The May fiasco turned out to be serendipitous; the Wrights were free to experiment and try to solve problems without their every failure reported in the newspapers. The first order of business was to change the launch mechanism. Two hundred feet of track was unworkable, so they set up an awkward, complicated pulley and weight system to replace it.*3 A twenty-foot-high pyramid-shaped scaffold held a 1,600-pound weight at the pinnacle. A forty-foot track ran from the base of the scaffolding with ropes and pulleys going from the weight to the bottom of the scaffolding, then out to the end of the track and back. The Flyer was positioned at the base of the pyramid and attached to the rope. When the weight was dropped, the aircraft was pulled down the track and launched. Unwieldy as the arrangement sounds, it worked. From September when it was first employed to year’s end, the flights became much longer.
The Wrights’ derrick launcher. This cumbersome mechanism would be supplanted by Curtiss’s wheeled takeoff.
Although the flying remained unpredictable, there was progress—and with progress came a decision. Newspapermen would no longer be welcome at Huffman Prairie. Wilbur wrote to Chanute on October 5, “Intelligence of what we are doing is gradually spreading through the neighborhood and we are fearful that we will soon have to discontinue experiments. As we have decided to keep our experiments strictly secret for the present, we are becoming uneasy about continuing them much longer at our present location. In fact, it is a question whether we are not ready to begin considering what we will do with our baby now that we have it.”
The American press might have decided they were likely frauds, but the Wrights were not dismissed everywhere. Chanute’s drumbeating had aroused a good deal of interest in Europe, particularly in his native France. The French considered themselves proprietary founders of aviation science. French experimenters raised a patriotic call for their nation not to cede supremacy in powered flight to uncultured Americans.
Wilbur and Orville seemed to understand that the risk from the Continent exceeded anything that existed at home. Their correspondence with Harry Toulmin during the second half of 1904 is almost entirely devoted to the various European patents they were pursuing. Finally, France, Great Britain, and Belgium approved their applications but German requirements were more stringent and the process was delayed. With patents in hand in two of the three biggest overseas markets, Wilbur and Orville decided not to wait until the Flyer had been perfected to pursue the main goal of their plan.
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*1 Orville also wrote an undated note to Milton that read, “Misjudgment at start reduced flight to hundred and twelve. Power and control ample. Rudder only injured. Success assured. Keep quiet.” But this was almost certainly written after Wilbur’s aborted flight on December 14.
*2 170 U.S. 537, 561-62 (1898). The case involved braking systems used to slow railroad trains. The opinion upheld the Westinghouse patent in its broadest application; Justice Brown had been an attorney for the railroads before being named to the bench. Brown added, “Most conspicuous examples of such patents are the one to Howe, of the sewing machine; to Morse, of the electrical telegraph; and to Bell, of the telephone.” Two years earlier, Brown had written the opinion for which he is best remembered in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal” and ushered in the era of Jim Crow.
*3 At this point, the Wrights, despite their bicycle background, never considered wheels. The Flyer was fitted with skids for landing.
The Vagaries of the Marketplace
On January 3, 1905, the Wrights visited their congressman, Robert Nevin, at his Dayton home. At his request, they followed with a letter on January 18. In it they claimed their machine had been “fitted for practical use,” that it “flies through the air at high speed.” They did admit that their “experience in handling the machine has been too short to give any high degree of skill,” but noted that “toward the end of the season” they made “two flights of five minutes each,” in which they “covered five miles at thirty-five miles an hour.” They then asserted, “Flying has been brought to a point where it can be made of great practical use in various ways,” suggesting “scouting and carrying messages in time of war.” While the details were accurate, the letter implied a degree of consistency and technological advancement that the Wrights had yet to achieve. The Flyer was not at all ready to be employed as a military asset. Nonetheless, the potential revenues from any nation that saw the wisdom of obtaining a monopoly on motorized flight were vast and, with their American patent still pending, the temptation for Wilbur and Orville to try to cash in on their invention with one giant stroke must have been irresistible.
Nevin promised to deliver the letter personally to Secretary of War William Howard Taft. The congressman took ill, however, and his aide passed the letter on to the army’s Board of Ordnance and Fortification. But the army had no further interest in writing checks on the vacant assurances of would-be inventors. “The Board has found it necessary to decline to make all allotments for the experimental development of devices for mechanical flight,” the commanding general wrote back, and the Wrights’ machine “has not yet been brought to the stage of practical operation.” The army response has been held up as the model of shortsightedness in most accounts of the period, but the general was correct. The Wrights might one day produce a machine with practical military application, but they were not there yet. Nor had they included any proof that their assertions were rooted in fact. And while the Wrights had not requested funds for development, it was clear in their letter that they were not offering their machine to their country out of patriotism.
The British, however, were not in a similar rush to issue a “flat turn down,” as Wilbur put it. Once he received what he considered an insulting reply from the army, Wilbur plowed ahead. An official at the War Office asked for terms and Wilbur offered a machine that would fly at least ten miles, perhaps as far as fifty. Of course, the Wrights hadn’t approached even the low number. The War Office replied that the terms were acceptable but they could not consider a machine that went less than fifty miles. In late April, the British offered to send an attaché to observe the Flyer in Dayton. Wilbur accepted, though it is uncertain what he intended to say when the Flyer could stay in the air for only twenty seconds and then more often than not crashed. A new model was in the works but had yet to be tested. While he waited for the attaché to arrive, Wilbur wrote to Chanute, “We would be ashamed of ourselves if we had offered our machine to a foreign government without giving our own country a shot at it, but our consciences are clear.”
In the end, the issue was moot; the attaché wasn’t coming. Without communicating the change of plan to the Wrights, he left for an extended assignment in Mexico and would not return until October.
But the delay turned out to be fortuitous. The 1905 model, despite a number of improvements and modifications—the most important of which was to separate control of the tail rudder from the wing-warping harness—achieved no better results than the previous year’s. If anything, the crashes and damage to the Flyer had gotten more severe. By the end of August, a good deal of tinkering had borne no fruit.*
In early September, they identified the problem. The size and placement of the forward elevator was changed and the Flyer suddenly began to live up to its name. Flights became longer, more graceful, and more controlled. By early October, they were staying in the air for thirty minutes, covering more than twenty miles, and landing not because of problems, but because they ran out of gas.
With the British attaché still unaccounted for, Wilbur and Orville once more looked to their own government. Four days after Wilbur flew for forty minutes, the Wrights wrote directly to the secretary of war. Without mentioning that they had already offered the Flyer to the British, they referred to their “informal offer” of “some months ago,” then asserted, “We do not wish to take this invention abroad, unless we find it necessary to do so, and therefore write again, renewing the offer.” They proposed a series of trials
in which the Flyer would travel up to one hundred miles (but at least twenty-five) at thirty miles per hour or more, with price on a sliding scale based on performance. Once again, Wilbur and Orville included no photographs nor proof that they had created a machine that actually flew.
They received a two-paragraph reply from the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, the first of which was a rejection virtually verbatim to that of the previous January. The second paragraph was equally dismissive. Before a contract could be entered into, the board wanted to know the cost and date of delivery “with such drawings and descriptions thereof that are necessary to enable its construction to be understood and a definite conclusion as to its practicability to be arrived at.” Wilbur and Orville, who already believed the board was populated by dolts, declined to tip their hand. Instead, virtually the day after they received the letter from Washington, they rekindled their offer to Great Britain and also offered the Flyer to the French.
To the British, they guaranteed a fifty-mile minimum. To interest the French, the Wrights wrote to Ferdinand Ferber, a French army officer and aviation pioneer with whom they had been in touch after an introduction from Octave Chanute. Ferber had built successful gliders based on the Wright model and, encouraged by Chanute, had inquired about purchasing a Flyer three months before. By November, Ferber had conducted some preliminary experiments in motorized flight.
Although the Wrights were aware that Ferber’s designs would fail, they heaped praise on his efforts, adding, “France is indeed fortunate in finding a Ferber.” Although “France already has reached a high degree of success,” they added, “it may wish to avail itself of our discoveries, partly to complement its own work; or perhaps partly to accurately inform itself of the state of the art as it will exist in those countries which buy the secrets of our motor machine.” They then offered the Flyer to France at what they described as the bargain price of one million francs, or $200,000, more than they had asked of either the United States or Great Britain.
That the Wrights would indulge in such uncharacteristic fawning seems to indicate a growing need to interest someone in their invention. But they had made another decision that would make a sale only more difficult. After the October flight, increasingly concerned that their design would be stolen, they decided to do no more public flying. A signed contract would be prerequisite to a demonstration. The Wrights were willing to forgo payment if the machine did not perform as advertised, but anyone who bought either an airplane or the design would be forced to do so without having first seen the airplane in flight.
That chimerical decision coincided with the return of the British attaché from Mexico, by then prepared to recommend purchase of a Flyer after the demonstration he had been promised months earlier. When Orville explained that the rules had changed, offering statements of witnesses and photographs of the Flyer in the air in lieu of an actual flight, the attaché was flummoxed. “Many people, you tell me,” he wrote, “have seen flights on Oct 3, 4 & 5. I only want to see one too.”1
But the Wrights were as always uncompromising and ultimately the British government declined to accede to the Wrights’ terms. As 1906 began, the Wright Flyer remained the only successful airplane and the brothers’ technological advantage was vast, but neither Wilbur nor Orville seemed to grasp that no lead is insurmountable if you stop running before you’ve reached the finish line.
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* The only positive development for the Wright family, and even that was mixed, was the clearing of Milton Wright’s name. Wilbur had prepared a detailed, scrupulously researched paper that demonstrated that virtually everything his father had said about misuse of church funds and the duplicity of Millard Keiter was true. At a general conference of the Old Constitution sect, the Wrights’ position was accepted and the matter was closed. But although Bishop Wright was restored to his previous position, he was by then seventy-seven and effectively retired from church leadership.
The Inexorable Progression of Knowledge
On January 1, 1906, the New-York Tribune noted in passing: “The Wright Brothers, of Dayton, Ohio, are said to have made no less than fifty short flights with [an aeroplane].” One week later, The New York Times ran a feature article in which “two young brothers … sons of a minister now residing in Dayton, Ohio … [who had been] experimenting in strict secrecy for several years” had succeeded constructing a flying machine “propelled by its own power, without any aid of balloon or gas bag.” The article went into great detail about both the machine and its performance and was atypical of those generally written about the Wrights in that it was largely accurate.
These articles and a number of others were the result of a different story about the Wrights, one that was printed in newspapers from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. “France to Buy Yankee Airship,” the headline read. A private consortium of French industrialists using government financing offered a $5,000 option on the agreed $200,000 purchase price. The syndicate would have until April 5, 1906, to deposit the remaining funds at Morgan Bank’s Paris office, at which time the Wrights would produce their airplane for testing. Even better, Wilbur and Orville would not be precluded from also selling the machine to the United States military.
Close-up view of the Wright Flyer, including the pilot and passenger seats.
The conditions were significant because the Wrights had learned that their patent application was near to being approved. Minor changes to the drawings and descriptions were all that were left of the patent examiner’s two-year string of objections.*
Unwilling to deposit $195,000 on a promise, the French sent a three-man commission to Dayton to see a demonstration without first asking permission of the Wrights. Incredibly, Wilbur and Orville refused even to show the delegation the aircraft, once again offering only witness testimonials and photographs to prove their claims.
Although the members of the delegation were convinced the Wright airplane could fly, the French ministry refused to move forward without some notion of how far, how fast, and how high the Flyer could go. The Wrights, it seemed, had competition. Another article appeared in American newspapers in early January, one that the brothers apparently missed. “Santos-Dumont has abandoned for the present the gas bag type of airship, of whose possibilities he has given the world the most striking demonstration. He is now working on the principle in which Maxim, Langley, Chanute, and the Wright brothers have had such faith.”
Santos-Dumont was revered in France, thought a genius. His balloon trips down the Champs-Élysées had become legendary. He had returned to France from St. Louis muttering of skulduggery, and at home in Paris, once more a hero, he changed his focus from gas bags to the box kite.
He was also intimate with the elite in every corner of French society, including the government. If Santos-Dumont intended to create a flying machine similar to the one under consideration, he should certainly be given the opportunity. And if he was successful, he would hardly charge his government one million francs for its design.
The ministers sent a telegram to Dayton adding conditions to the sale, such as a requirement that the airplane reach an altitude of one thousand feet, be delivered by August 1, 1906, and be exclusive to France, which the Wrights “at once rejected.” Instead, they proposed extending the option period one year if the French would extend the delivery date until October 1 and waive the exclusivity provision with regard to the United States entirely. The option lapsed. Soon afterward, the Wrights agreed to France’s terms but the war ministry refused to reopen negotiations. Wilbur and Orville got to keep the $5,000 but lost the opportunity for a far greater payday. Even worse, despite what seemed irrefutable proof that they had actually flown, whisperings began that they were simply a couple of bluffers who were attempting to perpetrate an elaborate hoax.
But for every skeptic, there was a convert. In April 1906, Scientific American, which had earlier scoffed at the Wrights’ claims, ate a good bit of crow:
When the list of their flights given above wa
s first announced last December in France, it was incredible to many people both there and here that so novel a device as a flying machine could be operated frequently for nearly six months in the vicinity of a large city without the fact becoming generally known. The Wrights refused to make a statement, and they gave the names of but a few persons who had seen them fly. With the communication recently sent by them to the Aero Club, however, they sent a list of names of seventeen men who were eye-witnesses of their experiments. In order to dispel any lingering doubt regarding the flights, the reported accounts of which the leading German aeronautical journal, Illustrirte Aeronautische Mitteilungen, characterized as “ein Amerikanischer bluff,” a list of questions was sent to the seventeen witnesses. In all we received eleven replies.
The editor eventually wrote, “In all the history of invention, there is probably no parallel to the unostentatious manner in which the Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio, ushered into the world their epoch-making invention.” The magazine expressed the hope that the Wrights would share their invention with an eager world. But rather than respond with a public flight, Wilbur and Orville dug in their heels. Wilbur wrote to Chanute on April 28, “Our position is constantly becoming stronger in other countries and we will soon find a sale somewhere. The French will buy eventually and probably under less favorable circumstances than today.” Whether this was bluff or self-delusion is not clear, but in no other country was a sale in the offing and the Wrights would never receive as much money from the French as they lost on this deal. In that same letter, Wilbur informed Chanute that their U.S. patent application finally had been approved.
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