The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

  From all Wilbur had reported and explained to him, and from his own judgment of Berg, and from the meeting, Orville had his suspicions absolved, his mind put to rest. He was ready to proceed with Wilbur and as Wilbur directed. “Our friends F [Flint & Company] and B [Berg] are not in the bandit crew,” Orville was glad to assure Katharine.

  Wilbur led Orville on a first stroll through the Louvre and to celebrate Orville’s arrival in Paris, Frank Cordley hosted an evening at the legendary and highly expensive Tour d’Argent by the Seine on the Left Bank, where a table-side preparation of duck, canard au sang, the main course, performed by the restaurant’s celebrated owner-chef, Frédéric Delair, seems to have made a far greater impression on Orville than anything he had seen at the Louvre. Delair worked in a formal tailcoat and with his flowing side whiskers and pince-nez eyeglasses, looked, as Orville would report to Katharine, more like a college professor than a chef and had a way of swinging his head as he carved up the duck into small pieces that in itself was worth the full price.

  The legs, wings, etc., [Orville continued] are sent to another room where we cannot see them receiving the finishing touches; but the carcass, after most of the meat has been removed is put in a fancy press, and all the juice and marrow extracted. The meat and juices are then placed over the alcohol flame and cooked together. Mr. Frederic basting the meat the entire time. Finally the duck is served with the enclosed card and folder which gives the serial number of the duck we ate.

  When, in a letter, Bishop Wright expressed dire warnings over the temptations of Paris, Wilbur wrote to assure him they would do nothing to disgrace the training they had received at home, and that all the wine he had tasted thus far would not fill a single glass. “We have been real good over here,” Orville added. “We have been in a lot of the big churches and haven’t got drunk yet.”

  Their prospects in France were at a low ebb, thanks in large part to the number of government officials departing for their customary August vacations. But with interest in Germany still active, Wilbur and Berg decided to leave for Berlin, departing August 4.

  On the way to Berlin, seeing a sign from the train window of the small town of Jemappes in Belgium, Wilbur began talking about the historic battle fought there in 1792, and, to Berg’s amazement, went on at length about the importance of the victory won by the army of the infant French Republic over the regular Austrian army. It was for Berg yet another example of the extraordinary reach of Wilbur’s mind. He had read about it in his youth, Wilbur explained.

  A week later, when Charlie Taylor arrived, Orville had him check into a less conspicuous hotel on the rue d’Alger, around the corner from the Meurice, and register simply as C. E. Taylor of Lincoln, Nebraska. “We do not want the papers or anyone here to know that he has come over,” Orville wrote Katharine. In the time since Orville’s arrival the press had been following the brothers everywhere, and it was becoming ever more bothersome.

  To the reporters the brothers were like no one they had ever tried to cover. A correspondent for the London Daily Mail told Orville he was “the toughest proposition” newspapermen had yet run up against. He himself, said the correspondent, had already spent more money on cab fares trying to learn what the brothers were up to than he could ever hope to recover, but that he could not give up for fear some other reporter would get the “scoop.”

  In mid-August, when it looked as though French interest in an agreement had revived, Wilbur and Berg returned from Berlin. Still there was no real progress with the French. Nor had there been with the Germans.

  By early September the brothers had little to do but bide their time, and to judge from what Orville recorded, they had become occupied primarily with sitting in the park watching the passing parade. If Wilbur had his Louvre, Orville had the garden of the Tuileries.

  “You need not worry about me missing the use of the front porch,” Orville wrote to Katharine, “I spend at least half of my time while awake in the park across from the hotel.” There were hundreds of little iron chairs in the park, the rent for which was 2 cents a day, he explained. “A number of women are employed in going about to pounce down on every unsuspecting chap that happens to be occupying a chair and to collect the two cents.”

  He especially enjoyed watching the French children, amazed by how well behaved they were. He described the small merry-go-rounds, each operated by a man turning a crank, and thought it was pathetic that the children could so enjoy something so tame, hanging on as if riding a bucking bronco. Then, every so often, along would come some American children to liven things up.

  They jump on and off the horses while the affair is going at full speed—which is never fast—seize the rings by the handful, which they are supposed to spear one at a time with an ice pick, and when the ride is over begin tossing the ice picks (I don’t know what they are called here) about among themselves when the man comes to collect them, till the poor fellow that runs the affair is driven nearly crazy.

  “Of course, we feel ashamed of the youngsters,” he added, “and know that they need a good thrashing, but it does seem pleasant to have something once in a while that is a little more exciting.”

  Greatest by far was the spectacle of seeing so many—children, men, and women of all ages—playing with “diabolo,” a simple, age-old toy that had lately become all the rage. It consisted of a wooden spool the shape of an hourglass and two bamboo sticks about two feet in length, joined by a string four to five feet in length, and it cost about 50 cents. The player would slip the string around the spool, then, a stick in each hand, lift the spool from the ground and start it spinning and by spinning it faster, keep it balanced in the air. It was because the spool would so often fall to the ground, until the beginner got the knack, that it was called “the devil’s game.” It had originated in China a hundred years or more earlier, and to the brothers it was irresistible.

  The whole course of their lives, they liked to say, had begun in childhood with a toy, and a French toy at that, and now here they were in middle age in France, enjoying themselves no less than if they were children still.

  With the diabolo the magic was not that the toy itself flew, as did Alphonse Pénaud’s helicopter. Here you yourself had to overcome the force of gravity with skill. You had to learn the trick by practice, and more practice, with the sticks and string, to keep the spool flying—just as an airplane was not enough in itself, one had to master the art of flying.

  The time the brothers devoted to playing diabolo so publicly did not go unnoticed and added still more to the growing puzzlement over les frères mystérieux. The “mystery” of the Wrights, wrote the Paris Herald, remained as dense as ever, and quoted an American visitor who frequently observed them in the garden of the Tuileries and became convinced they had laid aside their flying machine and quit thinking about it. “Everybody knows,” the man had said, “that when a person has contracted the diabolo habit he cannot possibly attend to anything else.”

  Apparently the brothers caught on quickly to the diabolo art and became quite good at it. But for Charlie Taylor, the spool kept falling to the ground nine tries out of ten. As for what else Charlie Taylor may have been doing to pass the time, besides diabolo, there is no record.

  When Katharine read about the hours spent in the park, she bristled as a schoolteacher must. “You never told me whether you learned to talk any French,” she wrote to Orville. “Instead of sitting around in the park everlastingly, it seems to me that I would have been getting around to see everything about Paris. Couldn’t you get someone to talk French with you?” Just the same, she asked them to “be sure” to bring home a diabolo for her.

  His sense of humor plainly in play again, Orville told her he had indeed met a Frenchman in the park who spoke English, but that he thought it hopeless to try to learn both diabolo and French at the same time.

  Schools had reopened in Dayton, Katharine was back in the classroom, and all was well at home, the atmosphere entirely different from what it had been. S
he and father were “getting along famously.” He had bought a new typewriter. She had ordered a new stove. “You can stay as long as you please,” she told the brothers.

  “What plans do you suggest?” Wilbur asked Orville at the end of September in a letter from Berlin, where he had returned again. “We cannot afford to spend much more time on negotiations, nor can we afford to return to America without some arrangements for our European business.”

  So stay they did and for a while Orville joined Wilbur in Berlin. Not until the start of November, back in Paris, did they decide it was time to go.

  But not before going with Hart Berg to see a demonstration put on by the French aviator Henri Farman, “Monsieur Henri,” a former artist, champion bicycle rider, and automobile racer, who was considered Europe’s outstanding pilot. Large crowds gathered at Issy-les-Moulineaux southwest of Paris. Farman had been getting a great deal of publicity, and even in the United States. (“Aren’t you getting worried over ‘Farman’s flights’?” Katharine had asked.) Farman flew a biplane made by a French aircraft manufacturer, Voisin Frères. Many of his trials were unsuccessful. On the longer flights, he had trouble getting off the ground, and the same was true when trying to make a circle. But in one flight he covered more than half a mile and flew an almost complete circle.

  Yet from what he saw, Orville felt he and Wilbur had no cause to worry. When asked by a reporter what he thought, Orville said only that he and his brother never liked to pass criticisms on the work of others, and that time would show whether the methods used in the Farman machine were sufficient for strong winds.

  French aviation enthusiasts had no doubt, however, that France was now clearly in the lead. France could boast of the Voisin brothers, Gabriel and Charles, who had formed their aircraft company only that year, and other French aviators beside Henri Farman, including Léon Delagrange, who also flew a Voisin biplane, and Louis Blériot, who had taught himself to fly in a monoplane of his own design. Like Henri Farman, these French pilots flew in public and greatly to the public’s delight.

  Also, quite unlike the Wright brothers, most of the pilots in France—Farman, Santos-Dumont, Delagrange, Blériot, Comte Charles de Lambert—were men of ample private means for whom the costs of their aviation pursuits were of little concern.

  “It seems that to the genius of France is reserved the glorious mission of initiating the world into the conquest of the air,” said the president of the Aéro-Club. To his eminent fellow member of the club, Ernest Archdeacon, the Wright Flyer was no more than a “phantom machine.”

  For the time being, the Flyer III and all its parts would remain in storage at the customs house at Le Havre. Wilbur and Charlie Taylor left for home first. Orville followed soon after.

  Writing from on board the RMS Baltic, his spirits high, Wilbur told his father:

  We will spend the winter getting some more machines ready for the spring trade. Then we will probably put out a sign, “Opening day, all goods below cost.” We will probably return to Europe in March, unless we make arrangements with the U.S. Government before that.

  While Charlie went directly to Dayton after arriving in New York, Wilbur stopped off in Washington to check on developments there before reaching home in time for Thanksgiving. He was extremely pleased to report that at long last the U.S. Army was seriously interested in doing business.

  With the onset of a new year, all that the brothers had worked to achieve in the way of sales agreements began to happen. On February 8, 1908, their bid of $25,000 for a Flyer was at last accepted by the War Department. Less than a month later, on March 3, they signed an agreement with a French company, to be known as La Compagnie Générale de Navigation Aérienne, with the understanding that public demonstrations of the Flyer in France would follow by midsummer.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Triumph at Le Mans

  Gentlemen, I’m going to fly.

  WILBUR WRIGHT

  I.

  “I am on my way to Kitty Hawk to get a camp in shape for a little practice before undertaking the official trials at Washington and in France,” Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute from Elizabeth City on April 8, 1908. The decision to proceed for the first time with large public demonstrations of their Flyer—as important and difficult a step as the brothers had yet faced—had finally been made, and “a little practice” was indeed called for. Neither had flown a plane for two and a half years, not since the fall of 1905.

  Though he had been forewarned that the camp at Kill Devil Hills was in shambles, what Wilbur found was worse than he had imagined. Of the original building, only the sides still stood. The new building was gone, carried off by violent storms or vandals who figured the brothers were never coming back. The water pump was gone. The floors of both buildings had disappeared under more than a foot of sand and debris. Walking among the ruins he kept turning up pieces and parts of the 1901, 1902, and 1903 machines.

  It was an altogether discouraging prospect to face, and particularly, one might imagine, for somebody who had so recently resided at the Hôtel Meurice.

  He arranged to room temporarily at the Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station and, with the help of two local carpenters, began building anew. High winds, driving rain, and a severe attack of diarrhea made things no easier. “Conditions are almost intolerable,” he wrote in his diary. Nor did the fact that so many of those he and Orville worked with in earlier years had either died or moved away. Bill Tate was tied up with work of his own; John T. Daniels had transferred to the Nags Head Life-Saving Station; Dan Tate had died.

  A Dayton mechanic the brothers had hired to help, Charlie Furnas, appeared on the scene and by Saturday, April 25, the day Orville arrived, bringing the crated parts of the Flyer, the camp was close to ready.

  Spent afternoon cleaning out trash and making the building habitable [Wilbur recorded in his diary]. I slept in a good bed of regular camp pattern. Orville slept on some boards thrown across the ceiling joist. Furnas slept on the floor. Each pronounced his own method a success.

  The morning of Monday, April 27, was spent uncrating boxes, brushing off wings, and setting up a workbench. That afternoon they repaired a few ribs broken in transit and began sewing the lower sections together. Mounting the engine and chain guides, and work on the launching track occupied another several days.

  The big change this time was that the Flyer had been modified to carry two operators. They were to ride sitting up side by side, primarily to provide better control over the wing warping. It also meant no more stretching flat on their stomachs straining their necks to see ahead. The wind resistance would be greater but the advantages counted more.

  In the three weeks since Wilbur arrived on the Outer Banks not a single reporter had appeared. Then the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot ran a wholly fabricated story picked up by newspapers everywhere that the Wright brothers, back again at Kitty Hawk, had already made a 10-mile flight out to sea against a wind of 15 miles an hour. In no time the rush of the press was on to the Outer Banks. In the lead was a young freelance reporter for the New York Herald, D. Bruce Salley, who could now be seen crouching among the scrub pine on a distant hill, spying on the camp with field glasses.

  Test flights got started on May 6. Orville went first and flew just over 1,000 feet. Two days later, taking turns, he and Wilbur both were making flight after flight until interrupted by Salley, who came rushing into camp unable to contain his excitement over what he had seen. Once he left, Wilbur took off again and flew more than 2,000 feet.

  A stream of reporters kept arriving. The advance of the press on their lives, a factor the brothers would have to contend with for years to come, had begun in force. The reporters to be seen hanging about on the hills with field glasses and telescopes represented the New York Times, the New York American Weekly, the New York World, Collier’s, Technical World, the Paris Herald, and the London Daily Mail.

  A writer named Byron Newton, sent by the Paris Herald, did full justice to the wild and unimaginably remote setting
he and the others found themselves confronted by after landing at Manteo on Roanoke Island:

  The Wrights we found were some twelve or fourteen miles distant from that point, among the great sand dunes on the coast near Kitty Hawk life saving station. Their place was on the narrow stretch of marsh and jungle that lies between the Atlantic and the mainland. . . . I have never viewed or traversed a more forbidding section of country. To reach this stretch of land we had to cross Roanoke Sound in an open boat and then walk about six miles, at times climbing over great mountains of gleaming white sand . . . and other times we were forced to pick our way through swamps and jungle infested with poison snakes, mosquitoes, wild hogs, and turkeys, with the air heavy with fever breeding vapors.

  Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk seemed “the end of the world,” wrote the correspondent for Collier’s Weekly, Arthur Ruhl, who then stressed that this end of the world had in fact become “the center of the world because it was the touchable embodiment of an Idea, which, presently, is to make the world something different than it has ever been before.”

  It was not newspaper reporters, he said, but the world’s curiosity that had ridden, climbed, waded, and tramped all those miles and now lay hiding there, hungry and peering across the intervening sands. “There was something weird, almost uncanny about the whole thing,” wrote another correspondent. “Here on this lonely beach was being performed the greatest act of the ages, but there were no spectators and no applause save the booming of the surf and the startled cries of the sea birds.”