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. . . .
I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.
Lest there be any doubts about him or the seriousness of his intentions, he added: “I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.”