3. Sharing an immensely close brotherly bond, neither Orville nor Wilbur married and they lived and worked together for the duration of their lives
Collaborating together throughout their lives, typically working six-day weeks, the brothers lived in the same house, ate meals together, and even shared a joint bank account. Despite this, contemporaneous accounts depict two people who could not have been more different in personality. Wilbur was regarded as the more serious and intellectual of the pair, possessing a remarkably sharp memory and often withdrew into his own thoughts; Orville, on the other hand, was a talkative, boisterous, if nonetheless somewhat shy, individual. As a result, Wilbur often managed the business aspects of their activities, whilst Orville focused on the mechanical concerns.
Equally, despite sharing a close and loving bond between each other neither brother ever married nor begat children. Orville repeatedly responded to questions regarding their bachelor lives that, as the elder sibling, it was Wilbur’s job to get married first; meanwhile, Wilbur responded that he had “no time for a wife and an airplane” and so chose the latter. When their younger sister, Katharine, whom they had been very close to, got married in 1926, Orville saw it as a betrayal. Refusing to attend the wedding or communicate with her for years afterward, he eventually relented and visited his sister just days before her death on March 3, 1929, from pneumonia.