The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

  The mayor had come to see them. He wanted to appoint a committee to plan a grand welcome home for the brothers. People were wild over the idea.

  Hasn’t Orv had good luck with his motor? [she continued] I am afraid that your health as well as your motor is interfering with your doing your best. You are doing well enough, but we know that you would have made an hour long’s flight long ago if you had had as good a chance as Orv. Since you didn’t, I am glad Orv did just what he did—to shut up the ever-lasting knockers. We hope every day that we will see that you have made a record. We know that there is some reason for it when you don’t and that makes us uneasy about your health. Those burns were so much more serious than we thought for a long time. That has pulled you down, I have no doubt. You look mighty thin in all the pictures.

  She had made up her mind that the Bishop should go to Washington to see Orville fly. She would go, too, but there was not money enough for both to make the trip.

  “Do you suppose we could scratch up the cash? Daddy has about a hundred dollars.”

  The Bishop liked to preach the futility of craving fame. “Enjoy fame ere its decadence, for I have realized the emptiness of its trumpet blasts,” he had written to Wilbur, and quoted favorite lines from the Irish poet Thomas Moore:

  And false the light on glory’s plume

  As fading lines of even.

  But for all that he was as eager as the thousands in Washington to see Orville in action. “He wants to go alright,” Katharine wrote.

  That same Sunday, September 13, on the other side of the Atlantic, Wilbur wrote to tell Orville the sensation he, Orville, was in Europe. “The newspapers for several days have been full of stories of your dandy flights, and whereas a week ago, I was a marvel of skill, now they do not hesitate to tell me I am nothing but a ‘dub,’ and that you are the only genuine sky scraper. Such is fame.”

  Wilbur’s longest time in the air at Camp d’Auvours thus far was just over 21 minutes, and only the week before, Léon Delagrange had made the longest flight ever in Europe, staying in the air slightly less than half an hour.

  He was having motor troubles, Wilbur explained, and the weather had been “something fierce.” To Katharine he reported he had had almost as many congratulations on Orville’s success as he himself had had a month earlier.

  But in a letter to his father, also written that same Sunday, Wilbur confided the real trouble was the constant fuss being made over him. It had become more than he could take. Everyone seemed a genuine friend and looked upon him as an adopted citizen of France. Nearly every evening two or three thousand people came out to see if he would fly and went home disappointed if he did not. One old man of seventy who lived thirty miles away made the round-trip on a bicycle almost every day for a week.

  The excitement and the worry, and above all the fatigue of an endless crowd of visitors from daylight till dark had brought me to such a point of nervous exhaustion that I did not feel myself really fit to get on the machine. . . . I can’t stand it to have people continually watching me. It gets on my nerves.

  As he explained to Katharine, he carried on his correspondence sitting in his shed, the door locked to keep people out.

  Close to midnight in Washington, from the privacy of his room at the Cosmos Club, Orville wrote to Wilbur that he had never felt so rushed in his life, and that he had a stack of unanswered letters a foot high. To Katharine he wrote that the weather, being what it was, would probably take another few days to “quiet down.” In any event, he added, “I do not think I will make any more practice flights.”

  In his brief time thus far at Fort Myer, Orville had set seven world records.

  Rumors in Washington and in an article in the New York Times on September 15 saying that President Roosevelt would soon announce his intention of going up in the plane with Orville provided still more excitement. To many it seemed perfectly in keeping with a president so “given to the espousal of the unusual.” Two years before he had startled the country by diving beneath the waters of Long Island Sound in a submarine.

  “Of course, if the President asks me to take him on a flight, I cannot refuse,” Orville said when reporters questioned him. However, he was not enthusiastic about the idea. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t believe the President of the United States should take such chances.”

  II.

  On Thursday, September 17, the day was clear and cool, wind conditions were ideal. The crowd by the time Orville was ready to take off numbered more than 2,600. Expectations were higher than ever.

  A young army officer had been assigned, at his own request, to go with Orville as a passenger, as two other officers had already done and to which Orville had had no objections. This time, however, the young man was someone Orville did not like or trust.

  Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was a twenty-six-year-old West Point graduate from San Francisco with two eminent military figures in his family background with the same name, a grandfather and great-uncle, both rear admirals. The great-uncle Thomas Selfridge had been the naval officer assigned in 1870 to survey the isthmus of Central America to determine the place to cut a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

  In little time Lieutenant Selfridge had become one of the army’s most knowledgeable and enthusiastic aviation specialists. He was tall, handsome, and personable and had been made a member of the Signal Corps Aeronautical Board. In addition, he was a member of what was known as the Aerial Experiment Association, or AEA, founded and headed by Alexander Graham Bell, in the interest of progress in the design of flying machines, and that in particular troubled Orville. The young man had a good education and a clear mind, Orville had told Wilbur in a letter, but he was almost certainly a spy for Bell and others of the AEA. “I don’t trust him an inch.”

  “Selfridge is endeavoring to do us all the damage he can behind my back, but he makes a pretense of great friendliness,” Orville told his father. The thought of someone like that seated beside him in the air was not easy to accept.

  Selfridge also weighed 175 pounds, more than anyone Orville had yet taken up. Still, as a member of the appraisal board, Selfridge was clearly entitled to a flight, and so Orville had agreed.

  Looking extremely happy, Selfridge removed his coat and campaign hat, handed them to a friend, and took his place next to Orville, who was attired in his customary dark suit, starched collar, black tie, and Scottish plaid cap.

  Charlie Taylor and Charlie Furnas turned the propellers to get them going and at 5:14, the plane headed down the track and lifted more slowly than usual, it seemed to those watching. For 30 to 50 feet it was barely above the grass before it began to “creep” into the air.

  The plane was at about 75 feet by the time it reached the lower end of the field, went neatly into its first turn, and came sweeping back at about 100 feet.

  “It was noticed that Lieutenant Selfridge was apparently making an effort to talk with Mr. Wright,” reported the Washington Post. “His lips were seen to move, and his face was turned to the aviator, whose eyes were looking straight ahead, and whose body was taut and unbending.”

  The plane circled the field three times at about 40 miles per hour. On the fourth turn, heading for Arlington Cemetery, Orville slowed down somewhat and all seemed to be working well.

  Then, suddenly, just as the plane was passing over the “aerial garage,” a sizable fragment of something was seen to fly off into the air.

  “That’s a piece of the propeller,” shouted one of the army officers.

  Orville would later describe hearing an unexpected sound, “a light tapping” behind him, in the rear of the machine. A quick backward glance revealed nothing, but he slowed the engine and started toward a landing.

  Then, at an altitude of about 125 feet came two loud thumps and “a terrible shaking.” Orville shut off the engine, hoping to glide to a landing. He pulled as hard as he could on the steering and lateral balance levers, but to no effect. “Quick as a flash, the machine turned down in front and
started straight for the ground.”

  Lieutenant Selfridge, who had remained quiet until now, was heard only to say in a hushed voice, “Oh! Oh!”

  Those below watched in horror as the plane twisted this way and that, then plunged straight down, “like a bird shot dead in full flight,” in Orville’s words.

  It hit the ground with terrific force, throwing up a swirling cloud of dust. A half dozen army men and reporters, along with Charlie Taylor, rushed out to help, led by three cavalrymen on horseback.

  Orville and the lieutenant lay pinned beneath bloodstained wreckage, faces down. Orville was conscious but moaning in pain. Selfridge lay unconscious, a great gash across his forehead, his face covered with blood.

  The scene around the wreckage became one of wild confusion. Officers were shouting orders, automobiles honking. Hundreds of people from the crowd who dashed forward had to be held back by the cavalrymen, one of whom was heard to shout, “If they won’t stand back, ride them down.”

  Several army surgeons and a New York doctor in the crowd did what they could for the two men until the stretchers arrived and they were carried off to the base hospital at the far end of the field.

  A reporter wrote of having seen Charlie Taylor bend down and loosen Orville’s tie and shirt collar, then, stepping back to lean against a corner of the smashed plane, sob like a child.

  Among the crowd that gathered outside the hospital as night came on were Charles Flint and Octave Chanute.

  Not until well after dark did word come from within the hospital. Orville was in critical condition, with a fractured leg and hip, and four broken ribs, but was expected to live. Lieutenant Selfridge, however, had died at 8:10 of a fractured skull without ever having regained consciousness. His was the first fatality in the history of powered flight. Speaking for the Army’s Signal Corps, Major George Squier praised Lieutenant Selfridge as a splendid officer who had had a brilliant career ahead of him.

  But no one who had witnessed the flights of the previous days could possibly doubt that the problem of aerial navigation was solved. “If Mr. Wright should never again enter an aeroplane,” Squier said, “his work last week at Fort Myer will have secured him a lasting place in history as the man who showed the world that mechanical flight was an assured success.”

  That Orville’s passenger that day could well have been Theodore Roosevelt was not mentioned.

  The telegram from Fort Myer arrived at 7 Hawthorn Street just after Katharine returned from school. Bishop Wright was in Indiana attending a church conference.

  There was never a question of what she must do. Moving into action without pause, she called the school principal, told her what had happened, and said she would be taking an indefinite leave of absence. Then, quickly as possible, she packed what clothes she thought she would need and was on board the last train to Washington at ten that same evening.

  Bishop Wright, too, had received the news, but from the little he wrote in his diary there is no telling how stunned or alarmed he was. Nonetheless, he excused himself from the conference and returned to Dayton without delay. Once there he wrote to Orville and clearly from the heart.

  I am afflicted with the pain you feel, and sympathize with the disappointment which has postponed your final success in aeronautics. But we are all thankful that your life has been spared, and are confident of your speedy though tedious recovery, and of your triumph in the future, as in the past.

  Then, in the way of a fatherly sermon, he added, “We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.”

  It was eight o’clock at Camp d’Auvours the morning of September 18 when Hart Berg arrived at Wilbur’s shed to tell him the news. At first Wilbur seemed not to accept what he heard. A thousand people had already gathered at the field. The weather was ideal for flying, Le Mans more crowded than ever with people eager to see him fly. But out of respect for Lieutenant Selfridge, Wilbur postponed all flights until the following week, then, shutting himself in his shed, refused to see anyone except Berg and one or two others who came to console him.

  “Now you understand why I always felt that I should be in America with Orville,” he said. “Two heads are better than one to examine a machine.”

  Left alone, he sat with head in hands. When another friend came in—Léon Bollée most likely—Wilbur looked up, his eyes full of tears, and said if anything could make him abandon further work in solving the problem of flight, it would be an accident like this. Then, springing to his feet, he declared, “No, we have solved this problem. With us flying is not an experiment; it is a demonstration.”

  Others present saw him struggle with his emotions. He asked for fuller details, but there were none.

  Since coming to Camp d’Auvours, he had acquired a bicycle on which he now went riding eight miles to Le Mans in the hope of hearing further word from Fort Myer. For some time he could be seen pacing nervously about the porch at the Hôtel du Dauphin. He felt very bad about “this business,” he told a reporter for the Paris Herald who approached him. “It seems to me that I am more or less to blame for the death of poor Selfridge, and yet I cannot account for the accident.

  Of course, when dealing with aeroplanes, or indeed anything mechanical, there is always the possibility of something breaking, and yet we imagined that we had eliminated all danger. . . .

  The thing which is worrying more than anything is that my father, who is almost eighty years of age, will take this matter very much to heart. He has always been nervous about our trials, but up to the present he has never had occasion to be so.

  Toward dusk, Wilbur took his bicycle and rode back to Camp d’Auvours.

  In a letter to Katharine written the following day, he told her he could not help thinking over and over that if he had been with Orville the accident would never have happened. “I do not mean that Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who with the most friendly intentions in the world would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from having proper rest.

  If I had been there I could have held off the visitors while he worked or let him hold them off while I worked. . . . People think I am foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important work on the machine. They say I crawl under the machine when the men could do the thing well enough. I do it partly because it gives me opportunity to see if anything in the neighborhood is out of order.

  He presumed their father was terribly worried about Orville’s condition, he wrote in conclusion, but things would turn out right at last. Of this he was sure.

  At his upstairs desk in Dayton that same day, September 19, Bishop Wright wrote to Wilbur in much the same spirit.

  It is sad that Orville is hurt and unpleasant that his success is delayed. It is lamentable that Lieut. Selfridge lost his life. I am saddest over his death. But success to your invention is assured. The brighter day will come to you.

  On Monday, September 21, at Camp d’Auvours, Wilbur was back in action taking “the bull by the horns,” as he liked to say, before ten thousand spectators. He flew one hour, 31 minutes, and 25 seconds, over a distance of 40 miles establishing another sensational world record.

  Among the enormous crowd was the American ambassador to France, Henry White, who was reported to have been the most excited man present and who, “quite forgetting his usual diplomatic dignity” went racing across the field to be the first to shake Wilbur’s hand.

  III.

  Katharine reached Washington early the morning of September 18 and found Charles Flint and two army officers waiting at the station, ready to drive her immediately in a Signal Corps automobile across the river to Fort Myer. At the hospital she was met by the young army surgeon and shown into Orville’s room.

  “I found Orville looking pretty badly,” she reported in a letter home to Lorin. His face was cut in several places, the deepest of the gashes being over his left eye. He was so sore everywhere he could not bear to
be touched. His leg was not in a cast, as she had expected, but “in a sort of cradle” held up by a rope to the ceiling, she wrote to Wilbur.

  “When I went in his chin quivered and the tears came to his eyes, but he soon braced up again. The shock has weakened him very much, of course.” As the day went on Orville turned extremely nervous and on edge. “I suppose the working with his leg has made him so. I bathed that side of his face that was exposed, and his chest and shoulders. That quieted him, some.”

  She liked the doctor and the male nurse on duty. The room, she was also pleased to report, was full of flowers and there was a great basket of fruit and a pile of telegrams on a side table, including one saying, “The thousand proud pupils and teachers of Steele High School unanimously extend sympathy and encouragement.”