To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  Clearly, the war fever had raised a new possibility in Langley’s mind. That morning, after discussion of official items, Langley mentioned his “interest in constructing a man-carrying aerodrome as a possible engine of war for the Government, at least so far as to demonstrate by actual performance that it was capable of carrying a man or men for a flight of an hour or more.” Such a project could easily cost fifty thousand dollars, the secretary said, perhaps twice that.

  Walcott spoke up. He could talk to McKinley, he said, and to others. Perhaps a committee could be deputized to review the prospects and make a recommendation.

  Langley needed no convincing, and Walcott moved with astonishing speed. Before the week was out, he had broached the idea to two important friends—Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the Navy, and Alexander Meiklejohn, assistant secretary of War—and laid the idea before President McKinley, along with a photograph of No. 5 in flight and a copy of Langley’s article in McClure’s. The President was much pleased with these items, Walcott told Langley. The Army was for it. Roosevelt urged John D. Long, secretary of the Navy, to join in: “The machine has worked. It seems to me worthwhile for this government to try whether it will not work on a large enough scale to be of use in the event of war.”

  Within a week a secret and unofficial advisory committee had been appointed—two officers from the Army, two from the Navy, and Stimson Brown, a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Observatory. On April 6, the committee spent three hours with Langley at the Smithsonian, examining No. 5 and No. 6 and listening to the secretary review his plan for scaling up to a man-carrying machine. Walcott attended, as did Bell, whose presence, Langley well knew, could not fail to awe the other guests.

  Out in the open now, Langley suddenly felt it unseemly to push. He wished to be asked.

  He “was by no means eager to assume so much care and responsibility,” he assured his visitors. But if his country needed him in time of war, he would undertake this important work. He could make no promise, of course, that a successful flying machine “would be at once an engine of war.” Yet he was quite confident it would become one eventually. The cost would be not less than fifty thousand dollars, to be spent entirely at his own discretion, without “the usual restrictions on appropriations.” Of course he held no financial interest in the endeavor, but sought only to serve the nation. For three hours he spoke, passed photographs, answered questions.

  The committee members could hardly help but find all this persuasive—the esteemed senior scientist, dignified and confident; the otherworldly machines, their fittings gleaming under the laboratory lights; photographs to prove they really had flown; and Bell, a genuine hero of American technology, nodding his approval of this pioneering enterprise. Professor Brown, preparing the committee’s report, not only adopted Langley’s review of aeronautics but allowed the secretary to edit the document heavily before passing it along to higher authorities.

  The committee readily agreed that Langley’s project gave all promise of producing a machine capable of wartime reconnaissance; of “communication between stations isolated from each other by the ordinary means of land or water communication,” and of serving as “an engine of offense with the capacity of dropping from a great height high explosives into a camp of fortification.”

  The members cited Octave Chanute’s definition of a successful flying machine—that it must have wings capable of supporting it in the air, a motor and propellers to push the craft forward, and the ability to “start up under all conditions,” to “alight in safety,” and to maintain “equilibrium and dirigibility,” that is, to keep its balance and to turn in one direction or another at the operator’s command. Langley already had proved he could build sufficient wings and means of propulsion, the committee affirmed. Indeed, he intended to incorporate recent improvements in internal combustion in “a much more efficient form of engine.” If a gasoline engine failed, it would be only “a minor difficulty,” for steam “has already demonstrated its practicability on even a much larger scale,” and would suffice.

  As for “alighting safely,” the group hinted at only slightly less confidence. They could attest the models had landed in the water without substantial damage. Safe landings on the ground would come when “the attainment of dirigibility and control shall have been completely secured.”

  And on that question—the operator’s ability to steer the craft as he chose—the members repeated what they took to be Langley’s view. Perhaps they didn’t understand what he had said, or perhaps he had claimed more than he should have. For the committee’s report said No. 5 and No. 6 had exhibited control “within the limits possible in such a construction”—a true statement only in the sense that the unmanned models had flown in the direction in which they had been launched, at least for a few seconds. And the committee said control of the manned machine was to be enhanced “by the addition of an intelligence which can intervene, or not, as desired.” By that they meant a human pilot. Yet there was no device on the model aerodromes that a pilot could use for steering. Nor did Langley yet know how to make one. So far, the aerodrome resembled a thrown stone, moving through the air only so long as its momentum held out.

  The plan was referred to the War Department’s Board of Ordnance and Fortification, a committee of Army and Navy officers established in 1888 to beef up national defense, particularly to repair coastal fortifications that had fallen apart in the years after the Civil War. In the 1890s, the board had taken on the responsibility of assessing new kinds of weapons, then all manner of inventions that might be useful in defense and war.

  Langley, preparing for a make-or-break presentation to the board, worried things along, phoning Walcott for updates and seeking the lowdown on members of the BOF. After some inquiries, a National Museum staff member assured the secretary that “the gentlemen . . . are honorable, upright and courteous army officers.” But in the spring of 1898 they also were on their way to the Caribbean. So, war or no war, Langley went ahead with his usual summer tour of Europe.

  LANGLEY KNEW HOW TO BUILD a telescope but not a gasoline engine, the only type he believed would be light enough for his purpose. He needed a talented full-time engineer to serve as his chief assistant. He sent a request for a recommendation to a friend, Robert Thurston of Cornell University, one of the few engineering professors in the U.S. willing to say he thought flying machines feasible. “Have you any young man who is morally trustworthy (‘a good fellow’) with some gumption and a professional training[?]” Thurston recommended a Cornell senior, Charles Matthews Manly, who was only twenty-two years old but highly promising.

  Manly came from an old Virginia family. Several of his forebears had been Baptist ministers; one of them offered the benediction at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy. Raised in South Carolina, where his father was a minister and college president, Manly as a youngster became fascinated by developments in electricity. Well trained in math and engineering, he possessed an even more valuable trait—a bottomless capacity for hard work. Langley apparently considered no other candidates, and Manly left Ithaca for Washington even before receiving his diploma.

  JUST BEFORE NOON on November 9, 1898, Langley entered the ornate stone edifice of the State, War, and Navy Building, just west of the White House. Approval from the Board of Ordnance and Fortification was not the lead-pipe cinch that his meeting with the impromptu committee of the previous spring had been. The fighting with Spain had ended some weeks earlier; the urgency of war had faded. And Langley could not count on a friendly audience.

  The chairman of the board was General Nelson A. Miles, commanding general of the Army. Miles had left school at an early age and was not accustomed to the company of astrophysicists. While Langley was preparing engineering drawings at a desk in Chicago, Miles had been killing Confederates at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Cold Harbor. Since then he had led Army regulars against Cheyennes, Sioux, and Apaches; Pullman strikers in Chicago; and, just lately, Sp
aniards in Puerto Rico. Now, at the age of fifty-nine, he was believed to aspire to the presidency.

  The general strode into the room late, skipped any pleasantries, and invited Langley to make his statement.

  The secretary began by emphasizing the scientific foundation he had laid in the late eighties and early nineties, the “long and costly investigations . . . which established the fact that the opinions then held by scientific men as to the impossibility of mechanical flight were unfounded.” Next came years of toil to construct engines of “hitherto unheard of lightness,” and “when this was done, I found I had . . . but fought my way to the great difficulty—that of balancing and guiding the aerodrome in free air by automatic machinery, when there was no man on board.” Yet this, too, had been accomplished, as evidenced by the sheaf of photographs he now presented, showing No. 5 and No. 6 in flight.

  Board members interrupted. How fast would a manned craft fly, and for how long?

  Twenty-five to thirty miles per hour, Langley replied, with fuel enough for a flight of three hours, though “I think subsequently very much longer periods will be obtained.

  “Concerning the use of the aerodrome in war, it is hardly for me, a civilian, to insist upon its utility to a board of military men. But I think I might be justified in saying that anything which, like this, would enable one party to look into the enemy’s tactics and movements . . . would tend to modify the present art of war, much as the game of whist might be modified if a player were allowed to look into his opponent’s hand.”

  With an “immediate expenditure” of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand dollars for construction, including a very large houseboat to launch the craft, Langley asserted “with confidence” that “the machine will be completely built and ready for trial within a year”—that is, by the end of 1899—though “I do not desire to convey the impression that it would be able to fly when completely constructed.” Time would be needed for “balancing and adjustment, and preliminary trial—a time which cannot be exactly determined, but which . . . is always more likely to take more than can be definitely defined in anticipation.” Given this uncertainty, he said, the board should plan on spending no less than fifty thousand dollars for a perfected aerodrome. This was for materials and staff costs only, he stressed; his own time would be offered free of charge.

  That afternoon, the board agreed that Langley’s project gave “promise of great military value.” To hedge their bet, the members allotted only twenty-five thousand dollars, enough to cover Langley’s early costs, with the informal understanding that a second allotment would be made after Langley gave evidence of progress.

  Someone at the War Department immediately passed the story to reporters. Langley, opening The Washington Post the next day, was quietly horrified. Thinking of the hundreds of smash-ups and flubs that had preceded the successes of 1896, he wanted no reporters peering over his shoulder. He had counted on secrecy. Worse, the newspapers said General Adolphus Greely, chief of the Army Signal Corps, would direct the project, with Langley merely giving “the benefit of his devisings and advice.” That was out of the question, Langley immediately told the board, as “I could not undertake a position of responsibility without authority, or conduct the operations under any other direction than that of the Board itself.” His protest convinced the board, which assured him of “fullest discretion in the work.”

  The board—indeed, the whole War Department—had its own reason for wishing it had kept its mouth shut. The Washington Post greeted the enterprise with mock excitement, as “the flying-machine has always been a favorite dream of ours. . . . We shall do our best to be at the launching. We intend to practice longevity with most industrious enthusiasm in the meanwhile. We should never forgive ourselves were we so careless as to die before the ceremony.”

  Langley, confident of his purpose, was unfazed. He pressed ahead quickly with his planning. The first task was the engine; he wanted the finest available. Inquiries went to all the leading engineering firms. Most said they could not build an engine light enough yet powerful enough to meet Langley’s specifications. But Stephen Balzer, a Hungarian-born engineer who in 1894 had designed and built the first automobile in New York City, said he could create such an engine in a matter of a few months, by the spring of 1899.

  Chapter Two

  “A Slight Possibility”

  “SCRAPS OF WOOD AND METAL AND ABANDONED PIECES OF FLYING TOYS”

  The Wright Cycle Company, 1127 W. Third Street, Dayton

  IN THEIR SEPARATE WAYS, Samuel Langley and the Wright brothers could claim to be self-made men, but there the resemblance ended. The Langleys were high-toned, well-fixed Boston Brahmins. The Wrights were midwesterners of modest means. Langley grew up among the descendants of Puritans in a world governed by rationalist churches (Congregational and Unitarian) and universities (Harvard and Yale). The Wrights, a generation later, also came from Puritan stock, but of the variety hardened by decades of life on the frontier, surrounded by Scotch-Irish and German farmers. And the family’s piety was of a much more active sort.

  The father, Bishop Milton Wright, detected a clear pattern in the fabric of his ancestral family, with vivid colors of nonconformism and virtuous combat. He saw the pattern among his Puritan farmer forebears and in a grandfather who fought the British at Saratoga in 1777. His father, Dan Wright, was a devout Christian who spurned the churches around his homestead on the Indiana frontier “because those he otherwise harmonized with indorsed human bondage,” and who took low prices for his corn because he refused to sell to whiskey producers. The same pattern marked Milton’s own life. Though deeply thoughtful and learned by the standards of his place and time, he was chiefly a man who obeyed his own strict conscience, planted his banner in the enemy’s midst, and defended it with no thought of surrender. He taught his children to do the same.

  As a boy in the 1840s, Milton had followed his father’s example of piety outside any church. But at nineteen, after much reading and careful deliberation, he submitted to baptism by full immersion in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. In 1850, in a declaration that determined the preoccupations of his lifetime, he said he had been called to the ministry, and after several years of directed reading, he was ordained. For several years he courted Susan Koerner, a young Brethren woman of German descent, and they married in 1859.

  The Brethren Church had been founded by German evangelicals in Maryland only a few decades earlier. It won its first great wave of converts among the early settlers of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, and by Milton’s day it was known as a church of the frontier, with the frontier’s scorn of social hierarchy and ritual. By 1850 the Brethren claimed some fifty thousand members—not many by Methodist or Presbyterian standards, but young and vigorous. Soon they leaped the Rocky Mountains to establish footholds in California and Oregon. Their aim was the reign of Christ in the New World, and for that to occur, Christian reformers first must sweep away the works of Satan, the worst of which was human slavery.

  As a young man in the 1850s, Milton sharpened all his intellectual weapons in the battle between the abolitionists and the “Great Slave Power” of the southern aristocrats. Good was on one side, evil on the other. Between them was a vast, weak-willed crowd susceptible to temptation and unholy compromises. These were the ones you had to watch. Among the worst villains of Milton’s early universe were clergymen who cowered from the attack on slavery for fear of losing the weekly offerings of slaveowners and their collaborators. With God’s Kingdom on the horizon, the stakes were always high. Daily life was a battle, and people deserved to be trusted only after they proved which side they were on.

  Milton discarded the intellectual blinders that many pietists wore. A zealous reader since childhood, he came by most of his learning on his own, through a program of “steady, continued and systematic investigation of subjects. In this he was a rigid disciplinarian.” While reading for the ministry, he took courses and taught at Hartsville College in southern Indiana, a
small Brethren school that attracted more elementary and secondary youngsters than college students. He never took a degree. Though he became a self-taught theologian and biblical scholar, he liked science and read widely about other faiths. His father apparently had had the same blend of pietism and openmindedness, or so Milton told an early biographer, who said Dan Wright, though “a man of strong convictions,” had been “very tolerant of the opinions of others, and very ready to recognize all that was good in any person, religious denomination or political party.”

  Still, “all that was good” constituted a pretty narrow range, in Milton’s view. After the Civil War, as he began his ministry as a circuit-riding preacher—first in Indiana, then as a missionary in Oregon, then back in the Middle West—he narrowed his sights on the evil that would be his special target for most of his career.

  For Wright and other evangelical reformers, the volatile fuel of antislavery was easily siphoned into the movement against Freemasonry and its imitators—“the dark-visaged sister of the now defunct institution of slavery.” In our own time, when the men’s fraternal lodges have lost much of their clout, it is hard to understand the power they wielded and the fears they inspired in nineteenth-century America. Touring the nation, Alexis de Tocqueville was startled by the “immense assemblage” of Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Red Men, and a hundred others. To members, especially among the growing middle classes of America’s cities, the lodges were places of good fellowship, charity, and social uplift. But to Milton Wright and many like-minded Protestants, they were ominous rivals of Christianity itself, elevating vague notions of brotherhood above the need for grace and salvation. The worst, in the opponents’ minds, were the Freemasons, the largest lodge and so the most dangerous. Their elaborate rituals mimicked the church’s, but were “Christless.” An odor of Old World aristocracy wafted from the lodges, of exclusionary social circles, of “ins” versus “outs,” of hidden favors and preferences among the initiated and a raw deal for those left out. This was anathema to men who cherished the anti-elite tradition of the American Revolution—despite the fact that Washington, Franklin, and other prominent patriots had been devoted Freemasons. Worst of all about the secret societies was their secrecy itself, which the opponents found intrinsically unchristian and antidemocratic and which, by its very nature, inflamed their imaginations about the danger. A strict ban on membership in any secret society was part of the 1841 Brethren constitution.