The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

Orville and Wilbur were both in fine spirits now, perfectly confident the machine would prove a success, and that Orville would remain at the controls. He would do no flying at Fort Myer, Wilbur told reporters. That was Orville’s job. But being “big brother,” he would do the “bossing.”

  A machine was like a horse, Wilbur said. “If it’s new, you have to get used to it before it will do just as you want it to. You have to learn its peculiarities.” As a result of the day’s test flights, it was discovered that one important “peculiarity” was that the ignition, or “sparker,” was being shaken loose by vibrations, and thus the motor had too little power.

  The next two days, while Wilbur, Orville, and Charlie Taylor worked on the engine, the Bishop and Reuchlin went to the Smithsonian to look at “all manner of birds, Ostrich, Emu, Condor, etc.,” as the Bishop recorded in his diary.

  Another day, when Orville took off again, the plane climbed only 20 feet and after a distance of 200 feet hit the ground hard enough to smash one skid.

  Then, on July 2, at an elevation of 80 to 100 feet and at about the same point over the hangar where the propeller had broken the previous September and Orville’s plane had plunged to the ground, the engine suddenly stopped dead. And though this time he was able to glide “nicely” down, he hit a small thorn tree, ripping open a good-sized portion of the plane’s lower wing fabric. Then the machine fell heavily, breaking both skids. Fortunately, Orville was not hurt.

  Again, as the previous September, reporters and some of the spectators rushed to the crash, as did Wilbur, who, seeing a photographer by the wrecked plane, lost his noted self-control, just as he had with the photographer at Le Mans, picked up a stick and threw it at the man, then demanded he turn over the exposed photographic plate, which he did.

  It had not been a good day. (Wilbur would later apologize to the photographer who, it turned out, was an official with the War Department.) But the brothers had had more than a little experience with adversity and, as so often before, refused to give up.

  The next day, Orville went off to Dayton to prepare a new wing covering and by July 7 was back at Fort Myer, where the work resumed. On July 21, Katharine arrived to join the brothers and that afternoon watched Orville make a short, 10-minute flight at an estimated speed of 44 miles per hour, or faster than Wilbur had ever flown in Europe, as she happily reported to those at home.

  On July 25, a Sunday and as customary a day off for the Wright brothers, came stunning news. In a frail, under-powered monoplane, his No. XI, the French aviator Louis Blériot had flown the English Channel. He had taken off from Les Baraques, near Calais, shortly before five in the morning, and landed in the Northfield Meadow by Dover Castle, covering a distance over water of 23 miles in just under 20 minutes.

  As it happened, Hart Berg and Charles de Lambert were at Dover at the same time and not far from where Blériot landed. De Lambert, too, had been planning to fly the Channel and he and Berg had come to look over possible landing places.

  A porter had awakened them at quarter to five that morning to say the wireless man at the hotel had just received a message that Blériot had left France, and as Berg wrote in a long letter to Wilbur and Orville, he and de Lambert were downstairs and on the beach inside three minutes. Only minutes after that a telephone message was received that Blériot had landed on the other side of Dover Castle.

  “You have had all the details from the papers,” Berg continued in his letter. “I can only supplement the fact that I had a long talk with Blériot afterwards, in fact he used my room to wash up in, and the rest of the day wore my clothes.

  He told me that he had never been so thrown about in his life, as when he got into this valley. He made two complete circles, and his machine was pointing out to sea when he came to the ground. The front chassis was wrecked, the propeller blades broken, but the wings and tail of his monoplane were intact. Blériot was not hurt.

  From Washington, Katharine wrote to assure the Bishop that the brothers were not at all disturbed by Blériot’s flight. And, as widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic, the brothers joined in giving Blériot due credit for his performance, which they characterized as “remarkable.” “I know him well,” Wilbur said in an interview with the New York Times, “and he is just the kind of man to accomplish such an undertaking. He is apparently without fear, and what he sets out to do he generally accomplishes.”

  Orville noted the many accidents Blériot had had with a machine over which he had so little control and expressed amazement that he had succeeded. Wilbur was asked if he and Orville would be making any attempts to win some of the prizes to be offered at the European air meets such as that at Reims. No, they would not, said Wilbur. Their time would be put to better use, though what that was he did not say.

  All the same, throughout France, indeed throughout much of the world, Blériot’s flight was taken as only a prelude to the very burgeoning of French aviation that the New York Times had made so much of earlier in the year.

  As if by magic, everything started to work at Fort Myer as it was meant to. On the evening of July 27, Orville took off with Lieutenant Frank Lahm as passenger on an official endurance trial and in an hour and 12 minutes flew around the field 79 times, at an altitude of 150 feet, not only passing the test but breaking a world record that Wilbur had set at Le Mans the year before. An estimated eight thousand spectators saw him take off and among them was President Taft.

  On Friday, July 30, Orville flew what was the official cross-country speed trial required by the army. The course covered from Fort Myer to Alexandria, Virginia, a distance out and back of 10 miles. Records of the speed flown varied, from 42 to 45 miles per hour, but there was no question that Orville passed the test.

  An especially smooth landing was made to the accompaniment of honking horns and cheering. Wilbur rushed to the plane, his face covered with a broad smile. Their contract with the War Department would be signed. The price to be paid by the department was $30,000—a figure that made headlines—but far more importantly their own country was at long last committed to their achievement.

  “Orv finished the Fort Myer business in a blaze of glory,” wrote Katharine, who ten months earlier, sitting by his bedside there at the post hospital, had wondered if he might ever have strength enough to walk again.

  III.

  As reported in the Chicago Tribune, the eager interest shown by the French people in the progress of aviation could hardly be appreciated in America, and foremost among that summer’s scheduled aeronautic events was the Reims “congress of aviators where it is expected great things will be done.”

  It was to be the world’s first international air race, and financed entirely by France’s champagne industry. Its official title was “La Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne,” and among the French aviation stars to take part were Henri Farman, Louis Blériot, Léon Delagrange, two of Wilbur Wright’s protégés, Charles de Lambert and Paul Tissandier (flying French-built Wright planes), as well as the American Glenn Curtiss, who had been chosen to participate by the American Aero Club when the Wright brothers declined.

  At age thirty-one, Curtiss was a lean, shy, intensely serious competitor who, like the Wrights, had started out as a bicycle mechanic in his hometown of Hammondsport, New York, then began building and racing motorcycles. (He became the first acclaimed American motorcycle champion, “the fastest man in the world,” achieving speeds on his motorcycle as high as 130 miles an hour.)

  His interest in aviation had begun when a balloonist named Tom Baldwin asked him to build a lightweight motor for a dirigible. Once, in September 1906, while in Dayton, Baldwin and Curtiss had visited Wilbur and Orville at their shop. Baldwin had thought Curtiss asked the brothers far too many questions, but, as he later said, they “had the frankness of schoolboys.” The year after, Curtiss met Alexander Graham Bell, who made him “Director of Experiments” for the Aerial Experiment Association.

  In 1909, with a wealthy aviation enthusiast who had worked wit
h Octave Chanute and Samuel Langley, Augustus Herring, Curtiss formed the Herring-Curtiss Company to build flying machines. Those they built relied on movable flaps on the wings—ailerons, “little wings”—instead of wing warping, to control rolling and banking. The idea had occurred earlier to a young French engineer, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, and had been tried by Santos-Dumont, Blériot, and others. Alexander Graham Bell, too, had become interested, but whether on his own or having heard about Esnault-Pelterie, is not clear. Also, it had already been described for all to see by the Wrights as an alternative to wing warping in their patent published in 1906.

  But for Curtiss at Reims, speed would be the point and the small, new biplane he would fly had been built strictly for that, with a powerful, lightweight engine.

  Anyone wanting proof of the pace of change in the new century had only to consider that just one year before, in August 1908, at Le Mans, all the excitement had been about one man only, Wilbur Wright, flying one airplane before about 150 people to start with. This August at Reims, a total of twenty-two pilots would take off in as many planes, before colossal grandstands accommodating fifty thousand people.

  The grand opening took place Sunday, August 22, and by then Orville and Katharine had once more sailed for Europe, heading this time for Berlin, the brothers having concluded that demonstrations there were a necessity. Orville, as a result of his “blaze of glory,” was the one in most demand. Wilbur remained in Dayton, concentrating on motors with Charlie Taylor, and seeing to business of the kind he most disliked, including the commencement, in mid-August, of a lawsuit against the Herring-Curtiss Company for violation of Wright patents.

  Events at Reims created an even greater sensation than promised. By the last days the crowds numbered 200,000, four times the capacity of the grandstands. The contestants flew higher, farther, and faster than anyone ever had, breaking every record set by the Wright brothers in the past year, and the biggest winner, the most celebrated of the contestants, was Glenn Curtiss, who won the prize for speed.

  Nor was the excitement limited to France and the rest of Europe, as was clear from the American press. “The great meeting at Reims has been an electrifying, delirious success” (New York Sun); “The scoffers scoff no longer” (Washington Herald); “The aviation tournament is only a hint of what the future will soon witness when the sky shall become the common highway” (Cincinnati Times-Star); “This week at Reims marks a new epoch and one of the most ambitious phases of human history” (Atlanta Constitution).

  Overnight Curtiss was the new American hero. But only a week later crowds as large as 200,000 turned out at Tempelhof Field in Berlin to see Orville fly, and in the course of his demonstration flights over the next several days, Orville, accompanied by a student pilot, flew for an hour and 35 minutes, a new world’s record for a flight with a passenger. And at the same time Wilbur had signed on to make his first-ever public flight in the United States, in New York. It was to be part of a celebration commemorating the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s ascent of the Hudson River and the hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton’s first steamboat on the Hudson. Wilbur was to be paid $15,000. Glenn Curtiss, too, was to participate in the event.

  Writing to Orville aboard the train to New York on September 18, Wilbur reviewed some of the precautions he might take, on the chance he would be forced to land his plane in the waters off Manhattan. An idea he had of using rubber tubes no longer made sense. “So I have gone back to my old plan of mounting a canoe under the center of the machine, well forward,” he wrote, adding, “Of course, I do not expect to come down, but if I do I will be reasonably safe.” The canoe would be purchased in New York. The plane had already been shipped to the army base of Governors Island in New York Harbor, where Charlie Taylor would be joining him.

  The great sweep of New York Harbor and the Hudson River had become a spectacle beyond anything ever seen there, with twenty American battleships at anchor, a squadron of the Royal Navy, naval vessels from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Argentina, in addition to ferryboats, tenders, colliers, all manner of river craft, and the giant luxury liner Lusitania—no fewer than 1,595 vessels.

  Added to all this was the promise that for the first time New Yorkers were to witness airplane flights over their waters.

  On Governors Island in Upper New York Bay, half a mile southeast of Manhattan, two hangars had been provided, almost side by side, one for Wilbur, the other for Curtiss. When Curtiss arrived to look things over, he and Wilbur greeted each other cordially enough and talked for five minutes or so, mainly about the events at Reims. Wilbur excused himself from shaking hands, saying his hands were too greasy. At about this point Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph, appeared on the scene and was so thrilled to meet Wilbur he insisted on shaking his hand, greasy or not. It had been arranged that whenever Wilbur or Curtiss was about to take flight, Marconi would send a wireless message from Governors Island to the warships in the harbor and they in turn would raise flags as a signal to other ships and all on land.

  Curtiss soon departed for Hammondsport in upstate New York, where he was to be honored with an all-out homecoming.

  One day the reporters who hung about as close as permitted hoping for a chance to talk to Wilbur saw some small boys from the garrison approaching the guards and expected to see the children rebuffed as they had been. Instead they saw Wilbur, “a kindly smile” on his face, welcome them, then through the open doors watched as he “explained every detail on the machine.”

  “I have been here about a week and have the machine almost ready to fly,” Wilbur wrote Katharine on September 26. He was staying at the stylish Park Avenue Hotel, but getting his lunches at the Officers Club on Governors Island.

  Yesterday was the big naval parade. . . . In the evening the boats were illuminated with millions of electric lights and the same was true of many of the great buildings. For ten miles the river was an almost solid mass of steamboats and but for the fact that they were nearly all outlined with electric lights, it would have been impossible to navigate.

  To reporters who descended on him, Wilbur said he had not come to astonish the world but to give everybody a chance to see what the airplane was like in the air. Asked if he thought it would be perilous to fly over a harbor so filled with ships, he said an airplane ought to be able to go anywhere.

  Glenn Curtiss returned from upstate late in the day on September 28, and camped that night in the hangar with his plane on Governors Island, in order to make an early test flight the next morning. As it was he made his flight shortly after six o’clock, with only a friend and one army officer as witnesses. He flew 300 yards, then went back to upstate New York.

  Wilbur, who had spent the night at his hotel in the city, did not get started with his preliminary tinkering until eight o’clock then, about nine o’clock, took off on a 7-minute practice run, circling Governors Island, the white-and-silver Flyer looking much as always except for the 14-foot, canvas-wrapped, red canoe that hung beneath. Thus the newest form of transportation was making its debut over American waters with one of the oldest of all forms conspicuously in readiness, in case of trouble.

  Soon after landing, Wilbur announced he would fly again. Wireless signals went out, signal flags went up, and off he went. Instead of heading toward the mouth of the Hudson, as expected, he swung to the west into the wind and, flying over two ferryboats, headed straight for the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, circled the statue, and sailed low over the Lusitania, which was then heading down the harbor, outward bound to Liverpool. Thousands of people were watching. Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan was thick with spectators, and passengers on deck on the Lusitania frantically waved hats, scarfs, handkerchiefs as Wilbur passed over their heads.

  He maneuvered his plane with perfect control through a whole series of dips and turns. But it was the spectacle of Wilbur Wright and his flying machine circling the Statue of Liberty that made the most powerful impression, which w
ould be talked about, written about, and remembered more than anything, as a writer for the New York Evening Sun tried to express in a front-page account:

  Once his great aeroplane, so near the horizon that it seemed one with the ocean gulls among which it flew . . . [was] just above the level of the feet of the Statue of Liberty. An instant later it appeared at the level of the statue’s breast and then passed in front on an even keel.

  In the air Wright seemed to pause for a moment to pay the homage of an American aviator to the lady who attests his country’s destinies. Then suddenly turning eastward with the wind, he sped rapidly over the waves while the harbor craft shrieked their welcomes, and the cheering men and women ashore bore witness that our Lady of Liberty had been visited by one of her children in a vessel needing only the winds on which to sail.

  Harper’s Weekly, “The Journal of Civilization,” would feature on its next cover a dramatic photograph of Wilbur and the plane circling the Statue of Liberty with the caption, “A New Kind of Gull in New York Harbor.”

  “Goes pretty well, Charlie,” Wilbur was reported to have said to Charlie Taylor, when, after a smooth landing, he climbed from the plane back on Governors Island. “Looks alright to me, Will,” replied Charlie.

  The next day came news from Potsdam, Germany, that Orville had flown to an altitude of 984 feet, higher than anyone had yet flown in an airplane.

  Stiff winds out of the north kept both Wilbur and Glenn Curtiss grounded on Governors Island for two days, Saturday and Sunday, and by then Curtiss announced he had to leave to keep a contract in St. Louis. This left only Wilbur to make the flight up the Hudson River that had been promised and all were waiting for.

  The morning of Monday, October 4, though the wind out of the north had eased off to a degree, it was still blowing at 16 miles per hour, or more than Wilbur would have preferred. Sensing it was only going to increase again, he decided to fly. The plane was brought out of the hangar and he looked it over. Finding the gasoline tank not full, he took an old can and filled it himself.