The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

Another contributor to the West Side News was a young Negro lad, a friend of Orville since grammar grades, Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose poetry afterward made him famous. Dunbar, in 1890, started a paper, The Tattler, for Negro readers, and Orville did the printing.

By the time the West Side News had been running a year, Orville had completed his course in high school. He thought the final year, devoted in the regular course largely to review, would hardly justify the time. Instead, having it in mind that he might decide to go to college and would need additional credits for college entrance requirements, he was a special student in Latin during that fourth year, attending high school an hour or two a day. The two elder Wright brothers had attended college in Iowa and Indiana, and later their sister Katharine took a degree at Oberlin, but both Wilbur and Orville gave up the idea of going to college, and neither ever received a diploma from high school. It may be added, however, that Orville in later years never agreed with those who suggested that “college might have ruined the Wright brothers.” More than once he said they doubtless could have done their scientific work more easily if they had had the advantage of college education.

Having decided, partly because of interest in the job at hand, not to go to college, Orville, in April, 1890, with Wilbur as partner, converted the West Side News from a weekly to a four-page, five-column daily, called The Evening Item.

This venture, though it showed no loss, was never profitable. At that time the perfecting-press was coming into use and Dayton newspapers were issuing big, thick editions that proved to be increasingly keen competition for a small neighborhood sheet. After about four months the paper was suspended. But, as late as 1894, Orville and Wilbur published for a time a little two-column weekly called Snapshots, devoted to vigorous comments on current local events. After the first issue or two these were usually written by Wilbur.

Both Orville and Wilbur now became absorbed in one more new interest. Orville had owned in Richmond an old high wheel bicycle for which he had paid $3—borrowed from Wilbur. Now, a new European type of bicycle with wheels about the same size, and called a “safety,” had begun to be popular. In 1892, Orville bought one of these, a Columbia. It had pneumatic tires and cost $160. Six months later, Wilbur got a bicycle. His was an Eagle and he was able to get it at an auction for $80.

Orville promptly became interested in track-racing and began to enter his name in various local racing events. Wilbur, though he had been a great athlete—a wonderful fancy skater and the best performer in Dayton on a horizontal bar—never went in for racing, because not yet completely recovered from the effects of his skating accident.

Within a few weeks or months from the time they bought their bicycles, these Wright brothers decided to go into the bicycle business—to sell certain well-known makes. Then they soon found that they would have to add a repair shop. Their first sales room was at 1005 West Third Street. They rented it in December, 1892, to be ready for business when the bicycle season began in the early spring of 1893. For a while Orville divided his time between the bicycle shop and the job printing business across the street in which Ed Sines was still employed. (Sines continued to work there until 1898 when an accident to a lame knee forced him to seek another kind of work, and a few months later the shop was sold.)

The brothers soon had to move their bicycle business to larger quarters, at 1034 West Third Street. They were successful both in selling new machines and general repairing. Among the bicycles they sold at one time or another were the Coventry Cross, Halladay-Temple, Warwick, Reading, Smalley, Envoy and Fleetwing.

By 1895 increased business had caused them to move once more, to 22 South Williams Street, and soon they began to manufacture bicycles. The first “custom made” model was called the Van Cleve—after their pioneer ancestors. A later and lower-priced model was the St. Clair; and finally they made a still lower-priced machine called the Wright Special. It sold for as low as $18. Before they were through with the business they had put out under their own brand several hundred bicycles. Many of these were built in the last building the brothers occupied, a remodeled dwelling house at 1127 West Third Street—the building afterward preserved as a museum at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.

Much of their work when building new bicycles was done in winter, when selling was slack, in rooms upstairs over the shop, and from time to time the brothers were interrupted by the necessity of going down to attend to wants of customers. Sometimes they went down to meet a caller who wished only to borrow their air-pump to inflate a tire. They had no pressure-tank but kept a large hand-pump on the wall near the front door. To avoid needless trips downstairs, the Wrights contrived mechanical means by which they could tell if a caller’s wants required their attention. They took an old two-tone bell, intended to be fastened to a bicycle handlebar, and attached it to the wall in their upstairs work-rooms. By means of wires and other mechanism, the opening of the downstairs door yanked the thumb-lever on the bell in one direction, producing one tone; and shutting the door pulled the little lever in an opposite direction to cause the other tone. The hook on which the air-pump hung was also connected by a wire and a spring to a pointer upstairs. Thus it was possible to have secret knowledge upstairs if the caller might be a real customer or if he “only wanted air.” If he promptly helped himself to the pump, there probably was no need for anyone to go down. Then when the pointer showed that the pump was back on the hook and the bell signaled the closing of the door, on the caller’s departure, the brothers could feel sure they had not missed a sale of any kind by sticking to their work.