Aeronautics -- United States -- Biography; Wright, Orville, 1871-1948; Wright, Wilbur, 1867-1912
Ambitious to be a really good printer, Orville took employment during
two summer vacations with a printing establishment in Dayton, and
worked there sixty hours a week. But he felt that the most fun and
satisfaction in connection with printing had been from building his
own press. Along in the spring of 1888, when he was nearly seventeen
years old, he started to build another press, bigger than any he had
used before. He didn’t know exactly what he would do with it, but that
question did not yet give him much concern. He would have the fun of
building it. In the family woodshed was a pile of fire-wood cut in
four-foot lengths. From these he made much of the framework, though
he had to buy at a lumber yard a few longer pieces. From near-by junk
yards he collected odds and ends of iron or steel that could be used. A
difficult problem was to find a means of forcing the type against the
printing surface, always with the same pressure, just enough and not
too much. Orville searched the Wright barn and tool-shed for something
that could be adapted, but without success until his eye happened to
alight on the old family buggy. The buggy had a folding top, held
firmly in place, when raised, by steel bars hinged in the middle. They
were designed to force the top just so far and no farther. Exactly what
he needed!
The job turned out to be much more difficult than Orville had expected,
and Wilbur Wright, observing his kid brother at a tough job, offered
to help him build the press. Some of the suggestions Wilbur made for
moving parts of that press were peculiar in that they seemed to violate
all mechanical rules and could not possibly be expected to work. Yet
they did. Some time later, a well-dressed stranger entered the shop
where Orville, merrily whistling, was feeding paper into his press,
and asked if he might look at that “home-made printing outfit.” He
had heard about it while visiting in Dayton. What at once astonished
Orville and two or three boys in the shop was that the visitor, with
complete disregard for his good clothes, lay right down flat on his
back on the floor to study the press in operation. After he had
observed it for several minutes, he got up, brushed himself off, and
remarked: “It works all right, but I still don’t understand _why_ it
works.” Before leaving he laid his card on a table. He was the foreman
of the pressroom of a newspaper in Denver.
Now that he had his new press, Orville wished he could put it to some
purpose to make full use of the greatly increased printing capacity.
The press was big enough and fast enough to print a newspaper. Why not
start a neighborhood weekly? He had hardly more than thought of this
before he decided to do so. It was probably the first time a paper was
ever started just to use a press.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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