In the years following Wilbur’s death, Orville had to face alone the burdens and tedium of continuing lawsuits. Further, he was outraged by an effort of the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Charles D. Walcott, with the help of Glenn Curtiss, to rehabilitate the reputation of Samuel P. Langley and in so doing discredit the Wrights.
Making the case that Langley’s failure had been the fault of the launching device for his aerodrome, not the machine itself, the aerodrome was taken out of storage to be tested again. But as was not disclosed, Curtiss oversaw major modifications of the aerodrome, so that when tested once more in 1914 it performed with reasonable success and the Smithsonian endorsed a statement saying, “Professor Samuel P. Langley had actually designed and built the first man-carrying flying machine capable of sustained flight.”
Before the aerodrome was sent back to the Smithsonian to be placed on exhibit, Walcott ordered that it be returned in its original 1903 condition.
Orville’s fury on learning of what had been done was momentous and altogether justified. Earlier, when he and Wilbur had offered their 1903 Flyer to the Smithsonian, they had been turned down by Walcott. In 1928, Orville sent the 1903 Flyer to England on loan to the Science Museum in London. Only then did the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian at last pass a resolution declaring “to the Wrights belongs the credit of making the first successful flight with a power-propelled heavier-than-air machine carrying a man.” But it would be another twenty years before the Wrights’ 1903 Flyer was returned from London and presented to the Smithsonian for display, and by then Orville was no longer living.
Of further aggravation were stories of others who had supposedly achieved flight before the Wrights, the most annoying being that of a German American named Gustave Whitehead, who was said to have flown a plane of his own creation in Connecticut in 1901 and 1902. The story was entirely without evidence and wholly untrue, but kept drawing attention as the years passed to the point where Orville finally felt obliged to denounce it himself. In an article titled, “The Mythical Whitehead Flight,” published in U.S. Air Services in 1945, he made plain that Whitehead was a man of delusions. Strangely, the story still draws attention, despite the fact that there is still no proof.
Advances in aviation all the while had been accelerating faster than Orville or anyone of his generation had thought possible, and starting with World War I to a form of weaponry like nothing before in human experience.
In 1927 young Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to land in Paris, a feat once thought impossible by the Wrights. On his return to America, Lindbergh made a point of coming to Dayton to pay his respects to Orville at Hawthorn Hill, an event that caused excitement in Dayton of a kind not seen since the brothers had made their celebrated return from Europe eighteen years before.
Orville lived to see, too, the horrific death and destruction wrought by the giant bombers of World War II and in several interviews tried as best he could to speak both for himself and for Wilbur.
We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong. . . . No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses.
As time went on, Orville grew increasingly inclined to withdraw from society, yet felt obliged to participate in a continuing number of public occasions in his honor, doing so in large measure out of respect for Wilbur’s memory. He received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan, and Oberlin College. In 1919 he received an Honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale, the university where once, nearly forty years before, Wilbur had hoped he might enroll.
Orville attended the dedication of the Wright Library in what had been named Katharine Wright Park in Oakwood, and having agreed to the removal of both the Wright bicycle shop and the family home at 7 Hawthorn Street from Dayton to the Henry Ford outdoor museum, Greenfield Village, at Dearborn, Michigan, he attended their formal opening on what would have been Wilbur’s seventy-first birthday.
Of the numerous Wright monuments erected, the one dedicated to Wilbur at Le Mans in 1920 was the first. The largest, the Wright Memorial at Kitty Hawk at Kill Devil Hills, was dedicated in 1932 with Orville present to accept it on behalf of both Wilbur and himself. A Wilbur and Orville Wright memorial was created on Wright Brothers Hill overlooking Huffman Prairie, and in 1945 an aircraft carrier, the USS Wright, was launched.
Orville remained at Hawthorn Hill, looked after by Carrie Grumbach, and outlived Wilbur by thirty-six years. He lived to see aviation transformed by jet propulsion, the introduction of the rocket, the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947.
He died of a heart attack at age seventy-seven in Dayton’s Miami Valley Hospital at ten-thirty the evening of January 30, 1948, and was laid to rest at Woodland Cemetery with his mother, father, Wilbur, and Katharine.
Ever the perfect gentleman to the end, “polite almost to a fault,” as said, always neatly dressed, his shoes always shined, Orville was also known to drive his automobile at such high speed that the police of Oakwood would close their eyes and hold their breath until he passed by on the way to his laboratory downtown.
On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer.