To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  To the brothers’ delight, Lorin Wright walked into camp on the last day of September, and, equally welcome, George Spratt arrived the next afternoon. The barren expanse of sand increasingly took on the look of a sportman’s camp. Spratt and Lorin snagged crabs for bait and caught an eel and some chubs. The three brothers competed in target shooting with Orville’s rifle. The results were measured to the eighth of an inch. “W.W. beat me with a record of 53/4 inches total from center to my 57/8,” Orville recorded. “L.W. 73/4.” To the rhythm of the nearby surf, they talked over the evening fire, the thoughtful farmer-physician lending his own assessments of the Wrights’ glides and the well-digging puzzle. Spratt led the brothers on tramps through the nearby forest, pointing out birds and insects and plants by name.

  Will climbed to his bunk early, often by 7:30. Orville stayed up later. He was working on his French and making headway in several books he had brought along. On the night of October 2, he drank more coffee than usual and lay awake for a long time. The glider’s curious geometry floated through his mind—angles formed by the arrows of the wind and the flat cloth surfaces of the flying machine—and a perception dawned. In the well-digging episodes, he saw that as the glider went into its sideways slide, the fixed vertical tail in the rear not only failed to keep the glider straight, it also collided with stationary air, and thus pushed the machine into its dangerous spin.

  Orville glimpsed a solution—to make the tail movable. If the pilot entering a turn could alter the tail’s angle, then pressure would be relieved on the lower side of the glider and exerted on the higher side. The machine would turn under control, and neither slide sideways nor spin.

  In the morning, Orville presented his idea. He expected his older brother to say he had thought of it already. Instead, after Orville spoke, Will was quiet for a moment. Then he said he saw the point—yes, the tail should be movable—and the movement should be brought about by the same hip-cradle action that operated the wing-warping. By shifting his hips, the pilot would twist the wings and alter the tail’s angle at the same time. Suddenly it was clear to both of them. The two movements were intimately connected and ought to be performed simultaneously. Wing and tail and wind would act in concert.

  Will’s moment with the twisted box had been their first great epiphany. Orville’s idea for a movable vertical rudder, and Wilbur’s addendum, was the second, and it was striking that they conceived it together, as if their two minds really were halves of one whole.

  They pulled off the two-surface rigid tail and replaced it with a single surface, five feet high and two feet across, that swung to either side on hinges. Wires connected it to the wing-warping cables. Now, when the man in the cradle swung his hips from side to side, the wings and tail shifted in a single, organic movement.

  AUGUSTUS HERRING had wanted to fly since the early stories about Otto Lilienthal had appeared ten years earlier. Born in 1865 to the family of a well-to-do Georgia cotton broker, Herring attended the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey, then became the first American to build and fly a Lilienthal glider. He sought the centers of action in American flight research but never held a job for long. He worked for Samuel Langley and fell out with him. He worked for Chanute and fell out with him, too. Working alone, he made impressive glides in a machine of his own design. In 1898, Herring attached an engine powered by thirty seconds’ worth of compressed air and claimed a motorized hop of fifty feet. That apparently taxed the machine’s limits. Unable to proceed, Herring gave up and did other work for a time. But before long he succumbed again to his passion. In the summer of 1902, he went first to Hiram Maxim, then to Chanute. In Chicago he confessed he was out of work and offered to revise Chanute’s old gliders in what he said would be an effort to overtake Wilbur Wright.

  Herring’s self-confidence was as powerful as the Wrights’. But without funds to support his own designs, he had no choice, if he wanted to fly, but to work for men of means and somehow make their work his own. It did not suit him. No matter how his superiors handled him, he grumbled and rebelled under direction. In their work in the late 1890s, Chanute told a friend, “Langley tried the cast iron way, and I tried the india rubber way, and we both failed. The trouble is that [Herring] tries sulkily those experiments which do not originate with himself, and is, as he admits himself, very obstinate.”

  On a dark, rain-soaked Sunday in early October, just as the Wrights were building their new tail, Herring and Chanute lumbered by horse cart into the camp at the Kill Devil Hills. They brought with them the parts for a three-wing glider, built by a Californian named Charles Lamson at Chanute’s request, that combined ideas of both men. Mostly it was another effort to achieve Chanute’s dream of wings that would shift by themselves to accommodate changes in wind pressure without reliance on the operator’s instincts and dexterity. Herring assembled the machine the next day and took it out to the big hill. But on only his second try, the glider struggled through the air for no more than twenty feet, then fell, smashing its main cross-piece. The Wrights helped with repairs, but when Herring tried again he could do no more than hop into the air. Even when kited in a powerful wind blowing up a steep slope, the machine failed to lift Herring. He had no idea what was wrong with it. The Wrights blamed its flimsy wings. Orv was sure he had seen the surfaces flap and twist so violently that the wind must be striking the top on one side of the craft and the bottom on the other. “Mr. Chanute seems much disappointed.”

  Herring and Chanute, rooted to the ground, now watched as Wilbur Wright, in high winds, kicked off from the summit of a dune and sailed far down the slope with “no trouble in the control of the machine.” Not only did he achieve a distance of nearly three hundred feet, but with the new apparatus for making turns, he banked the glider to both right and left in a long S shape. The two observers realized that Wright was gliding with the wind striking the machine not only from the front but from both sides, a feat of control that no other experimenter had ever even tried. With nothing of their own left to do, he and Chanute decamped nine days after they had come. In Norfolk they boarded a train for Washington.

  Chanute wanted to see Langley, who had returned to the United States from Europe only a few days earlier. He called at the Castle without an appointment, only to find the secretary rushing off in a hansom cab. Apparently unable to resist a hint about the aerodrome, Langley paused only long enough to say, “You may hear some interesting news in a short time.”

  Chanute tracked down Charles Manly for a talk, then followed up quickly with photographs and letters to Langley. He made it clear that he suspected Herring of intellectual theft. Herring had “doubtless . . . got some new and valuable ideas by seeing Mr. Wright’s machine,” he said, “and he announced that he wanted to return to Washington. I suspected (although he did not say so) that this was to revive his former unsuccessful application for a patent, with perhaps modifications which had occurred to him.”

  Chanute said the Wright brothers had made remarkable glides by placing the operator prone in their machine and attaching a horizontal rudder at the front. He did not mention wing-warping, nor the movement of the fixed tail, which he seems not to have understood or even perceived. But he was keen to make sure that Langley understood the progress the Wrights were making.

  They are bicycle manufacturers and repairers who find their business so slack at this time of the year that they indulge themselves in a vacation which is fruitful in results. They have heretofore considered their experiments as a sport, likely to bring no money return, and have not intended to apply a motor, but they have acquired so much of the art of the birds that I think they should proceed further. They are very ingenious mechanics and men of high character and integrity.

  Langley got the point. He shot a telegram to Kitty Hawk, asking if he might run down to the Outer Banks and see the experiments for himself. There was no immediate response by wire, but in a couple of days he received a letter from Wilbur Wright. He had not responded by telegram, Wright
explained, because he and his brother planned to break camp within several days, and “as it would be exceedingly doubtful, owing to miserable transportation facilities, whether you could reach here before that time, and as there would be the additional risk of bad weather for the single day that you might possibly be with us, we did not think it advisable to telegraph you to come on. We shall if possible arrange to stop a day in Washington on our way home.”

  But the Wrights did not find it possible.

  THE SKIES CLEARED and the wind blew steady and strong. Spratt had to go on October 20, leaving the brothers alone with only Dan Tate to help. Will and Orv now looked to see what this glider could do. In five days they made hundreds of glides, stretching their distances to three hundred, four hundred, five hundred feet, and in buffeting winds up to thirty miles per hour. Tate looked on in bemused wonder: “All she needs is a coat of feathers to make her light and she will stay in the air indefinitely.” On October 23 Will traveled 622 feet in a glide lasting nearly half a minute. Orville bubbled with excitement and pride. “We now hold all the records!” he wrote Kate on the night of October 23. “The largest machine ever handled . . . the longest time in the air, the smallest angle of descent, and the highest wind!!!”

  SOME ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER, Wright enthusiasts have spent many hours replicating the brothers’ 1902 glides in precise recreations of their glider. The sensations of the pilot are as close as possible to Will and Orv’s experiences. Leaving the ground is a coordinated rush of three men running and hauling. Then the operator feels one foot miss the ground. He knows the machine weighs more than a hundred pounds. Yet it defies gravity and rises up against his beltline, bearing his full weight and still rising.

  . . . one . . . two . . . three seconds . . .

  A beginning bicyclist often loses control by turning the handlebars too far to right or left. It is like that with the horizontal rudder in front of the glider. Too much of an angle makes the glider dip and bob.

  . . . seven . . . eight . . . nine . . .

  The wind feels like waves under a skiff, bucking the craft a bit, but yielding to it.

  . . . fourteen . . . fifteen . . . sixteen . . .

  A shift of the hip cradle brings a faint creaking and clacking as the wires pull at the wings and tail, and instantly the machine leans and banks like a bicycle.

  . . . nineteen . . . twenty. . . twenty-one . . .

  After a gentle descent the belly skids touch and slide, tossing skitters of sand. The flight is over, but the thrill is unforgettable. The pilot collects his dazzled thoughts and stands for another try.

  The brothers’ diaries show that Will made more glides than Orville, and that his glides were on average longer than Orville’s. But this reflects only the 121 flights that the brothers noted out of some one thousand glides they made that fall. Orville said later: “Unfortunately, unlike many who use other people’s money in their experiments, and therefore must keep records to make a showing of their work, we were working for ourselves, and just for the fun of it, so that some experiments were never recorded and the records of many others not as carefully preserved as they should have been.” Usually they did not take turns, glide by glide. Rather, one brother would make several glides, then the other.

  Only a tiny handful of humans had known the sensation—Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher, Chanute’s assistants—but none for so many seconds or with such confidence of the ability to remain in balance and to land safely. The Wrights remembered their promises to Milton and Kate. So only occasionally would one or the other nose the craft above the height of a man. The thrill came less in flying high than in a dawning sense of oneness with the machine. With more practice, Will hoped “the management of a flying machine should become as instinctive as the balancing movements a man unconsciously employs with every step in walking.”

  Their long glides had grown out their particular aptitude for learning how to do a difficult thing. It was a simple method but rare. They broke a job into its parts and proceeded one part at a time. They practiced each small task until they mastered it, then moved on. It didn’t sound like much, but it avoided discouragement and led to success. And it kept them uninjured and alive. The best example was their habit of staying very close to the ground in their glides, sometimes just inches off the sand. “While the high flights were more spectacular, the low ones were fully as valuable for training purposes,” Will said. “Skill comes by the constant repetition of familiar feats rather than by a few overbold attempts at feats for which the performer is yet poorly prepared.” They were conservative daredevils, cautious prophets. “A thousand glides is equivalent to about four hours of steady practice,” Will said, “far too little to give anyone a complete mastery of the art of flying.”

  IF HE DID NOT PAY as much attention to matters of balance and control as the Wright brothers, Charles Manly at least never lost sight of the fact that he was building an engine that must perform in the unfamiliar environment of the sky. Late in the summer of 1902, he began to worry especially about the effect on the carburetor of a sudden acceleration through the air. To imitate the conditions of a launch, he turned a powerful fan on the engine during tests in the South Shed. Secretary Langley approved. With “goodwill and sympathy in your disappointments,” he wrote from Europe: “I think you are very prudent to imitate the actual conditions under which the carburetor will work when the aerodrome is in flight, in its first few critical seconds.” Langley, still in Europe, planned to arrive in Boston in the first week of October. He fully expected Manly to be ready for a trial over the Potomac that month, while the weather was still comfortable.

  Then came a “totally unexpected” series of smash-ups to the propellers. Manly thought he had put them in workable condition a full year earlier. Now he faced a delay of four to six weeks, which “completely upset all of my calculations as to when I would be ready to start the houseboat with everything on board down the River, and until I overcome this trouble with the propellers, I can give no idea of when the aerodrome will be ready for trial.” Then the propeller shafts, which had stood up to all the tests to date without a single problem, “twisted and buckled under the strain of driving the new propellers.” Weeks passed.

  In November Langley wrote again to Captain Lewis at the War Department. Lewis was no longer assigned to the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, but he and Langley had developed a friendly relationship, and Langley was keeping him informed. “I tell you privately that the engine for which we owe so much to Mr. Manly is finally showing itself perhaps the best anywhere. . . . Everything is ready, and were there still time this season, a flight would be made, but I do not expect one until after the ice has gone; then I, who have never known any great initiatory trial without some mischance, look for what I call our ‘first smash.’ When every human care has been taken, there remains the element of the unknown. There may well be something that forethought has not provided for, and I expect it, but excepting for the fact that a human life is now in question, I could make it without fear at all.”

  Langley’s expression of confidence to Lewis was, indeed, private. The board’s official reports were not, to the delight of observers in the press. “Experiments with the Langley aerodrome as a military flying machine reveal the possibility of the machine as a practical weight carrier,” the New York Daily Tribune deadpanned that fall, “as it has successfully flown away with $50,000 of the allotment made by the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications. . . . The disproportion between the $214,000 remaining in the hands of the board and the $50,000 the flying machine has already cost leads to the conclusion that aerodromes come as well as go high.”

  STILL CURIOUS ABOUT THE Wright brothers, the secretary sent Manly to Chicago for a talk with Chanute. In a private memorandum, Langley recorded the crux of his aide’s report—that “Mr. Chanute feels that the Wright Brothers have made a real advance even over his own ideas and experiments.” Details of the Ohioans’ machine were scrambled as they passed from Chanute, who did not und
erstand them in the first place, through Manly to Langley. The secretary recorded that the Wrights controlled their balance by cords that allowed them to change the curve of the horizontal rudder at the front of the machine. He noted Chanute’s belief that “though not automatic [this is] better than the Pénaud tail.”

  Langley’s curiosity swelled. Clearly they had ideas about equilibrium that he should know about. Through Chanute, he again invited either brother to travel to Washington at his expense to speak with him, “especially of their means of control.”

  Chanute passed along the request, to which Wilbur Wright responded: “It is not at all probable that either Orville or myself will find opportunity to visit Prof. Langley in response to his suggestion. We have a number of matters demanding our attention just now. . . .

  “It is our intention next year to build a machine much larger and about twice as heavy as our present machine. With it we will work out problems relating to starting and handling heavy weight machines, and if we find it under satisfactory control in flight, we will proceed to mount a motor.”

  LANGLEY AND MANLY had spent most of four years building an extraordinary engine to lift their heavy flying machine. The Wrights had spent most of four years building a flying machine so artfully designed that it could be propelled into the air by a fairly ordinary internal combustion engine. With the design of a powered aeroplaneI now in its final form, the Wrights expended a minimum of thought and energy on their power plant. At first they hoped simply to buy an engine. But when they sent inquiries to manufacturers, specifying an engine of less than two hundred pounds that would make at least eight horsepower, only one said he had such an engine, and the brothers concluded he was overrating its power. So they sketched a design of their own and handed it to Charlie Taylor, who did most of the work in the back room of the bicycle shop while the brothers worked upstairs. He used a drill press, a metal lathe, and a few hand tools. The materials came from a Dayton foundry and the local hardware stores. At the end of six weeks, he had a simplified four-cylinder auto engine without a carburetor, spark plugs, or fuel pump. The spark came from dry batteries and a low-tension magneto manufactured by the Dayton Electric Company. The radiator was made from several pieces of metal speaking tube used in apartment buildings. Gasoline flowed into the engine by gravity from a small tank mounted on the wing strut overhead. The fuel valve was a petcock made for a gas lamp. In February 1903, the engine block cracked in a shop test. When a new block was delivered and the engine reassembled, it made twelve horsepower at 1,025 revolutions per minute. With four more horsepower than the brothers believed they needed, and twenty fewer pounds than their maximum, the engine was “a very pleasant surprise.” If Stephen Balzer could have seen Charlie Taylor achieve twelve horsepower at 180 pounds in just a few weeks, it would have been a bitter sight.