by James Tobin
In public the old man conceded nothing. He knew how his stand appeared. Even a close ally in the fight against “the Keiterites” said the elder Wright could seem “imperious, harsh, and unsympathetic.” A fellow bishop would later excoriate Wright as the victim of his own ego, which “esteems itself as being immaculate, without spot or blemish, stainless, without taint of evil or sin, pure and perfect.” But it was not self-regard that drove Milton’s behavior so much as the habits of a lifetime. By inheritance, training, and long experience, he was built to call out wrongdoers, then to smite them.
The bishop’s children, built in the same fashion, were his main support. Kate shored up her father’s morale with encouragement—“Will and Orv seem to think that it is turning out just right”—and shared indignation at the “Keiterites.” “Not one of that crowd knows what common honor, honesty or gratitude means.” Orville helped with such chores as typing and printing. But it was Will who stepped in as his father’s chief counselor—indeed, as the behind-the-scenes leader of the bishop’s whole campaign. He determined political tactics, advised Milton on legal maneuvers, studied Church law, and prepared his father’s defense against the disciplinary charges.
Although Will told Milton that “my chief regret is that the strain and worry which you have borne for fifteen years past shows no sign of being removed,” he apparently gave no thought to a compromise that would spare his father the ordeal. He framed the argument that Milton would advance in the coming battle. “The question of whether officials shall rob the church, and trustees deceive the church for fear of injuring collections, must be settled now for all time . . . to cheat the people by lying reports is more dishonest than Keiter’s stealing, and so far as church interests are concerned, the penalty will be greater.”
As the spring of 1902 turned to summer and the busiest days of the bicycle-selling season passed, Will juggled two essential matters—the Keiter affair and the construction of a new glider. To prepare for Milton’s disciplinary trial, he went repeatedly to Huntington, Indiana, where the trial would be held at the Church’s new college. At home, he stole time for the glider from “attending to some matters for my father which have occupied much of my time and attention recently.” For a time he was unsure whether Orville and he could get away at all that summer. “If we go to Kitty Hawk it will probably be some time between Aug. 15th and Sept. 15th,” he told Chanute. “It is a pity that the hills near Chicago are not smooth bare slopes.”
Chanute offered to help with the tedious computing needed to complete the Wrights’ lift-and-drift tables. He came to Dayton in early July and went away with instructions on how to do the tabulations. Early in August Will took four days for another trip to Huntington, after which he scribbled a searing tract against “Keiterites” and their “condoners.”
“When my father and myself came to examine the charges carefully, we at once saw that the whole thing was a mere sham. There never was any real intention of bringing the case to trial. . . . The real purpose was to harass the accused.”
He finished the essay on August 15, submitting it for publication as a tract by the Church, then returned full-time to the glider. Careful planning was essential, because the brothers were putting together what woodworkers call a kit—a collection of parts that are constructed in one place for assembly in another. All the parts they needed had to be planned correctly in advance, and none forgotten. Once they reached Kitty Hawk, it would be too late to buy or order anything left behind.
They could not make the curved wingtips and ribs themselves. This was work for specialists at a local firm that made parts for the carriage industry. They had the equipment needed for steaming strips of ash, then bending the pliant wood to the required curvature. The wingtips probably came off the rack in the form of four standard carriage bows. The ribs had to be specially ordered. The Wrights would have handed over sketches with precise dimensions, all based on the wind tunnel data.
They planned to reuse the uprights from their old glider, but everything else had to be new. Most parts they could make themselves—spars for the leading and trailing edges of the wings; outriggers and cross-pieces to form the forward rudder and the tail; belly skids for under the wings. For these pieces they bought spruce from one of the local lumber yards. For its weight, it was strong and resilient, good for withstanding repeated jolts. They ordered the spruce cut up into pieces of roughly the right length and shape. Then they went at the pieces with draw knives and spokeshaves, rounding the corners to preserve the wood’s essential strength while reducing weight and wind resistance. When this was done, the pieces were ready to be drilled and notched to make holes for screws and mortises for joining. Then the brothers brushed all the wood parts with several coats of varnish, to protect against the moisture-laden North Carolina air, which could destroy the glider as thoroughly as a catastrophic crash if it penetrated the precisely bent wood.
Now the wooden skeleton of the wings could be assembled. In place of screws or nuts and bolts, the brothers used waxed linen cord, a wonderful, all-purpose twine which conveniently stuck to itself and the wood, making it easy to tie tight lashes and knots. In a jolting landing, the lashed joints gave a little, then snapped back, minimizing the possibility of broken joints.
Next came the skin, made from yard upon yard of Pride of the West white muslin. This was the trickiest part of the entire job, and it depended entirely on the sewing skills that Susan Wright had taught her sons. Kate watched, aghast, as her brothers pushed furniture out of the way and filled the first floor of the house with ribs and spars and endless yards of linen. “Will spins the sewing machine around by the hour while Orv squats around marking the places to sew. There is no place in the house to live.”
They scissored the fabric into strips, then machine-sewed the pieces back together so the threads would run “on the bias,” at a forty-five-degree angle to the ribs. Thus each thread acted as a tiny cross-brace, helping to hold the wing together under the pressures of flight and landing. With painstaking measuring, stretching, and sewing, they created a long, snug pocket for each rib, to keep the fabric anchored and to preserve the precise curvature of the wing when it was subjected to the forces of lift. Then, inch by inch, starting at the trailing edge of the wings, they slipped the tight-fitting cloth skin over the wooden skeleton. The tips of the wings were covered separately, and required an artist’s touch at folding, tucking, and stitching.
Bishop Wright’s trial was scheduled for the last week of August, just when the brothers meant to leave for North Carolina. As they hurried from task to task, applying finishing touches and packing supplies, they stewed over their father’s crisis and worried about his health. Will hesitated to schedule a departure date. He wanted to be nearby if Milton needed him again in Huntington.
“They really ought to get away for a while,” Kate told the bishop. “Will is thin and nervous and so is Orv. They will be all right when they get down in the sand where the salt breezes blow etc. They insist that, if you aren’t well enough to stay out on your trip you must come down with them. They think that life at Kitty-Hawk cures all ills you know.”
Finally, perhaps with Milton’s urging, the brothers decided to go. It may have been the first time in his life that Wilbur put his own concerns ahead of his family’s. Kate shooed them onto the train on Monday, August 25. She regretted the loss of Will’s counsel, yet she was genuinely worried about the summer’s effects on his well-being. “I am sorry that Will is not here,” she told Milton, “but it was the best thing in the world for him to go away. He was completely unnerved.”
“The boys” were barely gone when she began to brood about their safety. She had only her own imagination to form a picture of their annual doings on the distant Atlantic dunes, and “I always feel a little uneasy about that trip.” To the experimenters themselves, she offered a brave face. “Dad seems worried over your flying business this year. The habit of worry is strong on him. I am not much alarmed . . . but don’t run any risks.
We’ve been worried enough for one year.”
IN THE SOUTH SHED BEHIND the Smithsonian Castle, Charles Manly labored day after day and often long into the night to solve a conundrum. From the beginning, the engine had come first. The entire enterprise was built on the notion that “the success or failure of the first flight will depend to a large extent on the power available.” By 1902 Manly had all but completed the construction of a superb internal combustion engine, surely one of the finest in the world. Also essentially complete was the most promising machine ever built to accomplish the goal of manned, powered flight. The airframe, Manly thought, “gave an appearance of grace and strength to which photographs failed to do justice,” with wings of more than a thousand square feet.
The problem was to bring the magnificent engine and the magnificent airframe into harmony. “If one is building bridges . . . ,” Manly said, “it would be criminal negligence to fail to provide a sufficient ‘factor of safety’”—that is, extra strength and extra power to ensure success. But he and his chief saw no room for a “factor of safety” in a flying machine. Greater power required increased engine weight. A heavier engine required reinforcements in the airframe, which in turn added weight, which in turn required more horsepower, which in turn required improvements in the engine, and so on.
To destroy the shibboleths of Isaac Newton and his friend Simon Newcomb, to build his “swift Camilla” to “skim along the main,” Langley needed “an engine of unprecedented lightness.” Thus, “weight is the enemy.” But weakness was an enemy, too, and lighter meant weaker. Any reduction in the engine’s weight made it more fragile and prone to breakdown, and less capable of bearing the weight of the whole. Any reduction in the airframe’s weight made it more vulnerable to the stresses of wind, lift, and engine vibration. Writing about his unmanned models of the 1890s, Langley had said: “Everything in the work has got to be so light as to be on the edge of breaking down and disaster, and when the breakdown comes all we can do is to find what is the weakest part and make that part stronger; and in this way work went on, week by week and month by month, constantly altering the form of construction so as to strengthen the weakest parts.” It was just the same with the great aerodrome, but with a more complex and delicate engine, and infinitely more at stake.
Time after time, delays in the South Shed arose from the struggle to reconcile the quarrelsome trio of weight, strength, and power.
Manly: “To determine more accurately what mode of construction would give the greatest stiffness and strength for a minimum weight, it was decided to make up some test pieces of different forms before making up complete ribs.”
Langley: “Mr. Manly adds that the entire vibration could be practically cured by counterweighting the pistons at a cost in weight of not over 40 lbs., presumably less.”
Manly: “Although this wing was a great improvement in every way over any of the previous constructions, it was felt that it was too weak for the large aerodrome.”
Langley: “Although an engine may develop sufficient power for the allotted weight, yet it is not at all certain that it will be suitable for use on a machine which is necessarily as light as one for traversing the air.”
Manly: “Great difficulties . . . were experienced in these tests of the engine in the aerodrome frame before the shafts, bearings, propellers, and, in fact, the frame itself were all properly co-ordinated so that confidence could be felt that all the parts would stand the strains which were likely to come on them when the aerodrome was in flight.”
Langley: “These engines were to be of nearly double the power first estimated and of little more weight, but this increased power and the strain caused by it demanded a renewal of the frame . . . and the following sixteen months were spent in such a reconstruction simultaneously with the work on the engines.”
Of course, the troublesome calculus of weight, strength, and power was not the only source of delay. Defective parts broke. Workmen quit. Orders were late. Estimates were mistaken.
As “the work lengthened out in all directions far above the estimate of the time required,” the pressure on Langley and Manly mounted. The BOF’s fifty thousand dollars had been exhausted. The additional ten thousand dollars from Alexander Graham Bell and Jerome Kidder was spent. Langley was forced to draw from yet another Smithsonian reserve fund, and it was dwindling as quickly as his credibility with the War Department. Worse, the secretary had become the target of a whispering campaign among his colleagues in the scientific fraternity.
All of this—the engine, the delays, the money, the politics—put a premium on getting the aerodrome into the air at the earliest possible moment. There was simply no time to develop the ideas about balance and control that Langley had conceived while watching Jamaica’s “John Crow”—the idea for altering the angles of the wings. He and Manly discussed the idea in “many conferences,” Manly admitted later. But Manly never followed through on Langley’s “instructions and suggestions.” The reason he gave later was “the extreme pressure already on [me] which had for its object, not the production of a flying machine which would embody all of the control which we wished it to have, but which would be burdened only with such devices and arrangements as would enable it to transport a human being, and thus demonstrate the practicability of human flight.” They resigned themselves to relying on the cruciform Pénaud tail in the rear, which the operator could manipulate with a wheel.
To solve the puzzles of balance, steering, and landing, they would need more time, and thus more money. So Langley and Manly focused all their work and all their hope on the goal of one “successful flight of a few miles.” Once that was achieved, Manly said, they considered it “very certain that . . . the funds for the further prosecution of the work would be readily forthcoming, and that when these funds were obtained the many problems of control, rising and alighting, could be undertaken.”
THE SECRETARY wanted to leave on his annual trip to Europe by the middle of June. Manly said it would be difficult to make a trial flight by then, and Langley agreed. “Considering the experience of ten years . . . nothing of this sort is ever ready when it is expected to be, and owing to the need of this journey for my health, I shall not delay it.” He told Manly he would be gone at least until September, and to “expect . . . to be ready on my return. . . . In any case I shall wish to be present at the first trials.”
With the engine now making forty horsepower, Manly thought he could make Langley’s deadline. But the aerodrome’s frame had been built to withstand the strain of only twenty-five horsepower. He worried that the greater power would shake the machine to pieces once the engine was installed in the frame. After “first one part and then another of the frame breaking,” Manly got the vibration down to an acceptable minimum. Then the left propeller flew off, stripping a gear. “All of the work is progressing in a satisfactory manner,” he wrote Langley, “except for continual set-backs due to various causes to which the work, as ever, has been particularly subject.”
Langley read this news at the spa at Karlsbad, in Bohemia. He tried to reassure his long-suffering protégé. “The injury to the propeller and bevel gear is only in the normal course of accidents. Perhaps we ought to be glad rather than sorry that they have happened in the shop instead of a thousand feet above it! But as the time for flight draws very near I confess my anxieties, for the incalculable play of what is all but chance, increase. I admit that I feel almost a shrinking from the time of trial which I suppose is now so near.”
AS THE MAN WHO was actually going to take the ride, Charles Manly may have worried more about the problem of balance than Langley did. The image of the skater skimming safely over thin ice at high speed still remained firmly fixed in Langley’s mind. In fact, Langley was considering a scheme by which flying machines might do entirely without the imponderable complexities of wings and rudders and tails.
He had often thought about the clean trajectory of a stone hurled through the air, or of an arrow. Stones and arrows fall, of cour
se, when they lose the momentum imparted by the thrower’s arm or the archer’s bow. But what if that momentum could be renewed indefinitely? Wouldn’t they continue on their straight path? He had mentioned the idea to Manly one Saturday early that year in the upstairs shop of the South Shed, and made a note about it the next day: “The ultimate development of the flying machine is likely to be an affair of very small wings or no wings at all . . . ,” he said. “It may depend for its velocity on what Mr. Bell calls ‘its momentum’ in the same way that an arrow or any other missile flies. It is known that the arrow derives its energy from the bow which projects it and that when this is spent the arrow will drop. We have, however, only to renew this energy and . . . the arrow may still be heading upward without limit. . . . It is a thing which deserves thinking over.”
He was still thinking it over several months later. The idea was “so paradoxical,” the secretary admitted, “that I hesitate to enunciate it even as a mere possibility. The very idea of the aerodrome as we have always conceived it, has been to obtain support from sustaining surfaces driven against the air. I seem to see my way to dispensing with the surfaces absolutely and altogether so long as the engine works. I do not mean that this is a hypothetical possibility, but something apparently practical and perhaps within our actual means, or very near it.”
Langley was imagining an engine like the ones that would propel rockets out of the earth’s atmosphere fifty years later. Perhaps he and Manly discussed it further, but he did not write about it again. It was an ingenious and visionary notion. But it would not help the great aerodrome fly.