed up. A small bomb would have dismantled the entire government. Other spectators included Alexander Graham Bell and Glenn Curtiss.
Curtiss, a motorcycle racer and manufacturer had set a world record of 136 mph the year before. He had tried to interest the Wrights in his engines; now he offered one for free. Other fledgling aviators loved his light, powerful motors but the brothers declined. Years later Orville admitted their engine was “one of the poorest parts of our plane.”
At Fort Myer, Orville set nine world records in four days, reaching an altitude of 310 feet and staying aloft for an hour and fourteen minutes. The incessant attention and demands mushroomed. Upwards of 100,000 people saw him fly. Viewers didn’t understand when Orville cancelled due to poor conditions.
On September 17, 1908 Army Lieutenant Tom Selfridge became one of aviation’s first passengers, and its first fatality when a propeller broke in mid-flight. The plane crashed in a tangle of wire bracing and splintered spruce. Selfridge was killed. Orville fractured a thigh and several ribs and sustained injuries to his scalp and back. He was in the hospital for six weeks, and in near-constant pain forever after.
Sister Katharine rushed to her brother’s side. She and Orv had always close, and she took a leave of absence from teaching to accompany him overseas to join Wilbur.
If shy, Orville nonetheless had grit. He had tumbled out of the sky before, once breaking a dozen ribs—on the plane, not himself. Danger was always there, one reason the brothers had promised their father never to fly together.
Wilbur had negotiated the Army contract so they could recoup their investment almost as soon as they flew. But the Ft. Myer crash delayed completion, required within a year. The public exposure meanwhile gave competitors valuable insights.
At the start the brothers had joined a free exchange of ideas with other would-be aviators. Things had changed after their string of breakthroughs. The Wright brothers felt they deserved to be compensated and recognized for their invention of powered flight. In 1906 their first patent was granted, valid for 17 years. Anyone who flew would have to pay a royalty. The highly collaborative aviation community was taken aback as the brothers initially sought $200,000 from buyers.
The Wrights knew they had been years ahead of others. But after 1908 all bets were off. French aviators soon reached the level of the Kitty Hawk glider, then that of the Huffman Prairie flyer. How long could two inventors stay ahead of the world?
In late June 1909, Orville tried to get back in the air at Fort Myers. Wilbur oversaw things on the ground. The plane didn’t cooperate, skidding around the field unbalanced, lifting for a few seconds before digging a wingtip into the ground or lurching to a stop against a tree. If the motor wasn’t acting up the winds were. Orville felt every bump up his spine.
Six weeks remained to meet the Army’s one-year deadline. In late July, affairs finally improved. On the 26th Orville flew for an hour with a passenger, before an audience that included the new President Taft. Four days later a ten-mile cross-country flight clinched the tests. Orville had earned the Wrights $30,000.
Their ten-year effort was beginning to be paid back. Money was coming in from Europe and patent royalties.
East coast investors such as Cornelius Vanderbilt took note, and in November 1909 the brothers formed the Wright Company to manufacture planes. As president, Wilbur soon focused on patent infringements. “Orville was (at the factory) all the time,” a worker noted, because “Wilbur was in New York, taking care of the lawsuits.” The brothers had learned litigation at their father’s knee, not business. Bishop Wright had traveled incessantly and led a church schism, leaving shy mother Susan to hold down the fort. The boys became their parents.
Next May the brothers risked one flight together. Afterwards Orv flew his father to make up for it. Milton’s only criticism was “higher, Orville. Higher.”
Soon Wright Company exhibition pilots were performing in air shows around the country. It proved to be their biggest profit center. In Edward Roach’s The Wright Company: from invention to industry, he tallies over a quarter million dollars grossed by Wright pilots in sixteen months from 1910 to 1911. To supply its pilots with vehicles to perform in, the company sold 21 Wright B Flyers to itself (list price: $5,000 each) before fatalities ended the team.
Meanwhile planes were cracking the skies open as far as Hawaii. The greatest amount of innovation was in Europe. In the States, Glenn Curtiss proved the unexpected newcomer, thanks to Alexander Graham Bell.
Before Lieutenant Selfridge died he had shared Wright designs with Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association. Bell planned to motorize his massive kite designs, and enlisted Curtiss for his engines. But the rest of the group had their own ideas, so Bell let each build their own plane. To get around the Wright patent, Curtiss used ailerons for lateral control.
A worried Bell recalled the lawsuits from his telephone patent. “There had never been in the world more litigations over an invention—but it will be as nothing should successful flying machines be the result of our efforts.”
He was right on both counts. Curtiss’ design was the best of the group, and his follow-on plane, the June Bug, flew over a mile to win a $2,500 Scientific American prize. Curtiss himself would prove to be a bug in the Wrights’ bonnet. As if to set the stage, the Aero Club of America awarded him U.S. Pilot’s License # 1. Orville received #5, alphabetically.
Curtiss then beat the Wrights to market, selling the first private airplane and establishing the first airplane factory (it made motorcycles earlier). The Wrights promptly sued in 1909, arguing their patent covered ailerons.
The courts upheld wing warping, but the aviation community adopted ailerons en masse.
Meanwhile the Wright brothers halted all apparent innovation as part of their patent strategy. While Curtiss replaced landing skids with motorcycle wheels and control levers with a steering wheel, the brothers stood pat. In a hostile world swarming with tinkerers, patent royalties seemed their best shot at financial security. But the legal battles were draining their bank account as well as Wilbur’s health.
In a way Curtiss was a mix of the Wrights—reticent almost to the point of shyness.
In other ways he was their opposite: collaborative, networking, generous, and a daredevil. The brothers focused on airframes, he excelled at engines. Wright vehicles were abstract 3D planar assemblages. Curtiss planes had snazz. The Wrights were micromanaging do-it-yourselfers; Curtiss delegated a one-man shop into a humming factory. His open-source approach collided with the proprietary Wrights. In court his tenacious competitiveness matched Wilbur’s obsession with the rule of law. The unstoppable force met the immovable object.
Wright loyalists (Daytonians) side with the brothers mostly. It’s distressing to one day discover their arch-adversary Killer Curtiss, curling his moustache in a villainous sneer, had a point. Many had helped bring flight to fruition. No one should have a monopoly on such a fundamental invention. Both positions were self-serving, yet also partly valid.
It grew harder to do R&D the quiet, protective Wright way. Planned work at Kitty Hawk in 1911 got derailed by nosey reporters. Instead Orville practiced flying a new glider. Soaring pioneer Otto Lilienthal had inspired the young brothers in the 1890s. Orville paid tribute, gliding for nine minutes, 45 seconds. His record stood for 10 years.
Before their fame the brothers had tested an amphibious aircraft on the Miami River. The U.S. Navy wanted to take off and land on water. Paved airfields didn’t exist, so the smoothest surfaces seemed to be rivers, lakes and perhaps calm seas.
The Wrights grew busy with other matters while their rival kept tinkering on his planes. In 1911 and 1912 Glenn Curtiss won the prestigious Collier Trophy for what he called “flying boats.”
In mid-1912 tragedy struck in Dayton. Wilbur came home with Typhoid fever, and died that May. Sister Katharine and older brother Lorin helped out. But the weight of the Wright Company fell on Orville’s shoulders.
Expertise from the city’s ‘thousand factories’ didn’t rub off on the Wright Company. As its new president, Orville procrastinated, resisted professional management advice from his more worldly investors, and spent most his time tinkering in the bike shop. Minor innovations occurred in new planes but the Wright Company fell far behind competitors.
Less than a year after Wilbur’s funeral came the Great 1913 Flood. For Milton, Katharine and Orville it turned their longtime West Dayton household upside down. The backyard shed was inundated, where the 1903 plane was stored alongside irreplaceable photographs of the world’s first flights at Kitty Hawk. It was weeks before Orville knew everything was salvageable.
Meanwhile Orville spread his tinkering energies. A built-in vacuum cleaner for the new Hawthorn Hill mansion allowed housekeeper Carrie Grumbach to plug her hose into any room. She never used it; from then on, Orville vacuumed the meticulous rug work he’d imported from Ireland. Legend has it that to soothe continual back pain, he designed the equivalent of a stand-up Jacuzzi shower with wraparound jets from knee to shoulder height. In truth, it was an American Standard fixture purchased off-the-shelf.
In May he resumed testing their Model CH hydroaeroplane at a secluded spot on the Miami River south of Dayton. In 100 flights he lofted up to 800 pounds of payload but not without another near-disaster.
On the thirtieth anniversary of flight, Edward Deeds explained to the Dayton Daily News. “Something went wrong and the whole machine plunged down under the deep water, taking with it Orville and Jim Jacobs, who was with him in the flying boat.”
“Orville scrambled to the surface, followed by Jim who excitedly said: “I’m glad you’re all right, Orville. I called out to you twice while we were under there and you didn’t answer.”” Jacobs had been one of two Wright Company pallbearers for Wilbur, and nearly became Orville’s that day.
Despite the effort, their competitor’s flying boats prevailed. The Curtiss 1914 Model H proved so influential almost 500 were built. The Curtiss CH-4 crossed the Atlantic first in 1919. Lindberg’s later achievement was to fly solo and non-stop.
Orville shied from experimental flights at Huffman Prairie due to the omnipresent press. Thus no one in the Wright Company knew a thing until, on the very last day of 1913, Lorin Wright called official witnesses to observe the “automatic stabilizer,” in development since 1905. Orville repeatedly demonstrated hands-off flying, culminating in seven circuits of the field with his hands held high.
Wilbur would have been proud. The world’s first aerial auto-pilot handily won the Collier Prize weeks later. But in six months the Sperry gyroscopic autopilot proved far superior. Another Wright patent fell to the cutting edge.
Innovation became a growing challenge. Whereas before the brothers had engaged in knock-down, drag-out “debate,” it was inconceivable that the shy, inward Orville would do so with an outside collaborator. But he would continue to collaborate, notably with Jacobs.
The Curtiss Aeroplane Company lawsuit dragged on until a January 1914 settlement gave the Wrights a legal monopoly in the United States, able to charge 20% of the profit from every plane made in the U.S.
What was good for the Wright Company was bad for the country. The patent fight cramped development in aviation stateside. Biographer Tom Crouch says that at least it didn’t cause lasting damage. When the nation entered WWI a patent pool was set up to get things moving.
As a result, Curtiss ultimately paid no penalty, though he almost went bankrupt from the battle. But Glenn Curtiss was still on his feet, and growing as an aircraft manufacturer. Perhaps his most unforgiveable sin was to out-innovate the brothers. Besides ailerons, tricycle landing gear and hydroplanes his company improved aviation through liquid-cooled engines and devised varied means of landing on or launching from ships. He appealed the legal judgment with the aid of the Smithsonian Institution.
Meanwhile, Orville proceeded to secure his finances.
By spring 1914 Orville was able to buy a controlling interest in the Wright Company, and in October 1915 put the company up for sale, in part from his “poor health.” He reportedly netted $500,000, or nearly $12 million in 2015 dollars. He was set for life.
But life remained difficult. Severe back pain while driving in December left him bedridden for eight weeks. At least he had the furnace wired for remote control from his bed.
~
Astronomer Samuel Langley served as secretary (CEO) of the Smithsonian Institution from 1887 until his death in 1906. He achieved early success flying smaller models of his “aerodrome” for nearly a mile in 1896. That led to a full-scale piloted vehicle funded by $50,000 from the U.S. Army plus $20,000 from Smithsonian sources. It all ended with two highly public crashes in December 1903, mere days before the Wrights’ quiet triumph. Langley never got over the failure and died in 1906.
The museum didn’t get over it either. Charles Wolcott, Langley’s successor, loaned the aerodrome to Curtiss in 1914. The Smithsonian hoped to rescue its reputation by proving the aerodrome could have flown earlier, with more experienced piloting. Curtiss sought once more to invalidate the Wright patents and made secret changes to engine and structure.
The museum turned a blind eye, and in August publicly described the Langley aerodrome as “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.” (Italics added.) That set off a fight lasting three decades.
Wright biographer Fred Howard wrote: “It was a lie pure and simple, but it bore the imprimatur of the venerable Smithsonian and over the years would find its way into magazines, history books, and encyclopedias…”
It didn’t help Curtiss. His appeal was rejected.
Orville fought back through quieter means. In 1916 he rebuilt the 1903 flyer. If anyone insinuated he, too had modified an earlier craft, the extensive photographic record proved otherwise. After several attempts to negotiate a “peace” with the Smithsonian failed he loaned it to the London Science Museum in 1928.
~
Orville hadn’t avoided outside collaborators entirely. In 1917, Dayton’s newly minted tech millionaires Deeds and Kettering put together the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company to supply planes as the U.S. entered World War I. Orville lent the power of the Wright name, served on the board, and consulted.
Now in his 50s, he tinkered in his new lab at 15 North Broadway with an automatic record changer that mostly broke records. He also sought to improve the typewriter and code machines. Did Orville have anything more to offer aviation?
Most of the work at Dayton-Wright involved mass-production like Henry Ford’s system. The former Wright Company had hand-built planes one at a time. Orville had little to offer there.
During the war the new company built 3400 planes based on outside European and American designs. Curtiss meanwhile produced 10,000 JN-4 “Jennies” from a design he commissioned. His aviation company was now the world’s largest, employing 21,000.
Orville focused on designing the propeller of what was effectively the first aerial drone. Kettering’s aerial torpedo, nicknamed the “bug,” never saw use in battle. But later Nazi Germany found its design valuable in the next war’s buzz bombs.
In 1918 Orville piloted his last flight, demonstrating the great advances in aviation between a Dh.4 biplane and a 1910 Wright B Flyer. He must have had mixed emotions.
After WWI ended, Orv consulted on other advanced projects at Dayton-Wright.
The R.B. Racer was a highly advanced design that included retractable wheels, a smooth sculpted body and a single high wing with adjustable camber (curvature). Tested at over 200 mph, it lost to a 168 mph biplane in Paris, proving the adage by racing expert Laurence Poeroy that “The first instance of novel principle is invariably defeated by the developed example of established practice.”
That held true for postwar aviation. It was still too new. Dayton-Wright tried all sorts of ways to repackage its surplus product.
Orville came up with one solution in 1919. Taking the DH.4 wings, he designed a 4-seat enclosed plane, the world’s first cabin cruiser. It flew swell. With four men aboard the OW-1 set an altitude record of 19,710 ft. Still no one was buying. (This is likely the plane that young Charlie Adams rode at age ten or twelve.)
The OW-1 became the final plane designed by a Wright. One last major aviation innovation remained.
In the first decade of powered flight it grew clear that wing warping was impractical. It weakened wings and gave less precise control. By 1915 virtually all planes used ailerons and flaps.
In the early 1920s Orville patented the split-wing flap with Jim Jacobs.
Ailerons move opposite one another for turning. Flaps on both wings move in unison to change lift and drag. Wright enthusiasts make a big hubbub about how advanced Orville’s split flaps were, enabling slower takeoffs, slower flight, or greater maneuvering in air combat. It was a decade or more before planes like the DC-3 sported them. Other sources argue split flaps were one of a dozen alternatives, and mostly disappeared by the 1940s.
Time was passing. Orville’s circle was shrinking. Father Milton had died in 1917 at age 88. In 1920 his eldest brother Reuchlin passed away. Only sister Katharine, Lorin, and Lorin’s family remained.
Orville was a beloved uncle and a prankster, especially at holiday dinners. Oakwood police turned a blind eye to his speedy driving. And of all things he once confessed a fear of heights while waiting for an elevator. In the air he’d always been too busy to be afraid. Guilt and sadness from Selfridge’s death preyed on him at times. He spent summers at a home at Lambert Island, 115 miles north of Toronto. He usually returned home through Buffalo, passing near the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company.
In 1920 Curtiss left the aviation business, pushed out by his company’s management. The industry was maturing. Orville, famous, wealthy and graying, also receded from the limelight to the mansion he and Katharine shared. She nicknamed him “His Criticalness.”
In May, 1925 she said, “I suppose none of us quite realize what a tremendous strain Orv has been under these last twenty years. It goes back of that really. But the severe shock to his whole nervous system in the accident at Fort Myer, the nerve-racking excitement of the years from 1908 to 1912, when Will died. The further strain of winning the law suits which Orv had to finish up. No lawyer could handle it all... The nervous shocks have reduced Orv’s vitality and energy beyond belief.”
The siblings were center stage at the April 1926 groundbreaking for Wright Field. It would be one of their last joint events.
That June she herself caused the worst shock to Orville’s system. At age 52 Katharine married an old college boyfriend and moved to Kansas City. He never forgave her, not speaking to her until she lay on her deathbed in 1929.
In his mid-50s, Orville Wright had to learn to live alone, rattling around in the mansion with just his housekeeper Carrie and her husband. At the lab his secretary Mabel Beck became a nearly impenetrable gatekeeper even to Lorin.
The sciatica worsened. Sometimes it was hard for Orville simply to stand up from a chair, let alone take to the air. The vibration of train travel was similarly uncomfortable.
In a grand irony the Curtiss and Wright companies, long since separated from their founders, merged in 1929. Curtiss died a year later at age 52, finally beating Wilbur by seven years. Orville far outlived both.
Charles Lindberg tried to assist with the Smithsonian debacle, to no avail. Then in the late 30’s Henry Ford lent credence to the Wrights’ legacy when he enshrined their West Side home and cycle shop in his historical park, Greenfield Village.
Orville continued consulting on aviation boards and making social appearances with the Dayton upper crust. But his days as an innovator were over.
He continued to make appearances with politicians, celebrities, and famous flyers but never spoke publicly. In 1940 Orville interacted with another U.S. president, and another Roosevelt, FDR, on a reelection tour through Dayton.
In 1942 the Smithsonian finally recanted and acknowledged the Wrights had been first in flight all along. Orville sent word to England but the 1903 flyer was in storage due to WWII. It would not return to the U. S. in his lifetime.
As the new war progressed, German aerial bombardment of London made clear the growing destructive power of airplanes. One day a reporter ran into Orville on the street and asked about his legacy. Despite the rise of military aviation in two world wars, Orville felt that the airplane would mainly prove a tool for peace.
In January 1948 Orville Wright passed away, nearly half a century after Wilbur had begun their quest for flight. Orville outlived his brother by 36 years, to witness the arrival of the supersonic jet age; just 20 years after his death, men circled the moon.
The invention of powered flight ranks as Dayton’s greatest innovation. As many have noted, the Wrights accomplished all of this in their spare time over the course of ten years and for under $1000 of their own money. It took Orville nearly three times as long and who knows how much money to defend the achievement, flying solo.
That December 1948, on the 45th anniversary of powered flight, the 1903 Flyer finally went on display at the Smithsonian, on the condition the museum never make claims of earlier flight success. Orville’s long quest to vindicate the Wright brothers was over. The invisible man in the famous photo continues to fly down through history.
A part of the club, yet apartWhen Deeds and Kettering created the Engineers Club of Dayton in 1914 they soon approached Orville Wright. Despite Orville’s intense shyness and dislike of public appearances, he quickly joined his peers. He stayed a member for over a third of a century, and served a term as President. Orville’s prestige helped the new club attract members and foster connections with military aviation in Dayton. But he always ate alone or with one other, at a small table in the dining room’s rear.
Deeds found Orville different in person than in public. He was “one of those great men who remain unspoiled by adulation. He is witty and has a keen sense of humor. While he never makes a public speech, he is an interesting and entertaining conversationalist, especially if the subject is a scientific one.”
Orville in fact did give a few speeches. At the Engineers Club he once introduced a presentation, and later received the keys to the new building in 1918. Amazingly, you can hear him speak briefly in a short film from 1935 at this book’s companion website, DaytonInnovationLegacy.org.
Orville was always a snappy dresser, so a frequent shave and haircut were required. One of his favorite haunts was the snug club barbershop off the upstairs porch. The window overlooked the Miami River to McCook Field. From his vantage point, Orville could keep up on the latest in aviation and rest his back. McCook, the predecessor to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, was the original research and development site for military aviation. In fact, the Engineers Club became an unofficial officers club for the aviators after the First World War.
Orv served as an official observer for many aviation record attempts at McCook and as chairman of the NAA Contests and Records Board.
A number of pieces of Wright memorabilia grace the Engineers Club. Wright Engine Number 3 is on permanent non-circulating display, bequeathed to the club in Orville’s will. Engine No. 3 powered the Wrights’ initial hydroplane tests on the Great Miami River near the Main Street Bridge in 1907. Other displays include framed pages from the Wright Airplane Co. catalog ($5000 bought an airplane), wind tunnel models and propeller designs.
Mounted behind the reception desk are model airplanes for children, allegedly designed by Orville. Lorin Wright’s company, Miami Wood Specialties produced the toys along with Flips and Flops, a circus toy that definitely was designed by Orville. It was his final patent, in 1923.
Downstairs, the Wright Room features historic photos and a copy of Pilot License Number One, presented to Orville Wright long after he had earned his wings, and pilot license #5, mentioned earlier.
Club members Chuck Dempsey, John Warlick, Hubie Miller, and other volunteers built a new Wright “B” Flyer in the 1970s. The aircraft continues to fly at Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport thanks to current members like John Bosch and Walt Hoy.
Just east of the Club stands a near-full size sculpture of the 1905 Wright Flyer. Perforated wings keep it from generating too much lift. But the most affecting sculpture stands on the front walkway. On a simple iron bench, two black bowler hats leave the impression the Wright brothers have just stepped away.
The Brothers of Invention
By Mark Martel
With apologies to Frank Zappa, the Wrights brothers were the necessity of aviation’s invention.
Charles Darwin was spurred to publish when Alfred Russell Wallace’s nearly identical theory of evolution arrived in the mail. Isaac Newton and Leibniz published their independent discoveries of calculus in the 1690s. Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered oxygen three times in two years. In fact science historian Robert K. Merton thinks multiple discovery is the rule, not the exception.
But no one was within years of Orville and Wilbur Wright. Were we to rerun history minus them, aviation development might have dragged a decade longer.
Deep character traits and life experience shaped the brothers’ partnership. Their focus on precision and safety kept them alive long enough to master the science and practice of aeronautics. Their distrust of outsiders and need to micromanage, however, helped competitors overtake them.
The story of flight’s invention is retold often. Around Dayton, home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, writers often start from a technical background in aeronautics.
I’ll focus on a few areas that strike me particularly or seem overlooked. Perhaps an artist can offer a different view than a technologist or historian. The lens of innovation also alters the viewpoint.
Surprisingly, some of the story turns out to be as easy as riding a bike.
Learning to flyMost of us first rode tricycles or bikes with training wheels, until one day when mom or dad helped us graduate to two wheels. After some false starts and banged knees we soon got it. Kid stuff.
But try learning to ride as an adult. In the early 1890s everyone had to start from scratch on the new safety bicycles (the basic two-wheel design we have today). 53-year-old Francis Willard wrote that it took “about three months” to learn, practicing 15 minutes a day. It was CIPU, as my old boss Raul Ramos used to say: Clear If Previously Understood. No one did.
We don’t know how much instruction the Wrights provided customers. But they must have learned to articulate the process, and rephrase it when people didn’t get it. The frugal brothers saw a lot of folks take a tumble and would have sought to minimize the damage to shins and expensive new merchandise. Mostly, they must have learned it’s not enough to build a new machine. You have to learn to ride it.
Experts today use a process much like we learned as kids.
* Start on a grassy field with a gentle downhill slope.
* Sitting on the bike, coast downhill with feet just off the ground. Repeat until comfortable.
* Then add pedaling. When you’ve got the hang of it, start further uphill.
* Next, practice pedaling straight ahead on flat ground.
* Last, add turning. Slow down, raise the inside pedal, lean in and steer slightly.
* When you’ve mastered the basics, make longer, faster, and more challenging rides. Take cargo, ride with others.
That’s essentially how the Wrights learned to fly. Mentor Octave Chanute suggested testing over water or sand as his colleagues did outside Chicago. That was just a few hours by train from Dayton, but instead the Wrights opted for the remote boonies of North Carolina.
Starting with gliders on soft sand at Kitty Hawk, they progressed to powered fliers at marshy Huffman Prairie, then drier land beyond. First they mastered balance, added power, then learned to turn and dismount. Of course, devising the vehicles was far more complicated.
Innovation in processIn the beginning, the Wrights were part of the free flow of information that Chanute fostered among the aviation community. Still, the brothers’ natural inclination was to control what they wished to share.
Analyzing glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal’s work, Wilbur figured that in the course of 5 years the German had flown only 5 hours in total. Powered flight would require much more frequent practice.
In 1900, the Wrights flew their first glider as an unmanned kite for 2-3 hours at a stretch. Manned glides of a few brief seconds built up experience aloft more slowly. The next year they made 50-100 such flights, then ten times as many in 1902.
When bad weather or repairs prevented flying, the brothers rehearsed mentally. Orville lay down at the controls while Wilbur visualized in his head. Today’s flight simulators build on Orv’s path.
My big aha moment came after watching a National Park Service video, On Great White Wings. In the first tethered flights, the craft was simply hovering a few feet in the air in the strong wind. By 1902, the training wheels came off. The Wrights were gliding distances up to 600 feet, learning to steer through wing warping while staying low over the soft sand.
Their famous first powered flight in 1903 rose only 8-10 feet and probably didn’t top 7 mph against a 25 mph headwind. That’s how Wilbur was able to run alongside it in the famous photo. At Ft. Myer in 1909 their flyer barely topped 40 mph.
The Wrong StuffTheir return trip to Kitty Hawk in 1901 was almost their last.
The second glider’s wing shape caused havoc. Both brothers flew and achieved better results than the visiting Chanute had seen anywhere. But the glider didn’t behave anything as expected. Wing warping sometimes steered in the opposite direction. Something fundamental was deeply wrong.
Wilbur was dejected by the confusion and the mountain of work he estimated remained to achieve flight. On the train back to Dayton he said, “Not within a thousand years would man ever fly.”
Perhaps it was Orville that got them back on track. In 1943 Edward Deeds told the Dayton Daily News, “I have always felt that one of the great decisions of history was made by the Wright Brothers when they decided to ignore all previous formulae and data on gliders and heavier-than-air experiments, and start over entirely new. The beginning of aviation really dates from the day of that decision. Orville should be given most of the credit for that decision.”
Other sources spread the credit, but both attacked the problem. The bad data traced back to pioneers like George Smeaton and Lilienthal. The Wrights returned to square one and investigated the basic science of flight, often working until midnight before rising early to open the bike shop. First the brothers tried a quick and dirty approach that turned the recent discovery of wind tunnels inside-out—mounting wing designs on a bicycle and pedaling fast enough to create their own wind. Later in their own wind tunnel, they built a delicate rig from recycled hacksaw blades to test 200 different wing shapes.
The results showed real genius in their simplicity and rigor, establishing the first precise numbers on lift using just high school math. Orville and Wilbur’s drive for exactness let them calculate the design of their 1903 flyer and even provided enough leeway to compensate for its lackluster engine.
The research prepared them for attacking propeller design, a mind-numbing problem with all the variables constantly moving and affecting each other. A propeller it seemed was a wing turned sideways and spinning. Like a child’s merry-go-round, the farther from the center, the faster things went. Speed through the air, RPM, lift and drag—it all made weaker heads spin.
Wilbur and Orville’s doggedness and deep mental focus finally won out. Their resulting propeller’s efficiency has scarcely been improved on since.
EngineWhen the Wrights couldn’t find a suitable automobile engine their mechanic Charlie Taylor came through, building a 180-pound motor capable of 12 horsepower. Performance increased to 20 horsepower by 1905, and double that amount five years later.
Curtiss motors became favored by aviators but weren’t well known or available as the Wrights were starting out. The cost may have been comparable, but Taylor was handy to have nearby, his salary covered by the bike shop.
Langley by contrast paid thousands for an engine that was a mere 120 pounds but got over 50 hp.
A family affairLangley’s very public trials along the Potomac river brought continual taunting by the press. The insular brothers felt deep sympathy.
Laboring in obscurity at Kitty Hawk bought them time to perfect their flyer. But their need for privacy later hobbled them against the freewheeling Curtiss.
Dynamic instabilityThe study of birds and bicycles suggested planes could not be made stable in the air in the manner that a boat’s sloping sides let it float on water. Instead, the pilot would have to adjust for continual instability. Cyclists shifted their weight for balance, but Lilienthal’s death had shown the harsh limits of that approach.
PublicationAt Kitty Hawk the Wrights measured lift on their tethered glider with a hand scale. Chanute encouraged precise note taking to analyze progress from flight to flight. Left unsaid was the implication they should leave a good record behind lest disaster struck.
For five years after the Kitty Hawk success the brothers worked in near-absolute obscurity while extending their flights to over an hour and altitudes of up to hundreds of feet. Had the Wrights perished before their public flights in 1908, aviation would have been set back a decade or better. After that point, less rode on their shoulders.
Mark Bernstein speculates aviation might have remained too primitive to merit development in WWI. The delay might have extended to WWII—no Battle of Britain or aerial bombing of Hiroshima. The world’s first nuclear exchange might have come later during the greater peril of the cold war.
Earlier claimants to flight pop up every few years, but if any did in fact succeed, they took their secrets to the grave or to obscurity. Sharing is essential.
Public disclosure and self-promotion proved central to others, as seen throughout this book. The PR factor closes the loop on innovation.
The Wrights shared considerably at their flight school. Students first received instruction at the Wright Company factory before heading out to Huffman Prairie. The course lasted ten days with two-four hours of flying time. Though brief by today’s standards, it was as much as the market could bear.
To Innovate or NotThe period leading to the Kitty Hawk triumph held a special magic never duplicated afterward. And as we’ve seen, competition with outsiders pulled Wilbur back to his more legalistic mindset. By his values and logic it all made sense despite the contrast to Curtiss’ approach.
The traits that kept them alive early on hobbled their later success and may have retarded US aviation. But however much the brothers seemed to grow obsessed with riches, the world had learned to fly.
However long the wrangling in court took, no Wright risked falling out of the sky to cement his fortune. Wilbur’s demise came from the lowly microbe, not the hubris of Icarus. After that magic day in May 1910 when the brothers flew together and then Orville took their father up in the air, Wilbur flew only once more in 1911. Orville continued a few years longer, not so much for money as to aid further tinkering or escape the boardroom. He last piloted a craft in 1918, though he occasionally flew as a passenger long after.
Many other techniques and habits of mind aided the Wrights’ quest for flight. Self-education, visualization skills, creative tinkering, rapid prototyping and more are just the start of the list. Aeronautical experts and historians tell far more, most recently in David McCullough’s bestseller, The Wright Brothers.
With apologies to Frank Zappa, the Wrights brothers were the necessity of aviation’s invention.
Charles Darwin was spurred to publish when Alfred Russell Wallace’s nearly identical theory of evolution arrived in the mail. Isaac Newton and Leibniz published their independent discoveries of calculus in the 1690s. Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered oxygen three times in two years. In fact science historian Robert K. Merton thinks multiple discovery is the rule, not the exception.
But no one was within years of Orville and Wilbur Wright. Were we to rerun history minus them, aviation development might have dragged a decade longer.
Deep character traits and life experience shaped the brothers’ partnership. Their focus on precision and safety kept them alive long enough to master the science and practice of aeronautics. Their distrust of outsiders and need to micromanage, however, helped competitors overtake them.
The story of flight’s invention is retold often. Around Dayton, home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, writers often start from a technical background in aeronautics.
I’ll focus on a few areas that strike me particularly or seem overlooked. Perhaps an artist can offer a different view than a technologist or historian. The lens of innovation also alters the viewpoint.
Surprisingly, some of the story turns out to be as easy as riding a bike.
Learning to flyMost of us first rode tricycles or bikes with training wheels, until one day when mom or dad helped us graduate to two wheels. After some false starts and banged knees we soon got it. Kid stuff.
But try learning to ride as an adult. In the early 1890s everyone had to start from scratch on the new safety bicycles (the basic two-wheel design we have today). 53-year-old Francis Willard wrote that it took “about three months” to learn, practicing 15 minutes a day. It was CIPU, as my old boss Raul Ramos used to say: Clear If Previously Understood. No one did.
We don’t know how much instruction the Wrights provided customers. But they must have learned to articulate the process, and rephrase it when people didn’t get it. The frugal brothers saw a lot of folks take a tumble and would have sought to minimize the damage to shins and expensive new merchandise. Mostly, they must have learned it’s not enough to build a new machine. You have to learn to ride it.
Experts today use a process much like we learned as kids.
* Start on a grassy field with a gentle downhill slope.
* Sitting on the bike, coast downhill with feet just off the ground. Repeat until comfortable.
* Then add pedaling. When you’ve got the hang of it, start further uphill.
* Next, practice pedaling straight ahead on flat ground.
* Last, add turning. Slow down, raise the inside pedal, lean in and steer slightly.
* When you’ve mastered the basics, make longer, faster, and more challenging rides. Take cargo, ride with others.
That’s essentially how the Wrights learned to fly. Mentor Octave Chanute suggested testing over water or sand as his colleagues did outside Chicago. That was just a few hours by train from Dayton, but instead the Wrights opted for the remote boonies of North Carolina.
Starting with gliders on soft sand at Kitty Hawk, they progressed to powered fliers at marshy Huffman Prairie, then drier land beyond. First they mastered balance, added power, then learned to turn and dismount. Of course, devising the vehicles was far more complicated.
Innovation in processIn the beginning, the Wrights were part of the free flow of information that Chanute fostered among the aviation community. Still, the brothers’ natural inclination was to control what they wished to share.
Analyzing glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal’s work, Wilbur figured that in the course of 5 years the German had flown only 5 hours in total. Powered flight would require much more frequent practice.
In 1900, the Wrights flew their first glider as an unmanned kite for 2-3 hours at a stretch. Manned glides of a few brief seconds built up experience aloft more slowly. The next year they made 50-100 such flights, then ten times as many in 1902.
When bad weather or repairs prevented flying, the brothers rehearsed mentally. Orville lay down at the controls while Wilbur visualized in his head. Today’s flight simulators build on Orv’s path.
My big aha moment came after watching a National Park Service video, On Great White Wings. In the first tethered flights, the craft was simply hovering a few feet in the air in the strong wind. By 1902, the training wheels came off. The Wrights were gliding distances up to 600 feet, learning to steer through wing warping while staying low over the soft sand.
Their famous first powered flight in 1903 rose only 8-10 feet and probably didn’t top 7 mph against a 25 mph headwind. That’s how Wilbur was able to run alongside it in the famous photo. At Ft. Myer in 1909 their flyer barely topped 40 mph.
The Wrong StuffTheir return trip to Kitty Hawk in 1901 was almost their last.
The second glider’s wing shape caused havoc. Both brothers flew and achieved better results than the visiting Chanute had seen anywhere. But the glider didn’t behave anything as expected. Wing warping sometimes steered in the opposite direction. Something fundamental was deeply wrong.
Wilbur was dejected by the confusion and the mountain of work he estimated remained to achieve flight. On the train back to Dayton he said, “Not within a thousand years would man ever fly.”
Perhaps it was Orville that got them back on track. In 1943 Edward Deeds told the Dayton Daily News, “I have always felt that one of the great decisions of history was made by the Wright Brothers when they decided to ignore all previous formulae and data on gliders and heavier-than-air experiments, and start over entirely new. The beginning of aviation really dates from the day of that decision. Orville should be given most of the credit for that decision.”
Other sources spread the credit, but both attacked the problem. The bad data traced back to pioneers like George Smeaton and Lilienthal. The Wrights returned to square one and investigated the basic science of flight, often working until midnight before rising early to open the bike shop. First the brothers tried a quick and dirty approach that turned the recent discovery of wind tunnels inside-out—mounting wing designs on a bicycle and pedaling fast enough to create their own wind. Later in their own wind tunnel, they built a delicate rig from recycled hacksaw blades to test 200 different wing shapes.
The results showed real genius in their simplicity and rigor, establishing the first precise numbers on lift using just high school math. Orville and Wilbur’s drive for exactness let them calculate the design of their 1903 flyer and even provided enough leeway to compensate for its lackluster engine.
The research prepared them for attacking propeller design, a mind-numbing problem with all the variables constantly moving and affecting each other. A propeller it seemed was a wing turned sideways and spinning. Like a child’s merry-go-round, the farther from the center, the faster things went. Speed through the air, RPM, lift and drag—it all made weaker heads spin.
Wilbur and Orville’s doggedness and deep mental focus finally won out. Their resulting propeller’s efficiency has scarcely been improved on since.
EngineWhen the Wrights couldn’t find a suitable automobile engine their mechanic Charlie Taylor came through, building a 180-pound motor capable of 12 horsepower. Performance increased to 20 horsepower by 1905, and double that amount five years later.
Curtiss motors became favored by aviators but weren’t well known or available as the Wrights were starting out. The cost may have been comparable, but Taylor was handy to have nearby, his salary covered by the bike shop.
Langley by contrast paid thousands for an engine that was a mere 120 pounds but got over 50 hp.
A family affairLangley’s very public trials along the Potomac river brought continual taunting by the press. The insular brothers felt deep sympathy.
Laboring in obscurity at Kitty Hawk bought them time to perfect their flyer. But their need for privacy later hobbled them against the freewheeling Curtiss.
Dynamic instabilityThe study of birds and bicycles suggested planes could not be made stable in the air in the manner that a boat’s sloping sides let it float on water. Instead, the pilot would have to adjust for continual instability. Cyclists shifted their weight for balance, but Lilienthal’s death had shown the harsh limits of that approach.
PublicationAt Kitty Hawk the Wrights measured lift on their tethered glider with a hand scale. Chanute encouraged precise note taking to analyze progress from flight to flight. Left unsaid was the implication they should leave a good record behind lest disaster struck.
For five years after the Kitty Hawk success the brothers worked in near-absolute obscurity while extending their flights to over an hour and altitudes of up to hundreds of feet. Had the Wrights perished before their public flights in 1908, aviation would have been set back a decade or better. After that point, less rode on their shoulders.
Mark Bernstein speculates aviation might have remained too primitive to merit development in WWI. The delay might have extended to WWII—no Battle of Britain or aerial bombing of Hiroshima. The world’s first nuclear exchange might have come later during the greater peril of the cold war.
Earlier claimants to flight pop up every few years, but if any did in fact succeed, they took their secrets to the grave or to obscurity. Sharing is essential.
Public disclosure and self-promotion proved central to others, as seen throughout this book. The PR factor closes the loop on innovation.
The Wrights shared considerably at their flight school. Students first received instruction at the Wright Company factory before heading out to Huffman Prairie. The course lasted ten days with two-four hours of flying time. Though brief by today’s standards, it was as much as the market could bear.
To Innovate or NotThe period leading to the Kitty Hawk triumph held a special magic never duplicated afterward. And as we’ve seen, competition with outsiders pulled Wilbur back to his more legalistic mindset. By his values and logic it all made sense despite the contrast to Curtiss’ approach.
The traits that kept them alive early on hobbled their later success and may have retarded US aviation. But however much the brothers seemed to grow obsessed with riches, the world had learned to fly.
However long the wrangling in court took, no Wright risked falling out of the sky to cement his fortune. Wilbur’s demise came from the lowly microbe, not the hubris of Icarus. After that magic day in May 1910 when the brothers flew together and then Orville took their father up in the air, Wilbur flew only once more in 1911. Orville continued a few years longer, not so much for money as to aid further tinkering or escape the boardroom. He last piloted a craft in 1918, though he occasionally flew as a passenger long after.
Many other techniques and habits of mind aided the Wrights’ quest for flight. Self-education, visualization skills, creative tinkering, rapid prototyping and more are just the start of the list. Aeronautical experts and historians tell far more, most recently in David McCullough’s bestseller, The Wright Brothers.
Related
Valley of the Giants—Orville Wright
Wright Family Oral Histories
Dayton Aviation Heritage NPS
How We Made the First Flight
by Orville Wright
Flying and The Aero Club of America Bulletin, December 1913
My Acquaintance With Orville Wright—“An Unassuming American…”
By Col. Edward A. Deeds, As Told to A. S. Kany
Dayton Journal Herald on December 12, 1943
Aviators: The Wright Brothers
A Pair Of self-Taught Engineers Working In A Bicycle Shop, They Made The World A forever smaller place.
By Bill Gates, TIME, Mar. 29, 1999
Wright Brothers Collection, Wright State University Special Collections & Archives
Includes the Wrights’ own technical and personal library, family papers including letters, diaries, financial records, genealogical files, and other documents detailing the lives and work of Wilbur and Orville Wright and the Wright Family.
Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers at the Library of CongressIncluded in the collection are diaries and notebooks, correspondence, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and other documents, largely from 1900 to 1940, as well as the Wrights' collection of 303 glass-plate photographic negatives. The Wright brothers' letters to aviation pioneer and mentor Octave Chanute, from the Octave Chanute Papers, are also included.
The Wright Brothers and The Invention of the Aerial Age, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
The first part of this exhibition tells the story of how Wilbur and Orville Wright invented the airplane—who they were, how they worked, and what they accomplished. The second part shows how their monumental achievement affected the world in the decade that followed, when people everywhere became fascinated with flight. The exhibition includes many historic photographs and cultural artifacts, along with instruments and personal items associated with the Wrights.
Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
Three exceptional men from Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright and Paul Laurence Dunbar, found their creative outlet here through accomplishments and failures, and finally success. However, these men offered the world something far greater, they offered the world hope, and the ability to take a dream and make it a reality.
National Museum Of The United States Air Force
Ohio’s Aviation Heritage Teacher Resource Guide
The Wright Brothers' Dayton Documentary FilmThe Wright Brothers' Dayton highlights an extraordinary period in Dayton's history, the 1890's through the early 1920's, when inventors, entrepreneurs and visionaries called Dayton home. It was a time when men like John Patterson, Charles Kettering, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Cox walked along the same city streets. Think TV
Wright Family Oral Histories
Dayton Aviation Heritage NPS
How We Made the First Flight
by Orville Wright
Flying and The Aero Club of America Bulletin, December 1913
My Acquaintance With Orville Wright—“An Unassuming American…”
By Col. Edward A. Deeds, As Told to A. S. Kany
Dayton Journal Herald on December 12, 1943
Aviators: The Wright Brothers
A Pair Of self-Taught Engineers Working In A Bicycle Shop, They Made The World A forever smaller place.
By Bill Gates, TIME, Mar. 29, 1999
Wright Brothers Collection, Wright State University Special Collections & Archives
Includes the Wrights’ own technical and personal library, family papers including letters, diaries, financial records, genealogical files, and other documents detailing the lives and work of Wilbur and Orville Wright and the Wright Family.
Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers at the Library of CongressIncluded in the collection are diaries and notebooks, correspondence, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and other documents, largely from 1900 to 1940, as well as the Wrights' collection of 303 glass-plate photographic negatives. The Wright brothers' letters to aviation pioneer and mentor Octave Chanute, from the Octave Chanute Papers, are also included.
The Wright Brothers and The Invention of the Aerial Age, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
The first part of this exhibition tells the story of how Wilbur and Orville Wright invented the airplane—who they were, how they worked, and what they accomplished. The second part shows how their monumental achievement affected the world in the decade that followed, when people everywhere became fascinated with flight. The exhibition includes many historic photographs and cultural artifacts, along with instruments and personal items associated with the Wrights.
Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
Three exceptional men from Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright and Paul Laurence Dunbar, found their creative outlet here through accomplishments and failures, and finally success. However, these men offered the world something far greater, they offered the world hope, and the ability to take a dream and make it a reality.
National Museum Of The United States Air Force
Ohio’s Aviation Heritage Teacher Resource Guide
The Wright Brothers' Dayton Documentary FilmThe Wright Brothers' Dayton highlights an extraordinary period in Dayton's history, the 1890's through the early 1920's, when inventors, entrepreneurs and visionaries called Dayton home. It was a time when men like John Patterson, Charles Kettering, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Cox walked along the same city streets. Think TV
Dayton Innovation Legacy is a multimedia website and educational resource about Engineers Club of Dayton members who represent a living history of innovation for over 100 years. Dayton Innovation Legacy was made possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council, a State affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. |