To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  “Almost regretfully”—that was the other side of Langley, not the scientist but the romantic and aesthete, the open-minded seeker reaching for the unknown. Henry Adams, who often went to Langley for tutorials on science, said the secretary “nourished a scientific passion for doubt.” But at a deeper layer he also harbored an unfulfilled passion for belief, a yearning for worlds beyond physical nature. He delighted in fairy tales, dabbled in psychic research, and spent years staring in wonder at the fabulous landscape of the sun. As a scientist he was duty-bound to quash tales of miracles and magic. Yet in a part of his mind he had wanted the upper surface of that stone to be fiery hot. It was the part of his mind where his longing for flight burned brightest.

  Adams said Langley had “the physicist’s heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception.” That is, he would claim certain knowledge only of that which could be directly observed. All else was speculation and hypothesis. Yet Langley gave the speculative realms their due—even more, perhaps, than Adams realized. “Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper.” His flirtation with the “miracle” of the fire walk apparently crystallized certain philosophical thoughts, for he wrote a short essay on the subject soon afterward, entitled “The Laws of Nature.”

  What, he asked, would constitute a miracle? Langley recalled the argument of the philosopher David Hume, who, a century and a half earlier, had defined miracles as violations of the laws of nature—a proposition that Hume found inherently illogical. Langley said Hume’s proof against the existence of miracles remained compelling. But he believed that now, in 1901, the argument had become antiquated and irrelevant. Hume’s century, the eighteenth, “was satisfied with itself and its knowledge of the infinite, and content in its happy belief that it knew nearly everything that was really worth knowing,” and “this ‘nearly everything’ which it thought it knew about the universe, it called the ‘laws of nature.’”

  The nineteenth century had brought a vast change in the common perception of the universe. “It is, that the more we know, the more we recognize our ignorance, and the more we have a sense of the mystery of the universe and the limitations of our knowledge.” The “laws of nature” turned out to be “little else than man’s hypotheses about nature.” Each reported miracle was like the fire walk—a phenomenon that upon close observation required an adjustment, an expansion, of man’s understanding of nature. In fact, the revelations of the astronomers’ telescopes and the biologists’ microscopes suggested that the expansion of knowledge had barely begun. Miracles were to be found not in violations of nature, but in the vast, unknown regions of nature itself.

  Langley had now spent more than fifteen years testing “hypotheses about nature” as it related to the sustenance of plane surfaces in thin air. At the beginning of his experiments, it would have been liberating and exhilarating to grasp the idea that no fixed “laws” prevented human flight, as Newton had argued. Now, it seemed, Langley was coming to an older man’s humility. He was nearly seventy. Waiting impatiently for Charles Manly to complete an engine that would defy Newton, Langley may have suspected that the rewards for his labors so far were terribly small compared to what he still had to learn.

  His experiments on the aerodromes seemed exhaustive and endless. But how much of the evidence could he count on? He had accumulated volumes of data. But “it may be a just inquiry as to what constitutes observation and, above all, who judges the evidence.” Science changed, but “human nature remains very much the same, and always has a good conceit of itself.” He recalled the best chemists of the 1700s, who had been certain that all combustible substances were permeated by an element called phlogiston. The best evidence left no doubt of phlogiston’s existence. Yet phlogiston had turned out to be utterly imaginary. Now, in a new century, that same, fallible human nature was judging the evidence adduced by experiments in new realms.

  “There is a great deal of this ‘human nature’ even in the best type of scientific man,” Langley warned. “We of this twentieth century share it, with our predecessors, on whom we look pityingly, as our successors will look on us.”

  THE LAWS OF NATURE ruled supreme in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. One could make a case that this slim arc of islands simply is not a place for permanent human habitation, for nature generally has its way there, despite the best efforts of man. The islands change constantly. Tides, currents, and waves push against each other, scraping and gouging the beaches as if they were bystanders at the edge of a brawl. Beach becomes marsh; marsh becomes beach. Sediment drops offshore to form immense shoals, their bulk rising like a whale lolling in the shallows. The waves wash the sand up on the beaches, where the wind scrapes up the particles and hurls them inland. There they join the shifting dunes or bury buildings and roads.

  Some changes happen slowly, through the action of wave upon wave and the piling of one sand particle on another. Some happen in a few explosive moments. A hurricane can dump so much water in the sounds between the islands and the mainland that when the storm surge passes and the water washes back toward the ocean, it cuts new channels, making two islands where a day before there was only one, and spreading in vast, shallow ponds in the valleys among the dunes.

  As the brothers bustled about in Elizabeth City in July 1901, buying groceries and lumber, a massive storm battered the islands. At the weather station at Kitty Hawk, the anemometer raced upward to a reading of ninety-three miles per hour, then the cups tore away in the wind. The wind smashed the remains of the Wrights’ glider, which lay in the sand where Addie Tate had left it shorn of its fabric. It was still raining when the Ohioans’ hired wagon creaked into the village the next day. As they unloaded their sodden crates of lumber and supplies, Bill Tate and the others said it had been the worst storm anyone on the Banks could remember.

  After one night under Tate’s roof, the brothers set out for the Kill Devil Hills four miles to the south, hauling their lumber and supplies and groceries. Near the base of the dune they called the Big Hill, they pitched their tent, drilled a well, and set to work raising a shed big enough to protect their new machine.

  A WEEK LATER, Edward Chalmers Huffaker arrived in Kitty Hawk, lugging the boxed-up parts of Octave Chanute’s new glider. Huffaker was a farm boy with a master’s degree in physics. He had turned down the University of Virginia’s offer of a scholarship to pursue a doctorate and instead had become a civil engineer. Popular articles by Langley and Hiram Maxim in the early 1890s had induced him to make his own flight experiments and Langley had been sufficiently impressed that he offered Huffaker a job at the Smithsonian, had assigned him an office, and put him to work on aerodromes.

  In manners and temperament, the secretary and the scion of Chuckey City, Tennessee, were less than a perfect match. Once, on a weekly inspection tour with Cyrus Adler, Langley peered into rooms where scientists and clerks attended to business in stiff coats or cutaways, their shirt collars well-starched, their posture formal, their manner industrious. When Langley reached Huffaker’s doorway, he saw his new assistant slumped in his chair, boots planted on his desk, thumbing through his reading and aiming tobacco juice at a distant spittoon. Langley shuddered and moved on, Adler recalled, then muttered, “Well, Huffaker is as God made him.”

  In fact, both Langley and Adler believed Huffaker’s mind to be “very good and original.” In Tennessee Huffaker had built hand-held models. In Washington he had experimented with strands of China silk, setting them loose to float upward in the baked air over Smithsonian Park. His experiments led to an extensive article on thermal air currents. Langley said Huffaker’s observations qualified him as “one of the most acute observers of this class of phenomena whom I have known.” In the small fraternity of flight experimenters in 1901, Huffaker’s claim to expertise was stronger than most. He had Chanute’s say-so on the
Wrights’ promise as flight experimenters, but he could justly consider himself very much their senior in experience.

  Yet when Huffaker walked into the little camp on the sand flats, his quiet hosts, though cordial, seemed neither eager for his help nor in any need of it. They were in the midst of installing a gasoline stove in the workshop they had just built, a substantial shed sixteen feet across and twenty-five feet long, with large, awning-type doors that swung up at either end to permit the easy storage of their machine in rough weather. The machine was still in parts, but Huffaker could see it would be a good deal larger than any glider he knew about. He inspected the neophytes’ work with admiration. The spars and ribs were sound and smooth. The cotton muslin surfaces, precisely stitched, felt taut and strong to the touch. The next day, Huffaker and Wilbur Wright walked the eight miles to Kitty Hawk and back for supplies and mail, Huffaker listening as the Ohio man described his experiments of the previous year in detail. “Their work is done with a good deal of accuracy and celerity,” Huffaker recorded in the diary that Chanute had asked him to keep. It was “first-class in every respect.” When the first wing was finished, Huffaker found “the completed surface is strong and well made, the workmanship being almost perfect.”

  THE KILL DEVIL HILLS stood only some fifty miles to the southeast of the Great Dismal Swamp. When the wind blew off the Atlantic, the air was clear and fresh. But northwest winds were nearly as frequent, and when they came in the summer months they brought mosquitoes in fearful numbers. Shortly after Huffaker’s arrival, the wind shifted, and “in a mighty cloud almost darkening the sun,” the insects descended on the camp. Typhoid fever had been more pleasant, Orv told Kate. “The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything was fairly covered with them. They chewed us clean through our underwear and ‘socks,’ lumps began swelling up all over my body like hens’ eggs.”

  The men tried to escape by going to bed, though it was only 6:00 P.M. They wrapped themselves in blankets, leaving just their noses sticking out. But “here nature’s complicity in the conspiracy against us became evident.” The wind, blowing hard until now, dropped dead. The heat of “our blankets then became unbearable.” But, of course, when they stripped off the covers “the mosquitos would swoop down upon us in vast multitudes.” After “ten hours in a state of hopeless desperation,” they dragged themselves into the early light to try to work on the machine, but soon were forced to retreat again. The battle continued for several days. The humans were repeatedly routed.

  On July 25, Chanute’s second recruit, George Spratt, joined them. That night, the campers spread out across the dunes to gather sun-bleached driftwood stumps to make a smoke ring around the camp. It was ingenious but not very effective. Each man had a choice as to how to spend the night—slapping insects or choking on wood smoke. Spratt hauled his cot back and forth all night long, unable to bear either choice for more than a few minutes at a time, and in the morning he “announced that that was the most miserable night he had ever passed through.” In fact, the veterans told him, it had been the best night in several. With great reluctance he braved another night. The next day the wind shifted, pushing the insects back toward their inland swamps, and the outlanders at last could proceed with their work.

  Eager to entertain his sister, Orville narrated the ordeal in a detailed chronicle of some 750 words. Will, concentrating on the experiments ahead, told the same tale to his father in just ten words: “The mosquitos have been almost unbearable for the last week.” Again, he sought to reassure the bishop that his sons were not risking life and limb: “We expect to be careful to avoid real risks. We do not think there is any real danger of serious injury in the experiments we make. We will not venture on thin ice until we are certain that it will much more than bear us.”

  The Wrights worked steadily on the assembly of the glider. George Spratt pitched in. Huffaker did not. He strolled on the beach, gathered shells for his children, and went to Kitty Hawk for more food. While the Wrights and Spratt worked, Huffaker talked . . . and talked . . . and talked, mostly on the topic of character-building. It did not take long for the brothers to realize that Chanute had foisted a first-rate boor upon them. Huffaker had displayed poor enough manners in the prim cloisters of Samuel Langley’s Smithsonian. One can only imagine the personal habits he exhibited in a wilderness camp far from any modern convenience or running water. But it was his carelessness and slothfulness that really annoyed the Wrights. He left delicate stop watches and anemometers lying around in the sand, and he used the Wrights’ box camera for a stool.

  “He is intelligent and has good ideas,” Will conceded to his father, “but little execution.” George Spratt, on the other hand, “we like . . . very well. He is not lazy.”

  • • •

  WHEN AMERICANS in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries talked about would-be inventors of flying machines, the name Darius Green often entered the conversation. He was the fictional creation of the Massachusetts novelist and poet John Townsend Trowbridge, whose comic epic, “Darius Green and His Flying-Machine,” had been a staple of public readings and popular anthologies since its first appearance in 1869. Had he written his poem thirty years later, Townsend might have used George Spratt as his model.

  Darius was a Yankee farm lad, ambitious but not too bright, who reasoned:

  “The birds can fly an’ why can’t I?

  Must we give in,” he says with a grin,

  “That the bluebird an’ phoebe

  Are smarter’n we be?”

  So, working in secret “in the loft above the shed,” Darius gathered “wax and hammer and buckles and screws and all such things as geniuses use,” and concocted an elaborate pair of wings and a tail. On the Fourth of July, he would leap from the loft and “astonish the nation an’ all creation by flyin’ over the celebration!” But all came to smash in the muck of the barnyard, to which he plummeted “in a wonderful whirl of tangled strings, broken braces and broken springs.” Darius Green was a rebuke to all those who hoped to rise above their proper place. “This is the moral,” Townsend scolded. “Stick to your sphere.”

  In appearance, George Spratt was Darius Green grown up—a dreamy young Yankee farmer who neglected his chores to tinker with odd contraptions and scribble arcane calculations in the pursuit of flight. The son of a prosperous physician in the town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, he took a medical degree himself in 1895. But his plans to enter practice fell apart during a long spell of rheumatic fever, leading to a chronic heart problem, and in any case, “to be a physician . . . was never my first choice.” Deeply ambitious “to be of direct service in promoting the plans of the Creator,” he tried other kinds of work but failed at each. His father induced him to take over the management of the family farm. But Spratt considered this worse than medicine, “and I began to think that life was a burden indeed with no redeeming qualities, and that . . . I was . . . forgotten by the powers that design paths for men.” Still frail from his illness and “not good for a day’s work in any line,” he lived with his parents, taking “nothing . . . but food and clothing and [asking] for nothing more for I know I have been a disappointment to them.”

  One day he flew a kite to pass the time, and “the sight of it captivated me so that I recognized in it my mission.” He considered a future devoted to such a pursuit, “and I finally said why not stake my whole self upon it.” He dared to hope that his destiny was to discover the principles of flight and apply them to flying machines. He had “no burning desire” to fly himself, “but I would love dearly to solve my share of the problem and like to claim the whole problem as my share.” Finding “more pleasure being with nature than with people,” he spent much of his time engrossed in the observation of birds, flying beetles, and grasshoppers. Indeed, “I have been almost forced to believe that birds and insects have come to me and performed for me as they never do for others, answering my questions with all the voice they could command.”

  When Sp
ratt began experimenting with a model glider, he met the response that greeted most Darius Greens. His father ridiculed him, “saying if the Lord intended man to fly he would have given him wings.” When Spratt gave the flight enthusiast’s standard response—that God had not given man fins either, “yet [he] crosses the Atlantic in a week and takes a good part of a city with him”—then Dr. Spratt, Sr., would get “vexed” and retort that “there is no parallel in the cases, he wasn’t talking of fishes & boats etc. etc.”

  In 1898, when Spratt was twenty-eight years old, he wrote to Octave Chanute to explain his theories and ask if they had merit. When Chanute said, “I believe you are on the right path as regards flying machines,” Spratt was thrilled, and a warm correspondence ensued. Like Wilbur Wright, he was delighted to find a respected older figure who approved of his preoccupation and with whom he could discuss his ideas.

  Yet Spratt was hindered by lack of wind in his Pennsylvania valley, too little money, the distractions of farm work, ignorance of engineering, indifferent mechanical skills, and “something that is a remarkably close second to laziness if it is not the genuine article.” Indeed, his letters suggest he would have made quicker progress had he spent more time actually experimenting and less time agonizing over the choices he had made and the shortcomings that bedeviled him. Nevertheless, the Wrights took to him immediately. They enjoyed his thoughtful talk about flight and respected his knowledge of the woods and fields. He lacked their self-confidence. But they would have liked his odd combination of ambition and humility, which was not unlike their own. And Will presumably recognized a kindred spirit, a man for whom the quest for flight had become the fount of identity.

  • • •

  THE GLIDER OF A YEAR BEFORE had fallen well short of Will’s expectations for lift. So the brothers had built a new machine nearly twice as large as the old. The wings spread twenty-two feet from tip to tip and were seven feet across from the leading to the trailing edge, making a fatter rectangle than the 1900 wings. Mimicking Lilienthal, they increased the curvature to a ratio of one in twelve, though they retained the elliptical shape of the first design. The glider weighed only ninety-eight pounds, but even with one man on each corner, the march up the dune had them sweating and panting. Sand slipped into their leather shoes and infiltrated their woolen stockings. Sand gave way under every footstep. When the angle was right, the wind filled the wings and took the weight. But in the valleys the machine was dead weight, and if the wind came at a bad angle, it bucked and pulled.