by James Tobin
THE BROTHERS HAD ASSUMED that propellers would cause them even less trouble than an engine, believing, as Langley had said ten years earlier, that “there is a very considerable analogy between the best form of aerial and of marine propellers.” But they soon learned that ships’ propellers were designed by trial and error, vessel by vessel. No one knew exactly how propellers worked, so no one had worked out a theory of propeller design, least of all for flying machines. The brothers had no reason to think either Langley or Hiram Maxim had solved the problem, since neither—so far, at least—had produced a machine capable of flying with a man aboard. With all the possible variations of the propeller blades’ diameter, angle, and area, design by trial and error might take forever. So the brothers had no choice but to plumb the mystery of how propellers actually worked. If they could do that, they could make calculations, and the calculations would lead to a reliable design. “We have recently done a little experimenting with screws,” Will told George Spratt, “and are trying to get a clear understanding of just how they work and why. It is a very perplexing problem indeed.” They began to consider the problem seriously soon after their return from Kitty Hawk in 1902, and “it was not till several months had passed,” Orville recalled, “and every phase of the problem had been thrashed over and over, that the various reactions began to untangle themselves.”
Naval engineers had proposed that a marine propeller cuts through water as a screw cuts through wood. The brothers conceived a different image. To them, “it was apparent that a propeller was simply an aeroplane [that is, a plane surface in the curved shape of a wing, or airfoil] traveling in a spiral course. As we could calculate the effect of an aeroplane traveling in a straight course, why should we not be able to calculate the effect of one traveling in a spiral course?” Put that way, the problem sounded simple. But it “became more complex the longer we studied it. With the machine moving forward, the air flying backward, the propellers turning sidewise, and nothing standing still, it seemed impossible to find a starting-point from which to trace the various simultaneous reactions.”
In the shop and at home, “they would get into terrific arguments,” Charlie Taylor said later. “They’d shout at each other something terrible. I don’t think they really got mad, but they sure got awfully hot.” One evening at the shop Charlie heard the hottest of their arguments yet. The next morning, Orville arrived at the shop first and “said he guessed he’d been wrong and they ought to do it Will’s way.” Then Will came in and “said he’d been thinking it over and perhaps Orv was right.” The argument reignited, each brother raising his voice on behalf of the position the other had taken the night before. “When they were through though, they knew where they were and could go ahead with the job.”
They filled five pocket notebooks with formulas and calculations. By the spring, they thought they had propellers that would deliver the thrust they needed. In a letter to Spratt, Orville recorded jubilation tempered by the knowledge that only an actual flight could vindicate their judgment.
“We worked out a theory of our own on the subject, and soon discovered, as we usually do, that all the propellers built heretofore are all wrong, and then built a pair of propellers 81/8 ft. in diameter, based on our theory, which are all right! (till we have a chance to test them down at Kitty Hawk and find out differently). Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them!!”
ON THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1902 a well-dressed stranger appeared at 7 Hawthorn in Dayton. His manner was engaging, his accent English. He handed the brothers a letter from Octave Chanute, which read: “Permit me to introduce Mr. Patrick Alexander, of England, one of the leaders in aeronautical investigations, who desires to meet you while in this country. I feel sure that you will be as much pleased to make his acquaintance as I have been myself.”
Chanute, as usual, meant well and misled. Patrick Alexander did not simply happen to be in the United States, nor had he led any investigations. He was an independently wealthy aeronautical enthusiast and promoter, not an experimenter. Only three weeks and one day earlier, he had been in London listening to Major Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell, president of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, give an account of recent progress in aeronautics, including the lighter-than-air ships of Alberto Santos-Dumont and Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and “the wonderful progress with flying machines” made by “Mr. Wilbur Wright and his brother.” It appeared, Baden-Powell said, that a practical aeroplane might be at hand, and “one can scarcely imagine any invention which could have a greater effect on the conduct of warfare. . . .” Patrick Alexander promptly left the meeting, canceled his schedule, and booked passage for America to meet the Wrights.
It was Christmas, a time the Wrights guarded for family and children. So the conversation was brief. But the brothers, if momentarily nonplussed by this sudden appearance, were charmed. “We both liked him very much,” Will told Chanute.
Alexander’s visit to Dayton was the clearest evidence yet that the Wrights were achieving a certain renown in the world’s small community of flight experimenters, and all because of Octave Chanute’s talents as a publicist. The elderly engineer was talking about the Ohioans to every experimenter he knew. In these bright young men, with their warmth and brains and rectitude, he could see the ripening of his fondest hopes for his own life. He still believed that a practical aeroplane, in its final form, must maintain its balance by adjusting automatically to changes in the wind—not, as the Wrights believed, through the constant control of the operator. But he was no fool. He had seen the brothers glide and turn, and he could see where they were headed. Still, he could not bring himself to regard the Wrights’ gliders as entirely original. He did not understand precisely how they made their 1902 craft turn, but he believed their controls were like the ones devised by his French-African friend Louis Mouillard, who had tried (and failed) to turn a glider by applying more drag on one side than on the other. And certainly the basic biplane configuration of the Wright craft seemed very much to resemble Chanute’s own double-decker glider of 1896. If the Wrights succeeded, Chanute could reason, surely their triumph would represent the culmination of his own long effort to help younger men overcome this most difficult of all scientific challenges. Surely, then, was he not merely the Wrights’ friend but their teacher—if not the father of flight, then at least its grandfather?
On January 3, 1903, with his two daughters and enough baggage for a long stay abroad, Chanute set sail from Boston for Europe. He went as an ambassador of the coming Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904—better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair—which would include a grand aeronautical congress. Chanute hoped to gather all the world’s important men of aeronautics in one place, and simultaneously impress European flight enthusiasts with the progress being made in his adopted homeland.
Of these, the French were the most zealous in believing their own nation held a special claim on the sky. Alberto Santos-Dumont was only the latest Parisian to attract notice for flights; in fact, since the brothers Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier had developed hot-air balloons in the 1780s, the French had led the world in lighter-than-air aerial navigation. By 1900 ballooning had become a popular craze, especially among Paris’s leisure class, and the pursuit of flight enjoyed far more credibility there than in the United States. Experiments, plans, and gossip about all things aeronautical radiated from the Aéro-Club de France on the exclusive Place de la Concorde. The club’s leaders included Ernest Archdeacon, a wealthy attorney; Henri Deutsche de la Meurthe, an oil magnate; and Comte Henri de la Vaulx—all well-connected men of affairs who dreamed that France would lead the world in the conquest of the air.
It was with some excitement, then, that the Aéro-Club’s members gathered on April 2, 1903, to hear an address by the Octave Chanute, whose name was well known in France by virtue of his authoritative work, Progress in Flying Machines. Most members were lighter-than-air men, by practice and belie
f, but they were well aware of the rival hopes of heavier-than-air men like Chanute. Even the name of Wright was not entirely new to them. They had heard it from one of their members, a soldier and captain of artillery named Ferdinand Ferber. In 1901 Ferber had flown a Lilienthal-type glider and become one of Chanute’s many correspondents. When Chanute sent Ferber a copy of Wilbur Wright’s “Some Aeronautical Experiments,” with a description and photos of the 1901 glider, Ferber instantly wanted one of his own. He was no engineer. He paid a carpenter to work up an imitation out of bamboo and sheets, with no way to twist the wings. But on a slope in the maritime Alps near the Mediterranean coast, Ferber had made several glides in the machine. Since then, he had urged his fellow aeronauts to abandon lighter-than-air means of flight and pursue the banner of Lilienthal, which the American, Wright, had seized. Only the previous Saturday, Le Monde Illustré had published five photographs of the Wrights in flight and the tantalizing assertion that “the aviator turns with his wings.” Still, Ferber’s was very much a minority voice in the Aéro-Club. The spectacular dirigible flights of Santos-Dumont had a firm grip on the plans and dreams of most members.
Shaking hands all around, Chanute found himself “very kindly received.” As patriots of the proudest and most comfortable kind, it would have pleased club members to regard this distinguished Franco-American as more or less one of their own. Yet as Chanute proceeded through his review of the latest developments in fixed-wing machines—and especially as he displayed his photographs of les frères Wright aboard their 1902 glider at Kitty Hawk—many among his listeners grew not more pleased but deeply unsettled.
No one in the audience recorded Chanute’s remarks. But press accounts make it clear that he made a profound impression. He reviewed the work of “the great German scientist, Lilienthal,” whose line of thought Chanute had picked up and extended after Lilienthal’s death. Then he described the “extremely remarkable experiments” of Wilbur Wright, “the most eminent aviator in America,” who, in a machine with twenty-eight square meters of supporting surface in a two-surface form, had achieved glides of 200 meters with an average angle of descent of only six degrees—and with no more damage than “a pair of torn trousers!”
The Wrights had told Chanute they were applying for a U.S. patent, but there is little doubt the engineer revealed patentable features of their glider to the French. It’s clear, too, that he implied the brothers were his pupils and protégés—that their work was an extension of ideas and designs for which Chanute himself was chiefly responsible. In 1900, one paper reported, the Wrights had written to Chanute “to ask him for some details about his experiments,” which they “desired to renew.” Chanute, another said, “understood very well the necessity of helping one another in this tremendous task,” and thus had taken “pains to train young, intelligent, and daring pupils, capable of carrying on his researches by multiplying his gliding experiment to infinity.” The Wrights had experimented with “his modified apparatus.” Ernest Archdeacon said he was struck by Chanute’s humility. But it masked a subtle assertion of credit for what the Wrights were doing—an assertion that was utterly at odds with the truth.
Why did Chanute mislead so egregiously, and with such unfairness to his young friends in Dayton? And why, when he knew the danger of giving away secrets, did he blab so freely about the Wrights’ control devices? Partly it was that Chanute simply did not understand the Wrights’ work, as later events were to show. But surely the British flight historian Charles Gibbs-Smith was close to the truth when he said that “with all due charity, one can only conclude that this fine old man, finding himself in 1903 in the romantic country of his birth, and surrounded by the warmth, respect, and indeed adulation of his audience, succumbed to the temptation of acting the part of inspirer, teacher, and mentor of the Wrights.” It was not the only time when Chanute yielded to this temptation, and in years to come, the Wrights would find themselves trying—first with extreme courtesy, then with increasing exasperation—to correct the deeply flawed version of events that began that evening in Paris.
For the moment the French airmen had no interest in fine distinctions over credit due to one American or another. That any American had seized so large an advantage over the true pioneers of flight—the French—unleashed a wave of patriotic indignation. “For most of the listeners, except Ferber and his friends, it was a disagreeable revelation,” de la Vaulx recalled. “When we spoke in France rather vaguely about the flights of the Wright brothers, we did not doubt their remarkable progress; but Chanute was now perfectly explicit about them and showed us their real importance. The French aviators felt at last that . . . they had been resting on the laurels of predecessors too long, and that it was time to get seriously to work if they did not wish to be left behind.”
Captain Ferber was away from Paris when Chanute gave his talk, but he learned of it. He wrote immediately to Ernest Archdeacon, whom he knew to be interested in fixed-wing flight, and urged that he use his influence with the Aéro-Club to establish a hefty prize for distance in fixed-wing gliding. “With our experience of the automobile,” Ferber told Archdeacon, “we know that it is racing which leads to the machines being improved; and the aeroplane must not be allowed to reach successful achievement in America.”
Archdeacon needed no special urging. He was near a state of patriotic apoplexy. In the next issue of La Locomotion, the lawyer issued a desperate, heavily italicized call to his countymen—which, in turn, was reprinted in the next issue of the more influential L’Aerophile. Not only Wilbur Wright but Samuel Langley, he declared, was on the verge of flight. Archdeacon had it on Chanute’s own authority that Langley already had “entirely solved the very difficult question of equilibrium” and was “counting on showing the universe, in the course of 1903, the first self-propelled, man-carrying aeroplane!!!” And Langley had government money behind him—“an indispensable condition of success, for definitive flying machines assuredly cannot be built without very long and very costly trials. . . .”
France, this great homeland of inventors, assuredly does not hold the lead in the special science of AVIATION, even when the majority of good minds are today convinced that that alone is the true way.
Will the homeland of the Montgolfiers have the shame of allowing that ultimate discovery of aerial science, which is assuredly imminent, and which will constitute the greatest scientific revolution that has been seen since the beginning of the world, to be realized abroad?
Gentlemen scholars, to your compasses! You, you Maecenases, and you too, gentlemen of the government, your hands in your pocket . . . or else we are beaten!
WHEN CHANUTE RETURNED to Chicago soon after his talk in Paris, he invited Will back to Chicago for a second talk to the Western Society of Engineers. On the evening of June 24, 1903, Will described the breakthrough experiments at Kitty Hawk the previous fall. When Chanute invited questions, one engineer asked Will what he thought of Alexander Graham Bell’s efforts to lift a man in a gigantic kite.
Will executed a courteous dodge.
“It is very bad policy to ask one flying machine man about the experiments of another,” he replied, “because every flying machine man thinks that his method is the only correct one.” Bell, he said, seemed to be interested principally in “the method of construction—to get something strong.”
Another man rose to ask whether a glider’s wings wouldn’t be stabler if attached at a dihedral angle—a V-shape, like many birds of prey.
That was Maxim’s approach, Will said, and Langley’s. Maxim’s craft had flipped over in “a side gust of only moderate force,” and “the Langley machine was tested only in dead calms when there were no side gusts to contend with.” He and his brother had tried the dihedral pattern on one of their gliders, he said. “But when we found that every little side wind threatened to capsize it, we drew the tips down like the wings of a gull.” When the wind blows hard, buzzards stay in their trees, he pointed out, while gulls navigate easily. “We found the gull po
sition much the best. The dihedral angle is the proper solution of the problem for flight in still air, but it makes matters worse instead of better when the wind blows.
“Unfortunately, the wind usually blows. So we have found it best to abandon this method and employ other means of securing lateral equilibrium.”
Wilbur Wright could pack a punch of enormous rhetorical power in the space of a few words—so few, in fact, that some such punches flew so fast that bystanders failed to notice them. So it was with these five words—“Unfortunately, the wind usually blows.” No one who heard them that evening in Chicago recorded whether the audience understood that Wright had just gutted the experimental strategy Samuel Langley had been following for more than ten years.