by James Tobin
SECRETARY LANGLEY was out of town when a letter arrived at the Smithsonian from Isaac Newton Lewis, recorder of the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, inquiring about “the present status of the work on your aerodrome,” and in particular, “when you expect to complete the construction of this apparatus.” Charles Manly, following up on his own, learned not only that the board would meet the following week, but that its “personnel . . . had almost entirely changed since the appropriations for the work were made and that a number of the present members had been lately inquiring quite frequently regarding the progress of the work.”
The slow schedule was the fault of the engine, Langley replied, which “has now turned out to be the formidable part of the problem.” After the “great delays” occasioned by “the failure of the engine builder,” Stephen Balzer, and the dashed hopes of “a most thorough and complete search both in this country and in Europe for a competent builder,” Langley had been “forced greatly against my wish to undertake the construction of the engine with the very limited facilities at my disposal in the Institution shops.” A suitable engine had been finished, “but unfortunately of not quite large enough size to furnish the full power which I deemed essential to have at the disposal of the aeronaut at the first trials in free flight.” Construction of another engine had been started, only to meet another “serious delay of several months in obtaining the very special materials necessary for the engine.”
Langley predicted—though he did not quite promise—a trial by the end of the year. About the time the board was asking where the aerodrome was, Langley learned that the last of his fifty thousand dollars had now been spent. He did not ask the War Department for more. He had other sources to tide him over. Ten years earlier, Bell had given him five thousand dollars to use for research as he wished. This money was still available, as was another five thousand dollars left to the Smithsonian by a Washington physician and friend, Dr. Jerome Henry Kidder. These monies were pooled in a Bell and Kidder Fund, and designated for aerodromics.
The day after Langley submitted his report to the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, Manly tested a new set of water jackets on the engine. They leaked badly into the cylinder head. That meant new castings, new cylinders, new steel shells, and new water jackets. The winter of 1901–02 began, and there was no trial of the aerodrome.
Chapter Five
“The Possibility of Exactness”
“MYSTERIES EVAPORATED.”
The Wrights’ lift balance. Inside the wind tunnel, the air flow struck the experimental wing shapes (top, held vertical). The dial, bottom left, recorded the degree of lift.
OCTAVE CHANUTE arrived home in Chicago deeply impressed by what he had seen on the dunes. When Wilbur Wright confessed in a letter that he was discouraged about the strange behavior of the glider when its wings were twisted, Chanute hastened to reassure him. “I think you have performed quite an achievement.”
In fact, the old engineer understood neither the nature nor the depth of the Wrights’ problem. With Chanute’s own money, his old correspondent in Algeria, Louis Mouillard, had built a glider that allowed the operator to increase the resistance on one side by altering the angle of the wing. This was meant to make the machine skid into a turn on that side, like a canoe whose pilot is holding his paddle firmly in the flow of water. To Chanute, the Wrights’ twisting mechanism appeared to aim at the same effect. He did not understand that the brothers had quite a different motion in mind—not the skidding turn of a canoe, but the banking turn of a bicycle. With more lift on the left and less on the right, the Wrights expected the left side of their glider to rise, pushing the machine into a banking turn to the right, pivoting around the low right-hand wing. The fact that it sometimes did just the opposite—turning in the direction of the higher wing—was what had them so confounded on the train back to Dayton.
But at the Kill Devil Hills, Chanute had not, like the Wrights, seen a glider failing to fulfill carefully calculated expectations. He had seen the largest glider ever constructed soaring down a slope for hundreds of feet under reasonably good control. To his eyes, whatever problems might remain, it was an enormous achievement.
Chanute had taken his own pictures of this spectacle, and the Wrights had taken more. Such images alone, he well knew, would ignite new interest in progress toward his great goal of manned flight—and he was not at all indifferent to having such progress associated with his own name. So Chanute talked up the Wrights among his colleagues in the Western Society of Engineers, based in Chicago. As the organization’s current president, Chanute had a large say about the choice of guest speaker at the society’s monthly meetings. The very next date—the evening of Wednesday, September 18—was open. Chanute conveyed the invitation to Dayton and urged Will to get his photographs ready quickly for conversion into lantern slides, “the more the better.” He left little room for demurral.
Will was a little staggered by the sudden prospect of addressing a prestigious professional society, and a little irritated with Chanute for dropping this fait accompli upon him with less than three weeks to prepare. He never had addressed an audience outside the Church, and given his confusion over what had happened at Kitty Hawk, he hardly knew what to say. He could look like a fool.
His sister would have none of this. “Will was about to refuse but I nagged him into going. He will get acquainted with some scientific men and it may do him a lot of good.” That settled, Will told Orville to hurry with the photographs, and to Chanute he replied, “After your kindness in interesting yourself in obtaining an opportunity to address this society, for me, I hardly see how to refuse, although the time set is too short for the preparation of anything elaborate or highly finished. If a brief paper of rather informal nature, with the enclosed pictures, will be sufficient to interest the members for a short time, I shall be glad to respond if desired.”
He had hardly sent this off when another note came from Chanute, asking: “May they make it ‘Ladies’ night’?”
One can hear the resigned sigh and the shiver of nerves in Will’s response: “As to the presence of ladies, it is not my province to dictate, moreover I will already be as badly scared as it is possible for man to be, so that the presence of ladies will make little difference to me, provided I am not expected to appear in full dress, &c.” Much earlier than he had intended, he was going to tell the world about his secret project.
Whatever Chanute’s motives in wangling the invitation, it had the marvelous effect of demolishing any thoughts of quitting. The brothers plunged back into their work. With Charlie Taylor, they installed a new shop engine to power new tools that would aid in the construction of new gliders. Will pored over his penciled records from the recent trip. Orville developed glass photographic slides in the darkened summer kitchen behind 7 Hawthorn.
“We don’t hear anything but flying machine . . . from morning till night,” Kate declared. “I’ll be glad when school begins so I can escape.”
AS WILL PREPARED HIS REMARKS, the September issue of the popular magazine McClure’s arrived by mail in subscribers’ homes across the nation. Among the articles were a serial installment from Rudyard Kipling’s epic Kim (“A low murmur of horror went up from the coolies”); a report from the leader of the ill-fated Baldwin-Ziegler polar expedition (“To solve the mystery that lies hidden at the North Pole has been for many years the cherished ambition of my life”); a memoir by the stage actress Clara Morris (“The warm pressure of Mr. Barrett’s hand, his brightening eye, gave me such an impression of sincerity”); an account of the spectacular growth of American cities based on the 1900 census (“The face of this good old world of ours never before saw such changes as those which we Americans have beheld, during the century just closed, here upon our Western continent”) and an essay on the possibility of human flight by the distinguished scientist Simon Newcomb, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, friend to Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Langley, and all the leading American
scientists, past president of the American Astronomical Society, the American Mathematical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Newcomb had calculated constants in the movements of planets and stars and measured the speed of light. America had no more august scientist to consider the claims of the flying-machine men.
The question that the McClure’s editors put to Professor Newcomb—“Is the Airship Coming?”—plainly irritated him. It encapsulated his countrymen’s glib assurance that they lived in an age of mechanical miracles—that any machine that could be imagined could be invented. To Newcomb and his academic brethren, the fascination with inventions was more tiresome evidence of technology’s supremacy over pure science in America. While German and English scientists probed the deep secrets of the universe, Americans had been dazzled by a parade of ingenious gadgets—the telephone, the phonograph, electric lighting, the cinema, the wireless, the automobile. Now a new crowd of tinkerers, aping that self-promoting mechanic, Thomas Edison, were saying that a flying machine loomed on the horizon.
Newcomb was the man to put such types in their place. Like Langley, his contemporary, with whom he shared a prickly friendship characterized by sharp scientific disagreements, Newcomb had made a tortuous climb to eminence. Born in Nova Scotia, he started his career as a schoolteacher, then became a “computer”—a human calculator—on the staff of the American Ephemeris, the great nautical almanac of the stars compiled at Harvard, where he took a degree at the Lawrence Scientific School. He became chairman of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins and director of the Ephemeris. From these heights he reigned as perhaps the nation’s preeminent mathematician and astronomer. He was a stern character. As a hobby he composed severe essays on political economy, all taking the strictest laissez-faire view of what was best for his adopted land. “The basis of Professor Newcomb’s character is intellectual and moral honesty pushed to its highest degree,” an admirer said. “He loves truth and detests shams.”
The spectacle made by clever mechanisms in recent years scarcely implied that putative flying machines, too, would come to pass, Newcomb warned. “The very common and optimistic reply to objections, ‘We have seen many wonders, therefore nothing is impossible,’ is not a sound inference from experience when applied to a wonder long sought and never found.” To his friends Langley and Bell, he brandished a startling rebuke: “No builder of air castles for the amusement and benefit of humanity could have failed to include a flying machine among the productions of his imagination. The desire to fly like a bird is inborn in our race, and we can no more be expected to abandon the idea than the ancient mathematician could have been expected to give up the problem of squaring the circle.” But, “We cannot conclude that because the genius of the nineteenth century has opened up such wonders as it has, therefore the twentieth is to give us the airship.”
If a great deal more could be learned about the nature of gravity, perhaps man could learn to overcome it. But so profound a mystery might lie entirely beyond human understanding; it was silly hubris to assume otherwise merely because Bell had found a way to transmit speech via copper wire and Edison had caused a carbon filament to glow.
Newcomb enumerated other reasons to doubt the boosters of flying machines. What would such a thing be good for? “It would, of course, be very pleasant for a Bostonian who wished to visit New York to take out his wings from the corner of his vestibule, mount them, and fly to the Metropolis. But it is hardly conceivable that he would get there any more quickly or cheaply than he now does by rail.” And who would risk it? An oceangoing ship whose engine broke down could float safely until a repair was made. But any mechanical accident on a flying machine would be fatal.
Finally Newcomb lowered the boom on Langley’s great project. He granted that it was possible to calculate the proper size of a wing to support an artificial bird, and the speed it must travel to stay aloft, and thus the horsepower needed to propel it. But here one met the classical problem, dating to Newton. How large would such a machine have to be?
Newcomb posited two flying machines, one exactly twice the scale of the other in all its dimensions. The wing surface of the larger machine would increase as the square of the wing surface of the smaller craft. But the volume of an object—and thus its weight—increases as the cube of its dimensions. The square of two is four. The cube of two is eight. Thus the larger machine would have twice the wing space of the small machine but four times the weight—a burden that would require a very powerful engine made of unimaginably light material.
Nature presented its own demonstration of the problem, Newcomb said. The most numerous flyers by far were the smallest—the insects. Given current materials, he said, “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect. When this is constructed”—one can hear the old professor chortle through his beard at his joke—“we shall be able to see whether one a little larger is possible.”
ON THE EVENING OF September 18, 1901, sixty or seventy members of the Western Society of Engineers and their wives rustled into their meeting room and took their seats. Most of the men, like Chanute, were civil engineers. They were highly skilled and practical men who built the solid, heavy works upon which America’s new urban civilization depended—railroads, bridges, sewers, streets, and towers of commerce. Most, too, were Chicagoans. Some had earned their professional stripes in the rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire of 1871. Members were accustomed to such topics as “Engineering Problems in Cement Manufacture” and “Proposed Specifications for Steel Railroad Bridges.” So the program for the evening, announced as “Late Gliding Experiments,” was not the usual fare. It promised more in the way of light amusement than practical enlightenment.
Octave Chanute, round and dignified in business dress, rose to introduce his obscure guest. As usual, he was cautious, almost apologetic, about raising the topic of aerial navigation among serious students of technology. “Those who ventured, in spite of the odium attached to that study, to look into it at all became very soon satisfied that the great obstacle in the way was the lack of a motor sufficiently light to sustain its weight and that of an aeroplane, upon the air.” But with progress under way toward light, powerful engines, such as those that Samuel Langley was known to have built, “there is now some hope that, for limited purposes at least, man will eventually be able to fly through the air.
“There is, however, before that can be carried out—before a motor can be applied to a flying machine—an important problem to solve—that of safety, or that of stability.” Two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, were making progress in this area, Chanute declared, and “these gentleman have been bold enough to attempt some things which neither Lilienthal nor Pilcher nor myself dared to do.” He himself had watched them glide on the Atlantic seashore only a month ago. “I thought it would be interesting to the members of this society to be the first to learn of the results accomplished, and therefore, I have the honor of presenting to you Mr. Wilbur Wright.”
Will stepped forward, pale and somber, clutching his sheaf of painstakingly composed pages. The lights were put out except for a shaded lamp for him to read by; this and the beam of the stereopticon used for his photographic exhibits threw shadows across his severe features and bald pate. Since receiving Chanute’s invitation, he had given every available hour to thought and writing. “We asked him whether it was to be witty or scientific,” Kate said, “and he said he thought it would be pathetic before he got through with it!” He had taken the train up from Dayton that morning, disembarking in time to search out Chanute’s home on Huron Street. Will was amused to find his host’s upstairs office in a state of extraordinary clutter, worse than Bishop Wright’s.
Will had not worn such fine clothes in a long time, perhaps ever. They were all Orville’s—shirt, collar, cuffs, cufflinks and overcoat. “We discovered that clothes do make the man,” Kate reported, “for you never saw Will look so ‘swell.’” He never had d
elivered a scientific presentation. He never had addressed an audience outside a church. Yet he quickly proved himself fully prepared to make his debut in the world of serious men.
At seventy-five hundred words, the talk was twice the length the engineers were accustomed to. But it flowed well, with colorful strands of insight and wit. The logic was sure and compelling, the explication plain. Will crystallized the arguments of the glider-first school of experimentation—Lilienthal, Chanute, and Pilcher—and made it plain, without a hint of boasting, that if anyone was betting on who would solve the problem first, they would be reckless not to choose the Wrights.
“The difficulties which obstruct the pathway to success in flying machine construction,” he began, “are of three general classes.” The first had to do with the construction of wings that could sustain the weight of machine and man; the second with the generation and application of power; the third with “the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight.” The first two problems—wings and engines—were more or less solved, he said, or would be soon. The real issue was control—how to keep one’s balance in the sky; how to go where one wanted and return to earth at a place of one’s choosing. “When this one feature has been worked out the age of flying machines will have arrived.”
In going over his data and the photographs and thinking the whole thing through, Will had thrown off the pessimism he felt leaving Kitty Hawk. He was back in the mode of a practical scientist, ready to build upon what he now saw as useful lessons, not disappointments. He led the engineers through each of the brothers’ achievements and conclusions—the importance of actual practice in the air, as opposed to theorizing; the notion that balance depended on control of the center of pressure; the decision to borrow and modify Chanute’s double-decker truss design, and to place the operator in a prone position to reduce resistance to the wind; the decision against a tail and in favor of a horizontal rudder plus wing-warping to control the dancing center of pressure. He asserted the advantage of approaching the problem gradually, with gliders, before attaching an engine, rather than starting with a powered craft, which had to be right from the start to be right at all, just as Langley had recognized. “The problems of land and water travel were solved in the 19th century because it was possible to begin with small achievements and gradually work up to our present success,” he said. “The flying problem was left over to the 20th century, because in this case the art must be highly developed before any flight of any considerable duration at all can be obtained.” The alternative was the gliding or soaring machine; whatever principle held the soaring bird aloft, it would work equally well with a glider, if a man could just catch the trick of the thing.