To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  The elderly engineer added a caution that showed he still had not taken the full measure of his young friends: “I hope that you will . . . tabulate the results as you go along, for the temptation to omit this is always strong.” This must have provoked smiles in Dayton. No one in the world would be less tempted than Wilbur and Orville Wright to omit the recording of such critical data.

  A few days before Thanksgiving, the brothers began a series of exacting tests upon the forty-eight surfaces that had emerged as the most promising from the first round of experiments. Each surface was run through a battery of trials with the lift balance, at fourteen angles from zero to forty-five degrees; then the drift balance was substituted, and again the surface was put through its paces.

  Mysteries evaporated. They learned that Otto Lilienthal’s table had been correct insofar as it went, for the single wing type he tested with his whirling arm. It was not Lilienthal who committed the error that made their gliders fly so contrary to expectation. That distinction now belonged to John Smeaton. Much to the relief of Chanute, who had published Lilienthal’s results far and wide, Will informed him that “the Lilienthal table has risen very much in my estimation since we began our present series of experiments for determining lift.” Will admitted obliquely to his own mistake: “It will not do at all to attempt to apply Lilienthal’s table indiscriminately to surfaces of different aspect or curvature; but for a surface as near as possible like that described in his book the table is probably as near as correct as it is possible to make it with the methods he used.”

  Comparing Lilienthal’s data with Langley’s the brothers concluded that Langley’s key findings about lift had been “little better than guess-work,” Orv said later. Lilienthal had gotten some things wrong, Will told Chanute, but the German’s Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation towered above Langley’s Experiments in Aerodynamics. Lilienthal’s errors, Will said, “are so small compared with his truth, that his book must be considered an extraordinary one to be the work of a single man. “The ‘monumental work’ of a great American,” he added in a reference that offered a glimpse of his private opinion of the Smithsonian secretary, “will not bear a moment’s comparison with it.”

  Column by column, row by row, they filled in their tables. Almost as an afterthought, it seemed, the brothers found their attention drawn to one particular shape. In their series of forty-eight, it was model wing number 12. It was a narrow rectangle with a six-inch span and a one-inch chord—the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge. Its curvature was one in sixteen. In a postscript to Chanute, Will said “#12 has the highest dynamic efficiency of all the surfaces shown.”

  With that, the brothers pushed the wind tunnel into a corner. It was the middle of December 1901—time to celebrate Christmas at 7 Hawthorn, then to begin making bicycles for sale in the spring.

  At this display of Wrightian self-discipline Chanute practically suffered an impatience-induced stroke. “You have done a great work,” he declared, “and have advanced knowledge greatly. Your charts carry conviction to my mind . . . I very much regret in the interest of science that you have reached a stopping place, for further experimenting on your part promises important results.” Granted, the Wrights could not yet expect a financial return for their labors. “If however some rich man should give you $10,000 a year to go on, to connect his name with progress, would you do so? I happen to know Carnegie. Would you like for me to write to him?”

  To Will, this dumbfounding offer was perhaps a bittersweet taste of the life he might have chosen had he been able to choose again. “Of course nothing would give me greater pleasure than to devote my entire time to scientific investigations,” he replied two days before Christmas 1901, “and a salary of ten or twenty thousand a year would be no insuperable objection, but I think it possible that Andrew is too hardheaded a Scotchman to become interested in such a visionary pursuit as flying.

  But to discuss the matter more seriously, I will say that several times in the years that are past I have had thoughts of a scientific career, but the lack of a suitable opening, and the knowledge that I had no special preparation in any particular line, kept me from entertaining the idea very seriously. I do not think it would be wise for me to accept help in carrying our present investigations further, unless it was with the intention of cutting loose from business entirely and taking up a different line of lifework. There are limits to the neglect that business will endure, and a little pay for the time spent in neglecting it would only increase the neglect, without bringing in enough to offset the damage resulting from a wrecked business. So, while I would give serious consideration to a chance to enter upon a new line of work, I would not think it wise to make outside work too pronounced a feature of a business life. Pay for such outside work would tend to increase the danger. The kindness of your offers to assist, however, is very much appreciated by us.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER, the brothers sketched a glider design for the coming summer of 1902. Every dimension was new. None was based on the guesswork of the past. The aspect ratio of the wings (the ratio of span to chord, or length to width) was the same as wing model No. 12—six to one. The wing’s curvature would be much shallower than the 1901 design—one to twenty-four. This, they were now convinced, was the true curve of flight, promising both powerful lift and a well-behaved center of pressure. They smoothed the stubby rectangle of the rudder into a leaf shape. They revamped the wing-warping system, switching from the difficult, foot-activated assembly of 1901 to a hip cradle. This was far better suited to the pilot’s instinctive tendency to shift his weight toward the high wing when the glider tipped. Now, when the wings tipped to one side or the other, the pilot would automatically warp the wings in the proper way as he instinctively shifted his weight. They made the elevator control more instinctive, too. To make the earlier gliders pitch downward, the operator had to pull up on the controls. A new mechanism allowed him to roll his wrists in the desired direction.

  The year before, in the waning days of the summer of 1901, the glider’s frightening sideways skids had pushed the brothers to the verge of quitting. Now an idea arose. The skids occurred—not always, only sometimes—when the operator warped the wings to attempt a turn. The very notion of wing-warping was to increase the lift on one side of the glider while decreasing lift on the other side, thus inducing a banking roll toward the side with less lift. Perhaps, they reasoned, the glider’s nose swung, or “yawed,” to one side in the midst of the banking maneuver because the upward-twisted tip offered too much resistance to the wind. The wing on that side would rise but simultaneously slow down, and the glider would slither out of control.

  The problem was exceedingly difficult to hold in the mind and examine. A jumble of invisible forces were at play.

  But a simple solution occurred to the brothers. It was a fixed vertical tail. Whenever the glider began to yaw into a skid, the tail would offer counterbalancing resistance to the wind, thus evening out the pressure on both sides of the glider and allowing the warped wing to bank into the desired turn. In 1900 and 1901 the brothers had scorned the idea of a tail, believing that wing-warping alone constituted a full answer to the challenge of turning. Now, for the first time since Will’s 1899 kite, they designed a tail, a two-surface affair with a combined area of nearly twelve square feet, attached to the trailing edge of the wings.

  “The matter of lateral stability and steering is one of exceeding complexity,” Will told Chanute in February, “but I now have hopes that we have a solution.”

  Chapter Six

  “A Thousand Glides”

  “A FEAT OF CONTROL NO OTHER EXPERIMENTER HAD EVEN TRIED”

  Wilbur banking to the right in the 1902 glider at the Kill Devil Hills

  SHORTLY AFTER WILL’S ADDRESS appeared in the Journal of the Western Society of Engineers, a brief summary appeared in the widely circulated Scientific American. In a show of local pride, the Dayton Daily News published the address as well, under the headline “Moder
n Flying Machine a Dayton Product.”

  “It is conceded,” the paper advised readers, “that aerial navigation sooner or later will be the modern mode of transportation. Like the [auto]mobile it will be slow in developing but will, it is predicted, be the coming method of rapid transit.” But when the editors reprinted a photograph showing the glider in motion at Kitty Hawk, with Will at the controls, they placed it so that the machine appeared to be flying straight up, like a rocket. Probably no one in town recognized the error except the Wrights themselves.

  These were the first public notices of the brothers’ project. But they ignited little interest outside the tiny circle of serious experimenters. When people talked about “aerial locomotion,” they were talking about massive, steerable gas-bags, and the glamorous figure of the predicted age of air travel was the twenty-eight-year-old Brazilian whom Langley had met in 1900, and who had flown again and again over the rooftops of Paris.

  “THE GLAMOROUS FIGURE OF THE PREDICTED AGE OF AIR TRAVEL”

  Alberto Santos-Dumont, ca. 1901, with the motor of his Airship No. I

  ALBERTO SANTOS-DUMONT was the youngest son of one of Brazil’s richest coffee growers. As a child he had played with kites, propeller toys, and silk-paper balloons, and on the family’s heavily mechanized plantation he had developed a knack for machinery. He read Jules Verne’s fictional stories of airships and true accounts of the French brothers Montgolfier, who had invented the hot-air balloon in the era of the French Revolution. “In the long, sun-bathed Brazilian afternoons . . . I would lie in the shade of the verandah and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil, where the birds fly so high and soar with such ease on their great outstretched wings, where the clouds mount so gaily in the pure light of day, and you have only to raise your eyes to fall in love with space and freedom. So, musing on the exploration of the vast aerial ocean, I, too, devised air-ships and flying machines in my imagination.”

  “MAN FLIES!”

  Santos-Dumont’s Airship No. V circling the Eiffel Tower

  As a boy, he and his friends played a catch-you-off-your-guard game like “Simon Says.” It was called “Pigeon Flies.” They would sit around a table. The leader of the round would say, “Pigeon flies!” at which the others would raise a finger to signify “yes.” The leader would continue: “Crow flies!” “Bee flies!” “Hawk flies!”—then try to cross the others up by saying, “Dog flies!” or “Pig flies!” If you raised a finger at this, you lost the round and paid a forfeit. Whenever a leader inserted, “Man flies!” Santos-Dumont recalled, “I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction, and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit.”

  In 1891, his father, partially paralyzed by a neurological injury and in search of medical care, took the family to Europe. Alberto, then eighteen, fell in love with Paris. He soon returned for good with a not-so-small fortune bequeathed by his father. Free to do whatever he wished, he engaged a tutor to instruct him in the sciences and became an accomplished aerial balloonist. Like all balloonists, he flew at the mercy of the winds, unable to steer or control his speed. He was pursuing a secret goal—to invent and fly a lighter-than-air craft propelled by an engine and capable of being steered.

  He built his first ship in 1898 and crashed it twice in the Bois de Boulogne. More study followed, and more construction. The next year he made many short flights over Paris in dirigible—that is, steerable—gas-filled airships, and Paris society anointed him as a favorite and a fashion-plate, “le petit Santos,” an exotic Latin bird to be petted and wondered at.

  When the industrialist Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe offered one hundred thousand francs to the first man to fly an airship from the Aéro-Club de France to the Eiffel Tower and back in under half an hour, a journey of seven miles, Santos-Dumont made a spectacular series of attempts. The first ended in a chestnut tree on the estate of the Rothschild family, the second on the roof of the Trocadero Hotel. On October 19, 1901, Santos made his third attempt. He reached the tower in only nine minutes, but lost precious time when his engine broke down. Crawling outside his little basket and along the keel without a safety harness, he fixed the engine while thousands of Parisians watched from far below. He missed the prize by forty seconds. When the Aéro-Club officials denied him the award, Parisians nearly rebelled. The club relented. Santos gave most of the money to the poor, and became one of the most famous men in the world.

  Among the thousands of letters he received was one from a childhood friend in Brazil: “ ‘Man flies!’ old fellow! You were right to raise your finger, and . . . you were right not to pay the forfeit; it is M. Deutsch who has paid it in your stead. Bravo! You well deserve the 100,000 franc prize. They play the old game now more than ever at home, but the name has been changed and the rules modified—since October 19, 1901. They call it now ‘Man flies!’ and he who does not raise his finger at the word pays his forfeit.”

  In the following spring of 1902, Santos-Dumont was an honored guest in Washington, where the Brazilian ambassador presented him at the White House for an overpowering presidential handshake. Theodore Roosevelt, an accomplished horseman and well-known adventurer, said he would be delighted to go aloft in Santos-Dumont’s machine. “And I believe he would,” the Brazilian told newsmen afterward. “He received me very pleasantly. He is very clever.”

  On the other side of Smithsonian Park, Santos-Dumont spent an afternoon with Samuel Langley, and afterward offered remarks on the secretary’s heavier-than-air machines. “They are beautiful. One is being made—large enough to carry people—from a model which he made some time ago. He expects to be able to give it a trial in about three months. He is your foremost man in this kind of work. There is no question of that.”

  NEARING HIS SEVENTIETH YEAR, Bishop Milton Wright looked forward to a peaceful retirement among his children, his grandchildren, and his books. He could take satisfaction in a life well spent in the service of Christ, from the victory over slavery down to his defiant leadership of the Radical Brethren in the battle against compromise with freemasonry. He was securely fixed—the sale of some valuable farm property had supplemented his salary—and cherished by his family. But he remained a warrior in the army of the Lord. A quarter-century earlier he had written: “The salvation of one’s self and of his fellows demands a struggle. It is a choice between heroic warfare, with assurance of solid fruits in victory, on one hand, and ease, desolation, and death, on the other. Hence the warfare must come; and, though it cost ever so much sacrifice of ease, friendship, and earth’s possessions, it must go on.” In the years since then, nothing had changed his mind. The gray-bearded bishop remained on watch for the enemy, and so did his children, who had inherited the warrior ethic.

  The enemy now raised his head in the person of Millard Fillmore Keiter, a sharp-faced Brethren minister who had assumed Milton’s duties as publishing agent in 1893. When Milton heard Keiter was doctoring church accounts, he assigned Wilbur and Lorin Wright, who was trained as a bookkeeper, to examine the records. “There is something rotten somewhere,” Will reported. But no official audit was taken until after Keiter, still under suspicion, slipped out of his post in 1901. The audit showed an unexplained deficit of some $1,480—more than enough to provoke Milton’s wrath, especially when reports of more defalcations accumulated. The bishop expected the Church to mete out swift justice. But when its Publishing Board convened in February 1902 to review the matter, a four-bishop majority outvoted Wright and his allies. Despite obvious evidence that Keiter had done wrong, the prevailing bishops wanted the matter buried without ceremony and Keiter given a free pass. With the ruckus of the 1889 schism still ringing in their ears, they wanted no more scandal, especially any that might dampen collections.

  In the Wrights’ eyes, the lone snake had spawned a viper’s brood, and within the Church itself. The entire family was stunned by what Will called the “inconceivable, incomprehensible and incredible” actions that allowed Keiter to skate. “Some members must have felt that since
they could not join the Masons they would make the Church a similar institution so far as ‘defending a brother right or wrong’ is concerned.” To Milton it was the battle of slavery revisited, with cowardly churchmen keeping their mouths shut in order to keep their parishioners’ purses open.

  So the “Old Constitution” wing of the Brethren plunged back into internal warfare. When Bishop Wright was excluded from the pages of the Church newspaper, he struck back with his own petitions and pamphlets and reported Millard Keiter to the civil authorities. Keiter was arrested for forgery. This was “going to law” against a Christian brother, a violation of Brethren discipline. When Keiter was acquitted on technicalities, he saw a chance to silence his aged nemesis, and filed his own disciplinary charges against Milton for “agitating controversy.” A decision on Wright’s conduct was postponed, but a war of editorials and pamphlets raged all through the spring and summer of 1902. The secular press, supplied with information from the Keiter forces, spread the embarrassing story of a United Brethren bishop under fire for actions “contrary to the teaching of the church.” Milton, losing friends and respect, lost weight and sleep as well, his bowels roiling from nervous tension. “Feel loss of sleep and cares considerably,” he confided to his diary.