The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  His journey began with what would be an all too characteristic mishap. His team of mechanics had mistakenly assembled his Wright Flyer not at the Sheepshead Bay racetrack, where a makeshift runway had been put together, but in a field a mile away owned by a local farmer. They had gotten themselves lost, and the farmer kicked them out his meadow, afraid for his cows. “Never mind,” said Rodgers, as he lit yet another cigar and went back to bed while they moved his biplane to the right place.

  Eventually, the contraption, assembled under the Wrights’ supervision in their workshops in Dayton, Ohio, and sent to New York by rail, in boxes—took off twelve hours late. A pretty and rather buxom young woman from Tennessee had poured a bottle of Vin Fiz over one of the lower wings—or planes, as they were then still called—having been told quite sternly by Rodgers not to try to break it, because it would most likely break the plane instead. Someone had lashed a small pouch of mail beneath the aircraft—with 263 letters, including notes from the mayor of New York to his counterpart in Los Angeles. Ten gallons of gasoline were poured into the tank.

  And then Cal Rodgers, his fifth cigar of the day clenched between his teeth, his brown tweed suit clashing somewhat with the painted bunches of pink grapes on the rudder and flying surfaces of his tiny craft, climbed aboard. He told the waiting crowd to step back, shorted the magneto, pulled the choke cable. The propeller began to turn, then roared into invisible life; black smoke poured from the exhaust; members of the team pushed the flimsy-looking machine onto the racetrack and pointed it into the wind; and with a roar, the release of a brake, and the pull of another accelerator lever, the craft bucked down the track, tilted crazily, bounced up into the sky, and rose, smaller and smaller, silhouetted against the late-afternoon sun. Within minutes the speck in the sky was gone from view.

  William Randolph Hearst started his stopwatch and clutched his wallet nervously.

  The daily log tells its own story. Rodgers had a good first day, heading north across Brooklyn to the East River, swinging left over Manhattan and the Hudson to Jersey City, then veering northward to Paterson and Suffern before making for the wooded western New York State hills around Middletown, and settling in there for the night. The following morning, he crashed on takeoff and totally wrecked his plane.

  Calbraith Perry Rodgers, a flamboyant pioneer of early aviation, made the first transcontinental airplane flight between New York and Pasadena in the fall of 1911. It took seven weeks, interrupted by dozens of mishaps and crashes. His trip was sponsored by the Chicago-based makers of Vin Fiz, a generally undrinkable pink-colored soda, which was taken off the market soon after the flight.

  For most, that would have been the end. But not for Cal Rodgers and certainly not for the makers of Vin Fiz. In their three-car support train, they had duplicates of every piece from which the Wright Flyer had been made. They had a completely assembled second plane. They had a car, a sporty and reliable Palmer-Singer, which would take mechanics to the crash site if it was far from the railway line. And at Middletown, New York, they did just that: by lunchtime they had the aircraft repaired, as good as new, and Rodgers took off once more, bruised but in no other way compromised and not the slightest bit reluctant to continue.

  A staccato tale of disaster unfolded. Crashed on landing, Hornell. Wrecked on takeoff, Cattaraugus. Broken skid. Cracked skid. Ruin! said the newspapers. Catastrophe! Disaster!

  But he kept on going. He was across the Mississippi by October 19. It had already taken him thirty-two days, so Hearst’s money was safe. But there was no hesitation: the flight should go on, just because the nation needed to be crossed, it needed now to be united by air. People were now coming out each evening in their thousands, summoned by the sight of the black speck in the eastern sky and the distant thrumming roar of an aircraft engine. These were sights and sounds utterly unfamiliar to most, in a country that had never seen anything smudging its skies other than birds. Here a man and a machine would appear in the emptiness, suddenly and without warning, the watchers below told that he was on his way from New York to California and the Pacific Ocean—incredulity abounded, and the need to see and feel and touch and understand him and his likely achievement swept up thousands—and before long, millions—as he passed roaring by.

  In truth, though, there was more stuttering than roaring. The catalog of mishaps grew. Broken this, cracked that, wrecked on takeoff, wrecked on landing, lost, delayed. He cracked a cylinder in Muskogee. He was given a baby jackrabbit as a good luck token in San Antonio, but two days later, he crashed close to today’s art-world gathering place of Marfa and contemptuously tossed the animal away, deciding it was more a curse than a charm. The entire engine then blew up in his face in the Texas cow town of Waco, and despite being rebuilt, it exploded again in the hot and lonely California town of Imperial Junction. A magazine writer named French Strother caught this sensational moment:

  He was flying west from Arizona, intending to go on to Banning, Cal. He had flown over Imperial Junction, in the solitary waste of the Colorado desert, and was speeding above the Salton Sea at an elevation of 4,000 feet, when suddenly, without a moment’s warning, the No. 1 cylinder of his motor blew out, completely wrecking his engine and filling his right arm with flying splinters of steel. An instant’s hesitation would have meant sudden death; a false move with his injured arm, which controlled the warping lever, would have tilted him down sideways and sent him hurtling down 4,000 feet to destruction. The aeroplane made two lunges downward before Rodgers could control it; and then he began a long, easy, graceful spiral glide, descending in loop after loop of diminishing radius, six miles in all, judging his distance so nicely that he landed only a short space from the station at Imperial Junction. I saw the remains of this engine in Pasadena, and a man could literally put his head into the hole that had been blown out of it.

  By now he was only a week away from finishing. His journey thus far had described a weird, more or less diagonal route across the nation, northeast to southwest, and weird because there were so many places—in eastern Indiana, Chicago, around Phoenix—where he went around in great circles. In northern Texas he went around in no fewer than three circles, lost and bewildered, so that his eventual track, followed as best they could by his intrepid supporters in their three-car railway train, looked like an intricate filigree of needlepoint.

  But then came the warm afternoon of Sunday, November 5, in Pasadena. Thousands were waiting in Tournament Park, where the New Year’s Day Festival of Roses is held. A band played jaunty music; a polo match was staged to keep everyone amused. Astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory trained their enormous telescopes over the shimmering desert landscape to the east. He was coming in from the town of Banning, though word spread that he had put down in Pomona to check the oil. A great tension gripped the gathering, everyone aware of the historic portent.

  Suddenly there was a flash of white light from a heliograph on the top of the mountain. The band started on a quickstep. The thousands rose to their feet. And then a small boy cried out, “There he comes!” and the tiny confection of string and sealing wax, baling wire and cloth-covered aerofoils appeared through the mountain haze. Rodgers tilted dangerously at one point, the crowd silent with horror, but then he righted himself and his image grew larger and larger. The sound of the engine changed from a hum to a growl to a roar—and then he refused to land. He performed ten minutes’ worth of stunts for the crowds, wowing everyone with rolls, dives, spirals, and passes so low he set the female bystanders clutching their hats. And then at last he turned, circled the field twice, came in low, and bounced down on the strip. A tire burst. The skid cracked once again. The engine finally shuddered and died, steam gushing from another hole.

  But suddenly these problems did not matter one whit. He had done it. He had crossed the country and was now officially done with the contest. He gave the pouch of precious mail, the first airmail, to an official of the post office. He held up the bottle of Vin Fiz, neither knowing nor caring that the pr
oduct was doomed and would be sold in stores for only a little while longer. He gave a brief interview to the Associated Press, and when the reporter asked him if he minded not having won the Hearst money, he retorted, “Never mind about the money. It don’t amount to much that way—but I did it, didn’t I?”

  He was then swept from the field to the Maryland Hotel, where he signed the register: “Cal. P. Rodgers, New York to Pasadena, by air.” America had been crossed by flying machine, by a device powered by fire, a device potentially so much faster than all others. It had been done once. It could now be done again and again and again. Millions would follow in the aerial footsteps of this majestic adventurer, the country now bonded more closely together by yet another indissoluble band of human achievement.

  The next few weeks were all footnote. He took his plane to Long Beach, fourteen flying minutes away, and taxied it into the sea, wetting its wheels in the surf so that he could say he had traveled from one ocean to the other. He then returned home to New York, by train—taking six days, whereas his flying had taken eighty-four.

  And then the story ends, on April 3, 1912, when he came back to California, to Long Beach. The train was still there, the backup aircraft still inside. So he took it up, alone, for one final hurrah, with the famous bottle of Vin Fiz still strapped beneath him as a talisman. Knowing all too well that people were watching from the pier, he performed some antics, well aware of the fleeting nature of his celebrity, which had peaked so spectacularly just before Christmas but which all could tell was ebbing away, fast and irresistibly. Maybe he hoped that he might perform one aerial feat so spectacular that he would be remembered always—but whatever his motivation, it remained unaccomplished, and fatally so. For some unknown reason—a bird strike, suggest many—the little plane nose-dived into the surf, the engine sheared from its bolts and slammed into Calbraith Rodgers from behind, breaking his neck and cutting his throat at the same time. Sunbathers rushed down from the beach into three feet of warm Pacific water. The aircraft was crumpled and broken like a great ungainly monster, and Rodgers, killed instantly, was found bobbing in the waves, under a mass of broken spars and canvas. He was thirty-three years and three months old, and he changed the face and nature of aviation forever.

  One small harbinger of a further revolution to come lies buried in the accounts of that first flight. It came while the enormous crowd was waiting on that November Sunday afternoon in Pasadena, expecting Cal Rodgers and his tiny craft to appear in the sky across the wall of the San Gabriel Mountains that separate Los Angeles from the deserts beyond. There was a dusting of early snow on the summit of Mount Wilson. The Carnegie Institution astronomers, whose sixty-inch telescope had just been installed in the observatory, were in for another cold night of stargazing.

  But on this afternoon, November 5, the men had another task. They had the wherewithal to spot the flier approaching them from the east, and they could signal the news to the crowds waiting to the west. But how to tell them what to do, what to look for, how to give the news to the mass of excited Californians?

  It was done by telephone. The manager of the local company had arranged for a special instrument to be installed in the park, and he established a connection from it to the astronomers six thousand feet up on the mountaintop. He asked these watchers of the skies to tell him when they first glimpsed the tiny plane, and for safety’s sake to use their mirrors to flash a heliograph reflection of the setting sun down to the crowds below.

  And this is what they did. They sent their coded sun message as planned. But more important for history, the moment that they glimpsed the incoming machine, they called, they telephoned, to let the Pasadena crowds know what they had seen.

  The call was by no means the first made in America nor the most important. It would be four more years before the first transcontinental telephone call was made, between New York and San Francisco. But this one call, made between a San Gabriel mountaintop and a Pasadena park, hinted to the waiting public at much that was to come. For while one day it might eventually take a person or a piece of cargo just a few hours to travel along the route that it had taken Cal Rodgers twelve weeks to complete, it was now clear that the existence of the telephone meant that other communications, weightless but no less vital than persons or their belongings, might travel along that same route, too, not in days or hours or even minutes—but in an instant, at the speed of light.

  That single telephone call suggested the birth of a new idea: that news, gossip, casual conversation, information, intelligence, knowledge, and perhaps even that which passeth all understanding could cross from one place to another, no matter how far apart, not just swiftly, by the power of fire, but instantly, along a wire.

  In years to come, such information would manage to pass with equal velocity in quite a formless, invisible, and almost unimaginable manner, through the very air itself. But in the first instance, as here in Pasadena, it would be carried along wires that were forged and spun and drawn from copper or any properly conductive metal.

  PART V

  WHEN the AMERICAN STORY Was TOLD THROUGH METAL

  1835–Tomorrow

  Some random touch—a hand’s imprudent slip—

  The Terminals—a flash—a sound like “Zip!”

  A smell of burning fills the startled Air—

  The Electrician is no longer there!

  —HILAIRE BELLOC, “THE BENEFITS OF THE ELECTRIC LIGHT,” NEWDIGATE POEM, 1893

  Electricity is not in any sense a necessity, and under no conditions is it universally used by the people of a community. It is but a luxury enjoyed by a small proportion of the members of any municipality, and yet if the [generating] plant be owned and operated by the city, the burden of such ownership and operation must be borne by all the people through taxation.

  —TAX LAWYER HENRY ANDERSON, QUOTED IN THE Richmond Times-Dispatch, OCTOBER 24, 1905

  . . . it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!

  —NUMBERS 23:23. THE LAST FOUR WORDS OF THE VERSE WERE EMPLOYED BY SAMUEL F. B. MORSE AS THE FIRST TO BE SENT BY A PUBLIC ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH, MAY 24, 1844

  The Song of the Talking Wire

  —HENRY FARNY, TITLE OF 1904 OIL PAINTING DEPICTING AN INDIAN AT FORT YATES, DAKOTA TERRITORY, PRESSING HIS EAR TO A TELEGRAPH POLE IN THE HOPE OF CATCHING A PASSING CONVERSATION

  TO GO, BUT NOT TO MOVE

  The story goes that in 1861 the chief of the Shoshone Indians, whom his white visitors had come to know as Sho-kup, declared his belief that the electric telegraph, whose metal wires were beginning to sprout across his people’s lands, was some kind of mysterious and ill-intentioned animal. The chief especially could not understand how this animal was to be fed. The white men told him it ate lightning, but Sho-kup remained suspicious.

  The men told the chief he could use this instrument to communicate with his pair of wives (at the time of the reported conversation, one was said to be under the weather) no matter how many miles separated them. But Sho-kup was not as impressed by this as they hoped. He said he would prefer to talk to each of them in the customary way, face-to-face. Nevertheless, he was grateful to them for suggesting the idea, and now he felt a little calmer and somewhat reassured—indeed, so calmed that he now probably could accept the telegraph’s inexplicable magic. He decided he could best deal with its mysteriousness by naming it, by giving it a sesquipedelian Shoshone word of his own making. He thought for a while, consulting those of his fellow chiefs who had some linguistic skills, before declaring the suitable word to be we-ente-mo-ke-te-bope. An interpreter quietly told the listening white men that this elaborate confection of sounds signified the phrase “wire rope express.”

  A name was nice, but it was still not exactly what the white men wanted. And so they waited, for they had come on an urgent mission. They were from the Overland Telegraph Company, and long-distance telegraphy was their business. They were trying for the first time to string a line right across America. In places this was not an easy
task, the simple engineering difficulties of the project aside. In a place like this remote corner of the Rocky Mountains, for instance, there was still much nervousness among the local native people about the new inventions and what they were bringing with them. The men of the Overland Company needed the local chief’s permission to arrange the lines across his people’s mountains. They also needed to be assured that their line—here suspected of being an animal, but feared for many other reasons in many other places—would not be attacked, torn down, destroyed.

  After some further thought, Sho-kup told the visitors that he by no means liked their wire rope express, nor did he trust its intent, and given his continuing belief that it was some kind of beast, he feared its appetite. But in an act of great magnanimity, he finally agreed to treat it kindly and with respect. Moreover, he promised he would send out an order to his men never to do it an injury. If the visitors truly wanted to build their poles across his land and hang their wire rope express from one pole to another, then that was acceptable, more or less.

  After saying their farewells to the old man and his council of chiefs, the white men set off in their small convoy of wagons. They left behind a detachment who then dug deep circular holes to hold the thirty-foot-high poles of stripped and treated pine, with crossbars from which the wire rope could be suspended. Once they had the poles firmly set in place, the detachment galloped out of the rugged lands of the Shoshone, and headed westward toward California, all of them in a confident mood.