WRIGHT BROTHERS
Aeroplane Company
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At the back of the showroom is a little cubicle with an oaken rolltop desk � the Wrights' office. In the half-wall between the office and the larger showroom is a pullout tray where customers could leave payments for merchandise if the Wrights were busy in the back room or out flying. There was apparently a lot of trust in West Dayton in 1903. Past the office, you jog to your right and then left and find yourself in the workshop. Once again, it strikes you how small these buildings are. And this room seems especially small because it is almost completely filled with tools and materials and the skeleton of an airplane. It isn't even the complete skeleton � the Wright's couldn't assemble their "whopper flying machine" in Dayton because they didn't have the space, as this workshop plainly shows. They just made the parts here and put them together at Kitty Hawk. It speaks volumes about their confidence in their own mechanical abilities when you consider they built a new, untested machine in one place to be assembled 500 miles away in a remote location with few machine tools available should they find the need to adjust or change something. The shop tools themselves also bear witness to the Wright's industry, the pride and pleasure they must have taken in their own workmanship. With the exception of a metal lathe, this place isn't as well equipped as the home workshop of a serious hobbyist today. I've talked to people who have built reproductions of the Wright Flyer 1 with better-equipped shops, and on the average it's taken them 8 to 10 years to get it done. The best time that I've run across is 4 years. And yet these two bothers, working part-time with only three power tools to their name, built their first Flyer from scratch in just 9 months, designing it as they went along,. When they got back from Kitty Hawk with a busted flying machine, they turned around and built an improved version in 5 months! If the inventiveness of these guys doesn't bowl you over, then their sheer energy will. That's the one thing Henry Ford couldn't capture when he transplanted these buildings. In 1903, Dayton, Ohio was bustling with this sort of innovative dynamism. This is where people invented the twentieth century, just as the twenty-first century is being invented in places like Silicone Valley and the Boston Outerbelt today. Orville and Wilbur could walk a few blocks in any direction and find like-minded people who were either on the cutting edge of technology or in a hurry to get there. There were (and still are) more patents per capita granted in Dayton than any other place on the planet. The Wrights could get things in their immediate neighborhood � casting, machining, materials, technical advice and information � that were scarce in most other locations. If ever there was a place custom-made to incubate airplane inventors, turn-of-the-century Dayton was it.These are the buildings where the Wright brothers lived and worked, expertly restored and preserved in Michigan. The leisurely atmosphere of Greenfield Village, with its quaint buggies, sputtering antique autos, and sleepy little steam locomotive that crawl past the old Wright Cycle Company, are pleasant, enriching, and well worth the trip. But don't think for a minute that this is the environment in which Wilbur and Orville worked and dreamed. These may be the buildings in which the Wrights did their inventing, but they are not the heart of their inventiveness. Wherever ideas fly like sparks and you breath in enthusiasm with each breath -- that's where the Wright brothers invented the airplane. |
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photo to enlarge it.
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ext door to the
Wright home, the showroom of the Wright Cycle Company is festooned with
tires, hanging everywhere from ceiling racks. In the front window is a
reproduction of a Wright bicycle, with a strange addition � a horizontal
wheel attached to the handlebars. This was on of their earliest scientific
experiments with air foils. They mounted metal vanes on the rim of the
wheel, then pedaled like crazy and watched which way the wheel turned as
the wind blew over the vanes. Later, they decided to make a wind tunnel
and save all that exercise.
