The Wright Brothers were the inventors of the world’s first functioning airplane, and yes, they had a sister.

Katharine Wright was born on August 19, 1874, in the state of Ohio. She was the youngest and only girl among five surviving children. Wilbur and Orville were numbers three and four.

The Beginnings of Responsibility

Katharine played a crucial role in their exploits from at least the age of three. Orville and a friend lit a fire in the backyard, and it threatened to get out of control. Katharine was the responsible one: she toddled off to get an adult (Heppenheimer, 20).

It would not be long before Katharine took on a lot more responsibility. Her mother had tuberculosis and was bedridden for years. Then she died, leaving Katharine as the woman of the house at age 14. It was a patriarchal age of fixed gender roles, so that was no joke. But she was fortunate to have a father who believed in education, even for girls, so she balanced school around running a household full of men.

Wilbur and Orville weren’t as convinced about the education idea. Not for themselves anyway. They dropped out of high school to open a print shop and then got excited about bicycles and started selling those.

In 1893, Katharine did something Wilbur and Orville never did. She went to college. Oberlin was the United States’ oldest coeducational college, Katharine got excellent grades. and an excellent education and made some lifelong friends, including one named Harry Haskell, who helped her with her math homework (Maurer, 31-33). Remember him, he’ll come back.

While Katharine was away at college, she was naturally not running her father’s house. But Wilbur wrote to tell her that all was in hand. He and Orville alternated weeks as cook, though their repertoire was somewhat limited. On Orville’s week, he served bread, butter, meat, gravy, and coffee three times a day. Wilbur prided himself on variety, by which he meant that for the first half of his week, he used Orville’s leftover meat in a hash, and when that ran out, he did eggs and sweet potatoes for the rest of the week (McCullough, 21).

Katharine graduated on June 22, 1898. She had the same education as the men in her class, but her career options were much more limited.

She went home and eventually found a job as a teacher at the local high school in the Latin and Greek department.

In a way, that was great. Latin and Greek were still considered the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, so that was a prestigious position. In another way, it was not so great. As a beginning teacher, Katharine was assigned the beginning Latin classes, which is fair and fine. What was unfair was that as a woman she could not advance beyond that point, to teach Greek or the upper-level Latin classes. Meanwhile, administrators were sitting around worrying about the dropout rates for boys and debating whether the reason behind the dropouts was the indignity of being taught by a female teacher (Maurer, 39-42).

To manage things back at home, Katharine had hired a fourteen-year-old as a housekeeper. She had been fourteen when she started doing that job, so maybe it didn’t seem so young to her.

A Dream of Flight

Wilbur and Orville still had a bicycle shop, but they also had a new interest. They were now tinkering with gliders and the problem of flight. This was a smaller leap than it might appear. Everyone else trying to invent an airplane was focused on how to power the thing without making it so heavy it couldn’t get off the ground. The result was several inventors who succeeded in getting into the air, only to find that getting up is relatively easy. Coming back down is a more urgent problem. If you mess that up, you might not get a second chance.

In contrast, Wilbur and Orville shelved the power problem. They used wind-powered gliders to learn balance and steering first, something that bicycles had already taught them a lot about. (Maurer, 44). Predictable winds and sand dunes for a soft landing were essential for testing, and after a great deal of correspondence with various weather experts, the brothers settled on going to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as the perfect location. Their first trip was in 1900. Katharine’s comment was “I never did hear of such an out-of-the-way place” (McCullough, 42). And she was right. There were no real roads there, no bridge from the mainland, very few human residents, millions of mosquito residents.

Guess who managed the bicycle shop in their absence? Yep, it was Katharine. It’s not like airplanes were a paying proposition. They were a hobby that probably would never amount to anything. Business went on. Wilbur and Orville did eventually hire someone else to help Katharine because she had a job of her own, but on that first trip, the man wasn’t there yet (McCullough, 74). On the later trips, Katharine half wished he wasn’t there still. In her opinion, he was more trouble than he was worth (McCullough, 75).

The first trip to Kitty Hawk was exciting. Still, Wilbur and Orville came home, thrilled to keep at it. Katharine commented that “we don’t hear anything but flying machine from morning till night” (Maurer, 46).

In 1901, Wilbur and Orville headed back to Kitty Hawk full of new ideas and renewed enthusiasm.

The mosquitoes were even worse that year (McCullough, 58-59). But they had a few human visitors as well, including some prominent engineers who were very, very impressed with the Wright gliders (they still weren’t airplanes). One of those engineers invited them to go to Chicago and tell the Western Society of Engineers about their research. This was an honor and an opportunity, but there was one problem. Wilbur and Orville were self-taught engineers. They were happiest tinkering in the shed with their tools. Public speaking was not their thing. In fact, they planned to say no to the invitation.

It was Katharine who said yes, yes, you are going to do that. They decided that Wilbur would be the one to go, though he wasn’t that eager. Katharine thought Orville was the smarter dresser, so she set Wilbur up in Orville’s shirt, collars, cuffs, cuff-links, and overcoat. He looked swell. (Her word not mine.) (McCullough, 66).

Katharine asked Wilbur whether his speech was going to be scientific or witty. He said “pathetic.”

The organizer asked if he would mind if they made that meeting a Ladies Night, by which we can learn that generally women were not allowed… <sigh>

Wilbur told the organizer it made no difference if women were present because “I will already be as badly scared as it is possible for a man to be” (McCullough, 66-67).

The speech Wilbur gave was entitled “Some Aeronautical Experiments,” which is pretty bland as a title. But it was an absolute landmark in the history of science and technology. Among other things, Wilbur said that his experiments with gliders were absolutely critical. It wasn’t safe, “but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.” He followed that up with a highly technical discussion of wing curvatures, and why the previously published literature on that subject was “somewhat in error” (Wright), which was a bit of an understatement.

A later writer referred to this speech as “the Book of Genesis in the 20th century Bible of Aeronautics” (McCullough, 67). So it’s a good thing Katharine pushed him into doing it, right?

Back at home in Ohio, the work went on. They had a new glider, which required sewing a lot of muslin together for the wing covering. I am very pleased to tell you that it was not Katharine who did the sewing. I was half expecting that, but no. The Wright brothers were fully competent with a sewing machine, which is, after all, a machine, much like a bicycle or an airplane. Katharine reported that “Will spins the sewing machine around by the hour, while Orv squats around marking the places to sew. There is no place in the house to live but I’ll be lonesome this time next week and wish that I could have some of their racket around” (McCullough, 74; Heppenheimer, 158-159).

The Reality of Flight

When all was in place, they headed out to Kitty Hawk yet again. By now, they knew how to fly. That is to say, they knew how to soar, float, dive, rise, circle, glide, and land. All good things, but one thing was still missing. They didn’t have a motor. None of this was powered flight. It depended on wind conditions to get off the ground.

There followed many heated discussions about motors, none of which were helped by the well-publicized attempts of some of their competitors. The pressure was on, and it made itself felt. At one point, Katharine was so irritated by the tension, that she said “if you don’t stop arguing, I’ll leave home!” (McCullough, 89)

I’m not sure if they stopped, but she didn’t leave home.

Then, finally, on December 17, 1903, Katharine came home from school to see a telegram had arrived from Kitty Hawk. It said:

SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING

ALL AGAINST TWENTY ONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM

LEVEL WITH ENGINE POWER ALONE

AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTY ONE MILES LONGEST 57

SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME FOR CHRISTMAS.

Orville Wright

Katharine and her older brother Lorin did inform the press. Only the press didn’t care. 57 seconds sounded trivial. Which is why the world sort of failed to notice that a dream that started with the Greeks and the story of Icarus was now real. Powered flight had been achieved.

Not only that, but it had been achieved at a total cost of a little under $1000, all of it earned in a little bicycle shop. The major competitor had spectacularly failed only a few days before, and he had spent nearly $70,000, much of it publicly funded. (McCullough, 108).

Of course, flying a few times once for less than a minute each time was still a long way away from selling anyone a functioning airplane. The work went on. Now that they could fly from level ground under varying wind conditions, they could do test flights at home. Local farmers grew so accustomed to flying machines passing by that they got bored. Some of the neighbors even felt sorry for the Wright family with the two grown men who neglected their legitimate business to work on crazy stuff (Maurer, 58).

A European Partnership

Eventually Wilbur and Orville felt confident enough to sell. The trouble was, they couldn’t find a buyer. No one in the US wanted it, not even the army. Europe was interested in flying machines, but they hadn’t seen it, and they had heard too many false claims of flight to believe yet another claim.

In 1907 Wilbur headed to Europe make his case to the interested parties. His confidence was maybe a little higher than it had been when traveling to Chicago to make his case to a few dozen engineers, but not a lot higher. He still didn’t want to go. He tried to get Orville to do it. Orville thought just the opposite, and he won. Wilbur went (McCullough, 134).

True to form, now the Americans were interested. Because if the Europeans were interested then clearly, there was something there after all.

Guess who handled the American media? Yes, that’s right. Katharine did all the correspondence with the American media (Maurer, 61).

By 1908, hard work had paid off. The Wrights had two contracts in hand, one with the French and one with the US Army. It was now time for demonstrations, which they had previously refused to do, because they worried that a demo would allow others to copy their designs without paying for them.

Wilbur did his demonstrations in France and had so many spectacular moments that the French took to calling him l’homme-oiseau or the Bird Man.

Orville was in Fort Myer, Virginia, demonstrating for the US Army. Things went spectacularly well for him too. He set world records right and left. Until he crashed. Badly.

He himself was hospitalized in critical condition, and the army lieutenant who was his passenger died.

When Katharine got the news, she took a leave of absence from her job and took a train out to Virginia.

It took weeks for Orville to heal, and even more for his sense of guilt to subside, though it was later shown that a crack in the propeller had caused the accident. It wasn’t Orville’s flying at fault.

Katharine took Orville back home in October, but he still needed a lot of help. She couldn’t return to teaching because her sub was contracted to the end of the semester, and the situation there had deteriorated anyway. The administrators had decided to save money by cutting the salaries of women on the faculty. Not all the faculty. Just the women on the faculty (Maurer, 65).

Overall, Katharine was feeling frazzled in every direction. She wrote to Wilbur that “Nobody else takes a particle of responsibility. They leave everything on me. I am about played out but Orv doesn’t realize it a bit. I think he wonders why I don’t teach school” (Maurer, 69).

Wilbur wrote back with a suggestion. He was feeling frazzled himself, but not because things were going badly in France. It was because they were going so well. He was absolutely swamped with requests for demonstrations and plane rides and parties and speeches and public appearances of all kinds. He was the type who liked to work with his hands. An adoring public was getting to him.

Wilbur said the whole family should come over to Europe, their 80-year-old father included. Orville could help with the demos, and Katharine could be the social manager, which was going to be a full-time job. Wilbur recognized that it was going to be a full-time job because he said he would pay her more than enough to make up for her lost teaching salary (McCullough, 209; Maurer, 70).

If a man born in the 19ᵗʰ century recognized that, it would be nice if writers born much more recently recognized it too, but I am sorry to say that some do not. Some sources make it sound like Katharine was going on vacation to Europe (Heppenheimer, 289). She was not. She went as an integral part of the business team.

She arrived in 1909 and France was wild for aviation. Every morning Katharine took a 2-hr French lesson and then leapt into lunch meetings and managing social engagements all afternoon and into the evening (Maurer, 73). The Wrights were invited to far more than they could possibly attend. She wrote home that “Every time we make a move, the people on the street stop and stare at us… We have our pictures taken every two minutes” (McCullough, 213).

In truth, the French press was spinning the story for as long as they possibly could, and Katharine was a gift to them. Wilbur and Orville were celebrities, but they never learned French, and they didn’t talk a lot even in English.

Katharine was by far the most sociable in any language, while remaining totally American, which was meant as a compliment, just in case that wasn’t clear.

She was meeting people of all social classes and Europe had rigid rules about that. Katharine had never been taught the rules. She tried. She practiced a curtsy before meeting the king of Spain, but then when she actually met him, she said forget it. She smiled big and stuck out her hand for a handshake (Maurer, 74). The king of Spain was charmed.

Europeans thought she was delightful. So delightful that they spun a lot more stories about her. Articles said she was the real mathematical genius behind the invention of flight (Maurer, 74; McCullough, 216) or that she had financed the entire operation. Neither claim was true (and believe me I’d be thrilled to say that it was), but it kept people buying newspapers.

The Business of Flight and Other Causes

The Wright siblings came home from France both rich and famous. They were invited to the White House to meet President Taft. Later that same year (1909 still), the US Army bought its first airplane. Katharine and Orville headed off for a repeat performance in Germany.

The business of flight was a juggernaut that still hasn’t stopped, but it did stop for Katharine. By 1912, it was so big and so professional that according to my major source, there was no longer a place for her in it (Maurer, 86).

That’s a statement that irks me a bit. How could there not be a place for her? She had plenty of experience by then, and she knew the business as well as anyone. So I’m not sure if she was pushed out (which is irritating) or if she simply chose to devote her time elsewhere (which is fine). She didn’t need the money anymore. Partly because the whole family had benefited from extraordinary success, and also because when Wilbur died in 1912, he left Katharine $50,000 in his will (Maurer, 89), which today would be 1.6 million dollars (online calculator).

Katharine spent her time on causes she believed in. Such as women’s suffrage. I am pleased to say that not only did she march in a parade for women’s right to vote, but Orville and her 86-year-old father marched right next to her (Maurer, 86).

Katharine was also the second woman to sit on Oberlin’s Board of Trustees. The signature issue she worked for was equal pay for female faculty. Also honorary degrees for prominent women (Maurer, 105).

A Twist Ending

The years passed and Katharine and Orville lived in a mansion and did pretty much what they wanted. So you can see why Orville was stunned when Katharine, age 52, said she was leaving to get married.

The lucky groom was Harry Haskell (I told you to remember him way back when Katharine was a student at Oberlin). He had graduated, had a great career as a journalist, gave an aspiring writer named Ernest Hemingway his first job, got married, watched his wife die, and renewed his friendship with Katharine.

Katharine had long since accepted that men liked her as a friend, but not romantically, so Harry’s proposal came as a complete surprise. After a little time to think about it, she wanted to say yes. Her problem was Orville. He depended on her. He really depended on her. She thought he would take it badly, and she was right.

Orville felt totally abandoned. He did not attend the wedding, and he did not write to her. Two years later when she fell very sick with pneumonia, he relented. He came to see her, one day before she died on March 3, 1929 (Maurer, 115).

It is a little sad that Orville couldn’t find it in him to be happy for his sister. But on the other hand, I do think it proves what this whole series has been about: women often played a supportive role in history, but supportive does not mean small. That support was very, very important.

Selected Sources

Heppenheimer, T A. First Flight : The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2003.

Maurer, Richard. The Wright Sister : Katharine Wright and Her Famous Brothers. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2016.

McCullough, David. The Wright Brothers. Simon and Schuster, 2015.

Wright, Wilbur. “Some Aeronautical Experiments.” http://www.wright-brothers.org, September 18, 1901. https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Inventing_the_Airplane/Kitty_Hawk_in_a_Box/Some-Aeronuatical-Experiments-by-Wilbur-Wright.htm.