Few days in history can rival Dec. 17, 1903, in terms of its profound effect on what came afterward.
It was that day, at Kitty Hawk, N.C., that Wilbur and Orville Wright, two young Ohioans, made the first successful human flight. The world was never the same again, as the millions of people who fly in aircraft today can attest.
How did they do it? It’s a better question than you might think. The Wright brothers, who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, grew up in a home without electricity or running water. Neither earned a high school diploma. And yet, as the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough shows in his new biography, “The Wright Brothers,” they were in some ways the ideal pursuers of the dream of flight.
Purposeful, driven, intellectually curious, indefatigable, unconcerned by setbacks and utterly fixed on their goal, the Wrights sacrificed everything — including whatever thoughts they might have had of wives and children, not to mention their own physical safety — to make the skies available to us.
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Printers Row Journal recently caught up with McCullough, 81— who won Pulitzers for his biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman, both of which were adapted as miniseries on HBO — for a telephone interview. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: How did you choose the Wright brothers as the topic of your new book?
A: As often happens in life, I started down one road and then found myself more interested in another one. I had been seriously considering extending the reach of my previous book — which was about the Americans in the 19th century who went to Paris to improve their knowledge and ability in letters or architecture or sculpture or literature — by carrying it on in the 20th century, but in a different way. It wouldn’t be about the Gertrude Stein/Hemingway crowd. But a great many other Americans were there, each for their own specific pursuit, whose time there had a great impact on them and subsequently on history. I began to assemble an interesting group, and among them were the Wright brothers. I was amazed because I never knew the Wright brothers had any experience in Europe, let alone experience that had such effect on the progress of their achievement. The more I read, the more I realized they were the true topic of my book.
Q: They were unusual, in some ways, and I guess we have to say they were unlikely candidates to pull off such a major achievement. They had little formal education, for example.
A: I think I had the impression of them that most Americans have: that they were a couple of small bicycle-shop craftsmen from Ohio who got tinkering and got lucky and succeeded in inventing the airplane. Now, all of that is to some degree true, but they were so much more than that. And their human story is so compelling that even if they hadn’t succeeded, I would have wanted to write the book about them. There is so much that is so reflective, so revealing, about the experience of America at that time, and in particular in that part of our country, the middle west. I see a lot of similarities between them and Harry Truman, in that they never finished high school, they had no money, they had the plainest and simplest origins. But they never quit. They never gave up, no matter how many bad turns life seemed to bring them to. And the courage, the sheer physical courage it took to do what they did, including the ever-present likelihood that they’d be killed. I think they’re a profoundly American story.
Q: How were the brothers similar, and how were they different?
A: Well, they were similar in that they had a joint purpose, and it wasn’t just a passing fancy. They meant business. They were serious. They were similar in that they were both thorough gentlemen. They were raised to be honest, to be hardworking, to be courteous, to be thoughtful of other people, to be helpful. They talked alike; their voices were almost identical. Their handwriting was very similar. They kept a joint bank account. They were together all the time, all day, every meal, lived in the same house, and so forth.
But they were quite different in that Wilbur, the older of the two, was really — without any question, in my mind — a genius. He was the older of the two by four years and was always looked up to as the boss, the big brother. While Orville was very clever and mechanically a genius, he didn’t have the far-ranging mind, the far-ranging interests, that Wilbur had. Nor had he the gift of speaking before the public or professional gatherings. Orville was intensely shy. He wanted to avoid the limelight if at all possible. Orville could also be quite moody and had what were known in the family as his “peculiar spells.” And he didn’t have the distinctive presence that Wilbur had. When Wilbur walked into a room, people knew right away there was somebody exceptional. The press in both France and the United States later wrote about this. Wilbur had a look in his eye, and a way of moving physically — striding fast and straightforward, using his arms when he was making a point. And he had a phenomenal memory — a memory for details, for books he’d read in high school, things like that.
Q: They were not remotely from a family with means.
A: That’s right. By our standards, they grew up with virtually no advantages whatever. They had no running water in their house, no electricity, no telephone. But it was a house full of books, and their father insisted that they read not only literature but read everything: history, natural history. And they didn’t bruise easily. Many people looked at them as a couple of crackpots — nuts — and that didn’t bother them. They were too focused on what they wanted to do. And, oh boy, could they work. People of that generation did work much harder than we realize, but these two men worked, I don’t know, 18 hours a day, every day. If it wasn’t at the shop, it was at home. And once they got going with their gliders, determined to solve this long-standing problem of history, they did it, without any help. They had no financial assistance. They had no university standing by them to say they were important in the development of aviation. All they had were the fairly modest earnings from their bicycle shop.
Q: It’s difficult to understand how these two guys with such a modest background, economically and educationally, could figure out how to fly a plane.
A: When a reporter interviewed Orville later, the reporter said, “Many people take you to be a perfect example of Americans who grew up with no advantages but advanced far, pursuing their dreams.” And Orville got cross about that. He said, “No, you’re wrong. We grew up with the most important advantage anybody could have: We were encouraged to have intellectual curiosity.” And they were. Their father insisted on that.
Q: The brothers’ choice of Kitty Hawk, N.C., as the site of their historic flight is one of those historical details that stays with people. Why did the brothers choose Kitty Hawk?
A: They had to go where the wind was. They were in search of strong, constant winds, and they checked with the weather bureau and found out which parts of the country had that kind of wind. They also wanted some privacy; they didn’t want a lot of people watching what they were doing. And they wanted a place that would provide soft landings. You’d be landing on sand, not hard ground or rock. And Kitty Hawk offered all three: winds — far more wind than they bargained for, not to mention far more mosquitoes — isolation and soft landings.
Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned about the Wright brothers while researching the book?
A: How far-ranging their interests were. Wilbur’s knowledge of, and really, passion for, architecture. The hours he spent at the Louvre, looking at paintings, and reflecting on them, writing about them. That surprised me very much. I was also surprised, and pleasantly so, by the part played by their sister, Katharine. She’d make a wonderful character in a play. She was tiny but forceful and feisty, talkative and opinionated. She kept her brothers in line. And she was always there when they needed her, particularly Orville, after his terrible crash while demonstrating a plane for the Army at Fort Myer, Va.
Q: Both of the brothers were bachelors, which seems a bit odd.
A: Wilbur liked to say that he was too busy to get married, and Orville said he couldn’t get married until Wilbur did, because he was the older brother. They were kidding, to a degree, but they really had no time to do anything but what they’d set their purpose for. That’s an important thing about them. We don’t talk about purpose anymore, but they really had a purpose. Every day they got out of bed with something they wanted to do, had to do. And if they were denying themselves the pleasures of a family, well, they had plenty of nieces and nephews around the house. It just doesn’t seem to have been part of the lineup of what they wanted out of life. Had Wilbur lived beyond 1912, I’d say there was a good possibility that he might have gotten married. Orville might have too, but it didn’t work out that way.
Q: They became celebrities later in life. How did they handle that?
A: Not very well. They didn’t like the limelight and tried to avoid it. … They didn’t crave celebrity as we call it. And they did become the most famous two people on earth for a good long while. They were American heroes, if ever there were. But none of it ever went to their heads. A key part of their nature is the fact that they didn’t change. They stayed the same, and they kept at their work.
A perfect example of that was when Dayton put on a big two-day celebration for them. The whole city shut down to celebrate the Wright brothers, with all kinds of parades and speeches and the rest. The brothers took part in it as fellow citizens, but at every chance they had, they would slip away to get back to the bicycle shop, to get back to work. That’s where they were happiest. Even at Kitty Hawk, when the mosquitoes were horrible and the wind was threatening to rip apart everything they’d done, they agreed, looking back, that it was the happiest part of their life. It wasn’t so much achieving their unprecedented objective. It was the work, the process of making it happen. And when they put on their demonstration, in 1910, back in Dayton for all the town to come and watch, it was the first time they ever went up in the plane together. In effect they were saying, “We can now go up together, because we’ve done what we set out to do.” Before that, they would never go up together, because if one got killed, there would still be another one to carry on with the dream.
Few individuals have ever changed history so dramatically, so markedly. And as history goes, it was just the other day. Orville Wright was the first man to ever fly in a man-powered machine, in 1903. He died in 1948, when I was 15. I could have known him. It’s a blink of an eye as history goes, but the whole world has been changed by that.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Follow him on Twitter @KevinNance1 More Top Picks Best Cat Towers
“The Wright Brothers”
By David McCullough, Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $30