The Wright Brothers’ Drive for the Sky

by David Andrews

Library of Congress

Wright gilder takes flight over Carolina dunes.

Big blows left the shore a litter of wrecks, bleached hulls a testament to the caprice of this sometimes sorcerous place. Then, as now, the Outer Banks were an open window on the sea’s malevolence. Yet this was where the man and his brother, aboard a frail craft of wood, muslin, and wire, came to test their mettle.

Wilbur Wright was transfixed as the bird hung nearly motionless on the headwind. The man could shutter the world with his uncanny focus. In a flash, he would glean a gem of insight for the next glider run.

In an age of machines, Will was their kin, honed efficiency his stock in trade. There is no evidence that he ever strolled the surf or stood in awe of azure skies. “The prettiest I have ever seen,” Orville said of the sunsets, with “deep blue clouds of various shapes fringed with gold,” yet Will was often lights out in his bed by that time, and likely up with the sun. Perhaps he was driven by a premonition of early death, haunted by a teenage injury and its emotional aftermath.

Next morning he put a formidable mind to work in the garb of the professional–coat, tie, and hat. Will was not the bootstraps-rustic, Capra-esque soundbite of today. He was a successful businessman, enough to spend summer and fall in pursuit of a dream. Later in life he played tete-a-tete with European royalty–perhaps the first international celebrity, his reversed cap a craze on the continent.

When he turned his inward outward (not often beyond his family), he could charm a tire off a rim. He regaled his nieces and nephews with a wry humor.

Neither brother married. Will, always shy with women, said he didn’t have time for a wife and an airplane. He lived at home, like Orv, seeing older brothers struggle through the economically troubled times.

He skipped the ceremonies at high school graduation, and college passed him by due to a chain of events. A hockey stick across the face–a seemingly minor sports injury–brought dental work, digestive problems, and heart palpitations. The event “drew a line across Will’s life,” says James Tobin, author of To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight, inducing the close-lipped smile of later renown. He stayed at home, assuming care of his tubercular mother and devouring the library his father, a bishop in the United Brethren Church, had built. “The Encyclopaedia Britannica and Chamber’s Cyclopedia were at his fingertips,” says Tom Crouch, author of The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright, “as were those classics of history and biography which the bishop cherished—Plutarch’s Lives, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Guizot on the history of France, Greene on the history of England, and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. There were sets of Hawthorne and Sir Walter Scott, and popular science alongside theological works.”

About younger brother Orville, his father said, “Enthusiasm always made him a leader among boys.” He had memory to spare. Orv amused officials in the second grade by racing through a reading passage with the book upside down. He had his own path through the puzzle.

Together the boys combusted, forging a mental space greater than the sum of their synapses, smithing ideas in the fire of discourse. It went beyond gray matter. Orville’s enthusiasm parried Wilbur’s doubt. Often Orville was the motor that made it go.

They were right brain and left brain, sculptors and statisticians.

Genius? Will had an answer in reply to a friend. “To me, it seems that a thousand other factors, each rather insignificant in itself, in the aggregate influence the event 10 times more than mere mental ability or inventiveness . . . If the wheels of time could be turned back . . . it is not at all probable that we would do again what we have done . . . It was due to a peculiar combination of circumstances which might never occur again.”