Lilienthal also had himself repeatedly photographed in action, something no gliding enthusiast had yet done. With advances in the technology of photography, the dry-plate camera had come into use. Reproduction of photographic half-tones had also been achieved, and thus unprecedented photographs of the daring “Flying Man” and his gliders appeared the world over. In the United States, his fame was greater than anywhere. A long article in the popular McClure’s Magazine, illustrated with seven photographs of Lilienthal in flight, reached the largest audience of all.
In 1894 Lilienthal had crashed and lived to tell the tale. On August 9, 1896, flying a favorite “No. 11” glider, he crashed again, falling from an altitude of fifty feet. He died of a broken spine in a Berlin hospital the following day at age forty-eight.
“It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird,” Lilienthal had written. “It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight.”
News of Lilienthal’s death, Wilbur later wrote, aroused in him as nothing had an interest that had remained passive from childhood. His reading on the flight of birds became intense. On the shelves of the family library was an English translation of a famous illustrated volume, Animal Mechanism, written by a French physician, Etienne-Jules Marey, more than thirty years before. Birds were also an interest of Bishop Wright, hence the book’s presence in the house, and Wilbur had already read it. Now he read it anew.
“Aerial locomotion has always excited the strongest curiosity among mankind,” the author said by way of introduction.
How frequently has the question been raised, whether man must always continue to envy the bird and the insect their wings; whether he, too, may not one day travel through the air, as he now sails across the ocean. Authorities in science have declared at different periods, as the result of lengthy calculations, that this is a chimerical dream, but how many intentions have we seen realized which have been pronounced impossible.
Marey’s serious, largely technical study led Wilbur to read more of the kind, including such treatises as J. Bell Pettigrew’s Animal Locomotion; or Walking, Swimming, and Flying, with a Dissertation on Aeronautics. For most readers the title alone would have been too daunting. For Wilbur the book was exactly what was needed.
Those authors who regard artificial flight as impracticable [wrote Pettigrew] sagely remark that the land supports the quadruped and the water the fish. This is quite true, but it is equally true that the air supports the bird, and that the evolutions of the bird on the wing are quite as safe and infinitely more rapid and beautiful than the movements of either the quadruped on the land or the fish in the water.
But, the book stressed, “the way of ‘an eagle in the air’ must of necessity remain a mystery,” until the structure and uses of wings were understood.
Of all animal movements, flight is indisputably the finest. . . . The fact that a creature as heavy, bulk for bulk, as many solid substances, can by the unaided movements of its wings urge itself through the air with a speed little short of a cannonball, fills the mind with wonder.
Wilbur was to draw upon and quote Pettigrew for years. Like the inspiring lectures of a great professor, the book had opened his eyes and started him thinking in ways he never had.
Once fully recovered from his illness, Orville proceeded with the same reading list. They “read up on aeronautics as a physician would read his books,” Bishop Wright would attest proudly.
Work at the bicycle shop went on with business better than ever. In 1897 the brothers moved the enterprise to a still larger and final location at 1127 West Third, which, like their previous business locations was only a few blocks from home. The building was a two-story, red-brick duplex, with the adjoining half occupied by Fetters & Shank, Undertakers and Embalmers. After considerable remodeling, the Wright Cycle Company had a front showroom, backed by a small office, and a machine shop to the rear with ample space for a drill press, metal lathe, and band saw, all powered by a gas engine, with room, too, for a workbench. Upstairs there was still more workspace.
Less than a year later, in the spring of 1898, Dayton suffered the worst flood in forty years. On the north side of town, two thousand people had to abandon their homes. For days it looked as if the West End, too, would be inundated. “We had a very narrow escape,” Orville reported to his father. “By putting 500 men at work with teams they succeeded in building the levee high enough to keep the water out.” Had the river risen another four inches, both 7 Hawthorn and the new shop would have been under three or four feet of water.
Years later, a hardware dealer in the neighborhood, Frank Hamberger, recalled how, at the time of the flood, he had been struggling to get started in his new business. Much of his stock consisted of nails stored in great quantity in the cellar and would have been ruined had the high water struck. When the Wright brothers heard of his troubles, he said, they came immediately, “pulled off their coats,” and helped carry the kegs of nails out of the cellar, “without seeking or accepting remuneration.”
Meantime, the automobile had made its appearance in the streets of Dayton in the form of a noisy homemade machine built by a friend of the Wrights named Cord Ruse, who occasionally helped out at the shop and with whom they enjoyed talking about all manner of mechanical problems and solutions. Orville was particularly interested in Ruse’s automobile and thought perhaps he and Wilbur should build one of their own.
For Wilbur the idea had no appeal. He could not imagine, he said, how any contrivance that made such a racket and had so many things constantly going wrong with it could ever have a future. His mind was elsewhere.
II.
On Tuesday, May 30, 1899—Decoration Day, as it was then known—the weather in Dayton was unseasonably cool, the sky overcast, the Wright house uncommonly quiet. Wilbur was home alone. The Bishop and Katharine had gone to Woodland Cemetery to plant flowers at Susan Wright’s grave. Orville was off somewhere else apparently.
Wilbur seated himself at Katharine’s small, slant-top desk in the front parlor to write what would be one of the most important letters of his life. Indeed, given all it set in motion, it was one of the most important letters in history. Addressed to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, it filled not quite two sheets of the Wright Cycle Company’s pale blue stationery, all set down in Wilbur’s notably clear hand.
“I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes after the style of Cayley’s and Pénaud’s machines,” he began. (Sir George Cayley, a brilliant English baronet and aeronautical pioneer, had also devised a toy helicopter very like the one by Alphonse Pénaud given to the brothers by Bishop Wright.) “My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable. . . .