There is always a danger that a person of this disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life struggling for bare existence (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location), where if put on the right path with proper special equipment, he would advance far. Many men are better fitted for improving chances offered them than in turning up the chances themselves.
But if not a “first corner” to fall into for the rest of life, what was “the right path”? As it was he felt trapped.
Bishop Wright offered to help with the cost of a college course. “I do not think a commercial life will suit you well,” he wrote in agreement. Then sales at the Wright Cycle Company picked up again, to the point where they were selling about 150 bicycles a year, and Wilbur stayed with it.
In 1895, their third year in business, they moved to a corner building at 22 South Williams Street, with a showroom on the street level and space for a machine shop upstairs. There, on the second floor, the brothers began making their own model bicycles, available to order. The announcement of the new product read in part as follows:
It will have large tubing, high frame, tool steel bearings, needle wire spokes, narrow tread and every feature of an up-to-date bicycle. Its weight will be about 20 pounds. We are very certain that no wheel on the market will run easier or wear longer than this one, and we will guarantee it in the most unqualified manner.
It sold for $60 to $65 and was called the Van Cleve, in honor of their great-great-grandmother on their father’s side, who was the first white woman to settle in Dayton. With the Van Cleve in production, and available in all colors, a second, less-expensive model was introduced called the St. Clair, in tribute to the first governor of the old Northwest Territory, of which Ohio was part. Their income grew to the point where they were earning a handsome $2,000 to $3,000 per year.
“Van Cleves get there First,” proclaimed one of their advertisements. And in the Van Cleve catalogue, the brothers declared:
Through fair and liberal dealing we have built up a large and successful business, and we are proud to number among Van Cleve riders the best judges of bicycles and bicycle construction in the city. Without their assistance in spreading the fame and praise of the Van Cleve, we could not have hoped to have pressed it to its present high position in popular estimation. Through their testimonies the name Van Cleve has become the synonym of excellence in bicycle construction.
At home, the enjoyment of Lorin’s children coming in and out grew only greater for both Wilbur and Orville. Their niece Ivonette would say of Orville in particular that he never seemed to tire of playing with them, and that if he ran out of games, he would make candy for them. Wilbur, too, would amuse them in equally wholehearted fashion, though not for long. “If we happened to be sitting on his lap, he would straighten out his long legs and we would slide off. That was a signal to us to find something else to do.
When we were old enough to get toys, Uncle Orv and Uncle Will had a habit of playing with them until they were broken, then repair them so that they were better than when they were bought.
Perhaps it was because he was away so much of the time that Bishop Wright put such abiding emphasis on the importance of family life at 7 Hawthorn—“the home circle,” as he said—and why it played so large a part in all of their lives however far those lives reached.
CHAPTER TWO
The Dream Takes Hold
I wish to avail myself of all that is already known. . . .
WILBUR WRIGHT, IN A LETTER TO THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1899
I.
As Katharine Wright said of her father, the habit of worry was strong in him. For as long as she and her brothers could remember, he had warned of the dire threat of contaminated water, and articles in the papers confirmed time after time that every case of typhoid fever was an instance of water poisoning.
In the late summer of 1896, twenty-five-year-old Orville was struck by the dreaded typhoid. For days he lay in a delirium, close to death, his fever at 105 degrees. The family doctor, Levi Spitler, who had nursed Susan Wright through her final illness, said little could be done. Wilbur and Katharine took turns keeping watch at the bedside. Bishop Wright, then on the road, wrote at once on hearing the news, dreadfully worried about Orville, but also Katharine and Wilbur. “Put him in the best room for air and comfort. Sponge him off gently and quickly. . . . Let no one use the well water at the store henceforth. Boil the water you all drink.”
It was a month before Orville could sit up in bed, another two weeks before he could get out of bed, and during this time Wilbur had begun reading about the German glider enthusiast Otto Lilienthal who had recently been killed in an accident. Much that he read he read aloud to Orville.
A manufacturer of small steam engines and a mining engineer by training, Lilienthal had started gliding as early as 1869, and from the start he had been joined in his aviation experiments by a younger brother, which could only have given Wilbur and Orville a feeling of something in common.
He took his lessons from the birds, Lilienthal said, and he saw, as many “prominent investigators” had not, that the secret of “the art of flight” was to be found in the arched or vaulted wings of birds, by which they could ride the wind. He had no use for gas balloons as a means of flight, as they had nothing in common with the birds. “What we are seeking is the means of free motion in the air, in any direction.” And only by flying oneself could one achieve “proper insight” into all that was involved. To do this, one had to be on “intimate” terms with the wind.
Over the years Lilienthal had designed and built more than a dozen different gliders, his normal segel apparat (sailing machines). One he particularly favored had wings shaped like the “fly-fans” to be seen at the tables of restaurants and men’s clubs of the day, and a big vertical rudder shaped like a palm leaf. All but a few of these different models were monoplanes, the wings arched like a bird’s and made of white muslin tightly stretched over a frame of willow. As pilot, he would hang by his arms below the wings. The setting for Lilienthal’s flights, Wilbur learned, was a range of barren hills known as the Rhinow Mountains, a two-hour train ride north of Berlin.
A squarely built figure with red hair and a beard who dressed for his flights in knickers with heavily padded knees, Lilienthal would position himself on a steep slope, the wings held above his head. As one American eyewitness described the scene, he “stood like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol.” Then he would run down the slope and into the wind. Hanging on as the wind lifted him from the ground, he would swing his body and legs this way or that—as his means of balancing and steering—glide as far as possible and land on his feet.