Orville had hoped to fly for as long as he lived, but had to give it up in 1918 at age forty-six, due to still lingering pains and stiffness caused by the crash at Fort Myer nearly ten years before. By 1918 he had sold the Wright Company and established his own Wright Aeronautical Laboratory in a plain, one-story brick building downtown, where he intended to concentrate his energies on scientific research.
The financial rewards for their efforts and accomplishments had been considerable for the Wright brothers, though not as excessive as many imagined. In his will, Wilbur had left $50,000 each to brothers Reuchlin and Lorin, and to Katharine. The rest of his estate, an estimated $126,000, went to Orville. With the success of the Wright Company and its sale, Orville prospered far more. His total wealth at the time of his death was $1,067,105, or in present-day dollars $10,300,000. Though a fortune then, it hardly compared to that of any number of multimillionaires of the time.
If money had been his and Wilbur’s main objective, Orville insisted, they would have tried something in which the chances were brighter. He thought it fair to say he was well-to-do, rather than wealthy, and loved to quote his father: “All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden to others.”
In the years following Wilbur’s death, Orville had to face alone the burdens and tedium of continuing lawsuits. Further, he was outraged by an effort of the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Charles D. Walcott, with the help of Glenn Curtiss, to rehabilitate the reputation of Samuel P. Langley and in so doing discredit the Wrights.
Making the case that Langley’s failure had been the fault of the launching device for his aerodrome, not the machine itself, the aerodrome was taken out of storage to be tested again. But as was not disclosed, Curtiss oversaw major modifications of the aerodrome, so that when tested once more in 1914 it performed with reasonable success and the Smithsonian endorsed a statement saying, “Professor Samuel P. Langley had actually designed and built the first man-carrying flying machine capable of sustained flight.”
Before the aerodrome was sent back to the Smithsonian to be placed on exhibit, Walcott ordered that it be returned in its original 1903 condition.
Orville’s fury on learning of what had been done was momentous and altogether justified. Earlier, when he and Wilbur had offered their 1903 Flyer to the Smithsonian, they had been turned down by Walcott. In 1928, Orville sent the 1903 Flyer to England on loan to the Science Museum in London. Only then did the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian at last pass a resolution declaring “to the Wrights belongs the credit of making the first successful flight with a power-propelled heavier-than-air machine carrying a man.” But it would be another twenty years before the Wrights’ 1903 Flyer was returned from London and presented to the Smithsonian for display, and by then Orville was no longer living.
Of further aggravation were stories of others who had supposedly achieved flight before the Wrights, the most annoying being that of a German American named Gustave Whitehead, who was said to have flown a plane of his own creation in Connecticut in 1901 and 1902. The story was entirely without evidence and wholly untrue, but kept drawing attention as the years passed to the point where Orville finally felt obliged to denounce it himself. In an article titled, “The Mythical Whitehead Flight,” published in U.S. Air Services in 1945, he made plain that Whitehead was a man of delusions. Strangely, the story still draws attention, despite the fact that there is still no proof.
Advances in aviation all the while had been accelerating faster than Orville or anyone of his generation had thought possible, and starting with World War I to a form of weaponry like nothing before in human experience.
In 1927 young Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to land in Paris, a feat once thought impossible by the Wrights. On his return to America, Lindbergh made a point of coming to Dayton to pay his respects to Orville at Hawthorn Hill, an event that caused excitement in Dayton of a kind not seen since the brothers had made their celebrated return from Europe eighteen years before.
Orville lived to see, too, the horrific death and destruction wrought by the giant bombers of World War II and in several interviews tried as best he could to speak both for himself and for Wilbur.
We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . . . No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses.