The Bishop's Boys (8 page)

April 1, 1881

It was the first of hundreds of letters that would tie Milton to his children over the next two decades. The Wright youngsters learned to write good, clear letters at an early age—their father insisted on it.

M
ilton had become a professional traveler in the service of his God. He was absent from home for months at a time, crisscrossing the West to visit the far-flung Brethren congregations in his charge. It was not a life a loving husband and father would much enjoy. Susan and the children were inundated with letters demanding news of home, and informing them of his health, progress at work, and the sights, sounds, and wonders that came his way.

Those letters were a part of the children’s education, enabling them to see the larger world with greater clarity than any lesson in a geography or history book. They traveled vicariously through the Dakotas and Montana only five years after Custer’s Last Stand:

St. Paul was more than just a spot on a map for young Katharine. Her father had been there:

Milton’s description of a fair that he attended in Los Angeles confirmed that California was an agricultural paradise.

Of course Orville and Kate would want to hear about the sea serpent rumored to frequent the waters around Santa Monica.

It was “probably a fish story,” Milton admitted, adding that he was going to Santa Monica the next day to see for himself.

In later years Orville spoke with pride of the advantages they had enjoyed growing up in the Wright household: “We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity. In a different kind of environment, our curiosity might have been nipped long before it could have borne fruit.”
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Milton’s letters to his children, designed to stimulate curiosity and portray new people and places, were a part of that environment. So were the presents he brought back from his trips. Milton recognized the importance of a gift as a means of ensuring that a child felt needed, and specially remembered. Birthdays were always an occasion in this household, and, while the bishop and Susan regarded Christmas trees and Santa Claus as unnecessary pagan survivals, there were always presents by the children’s breakfast plates on Christmas morning.

Milton was a firm believer in the educational value of toys, and took genuine delight in selecting things that would stimulate the imagination of his children and inspire their curiosity. One such gift, purchased during the course of a church trip and presented to Wilbur, then eleven, and Orville, seven, soon after the family’s move to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, would prove particularly significant. It was a toy helicopter designed by the French aeronautical experimenter Alphonse Pénaud.

Milton paid perhaps 50 cents for this variant of Europe’s oldest mechanical toy—and the world’s first powered flying machine. In its earliest form, dating to the fourteenth century, the idea was simple enough. A stick with a four-bladed rotor fixed to the top was set in a hollow spindle held by hand. When a string wrapped around the stick was pulled, the rotor rose out of the spindle and into the air.

The toy is a perfect illustration of play as the inspiration for technological innovation. From the time of Leonardo, when portrait painters used the little helicopter to quiet fidgety young sitters, to that day in 1878 when Milton Wright presented the gadget to his sons, rotary-wing toys were to intrigue and inspire generations of children, a few of whom would, as adults, attempt to realize the dream of flight for themselves.

Sir George Cayley (1773–1857), the English baronet who constructed the first man-carrying gliders, was just such a child. His early notebooks include sketches of the toy, and suggestions for its improvement. In 1784, Launoy, a French naturalist, and Bienvenu, a mechanic, flew a new, self-propelled version before the members of the French Academy of Sciences. Twin rotors were fixed to the top and bottom of a shaft that ran through the center of a small wooden bow. Holding the bow in one hand and turning the rotors with the other, the bowstring twisted around the shaft, flexing the bow. When released, the little craft bumped up against the ceiling, to the great delight of the assembled savants.

It remained for Pénaud to substitute skeins of rubber for the cumbersome bow. Octave Chanute, a civil engineer who was to play an important role in the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright, regarded Alphonse Pénaud’s helicopter as “the best of its kind.” “These models, when built in varying proportions, would either rise like a dart to a height of some fifty ft., and then fall down, or sail obliquely in great circles, or, after rising some 20 or 25 ft., hover in the same spot for fifteen or twenty seconds, and sometimes as many as 26 seconds,
which was a much longer flight than had ever been obtained before with screws.”
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Obviously, a single toy cannot shape the course of a life. Still, the little helicopter that Milton Wright brought home to Cedar Rapids in the fall of 1878 made a very big impression on his two youngest sons. Orville described the result in court testimony offered in 1912: “Our first interest [in flight] began when we were children. Father brought home to us a small toy actuated by a rubber spring which would lift itself into the air. We built a number of copies of this toy, which flew successfully…. But when we undertook to build the toy on a much larger scale it failed to work so well.”
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Orville’s first teacher remembered the incident as well. One day in 1878, Miss Ida Palmer, of the Jefferson School in Cedar Rapids, noticed the boy hunched over his desk fiddling with two pieces of wood. When she asked what he was doing, he explained that he was assembling the parts of a flying machine, a larger version of which might enable him to fly with his brother. It can only have been one of the small copies of the Pénaud model that the brothers had constructed. To her credit, Miss Palmer reprimanded Orville but did not confiscate the craft.
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A quarter of a century later young Milton Wright, Lorin’s son, reported that his uncles were still making helicopters “out of bamboo, paper, corks, and rubber bands and allowed us to run after them when they flew them.”
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There can be no doubt that Orville regarded his father’s gift as a major event in his life. In 1929, at the height of his feud with officials of the Smithsonian Institution, Orville became incensed when a Smithsonian curator confused the Pénaud helicopter with the Dandrieux butterfly, another flying toy of the period. He wanted the details of the incident to be recorded accurately, and was determined that Pénaud, one of the two or three early aeronautical experimenters the brothers most admired, should receive full credit.

The credit was all Milton’s—he knew a great deal about children in general and his sons in particular. The time he took out from a hectic schedule to select a stimulating gift had been very well spent.

Both parents were great believers in formal and informal education alike. Their home was filled with books, and the children were encouraged to read at an early age. But Milton, himself an ex-teacher, had some strong ideas on education that occasionally conflicted with school policy. Miss Esther Wheeler, who taught several of the Wright children at the Seventh Street School in Dayton, had clearer memories
of the father than his sons. “Bishop Wright did not believe in ten month school,” she recalled in 1909,

Like his older brothers, Orville started school late. Susan had intended otherwise, enrolling him in kindergarten back in Dayton at the age of five. She walked him to school on the first day, then saw him off, neatly dressed, each morning. Weeks later she discovered that he had stopped attending after that first day. He walked down the block to his friend Ed Sine’s house each morning and returned home on time each afternoon. Home tutoring began shortly after that, and continued until the family moved to Cedar Rapids, where he finally started school in the second grade.
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Orville was a good student. That first year in Cedar Rapids he won first prize—a picture of Miss Palmer—for best penmanship in class; he was also moved on to the third reader before the end of the year. To do so, he had to read out a passage from the second reader for visiting school officials. They were amused when Orville literally raced through the required passage, holding the book upside down. Any child who had memorized the text, they decided, deserved promotion.
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Eleven-year-old Wilbur was a sixth grader at the Washington School in Cedar Rapids that year. Emma Fordyce, his teacher, who knew Orville as well, remembered Wilbur as being “less communicative” than his little brother and “too dreamy” to get into trouble. Then, as later, history and geography were his favorite subjects.
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If Wilbur was quiet, and tended not to volunteer information in class, he was nonetheless already very sure of himself. Back at Garfield School in Dayton he had once been severely reprimanded by a teacher for failing to arrive at the correct answer to an arithmetic problem on the blackboard. A young girl was instructed to help him with the problem; several minutes later the students returned. Wilbur had convinced the girl that he was correct, and together the two of them then convinced the teacher. (Thirty years later, the young girl, now Mrs. D. L. Lorenz, greeted Wilbur when he came to New York to fly for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.)
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Orville Wright was eight in 1878….

Orville and Reuchlin were on the opposite ends of the educational scale when the family moved to Iowa. Reuch graduated from Coe’s Collegiate Academy in Cedar Rapids in 1878, the year Orv began school. There is some suggestion that he intended to enter the clergy—his high school graduation speech was entitled “The Evidences of Christianity,” and in the fall of 1879 he enrolled at Western College, a Brethren school only ten miles south of Cedar Rapids that turned out many ministers over the years. The next summer Reuch assisted his father in teaching a special Fourth of July Sunday School class at a local church.
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Reuchlin did not return to college in the fall of 1880. Instead, he took the state teaching examination on November 2, and taught one term at an elementary school a few miles south of Cedar Rapids. It seems clear that this break in the pattern of his life marked the beginning of a serious rebellion against parental authority.