In December came another voice of scientific authority denouncing, as Simon Newcomb had, the dream of flight as a total sham, the article appearing in the greatly respected North American Review, and written by no less than the chief engineer of the United States Navy, Rear Admiral George Melville. “A calm survey of certain natural phenomena leads the engineer to pronounce all confident prophecies for future success as wholly unwarranted, if not absurd. Where, even to this hour, are we to look for the germ of the successful flying machine? Where is the preparation today?”
By late December, their experiments finished and feeling the pressure of economic necessity, the brothers turned to the production of the next season’s bicycles. As Charlie Taylor liked to stress, they had to keep the business going to pay for the experiments. Octave Chanute wrote to say how greatly he regretted their decision.
For some time Chanute had been offering to provide financial help to the brothers, which they greatly appreciated but were unwilling to accept. “Practically all the expense of our aeronautical experiments lies in the time consumed and we do not wish to increase the temptation to neglect our regular business for it,” Wilbur wrote to him.
What if some rich man were to provide $10,000 a year, Chanute asked, adding that he happened to know Andrew Carnegie. “Would you like for me to write to him?” Again Wilbur tactfully declined. Besides, he added, it seemed likely Carnegie was “too hardheaded a Scotchman to become interested in such a visionary pursuit as flying.”
As he and Orville had no need to say, they knew full well the importance of what they had achieved with their “laboratory work.” They had done it together on their own, paying their own way, as they did everything, and they intended to keep going on their own.
Not for another several months, until the spring of 1902, were they able to begin building a new glider based on all they had learned from the wind tunnel tests, for even with the help of Charlie Taylor, production and sales of their bicycles still demanded a great part of their time and attention.
Word of what they were up to seems also to have been getting around in some circles and apparently with their approval if not at their own instigation. For on January 25, 1902, a short, unsigned notice appeared in the Dayton Daily News stating for the first time in any publication that two local “aeronautical experts” had demonstrated “to an absolute certainty that many of the theories heretofore advanced in flying machine circles may be cast to the four winds.
These gentlemen are Wilbur and Orville Wright, cycle dealers and makers, who have experimented with marked success in [North] Carolina and who at present bid fair to revolutionize the work of experts in making tests of aerial navigation. . . .
It would be fitting that Dayton should afford experiments which may lead to a complete solution to aerial navigation.
This notice, carefully clipped from the paper by the brothers, or perhaps Katharine, would figure prominently at the beginning of a first scrapbook documenting their efforts.
II.
At the same time the family was facing a highly unpleasant situation involving Bishop Wright that put severe strain on them all, and Wilbur in particular. It was a burden he accepted without complaint, even as it required giving up days, eventually weeks of his time.
The trouble had first taken root some fifteen years before, in the 1880s, when two contentious factions within the United Brethren Church struggled for control. The issue was mainly the church’s traditional anti-Masonic stance, one side holding firm to that position, the other arguing for acceptance of Freemasonry and its secret ways as one of the realities of the times and, not incidentally, as a clear means to increase church membership and revenues.
Those in favor of welcoming Masons to church membership were the so-called Liberals. Those opposed, the Radicals, were led by Milton Wright, never one afraid to speak out for what he believed, who, even then, had called on Wilbur to help write articles and editorials in response to attacks by the opposition.
But the Liberals prevailed. The Bishop lost his fight. His role in the church was reduced to virtually nothing. Undaunted, he continued with his travels as an itinerant preacher and in 1889, the year of Susan Wright’s death, he set about establishing a new church to be known as the Old Constitution Church.