The Flyers' Sister

By Amelia Boldaji

The story of how two brothers traveled from Ohio to the then-isolated and windswept beaches of Kitty Hawk in the early 1900s to conduct some of the most famous aeronautical experiments to date – and ultimately performed the first successful instances of sustained, controlled and powered flight – has been told many times. The part of the story that’s less well known, is that when it came to popularizing those achievements and that historic invention, the duo behind those innovations was actually a trio – which included a Wright sister: Katharine.

The youngest of five Wright children, Katharine (also known as Kate or Katie as a child) was closest in age to Orville (she was born on his third birthday) and Wilbur, who was seven when she was born. Besides their age proximity, the three grew up taking care of each other because their two eldest brothers already had families of their own, their father was a traveling minister, and, after a prolonged eight-year battle with tuberculosis, their mother passed away when Katharine was only 14.

Well before their mother’s death, much of the responsibility for managing a household of men fell on Katharine, but their father, Milton Wright, had progressive ideas about educating women for financial independence. In 1893, when Katharine was 19, Milton sent her to Oberlin College, which was located a half-day away from their home in Dayton, Ohio.

This was unusual during the late 1800s for several reasons. For one, the idea that women could benefit from higher education wasn’t yet a widely accepted notion. Even more distressing to many was the debate about whether or not women should be segregated at their own colleges. As the oldest coeducational institution in the country at the time, Oberlin’s approach of providing the exact same education to both sexes was even more radical.

By all accounts, Katharine’s time at Oberlin was foundational indeed. Regularly described as “vivacious” by those who knew her, Katharine excelled at her studies (especially Latin, Greek, English and history), and she developed a wide social network that, for the first time, included many deep female friendships.

Her family was still a large part of her world, however – particularly her beloved brothers, Will and Orv. That bond was further strengthened due to their mutually fledgling career tracks – as Katharine was starting her first year as a high school teacher (one of very few professions that were open to women around the turn of the century), her brothers were making inquires with the Smithsonian to learn more about the theoretical ideas behind flight. Not long afterwards, the brothers made their first two sojourns to the Outer Banks. Upon their return from their second trip in 1901, Katharine wrote a playfully mocking letter to their father about all the commotion. “We don’t hear anything but flying machine[s],” she teased. “I’ll be glad when school begins so I can escape.”

While Katharine was present during almost all of the glider’s initial manufacturing process – including a period when the brothers were absorbed with carefully cutting and sewing the wings – she never traveled to Kitty Hawk with them, and it wasn’t until about eight months after their first successful flight that she even witnessed them flying.

An Oberlin College photograph taken of Katharine in 1898, the year she graduated. Katharine was the only one of her immediate family members to earn a college degree. Photo courtesy of Wright State University.

Although it can be hard to comprehend this today, nothing much changed for the Wrights immediately following those first flights. Members of the press were informed, and a wildly exaggerated front-page story appeared in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot on December 18, 1903, but, generally speaking, public reactions ranged from disbelief to disinterest.

This continued for several years, due in part to the fact that a few technical setbacks made the brothers increasingly inclined to stop seeking publicity and focus solely on improving their technology.

By 1906, all that had changed, however. It was time to stop testing and start trying to sell their invention – and this meant that they needed to stop thinking like creative inventors and more like calculated businessmen.

But that was easier said than done – not least of all because neither of them particularly enjoyed public speaking, and also because interest in their revolutionary invention was lackluster during those early years. Besides some brief enthusiasm from the Barnum and Bailey Circus, even the United States Army turned the brothers down flat.

Some European governments were interested, but they were also somewhat suspicious of the brothers’ wariness with business matters and the lack of typically aggressive American press coverage. The brothers traveled to Europe for the first time in 1907 to try and secure some contracts anyway – and it was around that time that Americans began to develop flight fever.

Katharine, who had long handled the bulk of the family’s correspondence to begin with, essentially became their de facto press secretary. In addition to long days teaching, she spent her afternoons and evenings doing everything from responding to business propositions to correcting news reports about her brothers and their invention.

As Wilbur and Orville’s fame grew that year, so did Katharine’s responsibilities – and so did the number of contracts they amassed. The U.S. Army was now very interested, as was a large company in France.

Wilbur headed abroad to Europe a second time in 1908 to start demonstration flights, and he became a virtual instant celebrity as he wowed crowds of thousands with dizzying takeoffs and in-flight tricks. For his part, Orville was responsible for heading to Fort Meyer, Va., to oversee the Army test flights – and that’s when tragedy struck.

On September 17, Katharine received a telegram reporting the fact that Orville had crashed during a test flight, fracturing his ribs and one of his thighs. Less than two hours after she read the telegram, she was onboard a train headed to Virginia.

As Katharine feared, Orville’s injuries were somewhat more severe than the telegram had implied. In fact, his passenger during that ill-fated flight died upon impact. Katharine spent the next six weeks at the hospital with Orville as she helped him convalesce.

By the time he was on the mend, however, Katharine was struggling with how dependent he had become on her alone – in addition to concerns about her loss of income since she’d been too busy to return to the classroom – so Wilbur made an interesting proposition: They should both join him in Europe. Wilbur could then help with the flight demonstrations, and Katharine could act as their salaried social manager.

After some hesitancy on Katharine’s part, she agreed, and, on January 5, 1909, she boarded her first internationally bound steamliner with Orville in tow. She was 34.

The nearly four-month european trip that took the trio to places such as Paris, Rome and London, was part of a period that Katharine later recalled “like a dream.” While the brothers were excellent at conducting flight demos, their social graces were somewhat lacking, and Katharine’s natural exuberance allowed the Wrights to entertain the diverse array of influential people – from celebrities and diplomats to royal monarchs – who were both drawn to the flight fields and wanted to extend a flurry of invitations to dinner parties and other gatherings. Katharine charmed them all.

But Katharine wasn’t only universally adored by those crowds; she was also clearly an intellectual in her own right. After all, she was the only one in the Wright family with a college degree – sparking the persistent rumor, despite all her protests over the years, that she was actually the mathematical genius behind the development of the Wright airplane.

While Katharine planned to resume teaching when the trio returned to America, she was needed for a second trip accompanying Orville to Germany shortly thereafter. Eventually though, the Wright Company grew more established and corporate in nature, leaving all of them with less and less to do. Katharine’s teaching position was long gone by then, so she spent much of her time keeping house for her brothers and volunteering for an array of causes that were close to her heart, including her passionate support for the women’s suffrage movement.

Although Wilbur passed away at the age of 45 after a bout of typhoid fever in 1912, Katharine continued to care exclusively for Orville for almost another decade and a half. And, most importantly, her invaluable contributions to the Wright family legacy did not go unnoticed during her lifetime.

This was perhaps best expressed in the remarks made by a presidential board member during an honorary weeklong trip that Orville and Katharine undertook in 1925 at the invitation of President Calvin Coolidge.

“We are hearing, and have for years heard of the Wright brothers and their accomplishments,” he declared to a roomful of others who were in complete agreement. “But we hear very little of Miss Katharine Wright, who, after all, was just as instrumental in developing the airplane as were the brothers.

“I think,” he added, “we ought to at least be introduced to her.”