Voices were raised in protest. Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.”
Such concerns had little effect. Everybody was riding bicycles, men, women, all ages and from all walks of life. Bicycling clubs sprouted on college campuses and in countless cities and towns, including Dayton. At Oberlin College, Katharine and a group of her fellow co-eds would pose for a memorable photograph with their new bicycles. Each looked highly pleased, but Katharine beamed with the biggest smile.
In the spring of 1893 Wilbur and Orville opened their own small bicycle business, the Wright Cycle Exchange, selling and repairing bicycles only a short walk from the house at 1005 West Third Street. In no time, such was business, they moved to larger quarters down the street to Number 1034 and renamed the enterprise the Wright Cycle Company.
Of the two brothers, Orville loved bicycles the most. As an admirer who knew him in later years would say, “Bring up the subject of the shapes of handlebars or types of pedals on early ‘safety bicycles’ and his whole face lights up.”
Ever enterprising, incapable of remaining idle, the brothers now turned their off-hours to redoing the interior of 7 Hawthorn Street. They built a new gas fireplace and mantelpiece for the sitting room, redesigned and rebuilt the stairway, refinished all the trim, dressed up rooms with bright new wallpaper, ceilings included, laid new carpets, and with Katharine helping whenever she was home from college. Wilbur’s particularly distinctive contribution was the decorative carving on a new cherry newel post at the foot of the stairs.
The work was just about finished in time for the arrival of spring in 1894. On Saturday, March 31, Bishop Wright recorded in his diary:
Cloudy day, but moderate. At home. Orville and C[K]atharine arrange the house. First time for months, we had a room to sit in, all being torn up.
Business remained good, but with the opening of more bicycle shops in town, competition kept growing. When sales grew slack, Wilbur turned conspicuously restless, uncertain of what to make of his life. He had long thought he would like to be a teacher, “an honorable pursuit,” but that required a college education. He had no knack for business, he decided. He felt ill suited for it and, as he explained to his father, was now weighing the “advisability” of taking a college course.
I do not think I am specially fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had proper personal and business influences to assist me. I might make a living, but I doubt whether I would ever do much more than this. Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would [be] better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business.
In another letter, this to brother Lorin, Wilbur had still more to say. He was one who not only devoted much of his time to reading, but to thinking, and he had given a great deal of thought to the subject of business and reached a number of his own conclusions.
In business it is the aggressive man, who continually has his eye on his own interest, who succeeds [he wrote]. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has. No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition, so long as it is not carried to excess, for such men make the world and its affairs move. . . . I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen. We have all done reasonably well, better in fact than the average man perhaps, but not one of us has as yet made particular use of the talent in which he excels other men. That is why our success has been only moderate. We ought not to have been businessmen. . . .
There is always a danger that a person of this disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life struggling for bare existence (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location), where if put on the right path with proper special equipment, he would advance far. Many men are better fitted for improving chances offered them than in turning up the chances themselves.
But if not a “first corner” to fall into for the rest of life, what was “the right path”? As it was he felt trapped.