Authors: Tom D. Crouch
As the psychologist Adrian Kinnane has suggested in his outstanding study of Wright family dynamics, the episode had special psychological meaning for Wilbur. The bicycle business was no longer booming. The cycle craze had peaked in 1896–97; within two years sales had begun to drop precipitously. The slump was inevitable. The huge sales boom of the 1890s had saturated the market.
But the poor business climate was not the real reason for Wilbur’s malaise. In spite of his interest in cycling and the mechanical aspects of bicycle repair and construction, he felt “trapped” in a “commercial pursuit” for which he was ill-suited, and which had not enabled him to develop his latent talents and abilities.
Wilbur feared that Herbert was in danger of being caught in the very same trap from which he himself was struggling to escape. The situation was serious enough to warrant a long letter to Lulu. “Please understand that I am not presuming to blame either of you, or even to assert as a fact that there is any blame or cause for it,” he stressed.
44
But … I could not help wondering whether he [Herbert] would ever have a chance to develop his best qualities and choose a life work in which these qualities would be an assistance instead of a hindrance. When I learned that you intended to put him into business early I could not help
feeling that in teaching him to prefer others to himself you were giving him a very poor training for the life work you had chosen for him, for in business it is the aggressive man who continually has his eye on his own interest who succeeds…. If Herbert were less retiring and more self-assertive than he is I would entirely agree to putting him into business early for that is the best training in the world for a business life and is the path which practically all the leaders in the business world have followed. I agree that a college training is wasted on a man who expects to follow commercial pursuits. Neither will putting a boy who has not the aggressive business instinct, to work early, make a successful business man of him.
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Wilbur concluded that Herbert, like his father and uncles, had “talent sufficient to make him really great.” He was not self-assertive, however, and would require the thoughtful guidance of his parents.
If left to himself, he will not find out what he would like to be until his chance to attain his wish is past. You may say that he ought to be more aggressive or that if he was really determined to be a great scientist or a great doctor or a great business man that he would find means to accomplish his end without assistance from his parents. But this is really saying that he must exercise talents that he has not got, in order to get a chance to develop talents he already has.
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Wilbur cited his own experience, and that of his brothers, as proof. “I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push,” he admitted to Lulu. “None of us has as yet made particular use of the talent in which he excels other men, that is why our success has been very moderate. We ought not to have been business men.” Herbert could suffer a similar fate if Lulu and Reuch did not provide careful guidance.
There is always danger that a person of his [our] disposition will, if left to depend on himself, retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life struggling for a bare existence (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location) when if put on the right path with special equipment he would advance far. Many men are better fit for improving the chances offered to them than in turning up the chances for themselves.
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It must have been an extraordinarily difficult letter for Wilbur to write. The Dayton Wrights had never found it easy to get along with Lulu under the best of circumstances. The decision to send her a letter filled with criticism of the way in which she was raising her children can only have been inspired by a conviction that the matter was of overriding importance.
For fourteen years, from 1885 to 1899, Wilbur had allowed life and opportunity to pass him by. He had drifted passively along, nursing his mother and fighting his father’s battles rather than striking out on his own to acquire the education needed for what he regarded as the most suitable career—teaching. Rather than stepping boldly toward his own goals, he had taken the easy path, joining forces with his younger brother to run two small businesses, an occupation for which he believed he had little talent. He had talked of breaking free, dreamed of going to college and seeking to explore his own potential, but he had lacked the courage, or the energy, to do anything about it.
Wilbur had by no means given up on himself. He had always known that the great opportunity of his life might still lie in the future. If so, he meant to seize it without hesitation—and follow wherever it might lead.
Only now, in the spring of 1901, had he begun to realize that an “earthquake” had already occurred. He had a new hobby so fascinating and challenging as to be all-consuming, giving him a new sense of purpose and direction in life. In the upstairs room at the bike shop, Wilbur and Orville were hard at work on their second glider.
I
t was the summer of the Front Porch Campaign and the Cross of Gold. William Jennings Bryan, at thirty-six the youngest man ever nominated for the office of President, traveled ten thousand miles between July and November 1896, giving six hundred speeches to an estimated five million of his fellow citizens. To his friends, he was the “Boy Orator of the Platte,” “the Great Commoner,” and the “Silver King.” Republican newspapers dismissed him as “an irresponsible, unregulated, ignorant, prejudiced, pathologically honest and enthusiastic crank.”
William McKinley preferred to let the electorate come to him. Thousands of them did just that. Delegations from every corner of the nation were headed for Canton, Ohio, that summer. They were met at the station by a brass band and marched to the lawn of the McKinley home for an audience with the great man. Portly, and balding, he spoke of a full dinner pail and a sound dollar, and was as rock-solid as he looked.
1
Americans followed the progress of the campaign in the pages of their daily papers. Those newspapers, and the men who ran them, had become a power in the land. The average newspaper reader of the 1890s remembered his daily paper of the decade before as a thin, spiritless thing. For centuries, the scope of such publications had been limited by the necessity of setting type by hand and printing one sheet of paper at a time.
Technology had changed all that. The combination of the linotype
machine, the curved stereotype plate, and the high-speed rotary press, all introduced in the 1880s, enabled a publisher to set a vast amount of type in a short period of time, and to print up to 18,000 standard-sized papers an hour on both sides of a continuous roll of newsprint.
Technology had provided the means of mass-producing newspapers. The effort to take economic advantage of that potential transformed the practice of journalism in America. It was no longer enough to inform the reader; the goal was to stimulate, provoke, and titillate.
New features designed to catch the attention of the great mass of readers filled the mushrooming pages. In 1896, “Dorothy Dix” (Mrs. Elizabeth M. Gilmer) began to write the first “advice to the lovelorn” column for the New Orleans
Picayune
. Cartoonist Richard F. Outcalt developed the first modern comic strip character, “The Yellow Kid,” for the
New York World
.
The “sports page” grew to become one of the thickest and most popular sections of the paper. The big story in the spring of 1896 was the incredible success of the U.S. team at the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens that April. Beset by transportation problems, the exhausted young American competitors arrived on opening day, and went on to win nine out of twelve events.
As usual, a mixture of good news and bad dominated the front pages that summer. A tornado swept through St. Louis, taking four hundred lives. Gold had been discovered on Rabbit Creek, three miles from Dawson in the Yukon Territory of Canada. The U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in the case of
Plessy
v.
Fergusson
, approved the doctrine of “separate but equal,” legalizing de facto segregation. Utah was admitted as the forty-fifth state.
Shorter articles called attention to technical curiosities of some interest. The Duryea brothers, Frank and Charles, continued to win road races with their “horseless carriage,” just as they had in 1895. The giants of the new industry, they would produce thirteen automobiles before the end of the year. Up in Detroit a mechanic working for the Edison Company was the object of some humor. It seemed the fellow had built an automobile of his own in a local shed, only to discover that the thing was too wide to get through the door when complete. Henry Ford was forced to rip out the front of the building to get his machine to the street.
2
For all of the pride that Americans took in their native ingenuity, nothing delighted newspaper readers so much as short comic pieces on eccentric inventors off in pursuit of an impossible dream. Flying-machine inventors were a particularly inviting target.
John Trowbridge had fixed the image of the aeronautical experimenter in the public mind with his story poem, “Darius Green and His Flying Machine.” The hero, “like many another country dunce,” believed that “the air was also man’s domain,” and was determined to conquer the skies. Young Darius set to work
With thimble and thread,
and wax and hammer,
and buckles and screws,
and all such things as genius use.
Two bats for a pattern,
curious fellows!
A charcoal pot and a pair of bellows.
Some wire and several old umbrellas;
a carriage cover for tail and wings;
a piece of harness,
and straps and strings,
these and a hundred other things.
3
Encased in this contraption, the inventor leaped from the barn loft, only to thump into the yard below, surrounded by “a wonderful whirl of tangled strings, broken braces and broken wings, shooting stars and various things.” The poem was reprinted in newspapers, anthologies, and school textbooks. For the thousands of Americans who chuckled over Darius’ plight, the message was clear: If God had intended man to fly, He would have given him wings.
A wealth of educated opinion buttressed such popular skepticism. Had not Simon Newcomb, a leading American astronomer, argued that “the first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and carry nothing heavier than an insect”? Another authority, Rear Admiral George Melville, the Navy’s chief engineer, was even more forceful. “A calm survey of certain natural phenomena,” he argued, “leads the engineer to pronounce all confident prophecies for future success as wholly unwarranted, if not absurd.” John Le Conte, a well-known naturalist, had assured the public that “a flying machine is impossible, in spite of the testimony of the birds.”
4
As evidence of a bleak future for flying-machine inventors, the skeptics had only to open their daily papers on virtually any day in the first half of 1896. Captain John W. Veiru, “an old steamboatman and mechanic,” had unveiled plans for a fish-shaped, paddlewheel flying machine. Victor Oches, a convict serving three to five in the Kings County, New York, jail, asserted that his craft would travel at speeds of up to 300 mph, and “do away with battleships.” Oches offered his
invention to the public at the cut-rate price of $25,000—provided a full pardon was thrown into the bargain. Chicagoan Arthur de Bausset planned to construct an enormous airship; Captain Charles E. Smith, of San Francisco, was the sole incorporator of the Atlantic & Pacific Aerial Navigation Co.
An unidentified Harlem merchant was reported to have been “inoculated with the bacilli of aeronautica.” “A good, hard-headed, common sense, cent-per-cent commercial man” during the work day, he returned home each evening to labor over a flying machine. Yet another New Yorker had to be restrained by police when he sought to fly his ornithopter from a lumber pile near the 155th Street bridge. Cleveland inventor Ralph Koesch was developing a “spiral winged aircraft,” while the Reverend Mr. B. Cannon, of Pittsburgh, Texas, based his Ezekiel Flying Machine on biblical descriptions.
Charles Avery, of Rutherford, New Jersey, suffered two fractured ribs and was bleeding from the nose and mouth when rescued from the shattered remains of the flying machine in which he had hurled himself from a cliff. Avery attributed the catastrophe to “a poor start.”
5
Gradually, beginning in June and July 1896, the skepticism receded. Wild-eyed, cliff-jumping birdmen continued to appear in the papers, but they were overshadowed by a spate of stories dealing with successful aeronautical experiments being conducted by some of the world’s most reputable engineers and scientists. Large steam-powered models with wingspans of up to fourteen feet were cruising through the air near the nation’s capital. In Germany, and on the windswept dunes south of Lake Michigan, human beings had actually glided on the wings of the wind. If Alexander Graham Bell, the revered inventor of the telephone, believed that powered flight lay just around the corner, perhaps the whole business was worth more than a good belly laugh.
Late on the afternoon of May 5, 1896, two distinguished-looking gentlemen stepped from a Washington train onto the platform of the tiny station at Quantico, Virginia. It was an unlikely setting for great events. One observer described the place as a “drab hamlet,” a cluster of shabby buildings nestled in a remote cove on the Potomac shore, forty-one rail miles south of Washington, D.C.
The two visitors proceeded through the center of town, past a shanty with a pine board nailed over the door announcing “Meels Served At All Ours.” Moving across an open field to the riverbank, they rang a large dinner bell hung from a post to catch the attention of the boatman who would row them across the narrow channel to Scott’s Island.