It burned deep down in his stomach. He had been wronged. The world had wronged him again, much like it had wronged him as a young man, when absolute evil took away his life. Wilbur went to bed thinking about it, and it was the first thing that occupied his thoughts in the morning. It was the itch that couldn't be scratched. The legal process was like that. It moved at a glacial pace. And even though he and his brother had been granted the patent, he still believed that Glenn Curtiss and others were stealing from him.

Wilbur had visions of himself in court, dressing down Glenn Curtiss, many times. In his fantasy, he would shame Curtiss in front of the world. That would give him satisfaction. He nodded as he sat in the darkened hangar in his airplane. He moved the elevator and then the wing warping and rudder control. He envisioned one problem after another. He thought of down drafts, bumpy air, rain, the engine dying, dips, ascending, descending, turning, taking off, and landing. He went through it all in a silent pantomime. But this time he wasn't thinking of flying; he was thinking of Glenn Curtiss, and he felt the pain down in his stomach. He felt the headache, the gritting of his teeth. It happened whenever he thought about the way people were stealing from him.

That is what Curtiss was doing. He was stealing his money by stealing his patent. He was taking what he had invented and using it to make money and not paying a licensing fee or royalties. He had just told Curtiss that they would settle in court, but everywhere he looked now he saw infringement. It was not only that Curtiss was stealing from him; really, anyone who flew a plane was stealing from him. The judge said it. Anyone who flew an airplane was using his technology, his three axes of control that encompassed an elevator, wing warping, and a hinged rudder that moved in tandem with the wings. Everyone owed him licensing fees and royalties, and yet hardly anyone was paying him.

Take Curtiss, who had asked his price in a letter. Wilbur gave him a fair licensing fee of $1,000 per plane sold and $100 on every event where he flew a plane. That was fair, but Curtiss wouldn't even do that; and, even though he had an injunction against his company, Curtiss kept forming other companies with other people to get around Wilbur. They just had to launch another suit when he tried to say that separately controlled ailerons were not derivative of Wright technology. It was all a lie, and Curtiss knew it.

Wilbur sat in the darkness. He hated the feeling of being a victim. Just three years before, in Le Mans, close to Paris, in 1908, Wilbur had proved to the world that he had invented the first machine capable of flight. The French were the first to recognize his accomplishment—even before his own country. This was after the plane had been nearly destroyed by customs officials and he had to take two months to rebuild the machine, during which he was scalded by radiator steam. Then he flew at Le Mans, and the world stood at attention. The crowds kept coming to Le Mans by train and automobile and from increasingly farther distances. “Every day there is a crowd of people not only from the neighborhood,” Wilbur reported to Orville, who was still recovering from injuries sustained in his crash at Fort Meyer, “but also from almost every country in Europe.”1 He would fly for over 200,000 people in the end.² He flew with women, men, princes, and millionaires. They all wanted to have their picture taken with him. He had become an international celebrity, and for once the world stood at moral attention in recognition of his accomplishment.

At the Aéro-Club de France's banquet, he received the gold medal and a prize of 5,000 francs. It was a celebration of Wilbur, not Orville. This was the man who had flown; and, to the world, this man had invented the airplane. As Major Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell wrote after flying with Wilbur, “Mr. Wright, with both hands grasping the levers, watches every move, but his movements are so slight as to be almost imperceptible…. All the time the engine is buzzing so loudly and the propellers humming so that after the trip one is almost deaf.”³

The Wright brothers were mentioned in the press, but the French looked upon Wilbur as the man who had flown. Louis Barthou, the minster of public works, said in a speech at the Aéro-Club banquet, “Mr. Wright is a man who has never been discouraged even in the face of hesitation and suspicion.”⁴ It had the feel of the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago, where people listened to the man who had gone down to Kitty Hawk and were barely aware of his brother. Then Wilbur rose and addressed the crowd. After thanking the French for his warm reception, he gave his own vision of man's quest to fly: “I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across the trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air…. Once again, I thank you with all my heart and in thanking you I should like it understood that I am thanking all of France.”5

And then he was toasted, written about, celebrated, and feted from one ceremony to another. Kings came to see him fly, as did princes and other royalty. Then his sister came over with Orville, and he took her for a seven-minute ride on a cold February day. When asked if she felt like a bird, she replied, “I don't know exactly how a bird feels. Birds sing…but like the birds I sang best when the flight was over.”⁶

France changed everything for Wilbur. David McCullough wrote in The Wright Brothers, “At Le Mans and Pau he had flown far more than anyone ever had and set every record for distance, speed, altitude, time in the air, and made the first flights ever with a passenger and all this after so many years of the near secrecy…. The whole world now knew.”⁷ And he had made $200,000 between contracts and prizes. The four months he spent in Europe had portended only good things on the horizon. In this moment, people saw the inventor of the airplane, and Wilbur Wright doffed his hat to their praise.

But this was now years ago, and since then he had become increasingly bitter at the turn of events. In France alone factories were opening rapidly to produce airplanes. As Lawrence Goldstone cited in Birdmen, “On April 25 the New York Times reported that no less than fifteen factories were now in operation” in the United States and France.⁸ Wilbur hated feeling like people were reaching into his pocket and stealing the diamond he had found down at Kitty Hawk. He alone had risked everything. He alone had flown down in Kill Devil Hills and fought the elements and froze and baked and walked through the pouring rain while pulling a glider with his brother. He alone had emerged out of a three-year depression and pursued flying like a man possessed. He alone had written almost five hundred letters to Octave Chanute to work out all of the mind-numbing data that had to be changed. He had built the wind tunnel when he realized that the data was wrong and he would have to start over. He had designed a motor lighter than anyone else could have manufactured, and he alone had flown when no one else could. No one had suffered like he had. He had put his business on hold and had tracked down the men of science who could help him, from the Smithsonian to Octave Chanute, and now they wanted to take it all from him.

He had tamed the air and learned control when no one else could. It was his. The judge confirmed this, but Curtiss didn't respect that. A man like Curtiss just wanted to steal from him and, what's more, he would never stop stealing. Asserting and maintaining ownership of his own ideas was like trying to contain water in his hands—it just kept slipping through his fingers.

Wilbur sat in the darkness of the hangar. Where was the great payoff? When could he relax and enjoy the fruits of his discovery? He was consumed with business. He now thought back on Kitty Hawk, which had the quality of a dream. Everything was right there. The world was clear while he methodically experimented and worked out the mechanics of flying through the air. There he could control events just as he had learned to control an airplane in the sky. But now nothing was in his control.

He had returned to Kitty Hawk on April 10, 1908. Five years had passed since 1903, and Wilbur had breathed in the scent of the ocean and felt the stress slithering off his limbs. “Went down to camp…found things pretty well wrecked,” he later wrote in his diary.9 “The side walls of the old building still stand but the roof and north end are gone…. I strike various relics of the 1901, 1902, 1903 machines. A few months ago some boys stopped at the camp and ripped the cloth on the 1902 surfaces and ripped up our cots. The floors of both buildings are a foot under the sand. Two of the carbide cans are still on hand.”

Returning to his Eden, Wilbur must have marveled at how far he had come and how the world had changed since then. The lawsuits and endless rounds of meetings and patent fights had replaced the clear days of a single dream to fly. Wilbur now sat in the plane, in the darkness of the hangar. The suits would drag on and on. Curtiss would never settle. Every time Wilbur thought he had him, he melted away. It didn't matter that that crook Herring had run out on Curtiss and his company was in receivership. It didn't matter that he was broke and had a federal injunction on his company. The man continued to fly, continued to find backers, and continued to humiliate him with his flouting of his patent. The worst was that Curtiss won the races and made improvements on planes using their technology, and the press ate it up and put him on the front pages of the paper. Wilbur believed Curtiss was doing nothing less than stealing the Wrights’ moment in history. The injunction should have destroyed Curtiss, but it had not. He simply wouldn't die.10

His teacher and mentor had turned on him as well. Chanute had said Wilbur was greedy and questioned his legal suits: “I think the Wrights have made a blunder in bringing suit at this time. Not only will this antagonize very many persons but it may disclose some prior patents which will invalidate their more important claims.”¹¹ They said Wilbur was impeding the progress of aviation in America. The people who didn't want to pay said that. He wasn't impeding anything. He just wanted what was his due. He had invented the airplane. He had cracked the sky, and people were profiting from his work, his toil, and his intellectual drive that had solved the hard questions. No one even knew the correct lift coefficients before he fixed them. They were all wrong! Wrong! And if he had not built his wind tunnel and worked out the new coefficients, then men would still be flying off cliffs and hills and crashing to the earth without any idea why they flew or why they crashed. He had broken the code, but no one wanted to pay for his efforts.

Then Octave Chanute accused him of pursuing wealth in the protection of his patent. Chanute said wing warping was an ancient art that had been invented in France and that Wilbur had merely perfected it. In a letter to an editor of the World, Wilbur wrote, “We have repeatedly acknowledged our indebtedness to the Chanute double decker for our ideas regarding the best way of obtaining the strongest and lightest sustaining surfaces. But it is an absolute mistake that he suggested the warping tip idea. We were using the warping tip long before we made Mr. Chanute's acquaintance.”¹²

Wilbur felt he had developed the system of control that every plane used, and he wanted his due. It was the principle, not greed. Chanute didn't believe Wilbur had invented something original. Wilbur suspected that Chanute could never really accept that he was able to discover what his mentor could not. “The New York World has published several articles in the past few months in which you represented as saying that our claim to have been the first to maintain lateral balance by adjusting the wing tips to different angles of incidence cannot be maintained, as this idea was well known in the art when we began our experiments,” he wrote Chanute in 1910.¹³ “I do not know if this is newspaper talk or whether it really represents your present views.”

Chanute then fired back a letter that would drive a permanent wedge between pupil and mentor, friend and teacher. It was the coup de grace as far as Wilbur was concerned. Chanute wrote:

When I gave you a copy of the [Louis Pierre] Mouillard patent in 1901 I think I called your attention to his method of twisting the rear of the wings. If the courts will decide that the purpose and results were entirely different and that you were the first to conceive the twisting of the wings, so much the better for you, but my judgement is you will be restricted to the particular method by which you do it…This is still my opinion and I am afraid, my friend, your usually sound judgement has been warped by the desire for great wealth.14

This arrow went straight to the heart. Chanute then took umbrage to the impression Wilbur had given to several newspapers that the old scientist had sought him out:

In your speech at the Boston dinner, January 12th, you began by saying that I “turned up” at your shop in Dayton in 1901 and that you then invited me to your camp. This conveyed the impression that I thrust myself upon you at that time and it omitted to state that you were the first to write me, in 1900 asking for information which was gladly furnished, that many letters passed between us and that both in 1900 and 1901 you had written to invite me to visit you, before I “turned up” in 1901. This coming subsequently to some somewhat disparaging remarks concerning the helpfulness I may have been to you.¹⁵

Wilbur, clearly stung, responded immediately.

Neither in 1901, nor in the five years following, did you in any way intimate to us that our general system of lateral control had long been part of the art…. As to the inordinate desire for wealth, you are the only person acquainted with us who has ever made such an accusation…. You apparently concede to us no right to compensation for the solution of a problem ages old except such as granted to persons who had no part in producing the invention…. When I went to France I found everywhere an impression that we had taken up aeronautical studies at your special instigation; that we obtained our first experience on one of your machines; that we were pupils of yours and put into material form a knowledge furnished by you, that you provided the funds, in short, that you furnished the science and money while we contributed a little mechanical skill.

He then fired his final salvo at his teacher:

We also have had grievances extending back as far as 1902 and on occasion several years ago we complained to you that an impression was being spread broadcast by newspapers that we were mere pupils and dependents of yours. You indignantly denied that you were responsible for it…. One of the World articles said that you felt hurt because we had been silent regarding our indebtedness to you. I confess that I have found it most difficult to formulate a precise statement of what you contributed to our success.16

Wilbur knew the friendship would not survive. The eclipsed mentor had protested the lack of recognition in the development of flight, and the pupil wanted to fly alone now and declare his independence. Neither man could be blamed for his position, but the casualty was clearly their friendship. Herring had come out of the woodwork and demanded compensation for his part in the development of the 1903 Flyer; what that was could never be determined. But to Wilbur, the world had become unjust and had proven that their father, Milton, had been right all along. Only the family could be trusted; all else was suspect, all else was evil. Evil had knocked out his teeth and broken his jaw and sent him into the heart of darkness and on a quest to leave the earth.

Wilbur felt the pain in his stomach and stared straight ahead. He had devoted the last twelve years of his life to the quest to fly, and it was unfair that he should be so tormented. The world was not just. He had been treated unfairly once again, just like his father, who had found that even the church was corrupt. His father was right. Anyone outside the family was a potential enemy.

Wilbur gripped the control stick and went over possible scenarios in his head. It was all about turbulence. There was no way to anticipate turbulence, no matter how much you planned for it. It was always different. It came out of nowhere and could throw a plane to the ground or cause a tail spin or a stall, or even knock a pilot out of the plane. Wilbur stared into the darkness of the closed hangar as he went over scenarios and moved the stick and the elevator. No matter how much you planned, the fact of the matter was that an errant wind could still kill you.