logo

43 pages 1 hour read

David McCullough

The Wright Brothers

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Key Figures

Wilbur Wright

Wilbur was born in 1867, the third son of Bishop Milton Wright and Susan Wright. As a boy, he was both a brilliant student and a superb athlete. He hoped to go to Yale University until a hockey accident left him homebound for a time. (He neither attended college nor graduated from high school.) After recovering from the accident, he was reclusive and remained home for three years before helping his brother, Orville, publish a local newspaper. In the 1890s, the two brothers took advantage of the burgeoning bicycle business and opened a bike shop in their hometown of Dayton. The death of German aviator Otto Lilienthal made the news and caught Wilbur’s attention, rekindling an old interest in flying. He and Orville began making a model flying machine at the bike shop.

Beginning in 1900, they spent three years testing and perfecting their Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Wilbur’s hard work, intellect, and composed demeanor was essential to their success; when working out a problem, he could concentrate to the point of blocking out the rest of the world. He worried little what others said and was not disturbed by failure; problems were simply challenges to work through and learn from. As the older brother, he took the lead in many ways, doing all the flying in the early days and making public appearances, such as giving speeches.

As McCullough makes clear, the range of Wilbur’s intellect was remarkable. During the three years he stayed at home after his accident, he read voraciously, and when in Europe he immersed himself in art, architecture, and history in his free time. The author even makes a connection between Wilbur’s aspiration to soar through the sky and the impressive heights of the Gothic architecture he found so inspiring in Paris. In addition, although he disliked business matters, it was he who took the lead in them while he was alive, holding his own in France with his more sophisticated European sales representative, Hart Berg, and in the many business negotiations he had with the French in which he relied on translation.

Wilbur never married and lived his entire life in the family home with his father, his brother Orville, and his sister, Katharine. After contracting typhoid fever in 1912, he died at age 45.

Orville Wright

Orville was born in 1871, the youngest boy and one of five siblings in the family. Like Wilbur, he did not graduate from high school but read voraciously at home from the family’s extensive book collection. He, too, remained unmarried. Also like his brother, he was bedridden for time, when he contracted typhoid fever in 1896 at age 25. During this time, aviator Otto Lilienthal died in an accident, and Wilbur read aloud to Orville many of the articles about the incident, which sparked Orville’s interest in flight.

Temperamentally, Orville was shyer than Wilbur and cared more about what others thought. In addition, he was prone to moodiness, which his family called his “peculiar spells.” He was smart, possibly with a narrower intellectual range than his brother, but the real gift he brought to the partnership was his mechanical facility. Like Wilbur, Orville had a singularity of purpose in creating a flying machine.

Both brothers showed great courage, knowing that their flying experiments could result in death each time they were airborne, but Orville came back from a serious crash to fly again. After his accident at Fort Myer in September 1908, he insisted on completing trials there the following summer despite the concerns of both Wilbur and Katharine that it would be too overwhelming. He lived the longest of his three siblings, dying in 1948 at age 76.

Katharine Wright

Katharine was the youngest child in the family, born in 1874. Unlike Wilbur and Orville, she attended college, graduating from Oberlin, and became a high school Latin teacher in Dayton. She, too, lived in the family home with their father until well into adulthood, until the last three years of her life, when she married and moved to Kansas City, Missouri. An extrovert, she was by far more outgoing than Wilbur and Orville. Other people could get under her skin more and, having a bit of a temper, she could be “wrathy,” as her family called it.

The main thrust of the author’s discussion of Katharine in the book is how integral she was to Wilbur and Orville’s success. She played key roles at various times to help ensure that they met their goals. One significant example is how she nursed Orville back to health after his crash at Fort Myer. For all she did to ensure his physical recuperation (to the point of her own exhaustion), her role in his mental outlook may have been even greater. As McCullough writes, Orville told his sister that “he never could have gotten through the ordeal were it not for her” (199). The author went a step further in an interview, saying, “I think in some ways, she saved his life” in the sense that she helped Orville regained his spirit and confidence. (Lamb, Brian. “Q&A with David McCullough.” C-SPAN, 12 May 2015, www.c-span.org/video/?325996-1/qa-david-mccullough. Accessed 22 Sept. 2021.)

Katharine was instrumental to the brothers’ popularity in France. When she and Orville joined Wilbur there in 1909, she managed their social events and appearances, filling the role a spouse might have if either brother been married. Her winsome personality, near-fluent French (which she quickly learned while there), and frank American demeanor quickly attracted public adoration and even helped win over the French press, which until then had been a bit hostile to the brothers. She continued helping the Wright brothers’ cause until she and Orville fell out when she married in 1926, as he felt betrayed by her marriage and stopped speaking to her. They only reconciled right before her death in 1929, when Orville finally went to see her.

Milton Wright

The father of Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine, Milton was a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren. He traveled a lot during their childhood, as his position meant overseeing the church’s district west of the Mississippi River. His journeys were always learning opportunities through the letters he wrote home, which extolled the country’s beauty and described its geography. This was just one of the many ways he encouraged his children to educate themselves. The bishop was also well-read and kept an extensive library at their home in Dayton. As a result, the Wright children grew up in a climate of intense intellectual curiosity. Bishop Wright viewed their self-education so highly that he had no problem with their staying home from school to pursue projects of their own choosing. The bishop influenced the brothers’ lives in other ways too, urging modesty, restraint, and integrity in all they did. He once wrote to them, “Make business first, pleasure afterward, and that guarded” (14).

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text