To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  “The Usual Accident,” one paper reported.

  When Langley and Manly constructed the hollow ribs of the aerodrome’s wings, they had searched long and hard for a waterproof varnish that would protect the meticulously bent wood against moisture, which could soften the glue and cause the ribs to relax. To test the varnish, they submerged ribs in water for twenty-four hours. The varnish worked; the ribs kept their curve. But the tidewater fogs proved more destructive. Waiting for a turn in the weather, Manly discovered the glue in the ribs had softened after all. The wings had flattened into useless flat planes.

  They opened up each rib, scraped out the old glue, applied fresh glue, and wrapped the ribs in surgeon’s tape. The weather got worse. “Every storm which came anywhere in the vicinity immediately selected the river as its route of travel,” Langley said later, “and although a 10-mile wind on the land would not be an insurmountable obstacle during an experiment, yet the same wind on the river rendered it impossible to maintain the large house boat on an even keel and free from pitching and tossing long enough to make a test.” During two or three brief periods of calm, the men rushed to get the machine ready to fly. But each time, heavy winds and rain swept over the river. Once they had to leave the machine on top of the houseboat all night because the waves were too high to permit the safe use of the raft.

  AT 10:00 A.M. ON OCTOBER 7, the wind was blowing at twelve miles per hour—much higher than ideal, but Manly had become desperate. There was no time to call Langley or anyone else. Only the reporters were there to watch as the Smithsonian crew hustled to get the machine ready before the wind worsened. The engine was started. At twenty minutes after noon, Manly stepped into the little aviator’s compartment and checked his control devices. He signaled an assistant, who fired off two skyrockets in an “all ready” signal. One of the tugs answered with two toots of its whistle. Reed leaned down and slipped off the loop that held the catapults. There was “a roaring, grinding noise.” In three seconds the machine reached the end of its sixty-foot rail.

  Manly felt “a sudden shock,” then, for just a moment, “an indescribable sensation of being free in the air.”

  Then his mind grasped “the important fact . . . that the machine was plunging downward at a very sharp angle.” To bring the tail down and the nose up, he seized the wheel that controlled the Pénaud tail and shoved it as far as it would go.

  “THE MACHINE WAS PLUNGING DOWNWARD.”

  The test of October 7, 1903

  Nothing happened.

  The front wings struck the water and disintegrated. Manly found himself entirely underwater. He grabbed the guy wires over his head, pulled himself out of his seat, and kicked up to the surface. The first thing he saw was a reporter, “his boatman expending the utmost limit of his power in pushing his boat ahead to be the first one to arrive.”

  GEORGE FEIGHT, THE WRIGHTS’ neighbor on Hawthorn Street, sent them a newspaper account of events on the Potomac.

  “I see that Langley has had his fling, and failed,” Will wrote to Chanute. “It seems to be our turn to throw now, and I wonder what our luck will be.”

  AS THE BROTHERS ASSEMBLED their new machine, Patrick Alexander, the British flight enthusiast, was en route to New York for the second time in a year, this time to prepare for the aeronautical congress at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Chanute secured an invitation for Alexander to visit the Wrights’ camp, then cabled Alexander in New York, giving instructions to meet him in Washington so they might travel to North Carolina together. But either the telegram failed to reach Alexander or he decided other tasks were more pressing. Instead of heading for North Carolina, he boarded a train for meetings in Boston. After the Englishman learned what happened at Kitty Hawk that fall, and recalled the bungled connection, he blamed Chanute and never forgave him.

  GEORGE SPRATT APPEARED in camp on October 23. The extra hands were welcome, for Dan Tate had left the Wrights’ employ in a wage dispute. Even on his good days, Tate failed to meet the Wrights’ standards for industry, and “whenever we set him at any work about the building, he would do so much damage with his awkwardness that we found it more profitable to let him sit around.” Even so, the brothers had granted Tate’s demand of a guaranteed weekly wage of seven dollars, nearly twice the going rate in Kitty Hawk. But when Will asked him to fetch oak stumps for a fire, he refused the assignment as unreasonable, “took his hat and left for home.”

  So the brothers hauled their own wood—more and more of it as the calendar advanced. They never had stayed so late in the year, and some days it was “so cold that we could scarcely work on the machine.” They improvised a stove from a carbide can, and Will began to take to his bed with five blankets, two comforters, and a hot water jug.

  They assembled the upper wing—“the prettiest we have ever made,” Orville thought—then the lower, then the forward rudder, the tail, and a pair of skids. On November 1, Orv predicted, “The new machine will be ready for trial some time this week.” They decided to go straight to a powered trial, without testing the machine as a glider.

  The next day they began to attach the engine to the airframe and to attach uprights to hold the propellers. With one brother aboard, the machine would weigh a little more than seven hundred pounds.

  Until now the construction had proceeded smoothly. But in a test on November 5, a misfiring engine conspired with loose propellers and loose sprockets to make a disaster. The propeller shafts tore loose from their mountings and twisted. For metal-working, the Wrights had no choice but to send the shafts back to Charlie Taylor. George Spratt, seeing a flight delay of many days and unable to stay away from his wife and farm any longer, departed the same day, carrying the damaged shafts with him for shipment from Norfolk to Dayton.

  Spratt’s route of departure took him through the village of Manteo on Roanoke Island. Here he ran into Chanute, just arriving. They had a frank talk. Spratt believed it was dangerous to try the machine with an engine before testing it as a glider, and he expressed “apprehensions of disaster.” In a follow-up letter, Spratt said: “I do not believe their machine will ‘pick up’ from the ground and if launched free I am very fearful for the operator.”

  Chanute was worried about the Wrights. Without the propeller shafts, there would be no powered flight for many days, and Chanute said he couldn’t stay that long. For his benefit the brothers labored up the slopes to make a few more glides in the 1902 machine. But the wood had grown dry and rickety in the heat of the shed, and they decided the glider was no longer safe. For most of their friend’s stay the weather remained so bad the three men did little but sit close to the stove and talk.

  Chanute questioned the brothers closely about the mathematical calculations they had used in building their engine, and he didn’t care for what they told him. Engineers usually allowed for a 20 percent loss of an engine’s power in the friction of transmission chains and sprockets, he said. Yet the Wrights had built in a safety margin of only 5 percent. This worried the brothers. Unable to work because of the missing shafts, “We had lots of time for thinking, and the more we thought, the harder our machine got to running and the less the power of the engine became . . .” “We are now quite in doubt as to whether the engine will be able to pull [the flyer] at all with the present gears,” Orv told Milton and Kate.

  They were less impressed when Chanute tried to buck them up, saying, not for the first time, that the brothers’ expertise in operating their machines counted more heavily in their favor than the machines themselves. “We are of just the reverse opinion,” Orv remarked. They estimated their odds of success at no more than even.

  It grew colder. The sky turned winter white. Chanute left the camp on November 12.

  Concerned about Chanute’s warning, the Wrights devised a new mechanical test. The results confirmed their own earlier predictions of the engine’s efficiency, and they breathed easier. Orv told Milton and Kate of Chanute’s worries, but that “he nevertheless had more hope of our machine going tha
n any of the others. He seems to think we are pursued by a blind fate from which we are unable to escape.”

  AFTER THE GREAT AERODROME fell nose first into the Potomac on October 7, Manly told the reporters—and Langley, by telegram—that it had failed to fly because it was “too heavy in front.” He quickly changed his mind, but it was too late. The press had been waiting endlessly for a trial with little faith in its success, and the Smithsonian men from the secretary down had treated them like uninvited guests at an exclusive party. It was a deadly combination, for the reporters and their editors now unleashed a fusillade, saying the disaster discredited Langley’s entire project and raised questions about his worthiness to hold his high post, if not his sanity. “Dismal if not altogether unexpected failure is the outcome of Professor Langley’s elaborate and expensive experiment in aerial navigation,” one of them reported. The “total wreck” of the secretary’s aerodrome “demonstrated not only its complete inability to fly, but the impossibility of alighting without self-destruction, even could it be so perfected as to make short flights.” The Washington Post’s man called it “a crushing blow to his theory . . . The aeroplane . . . was too frail for the great strain put upon it, its wings were too feeble to sustain the weight put upon them, and its motor and propellers were incapable of doing what the inventor hoped they would.” The Post’s editorial page said “any stout boy of fifteen toughening winters could have skimmed an oyster shell much farther, and that without months of expensive preparation or . . . government fleets, appliances and retinues.”

  The Chicago Tribune was a little kinder: “Notwithstanding the outcome of the experiment, which, of course, everyone anticipated, it is impossible not to admire the patience of Prof. Langley and the pluck of Prof. Manley [sic]. . . . The accomplishment is still a long ways off, but apparently just as marvelous and difficult problems have been settled. We may all sail through the ether yet.”

  Langley asked his own questions and drew quite different conclusions. After closer examination of the wreckage, Manly had concluded—and several trusted eyewitnesses agreed—“that the front portion of the machine had caught on the launching car.” That meant, Langley said, that “the machine . . . had never been free in the air,” and thus no flight test had occurred at all, but only an experiment that ended before it had begun.

  He issued a statement, saying his faith in ultimate success “is in no way affected by this accident, which is one of the large chapter of accidents that beset the initial stages of experiments so novel as the present ones. . . .

  “Whether the experiments will be continued this year or not has not yet been determined.”

  The money was all but exhausted. The cost of keeping a tugboat constantly at the ready for many weeks had been a terrible drain on Langley’s remaining monies. And on the night after the crash, a major storm wrecked the steam launch, raft, and rowboats that had hovered around the houseboat. Replacements became yet another line in Langley’s starved budget.

  Yet there had to be another test, a true test. Contrary to the reporters, who had seen “an unrecognizable mass” lifted from the water, only the front wings, rudder, and tail had been damaged, and Manly had an extra rudder, tail, and set of wings ready to go at the South Shed. The engine was fine. Manly estimated it would take him only a few weeks to get ready. The weather was dangerous, but there was one advantage to working so late in the year: There would be fewer boats on the Potomac. That meant they could run a test much closer to home. They selected a spot just below the Washington Navy Yard, off Arsenal Point, where the Potomac and the Anacostia meet. It was twenty blocks south of the Castle.

  Manly made only one change to ensure that the mishap of October 7 would not be repeated. He removed one small lug from a metal rod that projected out from a guy post.

  ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 19, the Wright brothers emerged to find ice on the ponds around the camp. They huddled inside all day, trying to keep warm and stewing over the long wait for the new propeller shafts. At noon the next day a friend from Kitty Hawk arrived in camp with groceries and the new shafts. But to their mounting disbelief, they could not get the chain sprockets locked securely on the shafts, nor would the magneto provide enough spark. They gave up and went to bed. “Day closes in deep gloom.”

  In the morning one of them had a new idea and reached for the container of Arnstein’s hard cement. At home, they used this not only to fasten bicycle tires to rims but to “fix anything from a stop watch to a thrashing machine.” “We heated the shafts and sprockets, melted cement into the threads, and screwed them together again. The sprockets stayed fast.”

  The weather grew still worse, too stormy and windy to take the machine out. They fiddled indoors, making a gadget that would gather data on the duration, air speed, and number of propeller revolutions for each flight.

  Then, during an indoor test of the engine on November 28, one of the new propeller shafts cracked.

  They may have seen or heard about press reports that Langley was going to try again before Christmas. Certainly the prospect of returning to Dayton without a single test of their powered machine would have seemed worse than a couple more weeks in the cold. So they decided that Orville would travel back to Dayton, where he and Charlie Taylor would supervise the manufacture of new shafts of solid steel, not of tubes. Will waited alone.

  IN WASHINGTON, the great aerodrome was repaired and ready. Every day Langley and Manly hoped for the wind to die. On the evening of December 6 they thought the next day might be all right. But overnight it grew colder, and in the morning there was ice along the riverbanks.

  On the morning of Tuesday, December 8, Langley participated in the annual meeting of the Smithsonian regents. He informed them that a contract had been signed with the architectural firm of Hornblower and Marshall for the design of a grand new building for the National Museum. He discussed concerns—raised by Alexander Graham Bell and other regents—that he had overstepped his authority in appointing a new head of the Bureau of Ethnology. And he listened as Bell renewed his call to move the remains of James Smithson, the original English benefactor of the Institution, from the British cemetery in Genoa, Italy, to a tomb at the Smithsonian Castle.

  At lunchtime, Langley was notified that “a dead calm” had descended on the Potomac. He directed Richard Rathbun to notify the War Department that a flight might be tried. Manly had to rush around to line up a tugboat. Langley came down to the point at two-thirty with Richard Rathbun and Cyrus Adler. Hundreds of spectators already had gathered. Langley waited on a wharf with his colleagues and the official representatives of the War Department. Several more cold hours passed as Manly and the crew went through the laborious job of attaching the wings and rudder to the frame. By the time everything was ready, the light was fading and the wind had become “exceedingly gusty.”

  Langley and Manly looked out over a choppy gray river dotted with chunks of floating ice. The secretary apparently left the decision to his aviator. “It seemed almost disastrous to attempt an experiment,” Manly said. Yet, “it was practically a case of ‘now or never.’” Their money was gone. There was no way to keep the operation going until the spring. So he “decided to make the test immediately so that the long-hoped-for-success, which seemed so certain, could be finally achieved.” In an ambulance boat, a crew had blankets at the ready, and “a black bottle without a label.” Langley moved to the tugboat to watch.

  The engine was running very well—the best ever, according to McDonald, the chief machinist. Manly, wearing a canvas jacket lined with buoyant cork, climbed into his seat, the propeller blades whirling a few inches from his head. Manly signaled to Reed, who tripped the catapult. The aerodrome leaped forward and skimmed down the sixty-foot track.

  As the machine sped along the launchway, Reed thought the tail dropped and dragged.

  Just before leaving the track, Manly felt “an extreme swaying motion immediately followed by a tremendous jerk which caused the machine to quiver all over.”


  “THE WHOLE REAR OF THE WINGS AND RUDDER WERE COMPLETELY DESTROYED.”

  The aerodrome’s final test, December 8, 1903

  Witnesses saw “the whole rear of the wings and rudder being completely destroyed as the machine shot upward at a rapidly increasing angle.” To some, the aerodrome even appeared to break in two before it left the track. The enormous wings apparently could not withstand their sudden introduction to the forces of flight. They crumpled as soon as they were asked to fly.

  Langley, on the tugboat, “was not far enough forward to see certainly what happened.”

  To bring the nose down, Manly swung the wheel that operated the Pénaud tail. But “this had absolutely no effect.”

  An instant later the machine was vertical, the nose pointing straight up. For a moment it hung in the air, its 730 pounds counterbalanced by the propellers’ upward thrust. A photographer from The Washington Star caught the machine from a distance at just this instant. The image, enlarged, shows the rear wings already crumpled, the front wings beginning to contort. The frame, contrary to witnesses, does not appear to be broken, but only the wings. At dead center, unaffected by the wreckage around it, still driving the propellers, is the circular form of the Manly-Balzer engine.

  Then the wind struck the exposed underside of the wings with full force, driving the aerodrome backward toward the houseboat and down to the water sixty feet below, with Charles Manly pinned underneath.

  After several “most intense moments,” Manly disentangled himself from the machine’s framework and swam out from under the aerodrome, the houseboat, and a sheet of floating ice.

  Manly was bundled in blankets and given a dose from the black bottle. He went inside the houseboat to change his clothes. When he came out, he learned that the tugboat crew had gotten a line around the nose of the upside-down aerodrome. When they hauled it forward, the angle of the wings caused the machine to descend all the way to bottom of the river, where it lodged in the soft mud.