The Wright Way

Two Brothers

When Wilbur Wright was about 21, his brother Lorin, who had gone off to Kansas to find his fortune, wrote a letter home. He worried that Wilbur was aimless and would never amount to anything much. A few years later, Wilbur himself would complain that although he had built a successful bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio, in partnership with his brother Orville, his success was merely modest. He, too, worried that he would never amount to anything much.

Born in 1867, Wilbur did not seriously begin to pursue his interest in aeronautics until 1899, when he happened to read a book on birds. He sent off to the Smithsonian Institution for a list of recommended readings about man’s attempts at flight, and managed to get his brother Orville interested in the then-outlandish idea that men could indeed fly. They had ample reason to doubt it. Some of the most prominent scientists of the era had declared heavier-than-air flying machines impossible. All previous attempts by well-capitalized, well-educated and much-celebrated aviation pioneers had failed. Orville and Wilbur Wright were bike shop partners, sons of a Methodist minister; they began without much capital, without...