Aviation's Birth Certificate
When a private collection of Wright Company papers went public, we discovered that many of our notions about the Wrights' business practices were wrong.
- By Douglas Gantenbein
- Air & Space magazine, March 2003
(Page 2 of 3)
Perhaps. But the experiences of even the best trained Wright pilots indicate that flying the Wright machines was anything but easy. A letter discussing pay for pilot Archibald Hoxsey is followed a few months later by one in which Barnes mentions the creation of a trust fund for Hoxsey’s family—he was killed in a crash on December 31, 1910. Other letters arrange $12,000 to cover funeral expenses and a trust fund for the family of Ralph Johnstone, killed while demonstrating a Wright flying machine.
Letters also discuss the first female passenger of an aircraft, whether to take on a black student, how to guard the Wrights’ patents, and even how to skew aircraft part prices to favor the Wrights’ customers over competitors’.
The collection adds clarity to the Wrights’ years in the aviation industry. “The history books are often wrong,” says Parks. “There’s material for four or five new books in these documents.”
The papers refute, for instance, what appears in most aviation history books: that the Glenn L. Martin Company merged with the Wright Company in 1915. Instead, Parks says, records from both companies (the collection also includes early Martin and Curtiss Aeroplane Company materials) show their boards meeting separately a year later, an indication that the companies remained independent for some time after the supposed merger. The papers also reveal that the Wrights’ sister, Katharine, played a much more prominent role as secretary for the company’s executive committee than previously thought, and records of the dates and locations of flying exhibitions open a window on what had been the undocumented business of pre-1914 barnstorming.
Despite its obvious significance, the collection nearly met with an unremarkable end. For decades the papers were filed away at the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, a descendant of the Wright Company and a business begun by Glenn Curtiss, the brothers’ one-time rival. Then, in the early 1990s, aviation collector Joseph Gertler got a call from a former Curtiss-Wright employee who had an amazing story: He’d saved boxes of documents signed by the Wrights from the garbage can when company offices had been cleaned out. Gertler was initially skeptical, but after a week he called back and asked to see the papers. When he did, he realized how important they likely were, and in 1993, after lengthy negotiations, acquired the collection.
Though he was determined to get the papers into public hands, museums balked when he floated his initial asking price of $900,000. According to Parks, however, that was a bargain; single letters could have easily fetched $1,000 (far more if they bore Orville or Wilbur’s signatures), and the entire collection, sold letter by letter, might have garnered close to $2 million. “Although I had had several offers to buy different items piecemeal, I had never offered them [that way],” says Gertler. “I only expressed hope that they could eventually be acquired by a major institution, as a unit.”
Finally, in 1999, with the centennial of the Wrights’ first flight approaching, the Museum of Flight, backed by anonymous donors, put together a still-undisclosed winning bid.
“It’s quite a coup for the Museum of Flight to have this collection,” says Crouch. “Everybody wanted it—the Library of Congress, Wright State, and others.” According to Crouch, the National Air and Space Museum was also interested, but found the collection too expensive.
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Comments (2)
The world of aviation suffered when the Wrights squabbled over patents and again in 1947, Other notable builders have been flying under power from 1899 to 1903, Politics squander truth for a single hero.
Posted by Don Hillberg on October 28,2010 | 03:48 PM