June 10, 1909
Aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright were formally honored by President William Howard Taft for their considerable airborne accomplishments. The ceremony, which was held in the East Room of the White House, took place about five-and-a-half years after the brothers made transportation history with the world’s first controlled, powered, and sustained heavier-than-air human flight.
More than 1,000 people were on hand to watch Taft present the honorees with gold medals from the Aero Club of America, which had been established in 1905 to promote aviation in the United States. “I esteem it a great honor and an opportunity to present these medals to you as an evidence of what you have done,” Taft said during the ceremony. “I am glad — perhaps at a delayed hour — to show that in America it is not true that ‘A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.’”
Taft added, “It is especially gratifying thus to note a great step in human discovery by paying honor to men who bear it so modestly. You made this discovery by a course that we of America like to feel is distinctively American — by keeping your nose right at the job until you had accomplished what you had determined to do.”
Taft also highlighted how this White House event marked the first official presidential recognition of aviation accomplishments since 1793, when George Washington went to Philadelphia to give balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard a “passport” letter on behalf of the United States. Washington subsequently joined others in watching that French aviation trailblazer as he undertook the first balloon flight in the Western Hemisphere.
Just a few hours after being awarded the Aero Club medals by Taft, the Wright brothers boarded a train and made their way back home Dayton, Ohio, to continue working on their latest airplane.
The accompanying photo taken at the White House on June 10, 1909, includes the following individuals from left to right: Robert Shaw Olivier, U.S. assistant secretary of war from 1903 to 1913; Alan Ramsay Hawley, another early aviator; unknown; unknown; Wilbur Wright; William Howard Taft; Orville Wright; Katharine Wright, the younger sister of Wilbur and Orville Wright; Herbert Parsons, a U.S. representative from New York from 1905 to 1911; unknown; and unknown.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
For more information on the 1909 White House ceremony honoring Wilbur and Orville Wright, please check out Sacramento Star 10 June 1909 — California Digital Newspaper Collection
Additional information on the major activities of the Wright brothers during 1909 is available at Wilbur and Orville Wright A Chronology: 1909
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