To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  ORVILLE WRIGHT, carrying the new propeller shafts, read the news about Langley on the train from Dayton to North Carolina.

  It took less than a day to install the new shafts. With Dan Tate still observing his boycott, the brothers made an arrangement with the crew at the lifesaving station. They would raise a flag when they needed a hand with a trial of the machine. But on the first day the machine was ready, no flag appeared. The wind was too slack for a start from level ground—a requirement, they felt, for a true powered flight. They practiced running the machine along the track.

  The next day was Sunday. Their reading was interrupted only by the visit of A. D. Etheridge, a member of the lifesaving crew, who brought his wife and children to look at the machine.

  On Monday, December 14, the Wrights hoisted the signal flag. The breeze blew at a listless five miles per hour, but they were impatient for action and decided to run the machine down a slope. They laid a sixty-foot wooden launch rail. The aeroplane’s skids would rest atop a small, one-wheeled truck that would roll down the rail at the urging of the engine and propellers. A man at either wingtip would keep the machine balanced as it rolled. If all went as planned, it would lift off the truck and fly.

  Five men trudged over from the lifesaving station. A couple of small boys came, too, but they ran for home when the engine roared to life.

  Together the men trundled the machine up the sand hill on its creaky truck and maneuvered it into position on the sixty-foot rail. One of the brothers tossed a coin. Will won the toss. He fit himself into the hip cradle, ducking under the chain that led from the engine, on the operator’s right side, to the propeller shaft on his left. The machine began to roll before Orville, at the right wingtip, was ready to steady it properly. It raced downhill for thirty-five or forty feet and lifted away from the rail, but the elevator was cocked at too sharp an angle, and the machine rose abruptly to fifteen feet, stalled, and thunked into the sand after only three seconds in the air, breaking a few parts. But Will was encouraged. “The power is ample, and but for a trifling error due to lack of experience with this machine and this method of starting the machine would undoubtedly have flown beautifully. There is now no question of final success.”

  IN DAYTON, Bishop Wright was preparing copies of a description of the machine for distribution to the press. On the fifteenth he received a telegram from Wilbur which read in part, “SUCCESS ASSURED KEEP QUIET.”

  REPAIRS TOOK A DAY and a half. Late on the afternoon of the sixteenth, with the machine finally ready for another try, the brothers felt the wind fade. As they waited on the beach, tinkering and still hopeful, a man they had not met before approached the camp. He introduced himself as W. C. Brinkley, of Manteo, a salvager. He looked the machine over for a moment or two, then asked what it was. A flying machine, he was told. He asked if they intended to fly. Indeed they did, the brothers said, given “a suitable wind.” Brinkley looked for another moment or two at the thing, then remarked, with an obvious desire to be courteous, that it certainly looked as if it would fly—“with a suitable wind,” meaning, apparently, one of hurricane strength. But if Brinkley was skeptical, he was also curious, and he asked if he might stay the night to see a trial the next day. The Wrights said he was welcome.

  Overnight a northerly wind put a new skim of ice on the puddles and ponds. In the morning the brothers bided their time for a couple of hours. Then, convinced the wind would stay strong for a bit, they raised the flag to signal the lifesavers and went to work. It was so cold they had to run in and out of the shed to warm their hands. Brinkley was with them, and from the station came A. D. Etheridge, W. S. Dough, John Daniels, and a kid from Nags Head named Johnny Moore. One or two lifesavers who had stayed at the station kept an eye on the activities from a distance, through telescopes.

  The wind was blowing at about twenty-five miles per hour, strong enough for a launch on level ground. The sixty-foot launching track was relaid to face north-northeast, directly into the wind. The machine was hauled into its starting position. To the south, the hump of the big hill loomed over their shoulders. Ahead, the machine faced a blank, barren plain.

  By the coin toss of two days before, it was now Orville’s turn. The brothers padded through the sand around and around the machine, checking things. They cranked the engine and let it run for a few minutes. The camera was put in position, and the brothers asked John Daniels to pull the cord to the shutter if the machine got into the air. Daniels remembered that the brothers “walked off from us and stood close together . . . , talking low to each other for some time,” then shook hands. Will called to the men not to look so downcast, but to give Orville a little applause. They tried, Daniels said, but there was “no heart in it.”

  At 10:35 Orville inched into the cradle. He released the rope. With Will jogging alongside, his left hand on the right wingtip, the craft lumbered forward, reaching a speed of seven or eight miles per hour.

  Between the two spruce skids and the little one-wheeled truck running along the rail, a space appeared. An inch became a foot, two feet, three feet. A long shadow ran across the sand.

  John Daniels squeezed a rubber bulb to open the shutter of the camera.

  Will, still jogging, saw the machine rise abruptly to a height of about ten feet, then dip just as suddenly, then rise again.

  Spread-eagled on the wing, Orville struggled to keep the elevator controls level. The craft dipped a second time, a wing tilted, and he was back on the ground, 120 feet from where he had left the launch rail.

  A couple of parts were cracked, so an hour passed before Will could take the next turn. He bettered Orville’s distance by about fifty feet. Orville, on his second try, went a little farther still, and kept the machine steadier than in his first try. A gust came at him from the side, lifting the tip. When he twisted the wings to bring the tip back to level, he found the lateral controls strikingly responsive, much better than on the glider. But the forward rudder was too sensitive. The machine bobbed and dipped in an “exceedingly erratic” path.

  At noon Will tried again, and again came the bobbing and dipping. But somehow he found the proper angle for the forward rudder, and the men at the launch rail realized he was not going to come back to the ground right away. The machine was leaving them far behind—two hundred, four hundred, six hundred feet, the noise of the engine fading, the wings on an even keel.

  He was flying.

  The machine approached a hummock in the plain. Will moved to adjust the forward rudder “and suddenly darted into the ground.” He had gone 852 feet, a sixth of a mile, in fifty-nine seconds. The rudder frame was cracked but otherwise the machine was fine, as was the operator.

  This fourth flight had been by far the most impressive, the fulfillment of their hope for sustained, powered flight. But they also realized that Orville’s brief first try could be characterized in words that applied to no previous effort by any experimenter. Orville himself, who took excruciating care in later years to express their history in precise terms, fashioned a description of what the first trial of the day had achieved. It was “a flight very modest compared with that of birds,” he said, “but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started.”

  That wasn’t an exciting or inspiring way of saying that two human beings had learned how to fly. But it was the way the Wrights thought about things. Hyperbole about events of this day would come from others—but not for years. The magnitude of what they had done could be appreciated only by those who fully understood the steps they had taken and the problems they had solved through four years of work. That included the two of them and no one else in the world. They had flown, barely. But they were utterly alone in their comprehension of what that really meant.

  THE OFFICIAL COST of Langley’s enterprise now approached $70,000. The Wri
ghts figured up the total cost of their experiments of 1900 through 1903, including train and boat fare to and from the Outer Banks, at a little under one thousand dollars.

  Interlude

  “WHAT THEY WANTED WAS NOT SO MUCH SECRECY AS PEACE.”

  The brothers at Huffman Prairie, Ohio, April 1904

  ON THE AFTERNOON of December 17, 1903, the wind snatched up the flyer and hurled it into a splintering somersault. John Daniels, trying to save it, got tangled in the uprights and wires and was shaken up and bruised for his trouble. The machine had made its final flight.

  When the brothers were sure Daniels was all right, they stowed the wreckage, then walked the four miles to the weather station, the closest place where they could send a telegram. By coincidence, the man on duty was John Dosher, who had answered Will’s first letter to the Outer Banks. Orville dictated the message. Thanks to Dosher’s spelling, and someone’s error about the duration of the fourth flight (it was fifty-nine seconds, not fifty-seven), the message went out this way:

  SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL AGAINST TWENTY ONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL WITH ENGINE POWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTY ONE MILES LONGEST 57 SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME CHRISTMAS. OREVELLE WRIGHT

  At the weather station in Norfolk forty miles to the north, James Gray translated the dots and dashes into words, then tapped a return message: Would it be all right if he shared the news with a friend at the Norfolk newspaper?

  “POSITIVELY NO,” the brothers replied.

  But Gray chose to ignore the answer. By dinnertime, a reporter and an editor at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot were rushing to put together a story for the next morning’s edition. Unable to get further information from the Wrights themselves, they borrowed some facts from earlier accounts of the gliders, acquired a few new ones about the day’s flights—apparently through a telegraphed exchange with one or two of the Kitty Hawk witnessess—and filled in the gaps with audacious guesswork. Keville Glennan, the city editor, ordered a banner headline spread across the front page: “FLYING MACHINE SOARS 3 MILES IN TEETH OF HIGH WIND OVER SAND HILLS AND WAVES AT KITTY HAWK ON CAROLINA COAST.”

  AT 5:30 THAT AFTERNOON, at 7 Hawthorn, Carrie Kayler answered the Western Union man’s ring. She carried the telegram upstairs to the bishop’s study and returned to the kitchen. He came down smiling. “Well, they’ve made a flight,” he announced. Kate happened to come through the door at just that moment. They rejoiced to learn that the boys would be “HOME CHRISTMAS.” And they obeyed the instruction to “INFORM PRESS.” Kate ran the telegram over to Lorin, who—after his supper—crossed the Miami to the newspaper offices downtown.

  At the Dayton Journal, Lorin spoke to city editor Frank Tunison, who doubled as the Associated Press’s representative in Dayton. Tunison was tired of flying machines. Claims like this one found their way into newspaper offices month after month, and each was much like the last. He looked down at the black teletype.

  “FIFTY-SEVEN SECONDS,” he repeated. “If it were fifty-seven minutes it might be worth mentioning.”

  So the Journal carried no item on December 18. Editors at the Dayton Daily News were either more credulous than Tunison or more in need of local copy that night. They carried an accurate six-inch item on page 8, based on the telegram to Bishop Wright, though it ran under the misleading headline “DAYTON BOYS EMULATE GREAT SANTOS-DUMONT.”

  Kate had sent her own telegram to Octave Chanute on the evening of the seventeenth: “BOYS REPORT FOUR SUCCESSFUL FLIGHTS TODAY . . . LONGEST FLIGHT FIFTY-SEVEN SECONDS.” One can imagine the engineer’s surprise when he opened the Chicago Tribune of Sunday, December 20, to see a detailed drawing of the Wright machine featuring a horizontal, six-bladed propeller like a helicopter’s below the lower wing, presumably to push the craft off the ground. The Tribune’s version was echoed in The New York Times, which said the Wright machine carried “a propeller working on a perpendicular shaft to raise or lower the craft, and another working on a horizontal shaft to send it forward.”

  The phantom propeller made several appearances in the handful of U.S. newspapers that carried items about the “The Latest Flying Machine,” as a Boston paper put it, over the next several days. The articles were rewrites of the Norfolk men’s quick work. Readers learned that a “canvas fan” steered the craft; that it was launched from a track that ran down a slope; that it flew for three miles with a peak altitude of sixty feet; that Orville had made the longest flight; that Wilbur had made the longest flight; that “a small crowd of fisher folk and coast guards . . . followed beneath it, with exclamations of wonder”; and that Orville, upon landing, shouted, “Eureka!”

  Back in Dayton, the brothers read the newspapers and were appalled. They tried to set matters right by issuing a new statement to the Associated Press. Will took a scolding tone that was hardly likely to win newsmen’s sympathies. Their private telegram had been “dishonestly communicated” to newsmen, he said, leading to the dissemination of “a fictitious story incorrect in almost every detail,” then of “fakes pure and simple.” Beyond that, he offered only the precise facts of the four flights—speeds, heights, distances, durations, and wind velocities, with an emphasis on the final flight of fifty-nine—not fifty-seven—seconds.

  He allowed himself one flourish. He said he and his brother had wanted to know if the machine had enough power to fly, enough strength to land safely, “and sufficient capacity of control to make flight safe in boisterous winds, as well as in calm air. When these points had been definitely established, we at once packed our goods and returned home, knowing that the age of the flying machine had come at last.”

  Few papers had printed the original, error-ridden reports. Fewer still now printed the truth. Like Frank Tunison, editors undoubtedly thought this sounded much like many other flying-machine claims, all of which had turned out to be unfounded. The only American widely credited with a real chance of flying—Langley—had just failed spectacularly. And how could this pair of unknowns claim to have inaugurated “the age of the flying machine” when Alberto Santos-Dumont already had done so with his gas-bags?

  A handful of people knew the difference. Just after Christmas, the Wrights received a letter from Augustus Herring, their old, unlamented campmate from 1902. It was a galling attempt at blackmail. Herring said he had built his own biplane machine with a gasoline engine. It was so similar to the Wrights’ that “it seems more than probable that our work is going to result in interference suits in the patent office, and a loss in value of the work owing to there being competition.” He had just been offered cash for “all rights I might have to interference suits” against the Wrights. He had turned the offer down, he said, since litigation would only hurt both parties, and “there will be enough money to be made . . . to satisfy us all”—if the Wrights would agree to “joining forces and acting as one party in order to get best terms, broadest patent claims, and to avoid future litigation.” He already was talking to two foreign governments, he said, and he would settle for only a one-third interest.

  Will told Chanute about Herring’s letter. Even at Kitty Hawk in 1902, he said, the brothers had “felt certain that he [Herring] was making a frenzied attempt to mount a motor on a copy of our 1902 glider and thus anticipate us. . . . But that he would have the effrontery to write us such a letter, after his other schemes of rascality had failed, was really a little more than we expected. We shall make no answer at all.”

  Will found a good patent attorney. In the middle of January 1904, he took the interurban trolley twenty miles northeast of Dayton, to Springfield, Ohio. There he had a long talk with Henry Toulmin, who had been recommended by friends. Toulmin advised Will not to worry about Herring’s threat. He said he would prepare a new application for a patent—on the 1902 machine, with its perfected apparatus of control, not the 1903 machine, which the Wrights now began to call the “flyer,” to distinguish it from its glider ancestors. And he apparently confirmed Will’s inclination to say nothing more about th
e machine to anyone until a convincing public demonstration could be made.

  The brothers made a critical decision. They would push their bicycle business to the side, at least for the time being, and concentrate all their energies on flight. They began to build a new flyer. Frank Tunison had said they would deserve to be noticed if they could fly for fifty-seven minutes, not fifty-seven seconds. They accepted the challenge.

  IT HAD BEEN NEARLY DARK when Secretary Langley’s aerodrome took its second plunge into the Potomac on December 8, and the secretary left the scene in time to dine at home. He invited his friend Cyrus Adler, the Smithsonian librarian, to join him. They drank excellent wine, smoked Langley’s fine but very mild cigars, and referred not once to the failed experiment. Instead, Adler recalled, they discussed fairy tales and other matters of mutual intellectual interest. The secretary “seemed in perfectly good humor and quite philosophical.”

  When Langley and Manly saw the photograph of the collapsing aerodrome in The Washington Star, they embraced the notion that this second accident, like the first in October, could be blamed on the launching mechanism, not the aerodrome itself. It became an article of faith with them that the aerodrome’s failure was attributable solely to a bracket attached to a steel pin one inch long and one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. If this tiny implement had remained true, Manly said, then “certain it is that . . . success would have crowned the efforts of Mr. Langley, who above all men deserved success in this field of work, which his labors had so greatly enriched.” Yet their funds were exhausted, the river nearly frozen. No more trials were possible that winter. But if they could secure more money, they might look forward to a new flying season and ultimate vindication.

  When Manly saw reports of the flights of December 17 at Kitty Hawk, he was sure someone was exaggerating. He checked with Chanute, who reassured him that “the press accounts I have seen are all inaccurate.” Chanute relayed the contents of the telegram he had received from Katharine Wright—four powered flights against a wind of twenty-one miles per hour, the longest just under a minute.