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Authors: Seth Shulman
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incorporated it in their machine.
In biting letters early in 1910, Chanute was more pointed still. Even if they won in court, Chanute said, the strategy was a mistake. “I am afraid, my friend,” Chanute wrote to Wilbur, “that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth.” The breach in their relationship would never be mended. In November of that year, at age seventy-eight, Chanute died unreconciled with the Wrights.
Orville’s intransigence would become increasingly pronounced over the course of his life. The breach with Chanute would later be repeated in Orville’s closest relationship of all—in a rift with his older sister Katharine. Throughout his life, Katharine had been a surrogate mother to Orville; their own mother had died when Orville was still a boy. Katharine had nurtured Wilbur and Orville’s experiments at Kitty Hawk and helped in every facet of their work. She and Orville shared a house for the majority of their lives. But in 1926, at age fifty-two, Katharine fell in love and married a friend from her student days at Oberlin College, who had become an editor of a Kansas City newspaper. Feeling deserted and betrayed, Orville never forgave his sister for leaving him. After her marriage, he barely spoke to her again before she died just three years later in 1929.
In their dealings with others, even those closest to them, the Wright brothers—and Orville especially—could never be called magnanimous or generous of spirit. But, as the biblical saw goes, you reap what you sow. Orville’s lengthy list of perceived wrongs and injustices painted him as a truly tragic figure toward the end of his life. In a detailed profile in 1930, a reporter from the New Yorker depicts him as “a gray man now, dressed in gray clothes. Not only have his hair and his moustache taken on that tone, but his curiously flat face…. [a] man whose misery at meeting you is obviously so keen that, in common decency you leave as soon as you can.”
Personal animosities aside, the legal battle Orville Wright waged to uphold his exclusive control over the airplane in its first decade would also take on a life of its own. As Fred Howard, one of the Wrights’ biographers, put it many years later, the bitter legal battle between Curtiss and the Wrights gathered size and momentum “like a large snowball rolled down a snowy hillside, leaving exposed in its wake…a sordid trail of hatred, invective, and lies that muddy the pages of aeronautical history to this day.”
Ultimately, the case would cripple the development of the youthful aviation industry, especially in the United States. The effects are obvious in retrospect. The field was torn into rival factions. Experimentation was discouraged; investment tied up and, most notably, as the Wrights waged a total of nearly three dozen lawsuits, the legal wrangling siphoned energy away from building airplanes and tangled the field in knots of accusations and uncertainty. Many of these effects were felt at the time. As an editorial in the Boston Transcript newspaper put it after Orville Wright’s assertion of “absolute control” over the industry: “The effect of the Wright decree will beyond question numb what little life remains today in aviation in America.”
Aviators, in particular, resented the bitter and litigious climate that had engulfed their fabulous new flying machines. Charlie Hamilton, a student of Curtiss’s who would earn a place in the history books for his flights of unprecedented duration, quipped that the field had added a new prerequisite. As he put it, “A man has to have ten years in law school before he has a chance of becoming an aviator.”
Consequently, by 1914, anti-Wright sentiment ran high—not only in Hammondsport. Curtiss’s workers, like most aviators around the world at the time, resented the legal action the Wrights had instigated and saw Orville as a spoiler. Even Aeronautics, one of the most widely read
In biting letters early in 1910, Chanute was more pointed still. Even if they won in court, Chanute said, the strategy was a mistake. “I am afraid, my friend,” Chanute wrote to Wilbur, “that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth.” The breach in their relationship would never be mended. In November of that year, at age seventy-eight, Chanute died unreconciled with the Wrights.
Orville’s intransigence would become increasingly pronounced over the course of his life. The breach with Chanute would later be repeated in Orville’s closest relationship of all—in a rift with his older sister Katharine. Throughout his life, Katharine had been a surrogate mother to Orville; their own mother had died when Orville was still a boy. Katharine had nurtured Wilbur and Orville’s experiments at Kitty Hawk and helped in every facet of their work. She and Orville shared a house for the majority of their lives. But in 1926, at age fifty-two, Katharine fell in love and married a friend from her student days at Oberlin College, who had become an editor of a Kansas City newspaper. Feeling deserted and betrayed, Orville never forgave his sister for leaving him. After her marriage, he barely spoke to her again before she died just three years later in 1929.
In their dealings with others, even those closest to them, the Wright brothers—and Orville especially—could never be called magnanimous or generous of spirit. But, as the biblical saw goes, you reap what you sow. Orville’s lengthy list of perceived wrongs and injustices painted him as a truly tragic figure toward the end of his life. In a detailed profile in 1930, a reporter from the New Yorker depicts him as “a gray man now, dressed in gray clothes. Not only have his hair and his moustache taken on that tone, but his curiously flat face…. [a] man whose misery at meeting you is obviously so keen that, in common decency you leave as soon as you can.”
Personal animosities aside, the legal battle Orville Wright waged to uphold his exclusive control over the airplane in its first decade would also take on a life of its own. As Fred Howard, one of the Wrights’ biographers, put it many years later, the bitter legal battle between Curtiss and the Wrights gathered size and momentum “like a large snowball rolled down a snowy hillside, leaving exposed in its wake…a sordid trail of hatred, invective, and lies that muddy the pages of aeronautical history to this day.”
Ultimately, the case would cripple the development of the youthful aviation industry, especially in the United States. The effects are obvious in retrospect. The field was torn into rival factions. Experimentation was discouraged; investment tied up and, most notably, as the Wrights waged a total of nearly three dozen lawsuits, the legal wrangling siphoned energy away from building airplanes and tangled the field in knots of accusations and uncertainty. Many of these effects were felt at the time. As an editorial in the Boston Transcript newspaper put it after Orville Wright’s assertion of “absolute control” over the industry: “The effect of the Wright decree will beyond question numb what little life remains today in aviation in America.”
Aviators, in particular, resented the bitter and litigious climate that had engulfed their fabulous new flying machines. Charlie Hamilton, a student of Curtiss’s who would earn a place in the history books for his flights of unprecedented duration, quipped that the field had added a new prerequisite. As he put it, “A man has to have ten years in law school before he has a chance of becoming an aviator.”
Consequently, by 1914, anti-Wright sentiment ran high—not only in Hammondsport. Curtiss’s workers, like most aviators around the world at the time, resented the legal action the Wrights had instigated and saw Orville as a spoiler. Even Aeronautics, one of the most widely read
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