The brothers and Miss Wright

She was once the toast of Europe. King Alfonso of Spain called her the "ideal American". The French gave her the Legion of Honour - even now she is one of the few American women ever to have received it. Her flying exploits persuaded the elderly Edward VII that those new-fangled contraptions called aeroplanes might be safe to travel in after all. One admirer remembered her as having "coal black hair, deep blue eyes, and a smile that could blind you".

But this year, when the world celebrates the centenary of the first ever manned flight - by her brothers Orville and Wilbur - Katharine Wright will be all but forgotten. Yet she played as much a role in the conquest of the air as her famous siblings - so much so that at the time the French press christened her "the third Wright brother".

Katharine Wright was born in the archetypal American small town of Dayton, Ohio (pop. 100,000) on 19 August, 1874 - her brother Orville’s third birthday. She was the youngest offspring of Milton Wright, a zealous but intellectual evangelical minister, and the only girl to survive infancy. Bishop Wright gave each of his children distinctive first names - Reuchlin, Lorin, Wilbur and Orville - to build character. But to the world, Katharine was always Kate.

The Wrights were, by all accounts, a happy, close-knit family through the years America was recovering from the Civil War. But the three youngest - separated in age from the older brothers Reuchlin and Lorin - became a tribe of their own. Kate remembered Orville as the one who "pulled me in his wagon, protected me, and insisted that his friends include me". They formed a childish pact - Wilbur the shy, precocious leader, Orville his devoted follower, and Kate, the witty, gregarious one. They agreed never to marry or part from each other: an innocent oath which would have tragic consequences.

On 4 July, 1889, the US national holiday, Kate’s life was changed dramatically. Her mother Susan, still only 59, died from the killer disease of the age, tuberculosis. Who could take her place? As ever, Bishop Wright was preoccupied travelling extensively on church matters. The two elder brothers, Lorin and Reuchlin, had married but young Wilbur and Orville were still at home. At 19, Wilbur had been injured on the head in a hockey match, ending his vision of a college career. So, aged only 15, young Kate stepped into the adult role of mother, housekeeper and hostess for her father and brothers. The Pact had acquired an unexpected reality.

She ironed shirts for the meticulous Orville and nursed him through typhoid. She reminded Wilbur to stand up straight and helped him through one of the early appendectomy operations. But Kate was no drudge. Feisty, intelligent and opinionated, she completed high school years with honours then entered nearby Oberlin College.

In the Rag Time era of the early 1890s, the bicycle became a national craze in America, spelling new-found independence for youth - including young women like Kate Wright. She took to riding a bike to college where she was training to be a teacher. Competitive as ever, brothers Wilbur and Orville started racing theirs.

Suddenly bored with their existing printing business, Wilbur, now 25, and Orville, 21, decided on the spur of the moment to open a bicycle repair shop. Kate graduated to become a classics teacher at the local Steele High School. When not in the classroom, she helped out in the cycle shop maintaining records, writing advertising copy, providing meals and (so rumour has it) subsidising the financial shortfalls. The brothers were soon designing their own bikes. Yet soon the dilettante Wilbur was restless again.

The dreamer’s imagination was caught by another fad gripping America, the craze for manned flight. Everywhere, inventors were trying to get into the sky. Wilbur, with Orville in tow, visited the main contenders. Now his secretive nature - honed by the privacy of the Wright household and the sibling pact - came to the fore. Wilbur’s quiet espionage brought together all the current discoveries and experimental research into manned flight. He even bought a glider from a rival to see how it worked. Armed with this information, the obsessive Wilbur focused on getting into the air first. At long last he had an outlet for his dark personality and frustrated ambition.

Abandoning the bicycle shop to Kate and brother Lorin, Wilbur and Orville turned to building aeroplanes. They found a secret location at Kitty Hawk on the bleak Atlantic shore of North Carolina where the strong winds helped launch their early manned gliders. There they spent three long summers designing and testing their creations, partly subsidised by Kate’s money.

Plenty of people were getting into the air. The trick was to go where you wanted, which required a method of controlling direction. The Wrights applied intellect rather than guesswork. Back at Dayton, they enlisted Kate’s help with the mathematics needed to better understand the aerodynamics of flight. They came up with a wing shape and moveable control surfaces that just might do the trick.

In September 1903, Wilbur and Orville returned to Kitty Hawk for another try. The results were disastrous. The weather proved atrocious and their aircraft suffered repeated damage without getting off the ground. Christmas was looming and the thought of Kate and home. For once in their conservative lives, Wilbur and Orville gambled. They would try one more time in the morning, regardless of conditions, then call it quits.

The morning of 17 December, 1903 dawned cold, clear and blustery on the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk. Wilbur and Orville wore their customary dapper business suits for the occasion. Who should fly was decided by the toss of a coin. Lady luck decided it was Orville’s turn. He flew. That first flight wasn’t much - 12 seconds and 120 feet - but today it is recognised as the first controlled flight in a heavier-than-air craft.

At dinner that night, back in Dayton, Kate received a telegram: "Success four flights Thursday morning ... Inform press. Home Christmas. Orville." On returning from school next day, she walked the four blocks to her brother Lorin’s house and composed a press release. But her attempts to get newspaper attention proved hard-going - at first no-one believed her. It took several days before any newspapers mentioned the story.

The next few years were a battle to perfect the Wrights’ aircraft and sell it. Kate continued teaching but found the time to pester the US army to buy a Wright plane. She even wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt. But the American army proved sceptical of the new device as a weapon of war, so the Wrights’ thoughts turned to Europe.

The Europeans were now in the air themselves. In 1906, Alberto Santos-Dumont, a debonair aristocrat and celebrated balloonist, made the first powered flight in Europe before a crowd of excited Parisians. In order to protect their claim to flying priority, Wilbur was reluctantly persuaded to head for France on his own to show off the much superior Wright aircraft.

Back home Kate had unexpected success with her marketing efforts. The boisterous President Roosevelt responded to her entreaties. Early in 1908, a deal was made with the US Army Signal Corps to buy a Wright Flyer for $25,000. But first Orville had to do an exhibition flight over Washington DC. It was a disaster. A propeller snapped and Orville lost control of the plane, which plummeted to the ground, killing an army officer. Orville had serious injuries - a broken hip, broken ribs and concussion.

When Kate received a telegram with the news of her brother’s injuries, she immediately took leave of absence from her school and boarded the next train to Washington. She stayed six weeks nursing Orville back to health. It proved another turning point in her life. She never went back to teaching. Katharine Wright was now involved full-time in the aeroplane business.

She and the recovering Orville boarded a liner and headed for France to aid Wilbur. The three Wrights became an instant success in Europe and gained celebrity status. Newspapers clamoured for stories about them, particularly the "third brother" in her grand Edwardian hats and furs. Kate’s ability with languages and her outgoing nature made up for Wilbur and Orville’s introverted, small-town personalities.

On their triumphant return from Europe, the siblings were invited to the White House. Flushed with success, they formed the Wright Company in 1909. The share certificates were signed by Katharine. Kate took on the role of public relations co-ordinator, marketing staff and business adviser. She entertained politicians and fellow aviators. She sorted through the voluminous offers, threats and fan mail sent to her brothers. And she pestered reluctant Wilbur into conducting lecture tours, even writing his speeches.

But dark clouds were now gathering over the close-knit Wright household. Fame brought heartache rather than happiness for the Pact. The irascible and obsessive Wilbur became consumed with protecting his aircraft patents, filing lawsuit after lawsuit. His chief nemesis was a flamboyant New Yorker, Glenn Curtiss. An engineering genius, Curtiss was also everything Wilbur Wright was not: athletic, gregarious and a ruthless businessman.

The legal duel consumed Wilbur’s waning energies. Exhausted, he contracted typhoid. Three weeks later, on 30 May, 1912, he was dead at the age of 45. In a bid to put the loss of Wilbur behind them, in 1913 the family moved to a mansion that Orville had built on Hawthorn Hill - a rare display of ostentation. This was to become the centre of the Wright world. With Kate as hostess, family gatherings and weddings were held in the huge house. Orville remained an important man in aviation and Hawthorne Hill played host to the world’s aviation elite, with Katharine presiding.

But the death of Wilbur, the intellectual driving force of the trio, had demoralised Orville. In 1915, quixotically he settled out of court with Curtiss, handing over all his patents for only $1 million - worth about $20 million in today’s terms. Cannily, Curtiss called his new company Curtiss-Wright, taking the Wright glory although Orville had nothing more to do with it.

Two years later Bishop Wright also died. Over the next decade, an increasingly paranoid and bitter Orville became extremely reliant upon Kate. At that time, the world at large still neglected the Wrights’ claim to have been the first to achieve powered flight. Glenn Curtiss had persuaded American opinion that the honour fell instead to Professor Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution.

Although still looking after Orville, the dynamic Kate was making a name in her own right. She joined the advisory board of her old college, Oberlin, one of the first women to play a management role in American higher education. There she found herself attending meetings with an old college friend, Henry J Haskell. Between times, he had made a reputation for himself in journalism and was now editor of the influential Kansas City Star. Haskell had recently lost his wife.

Kate and Haskell began to correspond. Kate wrote frequently, sometimes three or four letters each day. Unexpectedly - for she was now in her fifties - she had fallen in love. She kept the romance a secret from Orville, knowing he would feel threatened by it. Even after all these years of fame, he remained painfully shy as well as angry at how he perceived his legacy to have been slighted. As far as Orville was concerned, the Pact was in force until they all died.

Kate had other ideas. Finally, in 1926, she decided to marry Henry Haskell. Orville went into alternate fits of rage and depression. He refused to attend the wedding, so Katharine married Haskell, not at Hawthorn Hill as family members had traditionally done, but at Oberlin. They moved to Kansas City with Orville still refusing to speak to her.

Whatever the root cause of Orville’s behaviour - immature selfishness, sexual jealousy, arrogance, pride - Kate was deeply hurt. The remaining Wright siblings, particularly Lorin, tried to change Orville’s mind but to no avail. Then, two years after her marriage, Kate suddenly fell ill with pneumonia.

Back in Dayton, Lorin - still happily running the family bicycle company - pleaded with Orville to see his sister. Still he refused. But it soon became apparent that Kate was dying. At last Orville set out for Kansas City. He had not spoken to Kate for two years. He got there with only days to spare. She died on 3 March, 1926. Bizarrely, Orville obtained permission from Katharine’s husband to take her body back to Dayton to be buried alongside Wilbur and, later, himself. The Pact endured unto death.

The world forgot the Wrights for a time, especially Kate. On the basis of Curtiss’s propaganda, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington honoured Samuel Langley for having built the first successful aircraft. In disgust, Orville sent his original flying machine to the Science Museum in London. Only in 1942, when the then secretary of the Smithsonian, Charles Abbot, finally agreed the Wrights had flown first, did Orville agree to return the aircraft to America. It was finally returned back home in 1948 - 11 months after Orville’s death.

When the Wrights were finally honoured as the first to fly, a new heroic myth was created of the lone inventors working in their bicycle shop. There was no room for Kate in this all-male picture. Only then was the Pact truly broken. Yet in Europe in 1908 Kate was always to be seen flying alongside her brothers. The sight of this confident woman aloft in her long skirts did more to convince Europe that the aeroplane was a safe mode of transport than a thousand technical articles. With Katharine Wright the aircraft came of age.