by James Tobin
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS had spent their lives in Dayton and a few small towns elsewhere in the Midwest. They had been to Chicago once. They had never seen an ocean, nor any place where the ground was not clothed in midwestern oaks, maples, crops, and gardens. This blank wilderness was as exotic to them as Antarctica.
A writer of the day called the Outer Banks “the strip of beach that encircles the whole North Carolina coast like a sort of front porch rail, sometimes a mile or two out, sometimes, as at Cape Hatteras, far out of sight at sea.” Kitty Hawk stood at one of the widest points in the rail, but even there it was only a mile from the ocean to Albemarle Sound. Water dominated the view at nearly every point. A few years before the Wrights arrived, a visiting naturalist counted ten thousand Canada geese passing over his head in a single afternoon, and “that flight represented only a small part of the myriads frequenting the sound both south and north.” He watched many more tens of thousands of gray-brown ghost crabs crawl ashore after sunset to feed on clams.
Winds from the Atlantic brought the sour scent of salt and the shore. From the west, across the sound, came the tang of bay leaves and pine. Along the sound there were woods where bears wandered and wild hogs rooted. Toward the ocean, there was only sand. It stretched in barren plains and rose in drifted humps.
“The sand!” Orville told Kate, “the sand is the greatest thing in Kitty Hawk, and soon will be the only thing. The site of our tent was formerly a fertile valley, cultivated by some ancient Kitty Hawker. Now only a few rotten limbs, the top most branches of trees that then grew in this valley, protrude from the sand. The sea has washed and the wind has blown millions of loads of sand up in heaps along the coast, completely covering houses and forest. Mr. Tate is now tearing down the nearest house to our camp to save it from the sand.” Orville said their nephew Milton could play all day and not have to wash his hands before dinner, as “you can’t get dirty. Not enough to raise the least bit of color could be collected under a finger nail.”
He found time to write two long letters to Kate—not enough to suit her, but more than Will, who apparently wrote no one at home once his brother had arrived. Orville’s mind wandered to business details at home, but Will said nothing about the shop. Orville took in the sunsets—“the prettiest I have ever seen . . . deep blue clouds of various shapes fringed with gold”—but Will was often asleep on his cot before the sun reached the horizon. When the wind died and the glider sat idle, Will went out on the dunes to watch hawks, eagles, buzzards, and ospreys. He climbed dunes to get better views of the birds in flight from in front or behind, not just from below. He wanted to see the angles at which they held their wings, and which weather seemed best suited to soaring. Orville wrote travel notes to Kate, telling her stories of Kitty Hawk’s poverty-stricken cows and horses and hogs; of the mockingbird who nested in the live oak by their tent; of the domestic habits and local celebrities of Kitty Hawk. Will recorded field notes:
No bird soars in a calm. . . .
If a buzzard be soaring to leeward of the observer, at a distance of a thousand feet, and a height of about one hundred feet, the cross section of its wings will be a mere line when the bird is moving from the observer but when it moves toward him the wings will appear broad. This would indicate that its wings are always inclined upward, which seems contrary to reason. . . .
Buzzards find it difficult to advance in the face of a wind blowing more than thirty miles per hour. Their soaring speed cannot be far from thirty miles.
The ocean was only a few hundred yards from their tent. But there is no record that either brother set foot in it.
By mid-October, everyone in the village was on speaking terms with the two “Mr. Wrights.” There was an old New Yorker named Cogswell who had moved to the Outer Banks for his health and married a sister of Addie Tate’s. He told the brothers if they didn’t leave soon Bill Tate would die from the excitement.
They wanted another try at manned glides before leaving. They were much surer of their controls than they had been on the first day, when Will had gotten scared in the high winds. On Saturday, October 20, with Tate along to assist, they loaded the glider on a wagon and went four miles down the island to the tallest of three big dunes called the Kill Devil Hills. It offered a long smooth slope, entirely bare of vegetation, running northeast toward the surf. Near the top, facing a hard wind, Will stepped into the operator’s slot.
Otto Lilienthal and Octave Chanute had warned that any glider with wings longer than twelve feet was inherently dangerous, since it could not be controlled by shifting one’s weight. Will had never made a free flight in a glider. Yet on this day he chose to defy the world’s only authorities on the basis of only his own calculations and preliminary experiments. It was a characteristic moment.
The three men ran down the slope and the wind took the craft. Will held the horizontal rudder steady, and the machine skimmed the slope, Orv and Tate panting along at the wingtips. The wing-twisting mechanism was tied off, so if one tip or the other rose, Orv or Tate simply pushed it back down to level. They rushed back up the hill and did it again and again, about a dozen times in all. In the longest, Will skimmed along the curve of the hill for nearly four-hundred feet. He found he could ease the craft down to the sand ever so gently and easily; the tracks in the sand were forty feet long.
At the end of the day they hauled the glider back to the top of the hill, hoisted it, ran a few steps and hurled it into the breeze. The machine wafted out toward the Atlantic, dipped, and thunked into the sand. They left it there.
Will had hoped for hours of practice in the air and wound up with roughly two minutes. Yet “we were very much pleased with the general results of the trip, for setting out as we did, with almost revolutionary theories on many points, and an entirely untried form of machine, we considered it quite a point to be able to return without having our pet theories completely knocked in the head by the hard logic of experience, and our own brains dashed out in the bargain.”
On October 23, five weeks after Will’s arrival, the brothers departed. Bill Tate went down to the sand hills, lifted the glider onto a cart, and hauled it back to his house. Addie Tate took her shears to it. She snipped the French sateen from the Wrights’ ribs and spars, washed it, cut it to size, and stitched new dresses for her girls.
LANGLEY WAS STILL poking around Europe for other prospects. He had instructed Manly to do his best to create a workable radial engine from the remains of Stephen Balzer’s disaster, but Langley was not yet ready to entrust all his hopes for success to his young engineer’s untested skill. He still hoped that the Old World’s finest minds had a solution to the challenge.
Near the end of his stay in Paris, he went to the nearby Château de Meudon, where Napoleon Bonaparte had founded a balloon school and factory more than a century earlier. Lately the place was home to the Third Republic’s Military Balloon Park. Here Langley peered at a gigantic hangar, watched a balloon rise from the ground, and met several leaders in the French campaign for lighter-than-air supremacy. It was a path that was leading from the balloon to the zeppelin—a stately, elegant, yet slow and ponderous means of flight. One of its enthusiasts was Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, an oil millionnaire who, the previous spring, had established a prize of one hundred thousand francs for the first man to make an aerial round trip from the outskirts of Paris to the Eiffel Tower, a distance of some seven miles. Langley also was introduced to an immaculate sprig of a young man, odd and elegant and very much the center of attention. This was the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, a young pioneer balloonist on the verge of great fame. Santos-Dumont invited Langley to visit him the next day at Suresnes to see the cigar-shaped balloon he was building for an attempt at the Deutsch Prize. Langley found him “discouraged at his failures” so far. Examining Santos-Dumont’s engine with intense interest and a newfound sense of expertise, Langley was quite sure, he told Rathbun later, “that, with the experience I have acquired at Washington, I could make the thing go, substituting .
. . machinery at once more powerful and light, which I believe I could do.” But Langley was not interested in gently floating beneath a directed gas-bag. He wanted speed, and power.
BY LETTER, Langley now learned that Manly, in Washington, was feeling hopeful. He had been conducting new tests and now felt entirely convinced that the rotary design was, as Langley had suspected, a doomed enterprise. He had swiftly converted Balzer’s handiwork to a radial design, with stationary instead of rotating cylinders, cooled by temporary water jackets. Immediately he got “very encouraging” results—“750 revolutions per minute with the horsepower varying between twelve and sixteen.” This promised to meet Langley’s standard and then some.
With only a short time left to find an alternative engine in Europe, Langley insisted that Manly be definite. Manly must tell him “either . . . that he will build something in Washington which will do the work, or that I had better abandon hope of his doing so, and attempt to buy on this side with all the difficulties in the way.” He must “say in substance ‘I can build here in reasonable time’ or ‘I give it up.’”
Richard Rathbun, on the other side of the Atlantic, met with Manly. The young engineer committed himself. Rathbun cabled back to their chief: “Manly can build here in reasonable time.”
Chapter Four
“Truth and Error Intimately Mixed”
“THE WRIGHTS NEEDED NO ASSISTANCE AND WANTED NO GUESTS.”
Octave Chanute, Orville, Edward Huffaker and Wilbur (standing) at the Wrights’ camp, 1901
AT THE BEGINNING, in 1899 and 1900, Will’s letters always referred to “my . . . ideas,” “my principles,” “my plan.”
“I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible . . .”
“I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject . . .”
“I wish to use spruce . . .”
“I have my machine nearly finished.”
But in the autumn of 1900, shortly after returning to Dayton, he reported to Octave Chanute that “my brother and myself spent a vacation of several weeks at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, experimenting with a soaring machine.” Will continued to handle the correspondence with Chanute and the rest of the world. But the pronoun changed.
“We began experiments . . .”
“The machine we used . . .”
“We soon found . . .”
“We also found . . .”
“Our calculations . . .”
“Our reasons . . .”
“Can you give us any advice . . .”
One can mark the day when acquaintances become friends or lovers, but it remains a mystery exactly how and when these brothers and business partners became partners in the pursuit of flight. So does the question of what cost in pride, if any, Will paid as the change occurred.
Many years later, when neither his brother nor his sister were alive to comment, Orville told a biographer that he “often chided Wilbur for talking down to him as if he were still a ‘kid’; and [for] his habit of saying or writing ‘I’ when he meant ‘we.’”
The hint that Will tried to hog the credit is doubtful. On the contrary, whenever asked, he took pains to say the two always had formed an indivisible team, as in this widely published remark: “From the time we were little children my brother Orville and myself lived together, worked together and, in fact, thought together. We usually owned all of our toys in common, talked over our thoughts and aspirations so that nearly everything that was done in our lives has been the result of conversations, suggestions and discussions between us.” In fact, the scant surviving evidence from the brothers’ childhood suggests it was otherwise—that Wilbur and Orville, like any two brothers four years apart, ran in different circles, especially when the gulf of adolescence stood between them.
Will used the word “I” in discussions of the project only in 1899 and 1900, when there was nothing yet to hog the credit for. In those months, “I” could only have meant what it seemed to mean—that the project was Will’s alone. He thought of it; wanted it; did the reading and thinking and work, or most of it. Certainly he and Orville discussed the project. And it must have been in those discussions, and in the camaraderie of the vacation to the Outer Banks, that Orville began to take a strong interest, and finally, step by step, to become a full partner.
Perhaps when this offbeat hobby became something much more than a hobby, Orville felt defensive about his own claim to the original idea, and his brother knew it and wanted to ease any strain. From long experience in the Brethren battles, the Wright family had the habit of solidarity. One suspects there was an unspoken rule: It must never seem to be Wilbur versus Orville. The family ethic was the Wrights versus the world, and the proper division of credit meant nothing compared to what bound them together.
The bonds were extraordinary. At one level they were the same that unite any close siblings—those of common experience and a shared way of looking at things. Scattered through their letters and Katharine’s is a family code of mangled words and phrases—“Great big sing!” “Sooccess!” “Them is fine!” These were funny things said by small children—the Wrights themselves, or their nieces and nephews—and recycled to fit new occasions down through the years. They were the threads of small events and mishaps, of walks to school and long Sundays, that formed the weave of a shared life.
Another bond was intellectual. The brothers shared a deep curiosity, a love of discovery, and a yen to solve problems. Of course, many families produce two children who think rather alike. Few produce two children who think together, though to outsiders, the brothers’ way of thinking looked less like cooperation than combustion. They argued for sport, their voices rising, relishing the debate as they might have relished a tennis match, whacking assertions and evidence back and forth. “I love to scrap with Orv,” Will said once. “Orv is such a good scrapper.” From the fracas, ideas emerged. They enjoyed the fight. But the fight was also a method, and the tougher the fight the better the results. Will once analyzed it for a friend:
No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses some elements of truth. If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some error with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each others eyes so both can see clearly. Men become wise just as they become rich, more by what they save than by what they receive. After I get hold of a truth I hate to lose it again, and I like to sift all the truth out before I give up an error.
Their niece, Ivonette, remembered the sound of their voices in the parlor on Sunday afternoons. “One of them would make a statement about something very important, and then there would be a long pause. Then the other would say, ‘That’s not so.’ ‘Tis too.’ ‘T’isn’t either.’” And “at the end . . . Wilbur would say, ‘Well, I think you were right. You certainly were right about that.’ And [Orville] would say, ‘No, I think you were right.’”
There were also bonds of purpose and of character. The brothers disagreed all the time about technical matters, and occasionally about business tactics, but never about what they wanted to accomplish or what was right or wrong. Their judgments of people seem to have been identical. In hundreds of letters they exchanged, there is scarcely a single overt expression of affection. Yet the letters also leave no doubt that each put the other first in his loyalties, that each trusted the other utterly and understood him completely.
Outsiders often found the two men virtually indistinguishable. Their handwriting was similar. They were about the same height (Will was taller, at five feet, nine and a half inches); same weight (140 pounds); same blue-gray eyes. One stranger said if you closed your eyes you couldn’t tell which one was talking. They finished each others’ sentences. When one finished making a point, the other often said, “That’s right.”
But that was all outside the family. Inside it, they were regarded as very diff
erent.
First, their alliances within the family differed. With Reuchlin and Lorin out of the house, Will was the big brother, while Orville and Kate, once the little kids of the family, remained accomplices and confidants, perhaps the two closest of all the children. Of the five, Will was the one closest to their father.
In the house on Hawthorn Street and the shop on West Third, the two brothers often moved about as if within separate force fields. Will’s aloneness was more obvious. He was the austere intellectual, always composed and cool. He vanished into silent solitude, his eyes focused on interior scenes. You had to work to get his attention. Every day at lunch, Carrie Kayler, the servant girl, would watch him come through the kitchen door, hang his cap on a peg, cross the kitchen, and remove one cracker from the jar on the counter. After lunch, he would go out through the same door without his cap. A moment later—every day—he would step back in with a wry smile, remove his cap from the peg, and go out again. If not working he seldom was without a book, though once, at a gathering, the family was astonished to learn he had somehow mastered the harmonica without anyone hearing him practice.
Orville was preoccupied in a different way. He was the bustling man in a hurry. Straight as a ruler, his collar points sharp and crisp, he bounced from task to task, intent on the errand of the moment and talking in bursts. “Excitable,” said his father, who remembered that as a boy, Orville liked to “punctuate” the tales he told his mother by “placing his hands on the seat of a chair” and throwing his heels up behind him—“the natural language of exhilaration.”
Will had a devastating dry wit, but there was more fun in Orville, though he preferred the types of fun that grow tiresome—teasing and practical jokes. One of Will’s letters to his father contains an unexplained reference to Orville’s “peculiar spells.” This may have referred to times when Orville stubbornly insisted on having his own way—perhaps, in turn, to resist Wilbur’s own implacable will. There was a fussiness in Orville that was absent in Will. The younger brother cared far more about his appearance and clothes. Orv’s pants were always pressed; Will’s bagged and sagged. Will could charm and impress a group in a speech but was taciturn in one-on-one encounters with strangers. Orville was incapable of addressing a group, but in one-on-one exchanges, friends and strangers alike found him warm and delightful. Both enjoyed children, and were good with them, though Orv was a little more patient with the nieces and nephews. “Orville never seemed to tire of playing with us,” Ivonette remembered. “If he ran out of games he would make candy. . . . Wilbur would amuse us in an equally wholehearted way, but not for long. If we happened to be sitting on his lap, he would straighten out his long legs and we would slide off. That was a signal to us to find something else to do.”