top of her full-time job, Katharine hired a teenage maid, Carrie Kayler, who would remain with the family for decades. Collaboration with brothers The Wright Brothers, having neither independent resources nor government support, funded their aeronautical endeavors with earnings from their bicycle shop. After they began spending summers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1901, Katharine not only helped run the shop but packed supplies for their experiments and handled their official correspondence and relations with the press. As Wilbur and Orville’s efforts to market the Wright Flyer took them to Washington, D.C., and Europe, Katharine wrote hundreds of letters in which she kept them abreast of the progress of the family businesses, as well as personal and hometown news. She often scolded her unmarried brothers when they failed to keep up their end of the correspondence and warned them against amorous liaisons and other “distractions” that lay in wait for them abroad. (Many of Katharine’s letters from this and later periods are available as digital scans on the Library of Congress website.) In 1908, after nearly three years of trying, the brothers convinced the U.S. Signal Corps to allow them to test their Flyer for possible sale to the government at Fort Myer, Virginia. Orville was the pilot for the demonstrations. After a week of successful and record-breaking flights, disaster struck: on September 17, 1908, a split propeller sent the airplane out of control. The ensuing crash killed the passenger, U.S. Army Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, and seriously injured Orville, who suffered broken ribs and a broken leg. Katharine took emergency leave from her teaching job and rushed to his bedside at an Army hospital in northern Virginia. She rarely left Orville’s room during his seven-week recuperation and never returned to the career that had given her both intellectual satisfaction and an independent income. Orville later said that he would have died without his sister’s aid. In the aftermath of the crash, Katharine helped her brothers negotiate a one-year extension of their contract with the Signal Corps. Celebrity Soon after Orville’s near-fatal accident, Wilbur asked Katharine to sail to France with their recuperating brother. She and Orville joined Wilbur in Pau in early 1909. Katharine dominated the social scene in Europe, being far more outgoing and charming than her notoriously shy brothers. She put her proficiency in French to use in liaising with European royalty and influential dignitaries like Alfonso