Aeronautics -- United States -- Biography; Wright, Orville, 1871-1948; Wright, Wilbur, 1867-1912
The company opened impressive offices in the Night and Day Bank
Building, 527 Fifth Avenue, New York, but the factory would be in
Dayton. In January, 1910, Frank Russell, a cousin of the Algers, who
had been appointed factory manager, arrived in Dayton and went to
see the Wrights at their office over the old bicycle shop. As the
brothers had no desk space to offer him, they suggested a room at the
rear of a plumbing shop down the street where he might make temporary
headquarters. According to Russell, Wilbur Wright came there a day or
two later carrying a basket filled with letters, directed to The Wright
Co., that had been accumulating.
“I don’t know what you’ll want to do about these,” Russell has reported
Wilbur as jokingly saying; “maybe they should be opened. But of course
if you open a letter, there’s always the danger that you may decide
to answer it, and then you’re apt to find yourself involved in a long
correspondence.”
At first The Wright Co. rented floor space in a factory building, but
almost immediately the company started to build a modern factory of
its own, and it was ready for use by November, 1910. Within a short
time after the company started operations in its rented space it had a
force of employees at mechanical work and was able to produce about two
airplanes a month.
The Wrights well knew that the time was not yet for the company to
operate profitably by selling planes for private use. Their main
opportunity to show a good return on the capital invested would be from
public exhibitions. Relatively few people in the United States had yet
seen an airplane in flight and crowds would flock to behold this new
miracle--still, in 1910, almost incredible.
As soon as they decided to give public exhibitions, the Wrights got in
touch with another pioneer of the air, Roy Knabenshue, a young man from
Toledo, who had been making balloon flights since his early teens, and
was the first in the United States to have piloted a steerable balloon.
They had previously become acquainted with Knabenshue. Because of his
curiosity over anything pertaining to aerial navigation, he had once
subscribed to a press-clipping bureau which sent him anything found
in the papers about aeronautics; and in this way he had been able to
read an occasional news item about the two Dayton men said to have
flown. With a fairly irresistible impish grin, Knabenshue never had
much trouble making new acquaintances, and he decided to call upon the
Wrights.
That was before the Wright flights at Fort Myer and in France, and the
brothers were not then interested when Knabenshue suggested that they
sell him planes for exhibitions.
“Well,” he said, “I have been making airship flights at the big state
fairs, besides promoting public exhibitions, and I know how to make
the proper contacts. You may have heard about my flights in a small
dirigible at the St. Louis World’s Fair. If you ever decide to give
exhibitions, just let me know.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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