by James Tobin
If his traits seemed contradictory—coldness and kindness; the eager search for friendship and the shying away from human contact—the answer may lie in Abbot’s simple observation that Langley was “a born aristocrat.” His aristocracy was not of family or money, but of learning and culture. He unconsciously divided humanity into the few who merited his attention and the many who did not.
Among those Langley favored, his friendship and loyalty attracted loyalty in return. In the Smithsonian, his aides made Langley’s quest their own, fending off visitors and other distractions from his aeronautical work, arranging affairs to forestall his wrath, helping him with the myriad tasks of invention. All through Langley’s tenure as secretary, George Brown Goode, Richard Rathbun, Cyrus Adler, Charles Walcott, and the other top men conspired to protect his time from all but the most essential burdens of administration, so that he might spend most of his hours in the Astrophysical Observatory and especially in the South Shed. Partly this was because Langley wanted it this way. But partly it was their own desire to help him. They were all too aware their friend was risking his good name and the Institution’s in his aeronautical enterprise. For him and for themselves, they would do all they could to ensure its success.
NO ONE GAVE more energy to Langley’s endeavor than Charles Manly, and every sign indicates that Langley recognized the diligence of this remarkable youngster whom he had asked to build the world’s first flying machine. Though not yet twenty-five, Manly supervised several simultaneous jobs of construction and testing, all “with the utmost speed.” These included building the aerodrome’s frame; crafting its wings and rudders; overhauling the No. 5 and No. 6 models for new tests; building a new small houseboat for the models and planning a large one for the great aerodrome; plus creating complex new launching apparatuses. The design and construction of a quarter-scale aerodrome for more testing was soon added to his burdens. Most important, he kept tabs on Balzer’s progress in New York. Manly constantly phoned Balzer, wrote letters, sent telegrams, ran up by train for surprise inspections, all with a single aim—an engine of no more than one hundred pounds that could deliver a sustained twelve horsepower. Manly liked Balzer and respected him, and believed his pledge to “strain every point to deliver the engine to you.” But Manly’s worries rose as each of Balzer’s promises gave way to another report that he must make another change in design or materials.
On February 3, 1900, nearly fourteen months after Balzer promised to deliver the engine in ten weeks, Langley’s latest deadline arrived. No engine. The next day Balzer promised to ship the machine on February 8. He did not. When Langley decided to build the quarter-scale aerodrome, Manly spoke up for Balzer again, saying the engineer could build the small engine but only if Langley advanced him another eight hundred dollars. Again, Langley agreed, but now he inserted a forfeit clause. If the small engine was not finished by April 1, 1900, the contract would be void. “I desire to say that I thoroughly understand the urgent need of the engine,” Balzer assured Langley, “and will make every effort possible to complete the engine, if possible before the specified time.”
In March Langley departed for a vacation in the Caribbean, “very uneasy” about the prospects.
“You must realize,” Manly chided Balzer, “that there is a limit to the number of times that a man of the Secretary’s experience will allow himself to be given assurance that everything is progressing as well as possible, and then after waiting several months, things are in practically no better shape than they were before, without losing confidence in the person giving him such assurance, and I fear that unless this large engine is completed very soon that it may be the means of the Secretary losing all confidence in my judgment and advice.”
THE JAMAICANS CALLED Cathartes aura—the turkey vulture—by the nickname “John Crow.” Langley found it easier to observe the birds in Jamaica than in Washington simply because they were more common, and he believed the Caribbean variant was “almost as much superior in skill to our buzzard as [it] is to a barnyard fowl.” The Jamaicans levied a five-pound fine on anyone who killed one of the beasts. For Cathartes aura meant “Golden Purifier”; the vultures cleaned up the muggy island’s rotting flesh, and thus were regarded as helpers. Safe from human interference, they wheeled fearlessly through the yards around Langley’s hotel. This was a mixed blessing. They came close enough for Langley to see their grotesque red masks, perhaps even to glimpse their habit of excreting on their feathery legs. But their nearness to his balcony also offered “exceptional opportunities for near study” of some of nature’s most skilled soaring creatures.
Langley watched the great carrion-eaters by the hour. They flapped their wings only for a moment upon leaving the ground. Once airborne the wings stayed all but motionless, the birds moving “with astonishing smoothness and indeed the extreme of grace.” Here was a perfect model for the great aerodrome—a creature able to sustain itself indefinitely with stationary wings, even in a calm. And the bird could turn at will. Langley gazed with bafflement and envy. How? How did the vulture accomplish a turn in the air?
Squinting into the semitropical sun, he glimpsed something like the trick Wilbur Wright had seen pigeons execute in the streets and alleys of West Dayton. In his notes Langley wrote: “I think their movement into the breeze was managed in some way by shifting the angle of the wing, chiefly the angle of advance.” The wing would tilt; that side would rise until “the line between the wing tips was nearly vertical.” Then, suddenly, the birds would “blow off to the leeward, with the wind in their backs, this final movement being made as quickly and deftly as the turning of one’s hand, and occupying but the fraction of a second, so that it was hard to see how, or just when, it was done.”
Amending his notes later, he wrote it a second time: There was something in “the angle of the wing.” The angle seemed to change on one side . . . the wing on that side rose . . . the bird turned. The movement was so fleeting, barely perceptible, the bird so high overhead, it was hard to see. But there was something to it.
Upon returning to Washington, Langley gave orders that led to a six-month investigation by six members of the Smithsonian staff led by Robert Ridgway, curator of the division of birds. Specimens of “John Crow” were collected (in Cuba, not Jamaica, to keep it legal), measured, weighed, hung up by strings in soaring position, and dissected. The same was done with Washington turkey vultures. The wings were measured separately, to determine their centers of gravity and pressure. To the Smithsonian’s astrophysical observatory went an order for twin telephoto cameras, and to the Zoological Park in northwest Washington, an order for the erection of a tall tower with a viewing platform. When cameras and tower were ready, T. W. Smillie, the Smithsonian photographer, went up the ladder to capture simultaneous images of soaring vultures from various angles.
At the same time, the secretary directed Manly to consider ways of changing the angle of the aerodrome’s wings in flight, in order to keep the machine balanced. “I have been noting this ability to guide by the slight inflection of the wing, in my studies of the Jamaica buzzard,” he said, “and am ready to say that I think, while the quarter-sized working model of the great aerodrome is building, it will be worth while to make some arrangement of the frame or wing-holder which will make it possible to test this idea. . . . I will request you to especially look out for this, as far as you can.”
It was the first time Langley had turned his attention from the quest for lightweight engine power.
IN THE UNITED STATES, only one other significant figure besides Langley and Bell stood against the wave of popular doubt about the possibility of human flight. This was Octave Chanute, of Chicago.
In 1900 Chanute turned sixty-eight. He was the son of learned French immigrants who moved from Paris to New Orleans when he was six, then to New York when he was twelve. Raised to be “a full-fledged American,” with perhaps a touch of immigrant defensiveness about his claim to America’s promises, Chanute went to work at seventeen, holding c
hains for surveyors on the Hudson River Railroad. Bright and diligent, he rose quickly and participated in the surge of construction that laced the nation with rails in the 1850s and 1860s. By his early forties he was regarded as “the best civil engineer in the West,” designing and building bridges throughout the continent’s midsection, including the first bridge ever to cross the Missouri River. He built the Union Stockyards in Chicago, one of the great industrial spectacles of the day. He spent ten years as chief engineer of the Erie Railroad in New York, and in 1891 was elected president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. By then he had brought to market a chemical preservative for wooden railroad ties, and it made him a wealthy man.
Chanute was the very picture of the accomplished American professional, eminent among his peers, comfortably fixed in a fine home in a great city, with a happy marriage and two beloved daughters. Plump in figure and round of face he looked like a slightly indignant owl. He had worked hard to gain respect, both for himself and for his still-young profession of civil engineering. If he longed for greater achievement, he also had much to lose. A taste for adventure and a nagging sense of caution mingled in his mind.
Like Langley, Chanute had begun to pursue an interest in flight in a time of low spirits. Since his youth he had thought flight “presented the attraction of an unsolved problem which did not seem as visionary as that of perpetual motion,” since “birds gave daily proof that flying could be done.” In the early 1870s the city of New York asked him for recommendations on public transit, and his proposal for elevated steam trains dragged him into a nerve-racking political rumble. Worn out, he took a long tour of Europe, where he happened to read about aeronautical experiments conducted by legitimate engineers. Chanute knew something about the startling effects that wind sometimes had on large plane surfaces, such as the roadways of bridges. He was impressed that serious European engineers not only believed the problem of flight was susceptible to engineering solutions, but had conducted research and published papers in reputable journals. He began to collect “such information as was to be found on the subject”—precious little, compared to other engineering fields—and added his own “speculations.” Soon his aeronautical studies were interfering with his work. He bundled up his papers, wrapped them in red tape, and vowed to leave them alone until he could take up the subject “without detriment to any duty.”
In the late 1880s he unwrapped the bundle and began to add to it again. By this point, he said later, learned debate about human flight had reached a point where “it was no longer considered proof of lunacy to investigate it, and great progress had been made in producing artificial motors approximating those of the birds in relative lightness.” Soon, in the upstairs office of his home on Huron Street, models of imagined flying machines hung from every square foot of the ceiling, and stuffed birds stood on every surface. Very early in the morning, “when only the milkman was about,” he would drop models of flying machines from his roof. He flew all sorts of kites “to the great admiration of small boys.”
Chanute was no impetuous youngster, rushing headlong after his will-of-the-wisp. He had no desire to be seen as a lone kook. Nor did he think one man alone could solve the problem. Instead, he envisioned a worldwide network of engineers collaborating informally, each working on his own plan but sharing ideas and findings. Chanute appointed himself an informal clearinghouse for such efforts, and went to work. He enlisted the help of a clipping service and began to correspond with experimenters in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Australia. Among his correspondents was Louis Mouillard, the dreamy, ne’er-do-well Frenchman in Egypt, author of The Empire of the Air, which inspired Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Through several years of reading and correspondence, Chanute became a sort of self-taught professor of aeronautics without portfolio and the acknowledged dean of flight experimenters. At the invitation of a friend, he distilled his findings into a series of articles in The Railroad and Engineering Journal, then collected these essays in his Progress in Flying Machines, published in 1894.
Where Mouillard, in Empire of the Air, had been deliberately inspirational, Chanute used only the soberest language. Yet anyone who skimmed Progress in Flying Machines found himself in an outlandish mechanical menagerie. Here were devices shaped like parachutes and umbrellas; birdlike machines with two wings, four wings, ten wings; “an aerial car with paddle wheels revolving in a transverse plane, for the purpose of lifting and propelling.” Here was a Belgian shoemaker named De Groof, who in 1874 had constructed “a sort of cross between beating wings and a parachute.” Cutting loose from a balloon over London, he had plunged straight to his death. All these and many more had been failures, of course. Yet Chanute told of promising experiments, too—the extraordinary toys of Alphonse Pénaud and others like them, which flew many feet when launched by hand with their rubber-band motors; a French flapping-wing model that had flown for eighty yards on the power of twelve explod-ing cartridges; and machines with rotating horizontal screws, or propellers. Thomas Edison himself, shortly after presenting the world with his incandescent light in 1879, had fiddled with aerial screws, concluding not that the enterprise was doomed, but simply that “the thing never will be practicable until an engine of 50 horse power can be devised to weigh about 40 pounds.” Now, in the 1890s, that sounded plausible, for the internal combustion engine promised to deliver the requisite power without inordinate weight.
Chanute concluded that flapping-wing devices, called “ornithopters,” were impractical. Machines with fixed wings, like the rigid wings of a soaring bird of prey, held the most promise. And he believed that experimenters should begin with gliders, as Lilienthal had. But he was interested in every idea and welcomed every thoughtful effort. After all, no one had succeeded, so who could predict which path would lead to success? Only by a broad, concerted campaign, with advances in knowledge shared openly and generously, would the fledgling community of flight experimenters move forward. Embarking on his survey, Chanute had wanted “to satisfy himself whether, with our present mechanical knowledge and appliances, more particularly the light motors recently developed, men might reasonably hope eventually to fly through the air,” he said. From what he knew now, “this question can be answered in the affirmative.”
FOR YEARS, Chanute dreamed that he might be the one who made the crucial experiments. But it was “only after Lilienthal had shown that such an adventure was feasible that courage was gathered to experiment with full-sized machines carrying a man through the air.” He meant courage to try the experiment, not to fly the machines himself. He was too old for that. When he designed his own gliders in 1896, he hired younger men to try them on the lonely dunes at the tip of Lake Michigan, near Chicago. He himself did try a few very short and tentative hops, to get the feel of it, and concluded that “there is no more delightful sensation than that of gliding through the air.”
He designed gliders with multiple wings, following the example of the British theorist John Stringfellow, who, in turn, was influenced by triplane designs of the founding genius of aeronautics, George Cayley, a British peer in the era of King George III who had been the first to imagine a flying machine with fixed wings, an engine, and movable surfaces to control the machine’s path. Another design Chanute tried was a near-replica of one of Otto Lilienthal’s, built and flown by Augustus Herring, an ambitious flight experimenter whom Chanute had hired as an aide. It acted “cranky and uncertain” in the stiff lake breezes. To keep any control at all, the operator was forced to throw his body back and forth “like a tight-rope dancer without a pole.”
“With every gust of the wind he would have to shift his weight to keep the machine going straight,” said a watching reporter from the Chicago Tribune. “The greatest difficulty is right there. The wind shifts so suddenly at times that no one can move fast enough to keep up with it.”
A second machine was of Chanute’s own design—a high stack of curved, ribbed wings that looked, in an early permutation, “like si
x pairs of birds superposed,” though the men nicknamed it the “Katydid” for its passing resemblance to the longhorned grasshopper of the same name. But the profusion of wings was not its key feature. Chanute had reasoned that if Lilienthal’s problem was the operator’s inability to shift his weight fast enough to control the wings, then perhaps “the wings should move instead of the man.” He attached each wing to a central frame so that it could pivot to stern when struck by a gust, then snap back on a spring. This, he hoped, would be an automatic way of keeping the centers of pressure and gravity together. In a hundred glides, the machine proved “steady, safe and manageable.” But its longest distance was only eighty-two feet, and there seemed to be no special magic in the pivoting wings.
A third design did better. It had two plane surfaces—a biplane, or “double-decker” configuration—that Chanute bound together by criss-crossing guy wires in a pattern familiar to anyone who had seen many bridges. Engineers called it a Pratt truss. It was an exceptionally good way of lending strength to the form without undue weight. The biplane design eliminated the need for awkward bracing wires above and below the wings—a nuisance that Langley and Manly were always struggling with. And it flew well. Many glides stretched over two hundred feet, and Herring, hanging from the bottom wing and making small adjustments of his weight to control the glider’s path, once flew more than three hundred feet in fourteen seconds. Chanute watched from the sand below. “It was very interesting,” he wrote, “to see the aviator on the hillside adjust his machine and himself to the veering wind, then, when poised, take a few running steps forward, sometimes but one step, and raising slightly the front of his apparatus, sail off at once horizontally against the wind; to see him pass with steady motion and ample support 40 or 50 feet above the observer, and then . . . gradually descend to land on the beach several hundred feet away. . . .