The Airplane - Jay Spenser [13]
It came as no surprise to the family when, while still in his teens, Orville built himself a working printing press. Its remarkable design, which could turn out a thousand printed sheets per hour, drew on an odd assortment of salvaged parts, including a tombstone slab, the fold-down top of a horse-drawn buggy, and discarded firewood.
Hearing of it, a professional printer stopped by to see it in action. He examined the machine from all sides, reportedly even crawling beneath it. “Well,” he announced in consternation, “it works, but I certainly don’t see how.”9
Wilbur’s mechanical skills nearly rivaled those of his younger brother, but cerebral pursuits were more likely to claim his attention. Studies had been planned for him at Yale in Connecticut, and he seemed destined for an academic life. That changed with a sports injury suffered at age nineteen in a hockey-type ice game called shinny.
It was the winter of 1885–86. A shinny bat flew from a friend’s hand and caught Wilbur full in the face. Although he lost some teeth, he initially seemed to recover from the accident. Then heart palpitations and other complications—perhaps including depression—assailed him. Wilbur withdrew into the Wright home and found solace in books. Other family members worried about him, as he appeared to give up all plans for formal studies outside of the home. Yale was forgotten.
Things were already difficult for the family because Susan Wright had fallen ill with tuberculosis. The older Wright boys were now grown and gone, Milton was away on church business, and Orville and Katharine were in school. Consequently, the burden of caring for his failing mother fell primarily to Wilbur.
They were much alike and he was devoted to her, carrying her up the stairs of the family’s house in the evening and down again the following morning. Sadly, Susan—who had done so much for her sons—would not live to see them invent the airplane. She died in her late fifties in 1889. Young Katharine, then fifteen, pitched in and helped pull the family through the ordeal by taking over her mother’s duties.
Orville, meantime, had been doing his best to keep his brother’s spirits up. He worked summers as a printer’s assistant to learn the trade. In the mid-1880s, he talked an apathetic Wilbur into joining him in a specialty printing firm in Dayton they called Wright & Wright. This small but flourishing business marked their first successful collaboration.
Of all things, a new craze sweeping the United States is what finally pulled Wilbur out of his doldrums. Bicycling was all the rage in America thanks to the 1887 introduction of an innovation from England called the safety bicycle. The bicycle had been around for many years, of course, but the previous incarnation—the ordinary—featured a very tall front wheel that made it unwieldy to mount and control. In contrast, the new British design used wheels of equal size. It also introduced pneumatic tires that eliminated jarring vibrations. Being easier to mount and ride, it opened to the masses the freedoms and joys of cross-country cycling.
The brothers purchased bikes of their own starting in the spring of 1892. Orville’s was a new machine, Wilbur’s used. Indicative of their different personalities, Orville, then twenty, loved to race flat out across short distances—he proclaimed himself a “scorcher”—whereas Wilbur paced himself in therapeutic tours through town or its verdant Ohio surroundings.
Thanks to their local reputations as masters of things mechanical, they found themselves repeatedly approached by friends wanting them to adjust or fix their bikes. This clamor and their love of the sport led them to open a small bicycle rental and repair business. Perhaps inevitably, they soon also began thinking of how to improve on this invention. By 1893, their