To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  • • •

  IN DAYTON, the Wrights were following all this through the newspapers, and not without sympathy. “Prof. Langley seems to be having rather more than his fair share of trouble just now with pestiferous reporters,” Will wrote Chanute. “But as the mosquitoes are reported to be very bad along the banks where the reporters are encamped he has some consolation.”

  IN OCTOBER 1902, George Spratt had left the camp at the Kill Devil Hills brimming with excitement over a “bright idea.” He became so excited on his way home to Pennsylvania that he stopped in Norfolk, bought a set of drawing instruments he could ill afford, and found a room at the YMCA where he could figure and sketch. Before long, “confusion set in deep.” But at home he kept after it—the beginning of a conviction that wings with a circular curve would be more stable than the flat parabolas of the Wright machines. He began to regard the idea as a “nest egg” of great value, which would lead him one day to the breakthrough he wanted so badly. Not least of all, he might finally win an argument with his accomplished friends in Dayton. “I am anxious to have good grounds for saying ‘I told you so.’”

  Spratt’s letters never were long on clarity, and the Wrights sometimes struggled to understand just what he was up to. When they did understand, they were dubious. Still, Will had come to believe that even a smashed hypothesis often pointed in a more promising direction, and he knew how much the work itself meant to “dear friend Spratt.” He encouraged Spratt to keep at it “till you get everything clear,” as “there is evidently something there worth knowing, though it may turn out different from what you expected.” When he had to press Spratt to define his terms, or support a contention with proof, or hint that he had misread his own experiments, he was gentle: “I know that an ounce of fact outweighs a pound of theory. We must be sure though . . . that we do not misapprehend what the facts really are.”

  Will also tried to coax Spratt out his periodic fits of “the blues.” But in the spring of 1903 they were deepening, for Spratt’s sense of his destiny and the demands of his daily life were colliding. He was now certain—or as certain as his perpetual self-doubt allowed—that he had “solved the mystery of the lift of curved surfaces and proven it experimentally.” It was “the keys to the heavens . . . the track in the air.” Yet he was newly married and building a house, and still responsible for the family farm, where the work left him feeling exhausted and ill. He started to build a glider to test his theory, but made only a little progress, for “I cannot get the time to work at it, and even if I could I haven’t the means to carry on such work. . . . You see I have more than I can handle.”

  In this state, the letters he received from Dayton—with news of an engine and propellers and a fine new flying machine, and extensive tables of wind tunnel data—became a little hard to bear. He cherished his own ideas yet seemed to get nowhere, while the Wrights, with theories he doubted, moved forward so confidently and decisively.

  With all this on his mind, he wrote a long letter to Wilbur on April 15, 1903. “How I envy your ability to act quick and to the point. I wish I had more of that trait, but alas by general make and training I was moulded differently. I am never certain even when I am sure! And experiments that I make, and note the result with all accuracy and positiveness, in a few days I begin to wonder if it was really so, and fear a mistake might have been made and I do it again.”

  He could see only one sure route out of his quandary. Perhaps, he proposed, there could be a partnership. He could supply the theory; the Wrights, with all their industry and mastery of mechanics, could apply it. He had thought of asking Chanute for his opinion, but since he had unburdened himself to Will, he plunged ahead and asked. “The application of the principal [sic] is I think patentable in such a way as to cover all possible flying machine construction,” he said, “and if so could it be possible, and would it be advisable for you, Orville and myself to hook up together and develop the thing. I am willing to share and do my fair part in such an arrangement, and would be even tho I could develop the thing myself for I have no burning lust for money, and prefer to be satisfied with making progress.”

  He asked Will for advice. Should he give up his plan to build a machine embodying his ideas, and instead publish the ideas in a scientific article? If he did, he would “put others on a par with myself.” Or should he patent the idea and make common cause with the Wrights?

  This presented Will with a delicate task. His brother and he had no wish to hitch their fate to anyone else’s notions, least of all Spratt’s ideas about wings. Yet he wished to do no damage to his friend’s fragile hold on self-confidence and hope. His answer was a diplomatic tour de force.

  As for advice, Will said:

  I must confess I am at a loss just what to say. . . . Regarding a matter which might affect the whole course of a man’s life, I almost fear to give any, lest injury might result from it, instead of good as intended. I can suffer the consequences of my own mistakes with some composure, but I would hate awfully to see some other person suffering from an error of judgment of mine. Nevertheless I have a great desire to see you succeed and if you feel free to communicate the matters you have in mind, I will promise to do what I can to help you either with advice or with assistance in obtaining help to carry forward the work, provided of course that the matters communicated are in my judgment meritorious.

  He silently side-stepped the invitation to become partners. But he gently addressed Spratt’s own sense of inadequacy in the face of what the Wrights were doing. “You make a great mistake in envying me any of my qualities. Very often what you take for some special quality of mind is merely facility arising from constant practice, and you could do as well or better with like practice.”

  He said Spratt must not think too much of the Wrights for their apparent skills in debate; they came with a price. “It is a characteristic of all our family to be able to see the weak points of anything but this is not always a desirable quality as it makes us too conservative for successful business men, and limits our friendships to a very limited circle. You envy me, but I envy you the possession of some qualities that I would give a great deal to possess in equal degree.”

  If Will had meant to send a hint about the partnership idea, Spratt missed it. He sent back a draft of a scientific article and renewed his invitation. He hoped the article would be published by the prestigious Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, but he had held back that “good nest egg—which is really the application of the principles set forth by the experiments, which enters . . . into construction of machines. . . .

  “If one of you could be spared from Dayton and go to Kitty Hawk with me, my wife would go to be our house keeper. I would move my machines and tools . . . and we could start a series of machines, and develop a machine on the quiet which I think would reward us in full for all money spent.” The Wrights’ plan for a motor was premature and dangerous. Their machine could not bear it safely. For in the building of a ship, “the hull of a boat . . . must first be obtained that will float, the oars or pole next, the sails next, the motor next.” Before a powered flyer, there must be a true soaring machine, with automatic stability. That—or an idea for it—was what Spratt was offering them.

  Will now had to be frank.

  Orville and I expect to go to Kitty Hawk again this Summer or Fall. We have designed a 500 ft. machine and propelling mechanism and have a large part of both already constructed, but much yet remains to be done before we are ready for our trip. We would be very loath to take up any thing new that would prevent us from carrying through the experiment we are already started upon. We would be very glad to give you such assistance as we are able to give, provided it did not take too much of our time, or interrupt our own work. . . . At all events we will expect to see you in Kitty Hawk when we go into camp this year.

  The Franklin Institute rejected Spratt’s article for publication, and his ardor faded. “Hay and wheat have taken all my time and ambition,” he told the brothers that summ
er. “My machine I nearly completed but now it is thrown back in the hay mow. . . . It looks very very tired and uncomfortable and I wonder, when I pass that way, if it will ever be able to fly—or in my imagination even, to soar as it did once.”

  FOR A YEAR Bishop Wright had ignored his official suspension from leadership in the Church of the United Brethren. He said the suspending body—the bishops of the church’s White River Conference—had been constituted illegally, thus its action was void. Milton simply had proceeded with his duties, defying his fellow bishops. Many laymen and clergy supported him.

  The showdown came at the annual meeting of the White River Conference, in the small town of Messick, Indiana, in the first week of August 1903. In a chaotic scene, Bishop Wright and the presiding bishop attempted simultaneously to gavel the convention to order. Will, who had taken a separate train, arrived somewhere in the midst of this scene, apparently in time to see the local sheriff serve an injunction on his father, ordering him to cease and desist. Three days later, the conference’s elders voted twenty-two to two to expel Milton from the United Brethren.

  THE BROTHERS ARRIVED at the Kill Devil Hills on September 25, 1903. In past years, in torrents of rain and clouds of mosquitoes, “We had supposed that nature had reached her limit,” Orville said, “but far from it!” Their long shed was several feet closer to the ocean than where they had left it—a wind of ninety miles per hour had shoved it there—and great pools of seawater stretched toward the horizon in all directions. They built a shed for the new machine, calling it their “ ‘hand-car,’ a corruption of the French ‘hangar’ used by foreign airship men.” The old shed became “the summer house,” which they used themselves.

  In mid-October a gale rose to forty, sixty, then seventy-five miles per hour. It whipped the sand into stinging furies, tore at the tarpaper on the roof of the shed and brought a tide of water over the floor. Orville scurried up the ladder to nail the paper down tighter. But the wind seized his coat, “blew it up around my head and bound my arms till I was perfectly helpless.” Will had to climb up and literally hold his brother’s coat while Orv furiously pounded nails and fingers. The wind’s effects on the sand hills were more welcome. They were in “the best shape for gliding they have ever been. . . . Every year adds to our comprehension of the wonders of this place.”

  Earthbound for a year, the brothers found the strong winds tempting. They had meant to get the new shed done before trying anything, but one day, “the wind was too good for gliding, so we got out the old [1902] machine and took to the hills.”

  They made scores of glides that day, hanging all but motionless for twenty and twenty-five seconds at a time. One glide lasted more than thirty seconds, the longest on record. In a glide of twenty-six seconds one of them landed only fifty feet from where he had left the ground—a span of time in which they had covered five hundred feet the year before. In another flight of ten seconds, the glider landed behind the spot where it had started.

  These glides showed that the machine was approaching the aerodynamic efficiency of the gulls and buzzards around them. The brothers were grasping the achievement that Will had imagined in the summer of 1899. It was “the nearest [to] soaring that has ever been done, probably . . . ,” Orv exulted to Charlie Taylor that evening—and if they could soar, they could fly. “A few more days like today,” Orv said, “and we will be able to stay up whole minutes at a time without descending the hill at all. Every thing now seems on the up grade to success.”

  Five days later, after they “arranged to get more twist to the wings with less motion of the body,” Will remained in the air, “practically stationary,” for forty-three seconds—“about three times the best of anyone else.” The wind had slackened a bit, yet both brothers made flights that were “higher and more spectacular than any heretofore.” After another severe storm they took the glider out again. “But we soon found that it was only too anxious to soar and we had great difficulty in keeping it from going up too high.” The machine would rise “without making any descent of the hill at all, and so rapidly that it would fairly take our breath.” One day they floated at altitudes of forty and sixty feet.

  After a delayed shipment of parts arrived, they spent less time gliding and more time inside the thin, wind-buffeted walls, attending to the main task of the season. “I think Nature was just storing up all her energies for this terrible blow she has just dealt us,” Orv told Kate. “We are now working on the new machine. . . . It’s a ‘Wopper.’”

  As the weather had put the Wrights in a mood to personify Nature, they may have taken hope from the visitor she now sent them. The year before, an earthbound mouse had taken up residence in the shed. This year their guest was a bird—a sparrow-sized beauty, yellow and black, with a thin, sharp bill. They couldn’t identify it. The little creature hopped about the kitchen, “perched on the cups, walked over the plates and made itself at home generally.” It was so at ease with the brothers that Orville could reach out and touch it.

  IN HIS BELATED REMARKS to the press about the quarter-scale aerodrome, Charles Manly had withheld at least one finding—that he would need more horsepower to drive the great aerodrome than the twenty-four he had estimated earlier. This was all right, he assured Langley, since the engine had been performing consistently at over fifty horsepower. But the secretary, still in Boston, was “deeply troubled” by the “painfully small margin” of power. “Perhaps you can relieve my anxiety, but I am almost ready to ask if it is desirable to try the momentous experiment at all, under such conditions, or might the flight be tried without the weight of an aeronaut?”

  Manly managed to reassure his chief that all would be well, and he went about his final preparations. Considerable planning and coordination was required, much of it having nothing to do with actually flying the craft. Manly was well aware that Langley insisted on being present for the climactic trial, though he also wanted it accomplished soon enough for him to make a quick European trip before winter. Members of the Board of Ordnance and Fortification and of the U.S. Geological Survey were to be summoned as official witnesses, along with Richard Rathbun, two members of Congress, a surgeon, the Smithsonian photographer, and the photographer’s assistant. Yet because the test must be held on a day of perfect weather—meaning virtually no wind at all, a rarity on the Potomac—Manly would have to be a shrewd forecaster indeed to tell everyone when to come down from Washington. Langley was pressuring Manly to fly on the earliest possible date, yet he did not want to come unnecessarily. And Manly, one can be sure, wanted the secretary underfoot as little as possible.

  Even more important, Manly had to take steps to prevent disaster from befalling the aerodrome before it ever left its traces. From long experience he knew that once the machine was assembled, a rogue gust of wind could wrench it from its handlers’ grip and send it tumbling. Even in favorable weather, no fewer than ten men were required to handle it safely, and Manly insisted they be thoroughly drilled in the elaborate assembly procedure. One by one, each of the four huge wings had to be carefully removed from inside the houseboat and placed on a raft alongside. From there, a derrick designed just for this purpose lifted the wing up to the houseboat’s roof, where it was placed inside a big bin to protect it from the wind. Then the heavy frame-and-engine assembly, too, was hoisted over to the raft, then to the roof, where it was placed on its launching car. Next the men lifted the wings out of the protective bins and attached them to the frame—first the rear pair, then the front pair. Finally the guy wires were attached, to keep the wings anchored. Manly discovered this process alone could consume two hours for each pair of wings. He supervised drills with his heart in his throat. The men were already complaining of being overworked, and “the slightest carelessness on their part in handling the wings etc. would seriously injure them so that many days would be lost in repairing.”

  Even so, Manly was less worried about mechanical problems than the effect on the secretary’s ragged nerves. “I sincerely trust that you wi
ll not let the work cause you any concern that you can possibly avoid,” he wrote Langley, “for the prospects for success are really much brighter than I fear you have allowed yourself to imagine.”

  Manly knew his boss well. Langley was indeed feeling pessimistic, and he confirmed his opinion on a visit to the houseboat after the flight of the quarter-scale. “Seeing things on the spot here, they look worse than from Washington. The summer’s experience indicates that the chances are about 5 to 1 against a launch being possible on any given day even if everything were ready.” He had hoped to stay downriver until a test was accomplished, but now he thought there might be no trial until as late as October, and “I cannot remain here for any such time.”

  In a letter to Mabel Bell, the inventor’s wife, he said the experiments were going forward “in spite of every impediment that ill fortune can visit us with. . . . I need hardly say to you and to Mr. Bell, in confidence, that there is no certainty what the result of this may be, only that I have always expected from the experience of past years that the first attempt would be a failure. I admit here to an anxious mind, but only to this, so long as I escape from malaria on the field of action.”

  On September 3 Manly thought everything was ready. The aerodrome was assembled. The photographers took their stations. Two tugboats steamed to points where they would stand ready to rescue Manly in case he could not circle back to the houseboat through the air.

  But the engine would not start. During the long weeks of delay, fog had ruined the dry cells.

  Several days of diagnosis and repair followed. Manly put the engine through several tests. He fixed a cylinder, made minor adjustments, and started it again. Then, “without any warning one blade of the starboard propeller broke at the hub, smashing into the cross frame and the guy wires.” Manly leaped to cut the power, but too late to save a crucial part on the shaft of the off-balance propeller.