[On May 20-21, 1932, Amelia Earhart became the second person, and the first woman, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic feat, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of aviation histories, leading up to a special weekend post on the myths and realities of Earhart!]
Three
lesser-known stories of the
brothers who helped change
transportation and the world.
1)
A Printing Press: In 1888, fifteen years before
their pioneering flight and when Orville was still just a junior in high
school, the brothers developed their first technological innovation, a printing
press that they built themselves. They used it not only to publish their
own newspapers in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio (first a weekly [West
Side News] and then briefly a daily [The
Evening Item]), but also produced publications for other friends and
locals. One of them was a high school classmate of Orville’s and a blossoming
young writer and poet, Paul
Laurence Dunbar; the brothers’ printed his newspaper the
Dayton Tattler for a time. Such personal and historical details not
only remind us that the Wright Brothers moved through many stages of invention
and profession before their aviation pinnacles, but also help situate them in
their settings, both of place and time.
2)
A Bicycle Shop: Like many talented inventors,
the Wright Brothers were never satisfied to stay in one stage or field for
long; just four years after they opened their press, they had moved on, opening
their bicycle repair and sales shop the Wright
Cycle Exchange in 1892. As detailed at wonderful length in Kate
Milford’s historical YA novel The
Boneshaker (which features a Wright Brothers bicycle in a prominent
role), bicycles had become something of a craze in this period, and the
brothers quickly realized that they could turn their technological prowess to
designing new and improved bikes. By 1896, the Wright
Cycle Company was producing its own brand of bikes, machines which would of
course also feature prominently in their later aeronautical efforts. But while
this business and pursuit offer a direct throughline toward the machine that
would propel the brothers into the air at Kitty Hawk, it also links them to a
transportation trend and history that were far more widespread and influential
throughout the 1890s and well into the early 1900s.
3)
A Museum Feud: The interesting and complex
histories didn’t stop with that 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, of course. One of
the most compelling was the brothers’ multi-decade
feud with the Smithsonian Institution, thanks to a rivalry with the
institution’s secretary Samuel
Langley over whose manned flying machine should be considered the first
successful model. The museum chose to display Langley’s
Aerodrome (which he had never gotten off the ground) much more prominently
than the Wright Brothers’ model, and the brothers (especially Orville, as Wilbur
died far too young in 1912) retaliated by lending their invention to the London
Science Museum in 1928. There it remained until Orville’s death in 1948,
when a long-negotiated
truce allowed the Smithsonian to purchase the flyer and return it to the
United States for the first time in decades. Among the many salient lessons
from this controversial history is a reminder that museums are living and
evolving spaces, reflecting the conflicts and struggles of their societies as
much as their ideals and innovations. It’s hard to imagine an American Air
& Space Museum without the Wright Brothers—but for a long time, thanks to
the tangled history of aviation, that was precisely the case.
Next history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other aviation histories or stories you’d share?
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