The Wright Brothers Controversy

Once upon a time there were two brothers. Everyone said they were the same but in fact they were not. The reason people saw them as the same is their father willed it be so. The Bishop was adamant that to the world they must provide a United Front. Their father believed the world to be evil and he wanted his children to stay home and provide him with a home when he returned from his travels. So Wilbur Katherine and Orville did just that. They stayed home their entire adult lives  and kept the Bishop company and presented an equal united front to the world.

But Wilbur was different. He was smashed in the mouth with a hockey stick by a future mass murderer and went into a three year depression. By the end he wanted to fly. His brother had no real interest in flight and was happy to continue making bicycles. But Wilbur read everything and then contacted the Smithsonian and then the weather bureau to find out where the winds blew constantly. He then built his own kite flyer and flew outside of Dayton. He knew then that he was onto something and went down to Kitty Hawk North Carolina with a gilder he built. He went alone.

But Orville would join him and watch Wilbur fly his gliders for two years. By 1902 Orville tried the gliders and crashed  but to the world they were now the Wright Brothers and nothing would change this. Even when Wilbur presented his findings to engineers in Chicago and had a five hundred letter correspondence with Octave Chanute where he worked out the physics of flight. Orville was not part of any of this but a photo on Dec 17 1903 showed him flying and not Wilbur. From then on it was assumed they both invented the first plane. All the books said so...

Until now.

Wright Brothers Wrong Story

Was Wilbur and Orville Wrights Sister Gay?

The sex lives of the Wrights are all mixed up. They all lived at home. They all had an overbearing father who proclaimed the world evil.  Orville had a secret girlfriend and Wilbur professed not to ever have time for any kind of relationship. Then there is Katherine Wright, the enigma wrapped up in a riddle. You don't start out researching with an agenda. You come to it like an explorer looking for gold. The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright in the Library of Congress were my gold mine. They are bound in two volumes that are probably five inches across each. About 2500 pages in all. And buried in those 2500 pages of letters, diaries, official documents, drawings, are the letters of one Katherine Wright who dutifully cared for Wilbur and Orville and her father most of her life. The brothers never left home and neither did Katherine until much later.

Pictures of Katherine Wright are not kind. She is a plain almost boyish woman with wire rimmed glasses who stares directly at the camera in many of her photos. Her father Bishop Wright demanded from his daughter she keep the home after his wife died. Add to that her two brothers who also needed looking after as they scurried off to Kitty Hawk. So where is all this going. Katherine's primary relationships from high school through college and into adulthood were with woman and one in particular. Her letters to Margaret are that of two people in a relationship. Margaret was her best friend and they spent lots of time together, going to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago on an extended trip when Margarets husband was away.

As you read the correspondence a glimmer of suspicion begins. We live in an age  when being gay has not a sixteenth of the connotation it did at the turn of the century. Katherine's letters gush about Margaret as they pursued their friendship and the pictures are one after another of the two women enjoying each others company. There is no smoking gun here but it would make sense. Katherine was a tough no nonsense woman who enjoyed putting bad boys in their place in her classroom. Katherine would marry at 55  a widower after a long correspondence. Orville would never speak to her again for leaving the family home. This of course is all conjecture, but the question is there along with all the other questions regarding the secretive Wright family....was Katherine Wright gay?

Wright Brothers Wrong Story

Orville Wright's Girlfriend

We have been told the Wright Brothers are stick men. They had no carnal knowledge and didn't want any. They come through history as these sawdust figures without urges, needs, bodily fluids. They are men in derbies and high collars hurrying to the next meeting on how to make a better airplane. Historians marvel that these men were so singularly focused on cracking the code of flight that they did not need women or anything else that mere mortals required. But...like most myths, it is simply not true.

Her name was Mabel Beck. She was Orville's secretary, protector, keeper of all things, and his girlfriend. This would not be revealed until the 1990's and then ignored by historians and all people writing on the Wright Brothers. But it was true. Many suspected it for years. After Wilbur had died Mabel moved onto the second brother. She had been Wilbur's secretary for years and then became Orville's. But Wilbur died in 1912 and that left Orville and Mabel 36 years to get to know each other before he succumbed to a heart attack in 1948.

In those years a secret relationship between the world famous inventor and the Dayton local girl developed. The smoking gun in all of this would happen during the Great Depression when a young boy pulled himself up to Orville Wrights laboratory window. He had been shining Orville's shoes and was curious to see the inventor at work. What he saw was Mabel Beck on Orville's lap and making out with the brother of Wilbur.

This clandestine relationship would go on to the end of his life. It fit perfectly really. Wilbur could still come across as the asexual man while having the very woman who acted as bulwark against the world be his sexual partner. It is almost blasphemous to assert that either Wright Brother had an interest outside of flying into the wide blue sky. But at least in Orville's case, he didn't mind being grounded every now and then for some maintenance.

Wright Brothers Wrong Story