A profile, from 1930, of Orville Wright, who, with his brother Wilbur, made the first successful man-powered flight on this day in 1903.
The first man ever to fly an airplane is a gray man now, dressed in gray clothes. Not only have his hair and his mustache taken on this tone, but his curiously flat face, too. Thirty years of hating publicity and its works, thirty years of dodging cameras and interviews, have given him what he has obviously wished for most: a protective coloration which will enable him to fade out of public view against a neutral background.
The interior furnishings carry out the same motif. The front room is a spare box. There is a thin, faded rug on the uneven floor. The walls are bare of pictures. Not a memento is to be seen. There is a roll-top desk against one wall and a small table against another. There are three chairs, thin chairs.
It all began in Washington, as do so many things. In 1927 it was decided that something should be done to commemorate a quarter-century of flight, and that a memorial be erected on the desolate sand dunes of North Carolina where two Americans had first lifted a flying machine into the air. As a preliminary to carrying out this plan, various assistant secretaries of aviation in government departments were appointed to a commission to investigate and recommend.
The return from Kitty Hawk was another retreat from Moscow. Some of the native automobile-owners had scrapped their “Welcome to Kitty Hawk” banners and gone off home to get warm. The Spanish delegation, as a result of an interpreter’s error, had got things mixed up and gone off to attend a duck dinner given by a native.
When the first machine was publicly exhibited in 1904, it looked awesomely ridiculous and no spectator who saw it trundled onto the field believed it would take the air. Even after it had, this country didn’t realize it. It was France which first became convinced that it had, and when Wilbur circled near the cathedral at Le Mans, that nation embraced him as it had embraced no other American since Franklin.
Wilbur’s death from typhoid, in 1912, was a sad blow to Orville, whose gradual withdrawal from the front ranks of aviation began then. He last piloted a plane in 1914 and last flew in one in 1918. In the latest edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica” you will find a long article about Wilbur Wright. Reading it you might gather that he was the sole inventor, developer, and pilot of the first successful airplane. There is but the faintest suggestion that Wilbur ever had a brother.
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