A year later, the brothers changed the name of their paper to The Evening Item, and the year following the Item ceased and they concentrated on making money as job printers.
The printing business had been Orville’s idea from the start, and he enjoyed it most, working as hard as he could. But he seems to have found Wilbur’s performance lacking. “We’ve been so busy for the past few weeks that we’ve had very little time to write,” Orville reported to their father in the fall of 1892. “I’ve been making $2.00 to $3.25 a day in the office, but I have to divide it with Will so that when the week is over I don’t have much left. Will’s working on the press, at least he says he is, but I can see little signs of it from the appearance of things.” At home, however, he reassured the Bishop, they were “getting along real well.”
With Katharine away at college by this time, they had no choice but to get by domestically as best they could and in this they succeeded in good, even high spirits, to judge by a letter from Wilbur to Katharine.
We have been living fine since you left. Orville cooks one week and I cook the next. Orville’s week we have bread and butter and meat and gravy and coffee three times a day. My week I give him more variety. You see that by the end of his week there is a big lot of cold meat stored up, so the first half of my week we have bread and butter and “hash” and coffee, and the last half we have bread and butter and eggs and sweet potatoes and coffee. We don’t fuss a bit about whose week it is to cook. Perhaps the reason is evident. If Mrs. Jack Sprat had undertaken to cook all fat, I guess Jack wouldn’t have kicked on cooking every other week either.
About this time, too, they decided to proceed with major changes in the house, building the spacious wraparound porch. They installed new larger windows downstairs, shutters for the windows upstairs, doing all of it themselves.
Importantly, like much of the country, they had also taken up bicycling, and as Wilbur reported, they had lately headed off on a “run” to the south, down the Cincinnati Pike, stopping at the County Fair Grounds to pump around the track several times. From there they continued on to Miamisburg up and over numerous steep hills to see the famous prehistoric Adena Miamisburg Mound, largest of Ohio’s famous conical-shaped reminders of a vanished Native American civilization dating back more than two thousand years. In all they covered thirty-one miles.
Bicycles had become the sensation of the time, a craze everywhere. (These were no longer the “high wheelers” of the 1870s and ’80s, but the so-called “safety bicycles,” with two wheels the same size.) The bicycle was proclaimed a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality, indeed one’s whole outlook on life. Doctors enthusiastically approved. One Philadelphia physician, writing in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, concluded from his observations that “for physical exercise for both men and women, the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century.”
Voices were raised in protest. Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.”
Such concerns had little effect. Everybody was riding bicycles, men, women, all ages and from all walks of life. Bicycling clubs sprouted on college campuses and in countless cities and towns, including Dayton. At Oberlin College, Katharine and a group of her fellow co-eds would pose for a memorable photograph with their new bicycles. Each looked highly pleased, but Katharine beamed with the biggest smile.
In the spring of 1893 Wilbur and Orville opened their own small bicycle business, the Wright Cycle Exchange, selling and repairing bicycles only a short walk from the house at 1005 West Third Street. In no time, such was business, they moved to larger quarters down the street to Number 1034 and renamed the enterprise the Wright Cycle Company.
Of the two brothers, Orville loved bicycles the most. As an admirer who knew him in later years would say, “Bring up the subject of the shapes of handlebars or types of pedals on early ‘safety bicycles’ and his whole face lights up.”
Ever enterprising, incapable of remaining idle, the brothers now turned their off-hours to redoing the interior of 7 Hawthorn Street. They built a new gas fireplace and mantelpiece for the sitting room, redesigned and rebuilt the stairway, refinished all the trim, dressed up rooms with bright new wallpaper, ceilings included, laid new carpets, and with Katharine helping whenever she was home from college. Wilbur’s particularly distinctive contribution was the decorative carving on a new cherry newel post at the foot of the stairs.
The work was just about finished in time for the arrival of spring in 1894. On Saturday, March 31, Bishop Wright recorded in his diary:
Cloudy day, but moderate. At home. Orville and C[K]atharine arrange the house. First time for months, we had a room to sit in, all being torn up.
Business remained good, but with the opening of more bicycle shops in town, competition kept growing. When sales grew slack, Wilbur turned conspicuously restless, uncertain of what to make of his life. He had long thought he would like to be a teacher, “an honorable pursuit,” but that required a college education. He had no knack for business, he decided. He felt ill suited for it and, as he explained to his father, was now weighing the “advisability” of taking a college course.
I do not think I am specially fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had proper personal and business influences to assist me. I might make a living, but I doubt whether I would ever do much more than this. Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would [be] better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business.
In another letter, this to brother Lorin, Wilbur had still more to say. He was one who not only devoted much of his time to reading, but to thinking, and he had given a great deal of thought to the subject of business and reached a number of his own conclusions.
In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds [he wrote]. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has. No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition, so long as it is not carried to excess, for such men make the world and its affairs move. . . . I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen. We have all done reasonably well, better in fact than the average man perhaps, but not one of us has as yet made particular use of the talent in which he excels other men. That is why our success has been only moderate. We ought not to have been businessmen. . . .