Neither in 1901, nor in the five years following, did you in any way intimate to us that our general system of lateral control had long been part of the [flying] art. . . . If the idea was really old in the art, it is somewhat remarkable that a system so important that individual ownership of it is considered to threaten strangulation of the art was not considered worth mentioning then, nor embodied in any machine built prior to ours.
Plainly wishing the dispute to be resolved, Wilbur closed on a warmer note. “If anything can be done to straighten matters out to the satisfaction of both you and us, we are not only willing but anxious to do our part. . . . We have no wish to quarrel with a man toward whom we ought to preserve a feeling for gratitude.”
When nearly three months passed with no response from Chanute, Wilbur wrote again to say, “My brother and I do not form many intimate friendships, and do not lightly give them up.
I believed that unless we could understand exactly how you felt, and you could understand how we felt, our friendship would tend to grow weaker instead of stronger. Through ignorance or thoughtlessness, each would be touching the other’s sore spots and causing unnecessary pain. We prize too highly the friendship which meant so much in the years of our early struggles to willingly see it worn away by uncorrected misunderstandings, which might be corrected by a frank discussion.
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.