The first Wright wingers?
Inflation calculator gives $34,883,720.93 as the 2015 equivalent
Does anybody know why they didn’t marry?
It’s one thing to be Mr. Wright. It’s another to be Mr. Right!
Good one, D18!
I want to jump in my time machine and introduce Orv and Wilbur to Lilian and Dorothy Gish, two other inexplicably unmarried persons from the same era.
Here ya go. Yes, one died many years before his brother did…
They tried courting the Wrong sisters, but everybody knows you can’t Wright a Wrong.
Ironically the Wrights came up with the left-handed thread idea for the left pedal and left side of the bottom bracket on bicycles.
I see the Wright answers have already been given. Good job everyone for helping this thread take off.
A direct quote from Wilbur that I just made up:
“Women are too flighty.”
The executive summary is that World War I came along and the Wright brothers were relegated to training pilots.
The war effort created so many aircraft designers, builders and aircraft pilots, that the Wrights were not particularly valuable at the end of the war… Also the war effort sunk the Wrights patents… there was not going to be any way for their patents to be enforced… well in modern times they might have made a claim after the war ended, but back then the gov could just give away the patent rights and not have to pay compensation.
One of the brothers, don’t recall which one, hit on both of The Wong sisters. (Betty & Sally). They turned him down flat, proving… …2 Wongs won’t *make *a Wright.
There’s a new book out:
I’ve always wondered if, in the overall scheme of things, if they actually provided a net positive contribution to aviation or if their subsequent actions perhaps stalled the pace of development to a greater degree than their initial leap had done.
Heavier than air, fully controlled flight was just on the brink of becoming a reality, it’s not even clear at all if they were the first ones to do it.
One of them nearly did, and was looking forward to spend the rest of his life with Mrs. Wright; but then he found out her first name was Always, and bailed out of it. 
Brand new biography: The Wright Brothers
One thing about why there is no Wright Brothers Aircraft Company today is the tendency of new industries to initially have a number of companies that dwindle to few, either through failures or mergers. The initial Indianapolis 500 automobile race in 1911 was won by a Marmon automobile. The company exists today but makes electrical and industrial. The pace car was a Stoddard-Dayton that appealed to richer clients. Ultimately they were undercut in price by Ford’s Model, got bought out by Maxwell Motors (the car Jack Benny supposedly drove) which merged with Chrysler (which has had various financial difficulties for decades). Other entries were by Simplex, Lozier, National Motor Vehicle and others.
Back about 25 years ago I worked for a company that did a lot of business with a local machine shop. I had to go over there one day to check on some contract stuff, and noticed that the owner of the company (about 75 years old) had put his pilot’s license up on their bulletin board.
The license had been signed by Orville Wright.
So, until not too many years ago, Orville evidently signed every pilot’s license issued in the U.S.
Haven’t read the new biography, but another good one I can recommend is “The Bishop’s Boys” by Tom Crouch. Read it a few years back, and it was very enjoyable, covering most if not all aspects of Wilbur and Orville’s lives and their work before and after their historic first flight.
They were brothers. It would have been illegal.