It may have been the well at the back of the bike shop. That well was quickly sealed, but it was too late. Orville went down in August 1896 with typhoid fever. The dreaded disease of the nineteenth century would kill Wilbur in sixteen years. In Chicago in the late nineteenth century, a typhoid epidemic broke out just before the 1892 Columbian Exposition. Human feces was the problem. Food or water tainted with feces became a potential carrier of the disease.

Indeed how could there not be typhoid in a city with 40,000 privies and people who wouldn't connect to the sewer even when threatened with legal action…. The four-mile tunnel came on line in December, 1892. Typhoid deaths had begun to fall in 1893, partly due to the cleaner water from the tunnel but probably also due to the new public awareness about boiling or filtering the water. Work on the huge Ship and Sanitary canal project, which was to famously turn the Chicago River around and send its waters and Chicago's sewage down to St. Louis instead of into Lake Michigan, had begun in September 1892.1

Chicago would reverse its main river to combat the disease and keep people from drinking contaminated water. When this didn't work, city engineers built water cribs, which were giant intakes situated a mile out in Lake Michigan, for drinking water to get clear of the sewage along the lakefront. The extremely high fever from typhoid produced delirium and, many times, organ failure. During the Spanish-American War, more men would die from typhoid than were killed in combat. Training camps with poor sanitation were often the culprit.² New York and other cities had typhoid outbreaks when drinking water was contaminated with raw sewage. It was the disease of terror in the late nineteenth century, with no antibiotics to stop the ravaging disease marked by death in many cases.

In the late summer of 1896, Orville was confined to bed, with his temperature spiking to 105.5°F. Dr. Spitler was called to the house but could do little beyond confirming that it was typhoid fever. Medical science had no weapons at all for any sort of infection, and the best anyone could do was try to keep the patient hydrated and strong while the fever raged and delirium set in. Typically, in the first week, the fever rises dramatically with a cough, maybe a bloody nose, while the white-blood-cell count plunges. In the second week, the fever hovers around 104, and rose-colored spots break out all over the torso. Delirium is now a constant, earning typhoid the nickname “nervous fever.” In the third week, diarrhea takes hold, the appetite vanishes, and the spleen and liver are enlarged. Patients often succumb when organ failure sets in.3

The bishop was nowhere to be found. He was traveling for church business and instructed Katherine and Wilbur from afar. They were to put Orville in the best room and sponge him “gently and quickly with least exposure, followed by rapid friction…boil the water you all drink, and set in ice water to cool. Use the best economy about rest. Be temperate in articles eaten. Be regular.”⁴

For the month of September, Wilbur stayed by Orville's bed, along with his sister. This allowed him to once again sink into books. During the last few years, Wilbur and Orville had been consumed with their bike business, with no time to read anything. The bicycle in 1892 was the link between the horse and the automobile. As Tom Crouch explained in First Flight, “It marked the first convergence of technologies crucial to automobile production, ranging from electrical welding and work on ball bearings to experience with chain and shaft transmission systems, metal stamping technology and the manufacture of rubber tires.”⁵

The first bicycle business in America sold “high-wheel ordinaries,” which were the large-wheel bikes that only the brave could sample. The “safety bicycle” had two wheels of the same size and allowed everyone to now ride the contraption that was better, in many ways, than riding a horse. Orville quickly purchased a bicycle and determined their next course: fixing and manufacturing bicycles.

Millions of bikes began pouring out of American factories in 1895. People could now pedal to work or go out for long rides in the country. The technology that was used for bikes would later be used in cars and then planes. It was a craze, with the church and moralists warning against the degradation that would follow bicycles. Strangely, the biggest moralist of them all—Bishop Wright—would have no objection to his sons’ new business. Now children could leave their neighborhood out of the view of their parents. Children were going for a bike ride when they should be reading their books. In fifteen minutes, children could be over a mile away from their parents. Later, cars would be attacked for the very same reason. Mobility was equated to moral decay, and at the very least it meant sex. Nobody cared about the outrage, though, and bicycles swept the country and swept up the Wright brothers.

In a prescient article published by the editor of the Binghamton, New York, Republican on June 4, 1896, he predicted that the flying machine would probably be invented by bicycle manufacturers: “The flying machine will not be in the same shape or at all in the style of the numerous kinds of cycles, but the study to produce a light, swift machine is likely to lead to an evolution in which wings will play a conspicuous part.”6 That summer, bicycling and flying were dominating the news. Swift, balanced, rolling on air-inflated tires, people did feel like they were flying. Others saw a more direct relation.

James Howard Means wrote in the Aeronautical Annual, “it is not uncommon for the cyclist, in the first flash of enthusiasm which quickly follows the unpleasantness of taming the steel steed to remark: ‘Wheeling is just like flying!’”⁷ Wilbur and Orville purchased bikes and went for long rides on the roads outside of Dayton. One can see Wilbur taking Means's next words to heart when he would later write, “to learn to wheel one must learn to balance…to learn to fly one must learn to balance.”⁸ He would equate the control of the bicycle with the control of an airplane.

In 1893, their company, the Wright Cycle Exchange, started doing business by offering to sell and repair bikes. The Wright brothers opened at one location and then moved to a bigger one as business improved. But Wilbur and Orville diverged again: “Bring up the subject of the shapes of handlebars or types of pedals on early safety bicycles and his whole face lights up,” a contemporary would later recall.⁹ He was talking about Orville. Wilbur, we can be sure, was bored to distraction. In a letter to his brother Lorin, he spelled out his problem, though he speaks in the plural sense.

In business it is the aggressive man who succeeds who continually has his eye on his own interest…. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors…. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition…. I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen…. There is always a danger that a person in this disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life struggling for bare existence….10

In other words, Wilbur did not want to fall into “the first corner” or any corner. This he knew after crawling out of his three-year journey into the dark night of the soul. At this point, he is the artist without calling. He knows what he doesn't want to do, and that is any type of business. This is a split in the Wright-brother motif of combined aspirations. Orville would have been quite satisfied to be a printer or the owner of a prosperous bicycle company. The intellectual boredom was not there for the younger brother, but it was there for Wilbur. So, like every man who has not found his calling, his destiny, Wilbur was looking for the path, the challenge that would satisfy the intellect that could have taken on Yale and that had burned through Milton's library for three years.

Then fate took a hand again with Orville becoming ill. It would be a month before he could sit up, but it was during Orville's illness that Wilbur began to read about the death of the German glider, Otto Lilienthal. It is here he would pin his interest in flight: “My own active interest in aeronautical problems dates back to the death of Lilienthal in 1896…and led me to take down from the shelves of our home library a book on Animal Mechanism by Prof. Marey, which I had already read several times.”¹¹

Common lore has it that Wilbur began to read to Orville about the glider's demise, and this seeped into the deliriums of Orville, and he emerged as his brother, intent on solving the problem of manned flight. The truth is that caring for his brother gave Wilbur time again to think and wonder and to contemplate something commensurate with his own intellectual, spiritual, and existential needs. Besides the fabled helicopter toy that caught the two brothers’ imagination, this is the first time Wilbur Wright considered the problem of human flight.

So, while Orville slept or tossed and turned in delirium, Wilbur read about the German pioneer. Lilienthal, like many early pioneers, had a day job manufacturing steam engines and was a mining engineer by trade. He had some money, and this helped put flying squarely in the realm of an expensive hobby. Men trying to fly had to be careful; history was littered with cranks and nuts who had jumped off castles, cliffs, boats, and hills, all to either perish or suffer severe injury. Even Wilbur, years later, would remark that flying was his hobby and the bicycle shop was most important. This was just cover—it is much easier to tell people that flying is just something on the side, when most people saw flying as crazy. In the late nineteenth century, anyone attempting to ascend to the heavens was clearly insane, in the view of most middle-class Americans. The analogy today would be someone dedicating his or her life to time travel; the technology did not support the ambition in either case.

But Lilienthal was deadly serious and had built up to a dozen gliders. He was the perfect late-nineteenth-century flying enthusiast joining athleticism with a quest to fly like the birds. His wings were shaped like a bird and made of white muslin, with a large rudder protruding off the back of the glider. Wilbur read about Lilienthal taking a running start off the side of Rhinower Mountains, a range about two hours by train from Berlin. Running off the side of the mountain, he would be lifted from the earth. Hanging down like a praying mantis, he kicked his legs one way or the other to go left or right. It was crude and very dangerous, but Wilbur recognized immediately that this red-haired maniac was flying. The only things he lacked were an engine and, more important, control.

Lilienthal was savvy enough to have pictures taken of himself while in flight, setting the bar for all would-be aviators to follow. If you do fly in the air, make sure you record it so the world can know what you are up to. This was not lost on Wilbur Wright. Lilienthal's glides had made him world-famous, and when he crashed on August 9 in one of his favorite gliders, it was national news. He broke his neck and died the next day, at the age of forty-eight, but he left behind an admonition for the young man looking for a path in life: “It must not remain our desire to acquire the art of the bird. It is our duty not to rest until we have obtained a perfect conception of the problem of flight.”12

Wilbur had his charge. While his brother lay writhing in the damp sheets on Hawthorne Street in the hell of typhoid, the man who had found nothing in this life to engage him since before the assault by the murderous Haugh now had something as big as his mind's capacity to wonder and scientifically attack a problem. Like the writer who finally finds the theme, the subject that will become the book of his life, Wilbur now had the ultimate engineering problem that had to be solved. Man must fly, man could fly, and it was up to him to crack the code of powered flight.

This was not a bicycle that had to be fixed or a business that had to be managed. This was something so complex, so varied, so unknown, that Wilbur would have to find out every known fact and start from there and then, like Lilienthal, jump off the side of the mountain to see where he would land. Once he had the bug, there was no turning back. Man should fly. It was in his grasp, but no one had put the pieces together. He knew this intuitively. Was it destiny? Maybe. Teddy Roosevelt had survived three years in the Badlands of the Dakotas, and there were cowpunchers who told him one day he would be president. Wilbur Wright knew this was his destiny, yet there were no markers of aeronautical greatness for others to recognize. It was simply a complex mechanical, spiritual, life goal. It was big. Bigger than anything anyone could imagine at the time. It was perfect for the man who had gone inward for three years and emerged with a tabula rasa, a blank slate of ambition and intellect. Here is where he would engage the world. This would be his San Juan Hill to climb. It would be his point of contact before he would take to the air and leave Earth forever. To fly would be the ultimate escape from the terrestrial hell of humans, pettiness, evil, concerns, and responsibilities. The world had seemed strange and demonic during his journey into the dark night of the soul, and yet he had to enter back into it. There would be no family for him. No partner. No woman. He would commit himself to the holy grail of manned flight and improve the world.

Wilbur looked up from the paper and looked at his brother Orville, now sleeping. It was October, and he had survived the worst of it, but it would be weeks before Orville could leave his bed. Wilbur would need assistance. He had built a printing press with his brother and then bicycles, but they were both Orville's projects. Now Orville could come along with him. He would take his younger brother along for the ride. If they were on a ship, he would be the navigator and Orville would man the tiller. But he would set the course for both.

Wilbur immediately dove into his father's book Animal Mechanism. He would base all of his initial science on the winged creatures who had already solved flight: birds. Étienne-Jules Marey, a French physician, had become fascinated with birds thirty years before and had drawn a line between winged flight by birds and man: “How frequently has the question been raised, whether man must always continue to envy the bird and the insect their wings; whether he too may not one day travel through the air as he now sails across the ocean.”13

From the beginning, Wilbur saw flight as a problem of control. The science was there. Air could lift a creature and could lift a man, but the bird could control the air currents and ride them at will; man had a bad habit of getting killed when he went aloft. Wilbur then discovered J. Bell Pettigrew's treatise, Animal Locomotion or Walking, Swimming, and Flying with a Dissertation on Aeronautics. These writings centered on birds and more specifically the birds’ wings as the key to solving the problem of flight. This makes perfect sense to us now, but would-be aviators had been busy for fifty years strapping on rockets and feathers, and creating bouncing, flapping machines that went nowhere. Time would prove that Wilbur differed from men who believed flight was a matter of power. Strangely, no one had taken on the simple concept of a wing. How does it provide lift, and how does one control that lift?

Wilbur fell back into his old mode of reading while the invalid Orville slept. Wilbur had done so with his mother for three years, and now he used the hiatus to uncover the thoughts of other men who had contemplated taking to the air. He continued, and, as Orville recovered, he gave the books to his brother. Did Orville take to these dense studies of birds and theories on flying? Maybe. But it's telling that Orville left no paper trail of any interest in flight at this point. The bicycle shop was booming, and one cannot imagine Orville taking too big a detour from being the enterprising Yankee to go solve the problem of flight. He probably thought Wilbur's interest in flight would pass; besides, they had a new line of Wright brothers bikes to get out the next year. But Wilbur took the next step.

It is one of those moments when a path is chosen. Reading books on birds and ruminations on winged flight is one thing, but to pass from the amateur to the professional systematically approaching a problem to be solved speaks of secret intent. A cool day found Wilbur alone in the house. The clock on the mantle ticked, the locomotives were whistling and clacking as they hauled freight into the interior of the country. It was the last year of the nineteenth century, 1899, and the last day of May. His father, Milton, and his sister, Katherine, had left to put flowers on Susan Wright's grave in Woodland Cemetery. Orville was at the bike shop, of course.

Wilbur slid down into a chair and faced his sister's slant-top desk in the parlor. He picked up the fountain pen and positioned the stationery emblazoned with Wright Cycle Company. The sun slanted in the West and drummed across the wide-plank floor. He was in his high collar and tie and a plain gray vest. He had exhausted the books he could get his hands on, and he needed more. Research cries out for volumes, the thirst for knowledge where there was none before. By trade he was a bicycle manufacturer and mechanic. A high-school dropout. A man who had veered from life for three years with no plans and then followed the whims of his brother half-heartedly. That was it. He only possessed the keen intellectual curiosity that is the hallmark of any man or woman who pursues the life of the mind. He began to write, his fountain pen scratching the rude paper.

I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes after the style of Caley's and Penaud's machines. My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practical. It is only a question of knowledge and skill just as in all acrobatic feats…. I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language…I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.14

Wilbur then asserted his belief “that simple flight is possible at least to man and that the experiments and investigations of a large number of independent workers will result in the accumulation of information and knowledge and skill which will finally lead to accomplished flight.”

The letter went off to the Smithsonian and ended up on Richard Rathbun's desk. He was an assistant to Secretary Samuel Langley, and since the flight of the aerodrome, the Smithsonian had been besieged with letters from would-be aviators. Wilbur was requesting anything on aeronautics, “such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.”15 It is amazing Rathbun replied to the letter that had been drafted on Wright Cycle Company stationery. A bike mechanic who wants to fly. Sure.

A reply came back from Rathbun, who had passed the letter on to a clerk who supplied a list of books and pamphlets on aviation:

They were reprints of articles originally published in the Smithsonian Annual Report: Louis-Pierre Mouillard's Empire of the Air; Otto Lilienthal's “The Problem of Flying and Practical Experiments in Soaring”; Samuel P. Langley's “Experiments in Aerodynamics”; and E. C. Huffaker's on “Soaring Flight.” Rathbun also suggested James Howard Means's the Aeronautical Annual.” The Langley could be purchased for one-dollar postage included.¹⁶

Wilbur placed the order for Langley's Experiments in Aerodynamics. These writings were those of Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley. Both men would be the twin pistons of Wilbur's future. One man would open the world for him while the other would be the lynchpin to a descent into darkness. Langley had funding and had managed to launch his model-sized steam-powered insect with wings from a catapult atop a houseboat, and the invention flew amazingly for a half a mile. Langley was convinced he was close to solving manned flight. All he had to do was build a bigger aerodrome and put a man aboard.

Wilbur learned that the great minds of the country were working on the problem of flight. Many were eminent scientists, with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison heading the list. They all had money and resources that Wilbur Wright could not possibly hope to possess. Another possible inventor, Hiram Maxim, had sunk a cool $100,000 into developing a flying machine that crashed on takeoff. It is worth noting here that the lack of money will be Wilbur's greatest advantage. It brought caution, methodology, and the slow cracking of the nascent science of aeronautics. There could be no frippery, because Wilbur couldn't afford any. Efficiency was uppermost. He had to isolate the central problem of flight before attacking the whole. This was the machine age, and men believed that a powerful engine could solve all problems. They went right past the central problem of lift. After all, since birds flew from rapidly flapping wings, it would follow that if a machine flapped just as rapidly, it should fly. Some pursued this idea and were immortalized a hundred and ten years later in YouTube videos of jumping cars.

Also, people tended to die while trying to fly; and this, along with the contraptions that kept crashing, going into the sea, or falling apart on takeoff, kept the art of flying squarely in the lunatic fringe category. Death ended most of the nascent aviators’ short careers. The science of aeronautics was not advanced, because there was no methodology. Like the trapeze artist in the circus, the man attacking flight in the late nineteenth century took the flying leap first and worried about the science of flying not at all. It was a mechanical problem that would be solved by trial and error. The error was costly and usually deadly. It was as if manifest destiny of the skies had been declared. If the birds could fly, so should the white man. All he had to do was leave the ground and figure it out as he flew through the air. Such hubris would sink the Titanic a dozen years later. But who would risk life and limb on something so foolish and dangerous? Technology was crude, and this led to machines shaped like ducks and one that had nitroglycerin pellets being ignited for thrust. Nothing worked, and—after the notices of another aviator's death—the newspapers of the time declared: “It is a fact, that man can't fly.”17

But this was also the age of invention, and with the new century came innovations that would change everyday life. A man named George Eastman had perfected an everyday camera called the Kodak, and Isaac Merrit Singer came up with the first electric sewing machine. People could now go high up in buildings in New York because the Otis Elevator Company had produced something called an elevator that hoisted people up to the heavens. Motorcars were being built all over America, and manufacturing in general was taking off with mass production and a populace ready to buy on easy credit. Change was in the air, and exploration was still the passion of the time.

In the letter sent to the Smithsonian there is no mention of Orville Wright. There is no use of the plural “we” that would later be applied to all correspondence. As the historian Tom Crouch would write in The Bishop's Boys, “In later years the brothers would claim that Wilbur had simply written ‘I’ when he meant ‘we’ but Wilbur was aware of Orville's touchiness about an equal division of labor, profits and credit. Had aeronautics been a joint interest in 1899, Wilbur would have spoken in the plural.”¹⁸

The truth is that the letter was from Wilbur because it was his desire to fly. His brother had no interest in flying. Even in letters to his father announcing his intention to go to Kitty Hawk, there is no mention of Orville. Why should there be—it was not Orville's idea or his quest. He wrote to the Smithsonian, “I have been interested in…. I am about to begin…. I wish to obtain”19 His father would maintain that Wilbur had “drawn” his brother into the “flying problem.” Wilbur was thirty-two years old in 1899. He poured over the known data of flight from the Smithsonian, reading Chanute's, Huffaker's, and Langley's findings. He obtained a copy of Chanute's Progress in Flying Machines; located copies of the Aeronautical Annual for 1895, 1896, 1897; and read through the back issues of popular magazines in search of articles on flying machines.

Wilbur Wright was a man on a mission. He would jump off where others had left off. The problem was that a lot of the information contradicted data gathered by one aviator to the next. He would later write, “Thousands of pages had been written on the so-called science of flying, but for the most part the ideas set forth, like the designs for the machines, were mere speculations and probably ninety percent was false. Consequently, those who tried to study the science of aerodynamics knew not what to believe and what not to believe.”²⁰

The school of one was in session. Langley and Chanute had some success with planes that had flown in brief spurts, but they did not really know how they did it. The man reading in Dayton, Ohio, the bicycle mechanic, wanted to know how a wing provided lift. What was the math behind it, the equation that would tell him how a wing lifted itself into the air? How did it work? Wilbur wanted to know how a plane could then be controlled. Secretary Langley just assumed stability was a given, and other “aeronautical investigators regarded flight as if it were not so different from surface locomotion except the surface would be elevated…the flying machine remained essentially level in the air…leaning or rolling to one side seemed either undesirable or did not enter into their thinking.”²¹ Octave Chanute was not sure anything would fly and believed in slow, methodical planning. Wilbur read on, looking for answers.

For now, his letters led with the singular “I.” The plural “we” that would punctuate later Wright correspondence is conspicuously absent. It is a slipup that Orville would correct forty-five years later.