The story of the Wright brothers put forth by Fred Kelly in his authorized biography is in some ways much better than the real one. In Kelly's story, the brothers are one and the same. Both are creative, inventive men who took on the challenge of flight and in perfect synchronicity produced a synthesis of mechanical engineering, physics, aeronautical restructuring, testing, innovating, and inventing—all with equal input and equal epiphanies—and at the other end a plane emerged that was able to ascend to the sky. Manned flight was solved down in the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk.
As a writer, I appreciate a good story, and the mythology generated by this story is massive. The kids’ books alone are a cottage industry. The two brothers in their collars and ties and their Ohio values, executing the best of Yankee inventiveness, perseverance, stick-to-itiveness, grit, and tenacity, with a touch of genius sprinkled liberally. It is an American story, a team story. A team of brothers who put their heads together. And what emerged was American values we can all recognize. The bishop father and supportive sister fill out the perfect ensemble cast.
A psychopath knocking out Wilbur's teeth and sending him into a three-year-long spiraling depression does not go along with this story. Orville as a myopic man who was mechanically inclined and who was inventive in his own right but did not have the vision for tackling the problem of flight does not help the story either. A man who did not fit into the world of business, in a bike shop, in a print shop, in college, even in high school is more problematic for the plot line. Two men who never had a sexual encounter with the opposite sex for most of their lives and lived with their sister and father their whole adult lives—that doesn't fit either. None of this would have made it past the Orville Board of Censorship that Fred Kelly had to deal with on every page. Certainly, the real story of Mabel Beck and Orville would have been a deal killer.
The malcontent, the misanthrope, the silent, brooding genius who found a kindred spirt in a brilliant engineer named Octave Chanute and began to crack the science of aeronautics in long polemics going over the known data and then questioning everything also would not give us the same warm fuzzies as the image of the jolly brothers building planes in the bike shop with knowledge pulled out of thin air. The Octave Chanute letters that are in the papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright offered the homeschooling that Wilbur never had. It is the online crash course of 1900 that began with the literature received from the Smithsonian (which would provide great irony later on).
The lone wolf trying to decipher what no one else could is a modern story we are familiar with—whether it be Edison, Bell, Ford, or Mozart. These are all men of genius who blazed new trails and were later recognized. Yes, there are epiphanic moments in teamwork, but someone must lead, someone must have an eye on the bit of stardust that falls down through the heavens on the cold, dark night but inspires and enlightens. Vision is singular, and Orville did not have that vision until his brother pulled him in; and, as late as 1902, he had not flown any of the planes, and he was never pulled into the Wilbur/Chanute seminars.
It was no accident that Wilbur was the one who published his findings at Kitty Hawk and spoke to the engineers in Chicago. He did this twice. One would think the second go-round would belong to Orville, if we are to go with the Fred Kelly version of events. That would be only fair. But it was Wilbur who presented, Wilbur who was questioned, and Wilbur who was invited by Octave Chanute to give the presentation in the first place.
Orville was perfectly satisfied operating in the bicycle business. He would have been fine with never going to Kitty Hawk to fly a contraption like a kite and then watch his brother fly above him. In fact, he did not go the very first time—Wilbur did. Wilbur went down there alone; and he went alone to find out whether it would be suitable to fly. Wilbur flew the glider in Dayton, alone, before he left. It was never Orville's quest; it was Wilbur's quest to fly, and this makes all the difference. The difference between them was as much as between the pilot and the mechanic. Orville would not fly a glider until 1902; and, even then, it was infrequently, with several flights resulting in crashes and then eventually one fatality in 1906. Wilbur never had a serious crash.
The Wright family culture, as dictated by Bishop Wright, makes this all a blasphemy. He saw the world as evil and full of temptation. He pointed to his older sons as evidence of the difficulty and the duplicity of the world. He made sure Orville, Wilbur, and Katherine would be there when he returned from his travels. There must be a united front against the world, and this demanded plurality, lest one of the corrupted sneaks in. He would slip up and let his true feelings be known, such as when he pointed out the cruelty that Orville and Katherine were expendable but that Wilbur had the gift and he must take no risks.
The gift was simply vision. Somewhere in the three years of reading and nursing his mother as she slowly died, he had a vison that something else lay out there for him. Not business. Not college. Not art. But a unique destiny suited for him—and that dictated his drive and his unfailing focus. He would solve flight. No one else would do so. He would give his brother credit with his clumsy “we” that quickly began to appear in his writings after 1901, but he also would reveal what he really thought when Orville could not hit the mark and justify his part of that plurality.
Orville had two serious crashes: in one, he escaped injury; but in the other, he did not, and it resulted in a fatality. The first was at Kitty Hawk, and the second was in Washington. On both occasions, Wilbur conceded that it was not a mechanical problem but a fault of the operator. On the second serious crash, Wilbur even went so far to say that if he had flown with the army captain instead, the crash would not have occurred. We see his frustration, at times, with having to share his determined quest with his brother. On something like shipping the Flyer, he was so hard on his brother that their sister had to ask him to back off.
None of this would play well in the Kelly version of events that set the tone for all historians to follow. It is amazing how this narrative has survived intact, right up to the latest biographies. The truth is that Wilbur was the primary inventor and pilot. His brother assisted him in many steps, but it was Wilbur who set up the wind-tunnel tables, and it was Wilbur who gave this groundbreaking data to Chanute to catalog. It was Wilbur who developed the concept of wing warping and then showed it to his brother, which led to modern ailerons on planes. It was Wilbur who would finally break with his mentor, Octave Chanute.
The discrepancy between the two brothers was so clear that Kelly needed something to put Orville front and center in the “invention process.” The winged rudder was the perfect story to make him part of the holy creative process of the plane. The suspicion that Orville might have been just a glorified mechanic assisting his older, smarter, genius brother has haunted the history of the Wright brothers and nibbled at the edges of the kids’ books, biographies, movies, CDs, stories, and even Wikipedia. There is something there that seeps out between the Kelly story of the midnight, coffee-induced epiphany and the fact that Orville was on the plane when John Daniels snapped the picture.
The picture would cement into history the notion of the brothers being equal and inviolate. Clearly, there is Orville on the plane. There is Wilbur running beside and behind it. Need we say more? Orville and Wilbur together solved the problem of flight at Kitty Hawk, and here is proof of that plurality. But the visionary is really the man on the right, not the man on the plane. We know that Orville will hit the sand after maybe twelve seconds in the air. The real flight that day occurred after the picture was taken—when Wilbur managed to fly for almost a minute. That was the first controlled flight of a man in an airplane, and it was done by the man who invented the airplane.
You cannot have coauthors. Not really. Someone is always leading the way, and someone is always following. Someone has the whole thing in his or her head, and someone else has a part. If the author who is following drops off, then another author will be hired. The visionary alone is the indispensable one who must have the entire world in his or her head. If that person quits, then the story, the novel, the film, the inventing of an airplane would truly end right there. This is because the coauthor or mechanic cannot see the next step in the same way that the luminary can. That other person simply doesn't have the vision.
If Orville had gone back to the bicycle business, could he have been replaced? Yes. If Wilbur had been killed or had died of natural causes or had been drafted, could he have been replaced? Would the work go forward on solving human flight without Wilbur? No. There were no other Wilbur Wrights in the world. There were men like Lilienthal, Langley, Chanute, even Curtiss, who had the parts of the problem solved but never the whole. Wilbur Wright not only saw the problem of flight in a unique way, but also solved it intuitively, much like the writer who must finish a very long book and knows where it will end up even as he sets his pen on the first page.
This is genius. This is the flash of insight, which is never taught and never known, but is recognized years later. We can call it destiny, brilliance, genius, or whatever term we can ascribe to what we don't understand. It is the musician who writes the incredible hit, the writer who formulates the bestseller, or the poet who wows the world with three lines. How do they do it? The best we can surmise is that it is something from the heavens.
And then of course the great tragedy occurs. The genius is struck down. Wilbur died in 1912, and that left Orville and the vacuum of history. There was no one else to interpret what really happened at Kitty Hawk before, during, and after. There was only Orville Wright and his friend Fred C. Kelly, and there are the intervening years between the first flight and the first biography describing what happened. There was the long-standing fight with the Smithsonian and the counterclaims that try to take away the very status and credit for the invention of the airplane. But the inventor had died, and that left the brother in the driver's seat.
For thirty-six years, he alone was the voice of the Wright brothers; and the story that he told needed to be airtight because the sharks were circling. As far as Orville knew, Milton was right. The world out there was dangerous and duplicitous, and the Wrights must circle the wagons. Men like Curtiss, Zahm, Walcott, and Langley were the enemy. And so the story was written during this thirty-six-year siege. The war against the Wright brothers brings about the desperate step of taking the very evidence of that flight and holding it hostage unless the story is corrected. That story was being dictated by Orville Wright to Fred Kelly, and it would be an undisputed story of two brothers equally talented, equally driven, and equally qualified to solve the problem of flight. It is telling that in the heat of the battle with the Smithsonian, the history of the Wright brothers, the bible of the Wright brothers, was being formulated as if to button up all loose ends. It would be the undisputed truth of the Wright mythology. And it is fitting that that bible would end the decades-long feud.
When all was said and done, the 1903 Flyer ended up in the Smithsonian and the story of the Wright brothers was published by Kelly. And there it has remained, unquestioned, like a bible that historians consult, then maybe write a few variations on, but basically retell the same story. It was a story told by one man to another, and it was written during a time of immense stress—a time in which truth was under assault by an array of people and institutions. Orville would risk nothing to chance and, like the situation where the bombs rained down on the Flyer during the blitz of London, the truth would be buried deep underground.
The Wright brothers were two fascinating, talented men. They did have an idiosyncratic family whose lifestyle raised more questions than it provided answers. They did have a hostile view of the outside world. They were both mechanically inclined to a very high degree. They both were remarkably inventive, determined, and resourceful. But Orville Wright operated on a linear plane, whereas Wilbur saw beyond it to the existential moment he discovered while in a dark journey that was brought on by a freak accident and the death of his mother. Somewhere along the way, he had a vision that wedded him to solving the problem of manned flight. His brother would come along for the ride, quite literally, on December 17, 1903, and eventually that brother would write their history.
The Wright brothers were similar in many respects, but it is the difference between the pilot and the mechanic, the visionary and the assistant, the poet and the scribe, that sets them apart. And that is all the difference in the world.