The Wright Cycle Shop and the Invention of Flight
Near Dayton, Ohio
In the eighteen nineties, two brothers ran a bicycle repair and sales business on West Third Street in Dayton. Their shop moved six times as the business grew. At each location they did what good mechanics do: they watched things that moved, thought about why they moved the way they did, and asked whether the principle could be improved.
The Wright Cycle Company sold and repaired bicycles. The brothers also manufactured their own models: the Van Cleve, named for that early Dayton settler, and the St. Clair, named for a territorial governor. They invented a self-oiling wheel hub. They built a printing press and ran it commercially. They printed a weekly newspaper for Dayton's Black community, the Dayton Tattler, whose editor was a young poet named Paul Laurence Dunbar, a classmate of Orville's from Central High School.
What happened next is American mythology, and like most mythology it contains a hard technical core. Wilbur and Orville read everything they could find about flight. They wrote to the Smithsonian for a bibliography. They built a six-foot wind tunnel on the second floor of the shop at eleven twenty-seven West Third Street and used it to test more than two hundred wing shapes, gathering data no one else had. They did not guess their way to Kitty Hawk in December of nineteen three. They calculated.
The brick building at twenty-two South Williams Street, where the brothers worked from eighteen ninety-five to eighteen ninety-seven, is the only surviving Wright bicycle shop still on its original foundation. It is now part of Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. The profits from selling bicycles funded every experiment. It cost under one thousand dollars to build the Wright Flyer. The return on that investment was the twentieth century.
