This time Chanute answered in a matter of days to say Wilbur’s letter had been gratifying, that he had been in bad health, and was about to sail for Europe. “I hope, upon my return from Europe, that we will be able to resume our former relations.”
Except for one week in February, it had been an unusually mild winter in Dayton. On February 16, as Bishop Wright recorded in his diary, more than a foot of snow fell. And it snowed “very much” again on February 18. But “considerable thawing” followed the day after, and he spent time breaking icicles off the roof. But with the first week of March the snow was “passing away.” One “bright, mild day” followed after another. His diary entries recorded: “Beautiful weather,” “Fine weather,” “Spring weather,” “most beautiful weather,” on into April.
Dayton’s West Side, Hawthorn Street, and Wright homestead looked as they had looked so often before in springtime. Gone were the homecoming flags and bunting and Japanese lanterns of the previous fall. All was as before. The West Third Street shop and the outlook from the interurban trolley on the ride out to Simms Station and Huffman Prairie were as ever.
So, too, were the Wright brothers. For all they had seen and done, the unprecedented glory bestowed on them, it had by all signs neither changed them nor turned their heads in the least. There was no boasting, no preening, no getting too big for their britches, as said, and it was this, almost as much as their phenomenal achievements, that was so greatly admired. As one writer on the scene put it, “They are the imperturbable ‘men from home,’ as always.” Katharine as well, for all her travels and the attention she had received, seemed no different than always.
Pau was a mighty interesting place—Miss Wright stoutly insists on that, too, in spite of her brother Wilbur’s dry smile; and there was pretty country in Germany, yes he will admit that, but if you want to see pretty country, you don’t have to go any farther then their own field at Simms’s. Ohio is plenty good enough for him. And Orville agrees, mildly suggesting, however, that you really can’t see it at its best till you get up about a thousand feet.
If the brothers might have had any cause for concern or annoyance, it would have been the lawsuit against the Curtiss Company over their patents. But they were confident in their case, for which there was already strong support in the press and in the country. As said in the New York Times, it was “a highly significant fact that, until the Wrights succeeded, all attempts at flight with heavier-than-air machines were dismal failures, but since they showed that the thing could be done everybody seems able to do it.”
Nor had the argument that patents by the Wrights would retard the progress of aeronautics made much headway. “The insistence of Professor Bell upon his rights did not retard the growth in the use of the telephone,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “Thomas Edison’s numerous suits for protection of his inventions have not kept any of them out of the market.” And as both Wilbur and Orville knew better than anyone, if ever the development of an idea had been thoroughly documented with written records and photographs nearly every step of the way, it was theirs.
Wednesday, May 25, 1910, was a particularly “nice day” in Dayton, noted Bishop Wright in his diary. It was also to be a very big day for the Wright family.
The brothers had invited the Aeroplane Club of Dayton, as well as friends, neighbors, anyone interested, to come to Huffman Prairie to see Orville fly, and the crowd that came numbered two or three thousand. The interurban was jammed. Automobiles lined the roadway by the field where ice cream and sandwich vendors had set up for business.
As later reported, Orville performed with his machine in such manner as to keep the spectators on tiptoe the whole time. “One minute he would be grazing the ground and the next shooting up in the air like an arrow.” He did figure eights, twists and turns all in the most “remarkable manner.” Most astonishing of all, he flew to an unbelievable height of 2,720 feet. And all the Wrights—the Bishop, Wilbur, Katharine, Reuchlin, Lorin and his wife and children—were on hand to see such proof of the genius of the brothers’ achievements performed there on home ground before a home crowd.
In all the years they had been working together Wilbur and Orville had never once flown together, so if something were to go wrong and one of them should be killed, the other would live to carry on with the work. But on this day at Huffman Prairie, where they had developed the first practical flying machine ever, the two of them, seated side by side, took off into the air with Orville at the controls.
To many then and later, it seemed their way of saying they had accomplished all they had set out to do and so at last saw no reason to postpone any longer enjoying together the thrill of flight.
Of the immediate family of 7 Hawthorn Street, only Bishop Wright had yet to fly. Nor had anyone of his age ever flown anywhere on earth. He had been with the brothers from the start, helping in every way he could, never losing faith in them or their aspirations. Now, at eighty-two, with the crowd cheering, he walked out to the starting point, where Orville, without hesitation, asked him to climb aboard.
They took off, soaring over Huffman Prairie at about 350 feet for a good six minutes, during which the Bishop’s only words were, “Higher, Orville, higher!”
EPILOGUE
Except for one brief training flight he gave a German pilot in Berlin in June of 1911, Wilbur Wright was not to fly ever again, so taken up was he with business matters and acrimonious lawsuits. The Wright Company, from the start, demanded a great deal of time and attention. But it was the interminable patent infringement suits that put the most strain on both brothers. “When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments,” Wilbur wrote to a friend in France, “we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.”
Of far the greatest importance to both—more than the money at stake—was to secure just and enduring credit for having invented the airplane. It was their reputation at stake and that mattered most. Their pride of achievement, quite understandably, was great. Eventually nine suits were brought by them, three brought against them. Over time they won every case in the American courts.
Octave Chanute, who had not returned from his trip to Europe until October of 1910, died at his home on November 23, at age seventy-eight, before he and Wilbur had had an opportunity to see one another again. On hearing the news, Wilbur boarded a train to Chicago to attend the funeral and later wrote a long tribute to Chanute published in Aeronautics, leaving no doubt of how he felt.