The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

Now Orville saw greater opportunities opening before them. With a liquid capital of $2, they could buy more type, do a greater variety of printing, and thus have more fun. But Ed Sines thought there was such a thing as over-extension of plant and equipment. Why not just divide their popcorn and eat it? Each was so uncompromising in his convictions that there was only one thing to do: one must buy out the other and they would dissolve the partnership. Inasmuch as Orville already owned the press they were using and most of the type, it seemed logical that he should be the buyer. By paying his share of the popcorn he was able to take over his partner’s interest without much cash outlay. Thenceforth, when they worked together, as from time to time they continued to do, Ed Sines was no longer co-proprietor but an employee.

At about this time, something set Orville to thinking of how interesting it would be to print circus bills. He wished some of his friends would organize a circus. Then he could do their printing. The idea seemed worth promoting. He went to the Truxell boys, and Fred LaRue, neighbors up the street, and convinced them that they had just the kind of abilities to organize and present a wonderful circus—one that would make a great hit with all the kids. The result of this talk was The Great Truxell Bros. & LaRue Show. Orville refused to accept any payment for printing the handbills and tickets of admission to the big show. The fun of doing it was all the reward he wanted.

Mrs. Wright had cleared out an upstairs room for Orville’s printing activities and that was his base for some time. He began to feel the need for a larger printing press and he determined to build one. The bed for the new press was an old gravestone he got from a marble dealer.

This press would print a sheet eleven by sixteen inches. Orville could now undertake larger printing projects. One order required more type than he had on hand. But that didn’t stop him. After he had used up all his type, with the job only half done, he recalled having heard of stereotype plates. He looked up in an encyclopedia a description of how such plates were cast from the impression of the original type in wet cardboard. And he contrived to make such a plate from the type already set. Then he redistributed that type for use in setting the rest of the job.

Ambitious to be a really good printer, Orville took employment during two summer vacations with a printing establishment in Dayton, and worked there sixty hours a week. But he felt that the most fun and satisfaction in connection with printing had been from building his own press. Along in the spring of 1888, when he was nearly seventeen years old, he started to build another press, bigger than any he had used before. He didn’t know exactly what he would do with it, but that question did not yet give him much concern. He would have the fun of building it. In the family woodshed was a pile of fire-wood cut in four-foot lengths. From these he made much of the framework, though he had to buy at a lumber yard a few longer pieces. From near-by junk yards he collected odds and ends of iron or steel that could be used. A difficult problem was to find a means of forcing the type against the printing surface, always with the same pressure, just enough and not too much. Orville searched the Wright barn and tool-shed for something that could be adapted, but without success until his eye happened to alight on the old family buggy. The buggy had a folding top, held firmly in place, when raised, by steel bars hinged in the middle. They were designed to force the top just so far and no farther. Exactly what he needed!

The job turned out to be much more difficult than Orville had expected, and Wilbur Wright, observing his kid brother at a tough job, offered to help him build the press. Some of the suggestions Wilbur made for moving parts of that press were peculiar in that they seemed to violate all mechanical rules and could not possibly be expected to work. Yet they did. Some time later, a well-dressed stranger entered the shop where Orville, merrily whistling, was feeding paper into his press, and asked if he might look at that “home-made printing outfit.” He had heard about it while visiting in Dayton. What at once astonished Orville and two or three boys in the shop was that the visitor, with complete disregard for his good clothes, lay right down flat on his back on the floor to study the press in operation. After he had observed it for several minutes, he got up, brushed himself off, and remarked: “It works all right, but I still don’t understand why it works.” Before leaving he laid his card on a table. He was the foreman of the pressroom of a newspaper in Denver.

Now that he had his new press, Orville wished he could put it to some purpose to make full use of the greatly increased printing capacity. The press was big enough and fast enough to print a newspaper. Why not start a neighborhood weekly? He had hardly more than thought of this before he decided to do so. It was probably the first time a paper was ever started just to use a press.

Orville now rented a room on West Third Street, near Broadway. The first issue of the paper—four three-column pages—appeared on March 1, 1889. In his salutatory, Orville said: “This week we issue the first number of the West Side News, a paper to be published in the interests of the people and business institutions of the West Side. Whatever tends to their advancement, moral, mental, and financial, will receive our closest attention.”

There were seventeen advertisements. A leading feature was a story about Abraham Lincoln and General Sherman, from the Youth’s Companion; and there was an article about Benjamin Franklin. The range of the publisher’s reading was indicated by a number of short paragraphs on foreign affairs, and about the approaching inauguration of President-elect Benjamin Harrison. Altogether it was a creditable job. No boyish “boners” or typographical errors were to be found.

All copies of the first issue were distributed free, as samples, but the paper was soon a fairly profitable enterprise. After the first few numbers, it was enlarged from three columns wide to four columns. Ed Sines devoted himself to rounding up advertisements and news items. From time to time Wilbur Wright helped to fill space by writing humorous essays, and after a few weeks his name was added to the paper’s masthead as “editor,” along with Orville’s as publisher.