Ann Honious, a historian for the National Park Service, has been
given the challenging assignment of writing yet another book about the
Wright brothers. The task was difficult because Wilbur and Orville
Wright were already about as well documented as anyone could be in their
era of history.
Early on, when the brothers began to work seriously on the problem of
flight, Octave Chanute encouraged them to keep careful records of what
they were doing. Mr. Chanute's recommendation merely strengthened a
predilection that was already there. Wilbur and Orville were careful and
methodical workers by nature, and fortunately they had an inherent
family trait of never throwing anything away if it had any conceivable
So historians have available a huge treasure trove of notebooks,
journals, photographs, letters and personal memorabilia belonging to the
Wrights, as well as countless newspaper accounts and journal articles,
written by their contemporaries as the Wrights' fame spread. Succeeding
generations have added computer analog analyses, wind tunnel tests,
construction of replicas and other research studies to develop more
information about their lives and work.
This rich historical store has already generated much literature
about the Wrights, some of it apocryphal, of course. There are excellent
major historical, technical and biographical works, however, by writers
such as Fred Kelly, Marvin McFarland, Tom Crouch, Fred Howard, Charles
Gibbs-Smith, Howard Wolko, Alfred Gollin and Arthur Renstrom.
In view of all of this, what is left for a historian to write about?
Fortunately, Ann Honious has a fine sense of history, and for some
months she has been happily ensconced in a small office on the second
floor at 22 South Williams Street in Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur and Orville
Wright moved their bicycle shop and their printing office into this
building in 1895 so they could combine both of their commercial
businesses under one roof. It was here that they began manufacturing
their own brands of bicycles, and it was during this period that they
read about the death of Otto Lilienthal and started their serious study
of human flight.
The brothers had only to walk out the back door on Williams Street
and go a short half block south through the alley to reach 7 Hawthorne
Street, the house where Orville and Katharine had been born, and where
Wilbur died in 1912. Just north of the shop, facing on Third Street, was
the Hoover Block, the building that had housed Wright & Wright, Job
Printers, from 1890 till 1895.
In 1897, the brothers moved their shop around the corner and onehalf
block west to 1127 West Third Street, where they maintained their Wright
Company offices even after they had phased out their bicycle and
printing businesses in favor of flying machines. Orville stayed on there
after Wilbur's death until he built his laboratory in 1916. It was
another half block further west and just around the corner at 15 North
Broadway. And Orville's friend and classmate, the renowned poet Paul
Laurence Dunbar, had lived several blocks farther west on Summit
So after the family moved back to Dayton in 1884, those few blocks in
West Dayton were Wilbur and Orville's neighborhood home for the rest of
their lives. They tested their aircraft over the sands of Kitty Hawk and
the marshy ground of Huffman Prairie; they traveled abroad; they flew in
Washington, D.C., and France and Italy and Germany; they dined in
European palaces and had lunch at the White House; but they always came
back to the modest frame house on the West Side.
Even after he had built his new home, Hawthorn Hill, in Oakwood,
Orville returned to work in his old neighborhood six days a week (never
on Sunday) until his death in 1948. Famous visitors like Hap Arnold,
Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Edward Deeds and Charles Kettering called
on him there in the office and workshop at 15 North Broadway.
Ann Honious has worked in that neighborhood, has absorbed its
atmosphere, and has written another book about the Wrights. She has not
left out the bold experiments, the epic decisions or the courageous
actions that changed the world. But she has carefully set these
historymaking events in a matrix of factual details, in the context of
their family life, their personal friendships, their domestic chores,
their small business enterprises and their daily work. In short she has
placed them in the neighborhood where they lived and died, providing
Dayton's new national historical park with a valuable resource that
describes, explains and celebrates the lives of Wilbur and Orville
Wright and their friend, Paul Laurence Dunbar. The literature about the
Wrights is richer for it.