5

DOWN TO BUSINESS

On Fountain Square in Springfield, Ohio, about thirty miles northeast of the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, stands a bronze statue of a stout man, pen in hand, facing the Bushnell Building across East Main Street. The statue is that of Harry Aubrey “H.A.” Toulmin Sr., a patent attorney who had his office in the Bushnell Building at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1904, Springfield was a thriving manufacturing town with plenty of business for a good patent attorney. Today, Toulmin’s statue memorializes his critical role in aviation history as the man who wrote the patent application for the flying machine.

The Wright brothers didn’t need lettered scientists or certified engineers to invent the airplane, but convincing the U.S. Patent Office of their achievement was another matter. They learned this the hard way when they tried writing their own patent claim.

They crafted the application in late 1902 and early 1903, basing it on their 1902 glider. (Even then, it was clear they recognized controlled flight, not powered flight, as the real breakthrough.) They made their application on March 23, 1903—nearly a year before their first powered flights.

The Patent Office, all too familiar with baseless flying machine claims, promptly rejected it. Wilbur wrote back and tried to explain that their invention actually worked. The Patent Office turned them down again, with the suggestion that they hire a skilled patent attorney.

Wilbur asked friends for the name of a good lawyer. They recommended Toulmin. On January 22, 1904, Wilbur rode the DS&U interurban out to Springfield to meet with him. Toulmin grasped the essence of their breakthrough and agreed the patent should focus on their system of control, not simply an airplane. He went to work on a patent application that would give them the broadest possible protection and withstand all court challenges.

A statue of Harry Toulmin, the attorney who wrote the Wright flying machine patent, faces the building where he had his office in Springfield, Ohio. Author’s photo.

In the meantime, the Wright brothers looked for their first customer. They hoped it would be the U.S. Army. After all, they could deliver what the army had paid Langley to develop. They met with their congressman, Robert Nevin, on January 3, 1905. He offered to forward a letter from them to William Howard Taft, secretary of war, a Cincinnati native and fellow Republican.

The letter they sent on January 18 summarized their accomplishments on Huffman Prairie and declared they now had “a flying machine of a type fitted for practical use.” Two wartime applications they suggested were scouting and carrying passengers. The letter included a boast about their invention that sounds humorous today: “It not only flies through the air at high speed, but it also lands without being wrecked.” But Nevin was out sick when the letter came. Instead of sending it directly to Taft, an aide forwarded it to the U.S. Army Board of Ordnance, which demonstrated its lack of interest in a reply that read like a form letter.¹

The Wright brothers also sought a deal with the British War Department. British military officials were interested, but they wanted to see it fly before they would negotiate terms. This was a deal breaker for Wilbur and Orville, who had become cautious about disclosing their trade secrets. Until they had a patent to protect their invention, they couldn’t take the risk of public demonstration flights. They weren’t asking for a penny up front; they simply required a contract that would guarantee them payment once they delivered the goods. But they faced the deeply entrenched and widely accepted belief that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. The negotiations fizzled out in December 1905.²

The Wright brothers had good reason to worry about protecting their trade secrets. Word of their gliding experiments had caused a seismic shift in thinking among members of the Aero Club of France. They immediately shifted their focus from ballooning to gliders. What galvanized them was none other than the Wright brothers’ Chicago friend, Octave Chanute. In April 1903, the well-meaning flight evangelist visited France and gave detailed descriptions of American gliding efforts. He also wrote an article for the August issue of the Aero Club’s journal, L’Aérophile. The article described the Wright brothers’ gliding experiments and included illustrations showing basic structural details of their 1902 glider. A few European experimenters began building and testing their own machines based on the Wright design. Their inability to duplicate the Wright brothers’ success fueled skepticism and outright disbelief, especially after they heard of the Wrights’ 1903 powered flights.³

So strong was the disbelief that Aero Club members Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe and Ernest Archdeacon offered a prize worth the equivalent of $10,000 to the first person to fly a one-kilometer circle in France. Archdeacon even taunted the Wright brothers with it in a March 10, 1905 letter that noted France’s “incredulity” about their claims and suggested they “come to give us lessons” in flying. By then, of course, the Wright brothers had flown circles of more than a kilometer on Huffman Prairie. But even $10,000—roughly equal to $240,000 in 2014 dollars—wasn’t enough to tempt Wilbur and Orville to give up their secrets without a patent.⁴

It was a tough situation. The Wright brothers needed to protect their trade secrets, but they also needed credibility if they were to attract any customers. After wrapping up their flying in 1905, they sent letters describing their work to publications in England, France and Germany. Over the next two years, business and government representatives would approach them, only to back off before closing a deal.

Late in 1905, some French business leaders decided to form a syndicate and act on behalf of their government, which was indecisive about the Wrights’ claims. The syndicate sent a representative, Arnold Fordyce, to meet with the brothers in Dayton in December 1905. Wilbur and Orville wanted $200,000 to deliver an airplane that could fly fifty kilometers in an hour and technical data that would allow France to build airplanes of other sizes and speeds. The syndicate would deposit the money in a New York bank by April 5, 1906, to be paid to the Wrights once they had delivered the machine and demonstrated its performance. A $5,000 deposit would hold the option; after April 5, the option would expire, and the Wrights could keep the deposit. The agreement wouldn’t prevent them from continuing to seek a contract with the U.S. Army.

A replica of the Wright brothers’ 1904–05 flyer shed stands on Huffman Prairie. Author’s photo.

The French War Ministry agreed to put up the money for the deposit and dispatched Fordyce back to Dayton in March 1906 with an official government delegation. Seeking to avoid public notice, they stayed in the downtown Beckel House at Third and Jefferson instead of in the newer, grander Hotel Algonquin at Third and Ludlow, where Fordyce had stayed on his first visit. A hotel telegraph operator tipped off a reporter about the foreign delegation, but Fordyce convinced the journalist that the group was only in Dayton to study its water system.

Again, the Wright brothers refused to show their airplane, but their forthright manner, photos and numerous eyewitness accounts by responsible citizens were enough to convince the delegation—especially since the brothers weren’t demanding any payment until after they had demonstrated a machine that met all requirements. But ministry officials back in Paris set additional demands. It became apparent to Wilbur and Orville that the ministry really just wanted a one-year extension on its option, buying time for French experimenters to come up with a successful machine of their own. The Wrights refused, and the negotiations collapsed. Wilbur and Orville collected the $5,000, but they hadn’t sold an airplane. Similarly, another round of negotiations with the British, including a visit by a British War Department representative, went nowhere.

Compounding the frustration of dithering foreign officials was the continuing public skepticism at home. The U.S. press was picking up European reports about the Wright brothers’ claims. Scientific American openly doubted them. Surely, it argued in a January 1906 editorial, the aggressive American press would have rooted out the news if they had really flown: “Is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face—even if he has to scale a fifteen-story sky-scraper to do so—would not have ascertained all about them?” Apparently, Scientific American didn’t believe its own reporting; it had published a full-page, illustrated feature about the brothers’ gliding experiments in 1902 and an article—albeit one riddled with errors—about their powered flights in December 1903. Of course, the Dayton press had publicized their flights on Huffman Prairie.⁵

Coming to the Wright brothers’ defense was the new Aero Club of America. The predecessor of today’s National Aeronautic Association, the club had just formed the year before. In January 1906, it held the first large American aeronautical exposition in New York. The Wright brothers furnished photos and parts from their 1903 engine for a small exhibit. After Scientific American’s January insult and barely a mention in a February supplement about the show, the Wright brothers detailed their flights over the previous two years on Huffman Prairie in a letter to the Aero Club. The letter included a list of seventeen eyewitnesses.

Ten days later, the club adopted a resolution congratulating Wilbur and Orville and sent it out in a press release, accompanied by the full text of their letter. Scientific American queried the witnesses and received eleven replies, all confirming their fellow Daytonians’ claims. The magazine’s editors reversed their position in an April feature story. “There is no doubt whatever that these able experimenters deserve the highest credit for having perfected the first flying machine of the heavier-than-air type which has ever flown successfully and at the same time carried a man,” it stated. Suddenly regaining faith in the magazine’s past reporting, the editors gave themselves credit for recognizing the Wright brothers’ work four years earlier.⁶

The U.S. Patent Office finally granted their patent, No. 821,393, on May 22. France had granted a patent back in 1904. Germany granted one in July 1906. But Wilbur and Orville were still reluctant to make exhibition flights.

Holding a patent was one thing; having the means to defend it against infringement was something else. “We decided we would be absolutely lost if our patent became known before we had $200,000 to fight with,” Orville said years later in a February 27, 1914 article in the New York Times. He said their experience in court showed their fears weren’t exaggerated.

On December 1, 1906—now more than a year after they had stopped flying—the Wright brothers received a visit from Ulysses D. Eddy. He was a New York businessman who had formerly worked for Charles Ranlett Flint of Flint & Co., a well-known investment banker. Eddy wanted to negotiate a deal he could offer to Flint. Wilbur and Orville happened to be on their way to New York for the second Aero Club exhibition, so they agreed to meet with a Flint & Co. executive. Negotiations with Flint & Co. would go on for more than a year before bearing fruit.

All along, the brothers had hoped to interest the army, but officials refused to take them seriously. In early 1907, Wilbur and Orville thought of a way to get the government’s attention. It was a stunt that would have been the envy of Maverick, Tom Cruise’s character in the Hollywood film Top Gun: buzzing the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet.

This copy of a newspaper photo shows Wilbur and Orville conducting hydroplane experiments on the river in Dayton in 1907. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

In the spring of 1907, organizers in Virginia planned a massive celebration of the 300^th anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown. The celebration would take place south of Jamestown on Sewell’s Point in Norfolk, where the James River empties into the Hampton Roads. President Theodore Roosevelt would be there. So would members of Congress, the navy’s Atlantic Fleet, the press and vast crowds of people. What if Wilbur and Orville staged a surprise fly-over? The sudden sight of a flying machine soaring over the fleet would steal the show, stun the country and prove beyond doubt the Wright brothers had mastered the air.

It wouldn’t be easy. They figured they would need to take off from, and land on, water. They went so far as to build a small raft on pontoons and rig it with an engine and propellers. They floated it on a wide stretch of the Miami River near the Third Street Bridge, just upstream from a low dam. People lined the bridge to watch the strange, noisy contraption. It seemed to work with one person, but with two on board it tipped over and plunged into the water, damaging the propellers. Fate seemed to be conspiring against them; before they could make another attempt, the dam broke, ruining their test site. They abandoned the project, but the fact that this low-key, sometimes secretive pair would even consider such a scheme hints at how frustrated they must have been with the War Department.⁷

Fortunately for Wilbur and Orville—if not for the rubberneckers on the bridge—an alternative to the dangerous stunt soon surfaced. On May 16, Flint & Co. sent a telegram asking for one of them to join some company officials to meet their marketing representative in France, Hart O. Berg. The ship would leave New York on May 18. Wilbur hurriedly packed and jumped on a train. Orville stayed behind to finish a new flyer.

Wilbur started with low expectations. “I think there is nothing special on,” he wrote Chanute from the train. But he soon found himself negotiating with French businessmen to form a company to sell airplanes to the French government.

Just as Wilbur was leaving for France, a new letter came from the War Department. Congressman Herbert Parsons of New York had read the Scientific American article and sent it to President Roosevelt, who had passed it to Secretary of War Taft, who had passed it to the Ordnance Board. On May 11, the board sent a letter to the Wright brothers offering to hear about their project, but its grudging tone implied to Wilbur and Orville that the board was only going through the motions to appease the White House.

Wilbur was off to France, leaving Orville to follow up with the Ordnance Board. They made a new formal proposal: for $100,000, they would deliver one flyer and teach a pilot how to fly it. Before collecting any money, they would make a demonstration flight of fifty kilometers in no more than an hour “and land without any damage that would prevent it immediately starting upon another flight.” The board responded that their asking price “would require a special appropriation” from Congress.

With Wilbur deep in negotiations in Europe and Orville dealing with the Ordnance Board while trying to finish the new flyer, they found themselves without each other’s company and support in possibly the most stressful time of their lives. Adding to it was the misunderstanding and frustration that resulted from having to communicate by letter and telegram.

Things weren’t going well for Wilbur. The French plan to form a company wasn’t working out, and he felt Orville was making vague and unreasonable demands instead of trusting his older brother. Wilbur pressed him to finish the flyer so it could be ready to ship to Europe in case they reached a deal.

But Orville was also annoyed with Wilbur. “You have not answered a single question I have asked in my cables,” he chided on July 11. He was also “completely disgusted” with what he saw as mismanagement by Flint & Co.

It didn’t help that Wilbur’s cables often referred to letters that hadn’t come yet, causing confusion. Milton complained to him that it was “trying on Orville’s nerves.” Wilbur wrote an angry retort. “You people in Dayton seem to me to be very lacking in perspicacity,” he said on July 20—thickheaded, in other words. By then, Wilbur had been away from home and out of his country for more than two months, and the negotiations were still fruitless. No doubt he was homesick and angry at the same time. Wilbur had tried to persuade Orville to make the trip instead of him. But Orville “happened to be in one of his peculiar spells just then, and I soon saw that he was set on finishing the machine himself,” Wilbur complained to their father. He also groused that Orville wouldn’t be taking so long on the airplane “if he had attended energetically to his department, and avoided interference in mine.”

Orville finally got the flyer shipped and joined Wilbur on July 28. Charles Taylor left separately and joined them on August 11 in case they needed his help to assemble the flyer.

But negotiations with the French military went nowhere, and the Wright brothers finally withdrew their offers. German military officials were interested, but they refused to commit to a deal. Orville even went to England for a fruitless discussion with the receiver of the Barnum & Bailey Circus and the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.

Wilbur returned home on November 28. They still hoped to sell airplanes in Europe, but they thought they might have to make demonstration flights in the spring to convince their doubters. They left the flyer in its crate in France. Orville spent some extra time in Paris to arrange to have some engines built there. He finally returned home on December 13.

While still overseas, Wilbur and Orville received word from the Ordnance Board that it was considering their proposal, but it still faced the prospect of asking Congress for money. They indicated the price was negotiable if they could be assured their patents wouldn’t be “palpably disregarded” by the government. “We care much more for an assurance of fair treatment than for extreme price on the first machine,” they wrote from London on October 30.

This broke the logjam. The Ordnance Board drew up specifications for an army airplane based on what the Wright brothers had proposed. On his return from Europe, Wilbur stopped in Washington and met with the board. He offered a big price drop—the first flyer for $25,000 and subsequent airplanes for $10,000 apiece. Even so, the army’s Signal Corps decided it needed to advertise for bids.

On January 27, Wilbur and Orville submitted a bid that promised to deliver, within 200 days, a machine that could fly two people at a speed of forty miles per hour. The bid process was a legal formality; the Wright brothers had the only machine that could meet the requirements. That didn’t stop some forty other dreamers, tinkerers and fraud artists from submitting bids, offering unsolicited advice or simply asking for money. But two valid bids were lower than the Wrights’, and the Signal Corps felt obliged to accept the lowest bid. It resolved the dilemma by accepting all three. One immediately withdrew, leaving the Wright brothers with one competitor—Augustus Herring, whose bid claimed he could produce an airplane in 180 days for $20,000. Signal Corps officers didn’t believe Herring could deliver, and he met their expectations. He had done no serious work and never produced an airplane. While the army was only looking for one airplane, Hart Berg continued to work on a bigger deal in France. Finally, he reached agreement with a new syndicate whose goal wasn’t simply to stand in for the government but to set up a commercial business to make and sell Wright airplanes in France. The terms were less than Wilbur and Orville had sought the previous year; instead of $200,000 for one airplane, they would get half that amount, plus half the company’s founding shares and about $4,000 apiece for the next four airplanes they delivered. But at last they had a deal. They signed.

The Wrights returned to Kitty Hawk in 1908 with their modified 1905 Flyer. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

It might be true that an army marches on its stomach, but Wilbur and Orville found it an uncomfortable way to fly. “I used to think the back of my neck would break if I endured one more turn around the field,” Kelly quoted Orville as saying in The Wright Brothers. The flyer project that had delayed Orville’s travel to Europe was an improved design that would allow two people to sit upright on seats and control the flyer with levers. The configuration would be necessary for training and for operational use such as observation. Orville found the new controls to be “a great improvement over the old system.” After the first flyer, Orville built four more for demonstration flights in America and Europe. The new flyer also had a redesigned engine.

Wilbur would need to make demonstration flights in France while Orville put the military flyer through its paces at Fort Myer, Virginia. They rebuilt their experimental Wright Flyer III to test the new configuration and knock the rust off their flying skills. They added upright seats and control handles, as well as a bigger engine, radiator and fuel tank. They took it to Kitty Hawk in April 1908. Wilbur left on April 6 and Orville soon after. Charles Furnas, a Dayton mechanic interested in their work, went along as a volunteer.

As word of the army contract spread, the national press began to take a serious interest in the Wright brothers. Several publications dispatched reporters to Kitty Hawk to observe them. Lurking in nearby woods as Wilbur and Orville tested the modified flyer, the reporters witnessed the first flight of an airplane carrying two people.

Wilbur went directly from Kitty Hawk to New York in May 1908 and sailed to France. Once again, the brothers found themselves an ocean apart, each bearing major responsibilities. Both must have felt tremendous pressure.

Wilbur found strong support in Léon Bollée, an auto manufacturer, who offered space in his factory at Le Mans, about 125 miles southwest of Paris. Scouting the area for a flying field, Wilbur found Les Hunaudières racetrack. The track’s owner agreed to lease it to him. Wilbur sent for the crated airplane that had been sitting in storage since the year before. He opened it to find not an airplane ready for assembly but a jumble of damaged parts and equipment. Ribs and other wooden parts were broken, fabric was torn, the radiators were mashed and engine parts were damaged. Wilbur lashed out as he had before: “I never found such evidence of idiocy in my whole life,” he fumed in a letter to Orville. “Did you tell Charley [Taylor] not to separate anything lest it should get lonesome?”

Orville suspected customs agents of rooting through the flyer’s crate and repacking it carelessly. Whatever the cause, undoing the damage cost Wilbur several days of hard work and compounded frustrations he was having with inept helpers.

Wilbur Wright at Le Mans, France, in 1908. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

They persevered. After years of working in the shadows while inaccurate news reports fueled skepticism and disbelief, the Wright brothers were finally ready to go public.

Wilbur flew first. On August 8, a catapult launcher like the one they had used at Huffman Prairie shot the flyer off its track before a crowd that included members of the Aero Club of France and newspaper reporters from Paris.

The flight lasted less than two minutes, but Wilbur’s steady control and graceful, banked turns electrified the crowd. The French press sang the Wright brothers’ praises.

Wilbur Wright circles the field at Les Hunaudières racetrack in France. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

Wilbur made nine flights at the racetrack between August 8 and August 13. In late August, at the invitation of the French army, Wilbur relocated to the larger Champ d’Auvours, a French army field about ten miles away.

While Wilbur was a sensation in Europe, his flights weren’t getting prominent play in the United States. Fewer than a thousand spectators turned out for Orville’s first flight attempt on September 3. Orville made a brief hop, circling the small field one and a half times and staying aloft for just over a minute. But the crowd “went crazy,” Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the president and a witness to the event, told Kelly years later. Kelly quoted him in The Wright Brothers: “‘I’ll never forget the impression the sound of the crowd made on me. It was a sound of complete surprise.’” Three or four newspaper reporters who witnessed the flight approached Orville in tears.

Orville Wright flies at Fort Myer. George Grantham Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Several thousand were on hand the next day when Orville flew for four minutes, fifteen seconds. Orville made more flights in subsequent days. On the morning of September 9, he circled the field about once a minute for nearly an hour. Later in the day, he flew for just over an hour and then invited Lieutenant Frank Lahm to climb on for a ride. They were aloft for six minutes, twenty-four seconds. Each flight set a new world endurance record. Orville kept flying and breaking his own records as he circled the field, made figure eights and climbed to altitudes estimated at three hundred feet.

Then came tragedy. Orville’s plane crashed on September 17, killing passenger Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, a twenty-six-year-old West Point graduate from San Francisco. Orville was diagnosed with a fractured left leg and four broken ribs, but X-rays years later would reveal he had also fractured his hip bone and dislocated it. The injuries would cause him pain for the rest of his life. The airplane was a loss, and the army suspended the flight trials.

Wilbur learned of the crash the next day. He was an ocean away, but he still felt guilty somehow for not protecting his younger brother. “I cannot help thinking over and over again ‘If I had been there, it would not have happened,’” he wrote to Katharine on September 20. “It was not right to leave Orville to undertake such a task alone…I do not mean that Orville was incompetent…[but a] man cannot take sufficient care when he is subject to continual interruptions and his time is consumed in talking to visitors…If I had been there I could have held off the visitors while he worked or let him hold them off while I worked.”

Of course, Wilbur was in exactly the same situation. He was getting ready for a qualification flight when he learned of the accident. It was a perfect day for flying, but “I did not feel that it would be decent to proceed” in view of Selfridge’s death, Wilbur wrote to Katharine. He postponed his flights for a week.

Orville conducted a crash investigation from his hospital bed. Taylor and Furnas brought him a broken propeller and some other parts. One blade of the right propeller had cracked. Orville made a preliminary finding that the crack had allowed the blade to flatten and lose thrust, causing severe vibration until the propeller came loose and struck a stay wire in the tail; the tail then flopped on its side, putting the plane into a steep dive to the ground.

Katharine immediately took a leave of absence from Dayton’s Steele High School and rushed to Fort Myer. She stayed by Orville’s side for more than six weeks until the hospital dismissed him. She returned home with him on November 1. Orville recovered slowly. The army doctors had treated his fractured leg with traction; the family doctor put it in a cast. The wrecked flyer was shipped back to the bicycle shop. Twice over the next two weeks, Taylor pushed Orville in a wheelchair up Williams and across West Third to the bicycle shop, where he went over the wreckage.

Wilbur continued to make flights in France, extending them to more than an hour and often taking passengers. On October 7, he took Berg’s wife, Edith, who became the first American woman to fly in an airplane. He set numerous records and won cash prizes offered by French aero clubs. As the flying season waned in December, Wilbur moved his operations to Pau, a picturesque resort town in southern France.

Orville and Katharine joined Wilbur in Paris on January 12, 1909, and followed him to Pau, where he slept in his hangar while they stayed in a hotel. Katharine took her first airplane flight there. They stayed in Europe until May 5. During that time, the Wright brothers entered a contract with the Short Brothers of England to build six Wright airplanes; Short paid the brothers £1,000 for each airplane. Wilbur completed his work in France and signed a contract for demonstration flights in Germany. He also trained two Italian pilots at Centocelle Field near Rome.

Katharine and Orville Wright stand with a cabin boy on a German ocean liner bound for Europe in 1909. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University.

Before leaving Europe, the Wrights returned to Le Mans to receive a fabulous bronze sculpture from the Aero Club of the Sarthe and to London for banquets and medals from the British aviation societies. The accolades continued in New York with a luncheon by the Aero Club of America.

By this time, the Wright brothers had become Dayton’s first superstars. The city greeted their return on May 13 with a massive welcome home celebration. Ten thousand Daytonians massed at Union Station to greet the train. A special carriage drawn by four white horses carried them to their modest home at 7 Hawthorn, leading a procession of nineteen carriages. A mass of people followed while others lined the route. The whole procession had the air of a circus parade coming to town. They found their home and most of the houses on the street bedecked with flags and Japanese lanterns. At Fourth and Hawthorn, lanterns had been arranged to spell “Welcome.” Crowds packed the sidewalks and neighboring yards. As the carriage turned onto their street from Fifth, a band on a platform set up in front of their house struck up the tune “Home Sweet Home.” Neighbors and distant relatives made speeches.⁸

Civic leaders were planning an even bigger celebration for the next month. In a June 6 letter to Chanute, Wilbur called it an “excuse for an elaborate carnival and advertisement of the city under the guise of being an honor to us.” The hoopla was just an annoying distraction to the brothers. They needed to nail down the cause of the Fort Myer accident quickly because they were building a new airplane to complete the trials.

Wilbur and Orville cloistered themselves in their bicycle shop and in a shed behind Lorin’s house to examine the crash evidence. They concluded that Orville’s preliminary finding at the hospital was correct. Seeking to understand what had caused the propeller blade to crack, they discovered a flaw in their propeller testing that had masked the blade’s weakness. They made new propellers that were stronger and braced the axle supports so that a similar propeller failure wouldn’t allow a blade to contact the tail wires. “I am glad it was no carelessness of Orville that brought about the catastrophe,” Wilbur wrote to Chanute on June 6.⁹

In late May, Wilbur and Orville traveled to the Packard Automobile Company plant in Detroit to meet with the brothers Russell A. and Frederick M. Alger. The wealthy Packard stockholders were interested in forming a company to produce Wright airplanes. The meeting would bear fruit later.

The Wright brothers traveled to Washington, D.C., in mid-June to endure a day of accolades and to receive the Aero Club of America medal from President Taft in a White House ceremony. Katharine accompanied them. They returned to Dayton for an even gaudier demonstration of hometown pride and municipal self-promotion.

Civic leaders had spent months organizing the massive festival. They had commandeered the National Cash Register Co.’s Welfare Hall, a huge employees’ dining room, where a small army of craftsmen built props under the direction of noted Philadelphia designer Henry Kablerske. They constructed the elements of a lavish “Court of Honor,” an array of Roman-style columns that would line three blocks of Main Street between Third Street and the Soldier’s Monument at Monument Avenue, bracketed at each end by triumphal arches.¹⁰

The meticulously planned festivities started at 9:00 a.m. on June 17 with bells tolling, cannons booming and factory whistles shrieking. Separate carriages conveyed Wilbur and Orville to Van Cleve Park on Monument between Main and Jefferson, where a band concert led up to opening ceremonies and hours of presentations and speechifying. The Dayton Fire Department paraded its apparatus in the afternoon. On and on went the events. They wrapped up twelve hours later with a fireworks display along the Miami River. In between, Wilbur and Orville tried to get some work done in their shop, covering the windows with canvas to shield them from a crowd gathered outside.¹¹

A postcard shows a view of a parade honoring the Wright brothers in Dayton’s Welcome Home celebration. Author’s collection.

The celebration resumed the next day at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds, where 2,500 schoolchildren dressed in red, white and blue assembled in the pattern of an American flag. Wilbur and Orville received a pile of medals, including the Congressional Medal presented by General James Allen, Signal Corps chief. More events followed, including another parade, and the second day closed with an illuminated parade of automobiles.¹²

Wilbur and Orville left for Fort Myer the next day to complete the demonstration flights. Milton and Reuchlin joined them to watch preliminary flights. Katharine went in time for the official trial flight. The previous day, Orville had demonstrated a passenger flight with Lieutenant Frank Lahm; for the final flight, he stayed aloft for more than an hour and averaged 42.583 miles per hour, beating the contract’s requirements. President Taft, his cabinet, other top government officials and a crowd of some ten thousand people witnessed the flight. Taft personally congratulated Orville after he landed. On August 2, Allen approved the purchase of the Wright airplane.

Wilbur starts his flight from Governors Island. He lashed a canoe under the flyer in case he had to ditch in the water. George Grantham Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Orville and Katharine returned to Dayton on July 31, but on August 8 they were off again—to Berlin this time, where Orville was to make demonstration flights to complete the negotiations for the sale of Wright patents to a German syndicate that had been formed in May.

Wilbur capped the Wright brothers’ 1909 public flights with the most spectacular feat yet. Between September 25 and October 4, Wilbur participated in the Hudson Fulton Celebration in New York. The event combined the tricentennial celebration of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River and a postponed centennial celebration of Robert Fulton’s first use of steam power to navigate the river. Crowds estimated at one million people watched Wilbur make several flights, including one that circled the Statue of Liberty. His most epic flight was a twenty-one-mile loop from Governors Island up the Hudson River past Grant’s Tomb and back. Because he would be flying over water, Wilbur fitted the airplane with a makeshift pontoon: a red canoe with a canvas cover.¹³