Blaming Wilbur and Orville

Abstract

Few Americans can match the honors and adulation accorded Wilbur and Orville Wright. The brothers emerged as great international heroes with their first public flights in Europe and America in the high summer of 1908. They were no longer the shadowy figures whose claims to have flown an airplane as early as 1903 were widely discounted; now kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers flocked to see them fly and showered them with awards. Newspapers on two continents chronicled their triumphal progress across Europe and return to the United States in 1909. Wilbur's death from typhoid in 1912 was reported in bold headlines around the world. In the decades that followed, the Wrights' joint achievement would be commemorated with a great national monument, enshrinement in Greenfield Village (Henry Ford's grand tribute to the heroes of American ingenuity), and membership in good standing in the pantheon of brilliant inventors whose work reshaped history.