by James Tobin
On Christmas Day, at his family’s home in Lexington, Virginia, Manly jotted a soothing note to Langley. He told his chief what Chanute had said about the Wrights. Of course, Manly conceded, even the actuality “marks quite an advance. . . . Yet until the Wrights do much better than this, I think we may safely contend that the upward trend of the wind was a large factor in enabling them to accomplish the short flight.” Manly missed the implication of Chanute’s plain statement that the flights of December 17 had been “from level,” not on the slope of a dune, the only place at Kitty Hawk where the wind had an “upward trend.”
Then he said something that revealed the terrible gap between the Wrights’ conception of the flight problem and the one to which he and Langley still clung. “To advance 10 miles per hour against a 21 mile wind,” the young engineer said, “was quite a different thing” than “to fly in a calm at the rate of 31 miles per hour”—a reference to the aerodrome’s capacity for speed. After all, he pointed out, “the buzzard soars indefinitely in a 21 mile wind but can’t do much when there is no wind.”
Manly still was thinking of that superb engine. It possessed enough power to propel the aerodrome at a great speed. Therefore it must be the magical force that Langley had imagined all these years. The two were trapped inside an utter misconception of the problem they were trying to solve. It still seemed better to them to be able to fly in a calm than to be able to fly in the wind—even though “the wind usually blows.” In fact, the aerodrome was structually incapable of sustaining speed through the air, calm or not. Even if it could have flown, it could not be balanced in a wind. It probably could not be steered in either a wind or a calm. And it had no means of returning to Earth without endangering the life of its pilot.
But Langley and Manly sensed no trap. To their friends and colleagues, they spoke of a tragic mishap—an experiment gone awry, an endeavor interrupted. The aerodrome had not been tried and found defective; it simply had not been properly tried. It did not fly, but it was capable of flight. Among Langley loyalists, this argument seemed plausible, and they kept it alive. The man who became, for a time, its most prominent spokesman was perhaps the one man in the world best suited to guarantee it a measure of credibility—Langley’s best friend, Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell for the rest of his life would contend not only that Langley’s 1896 models had “demonstrated to the world the practicability of mechanical flight,” but that the great aerodrome itself “was a perfectly good flying machine, and . . . the first flying machine ever constructed capable of carrying a man . . . There was nothing the matter with it. It stuck in the launching ways, and the public were no more justified in supposing that it could not fly, than they would be were they to suppose that because a ship stuck in the launching ways it would not float.”
In the meantime, Bell had flying plans of his own. He was working on a new invention. It was based on a complete departure from the ideas of Langley and the Wrights alike. Perhaps the Wrights had flown; perhaps they had not—for a time Bell found it hard to believe that such a feat could escape broad coverage in the press. But whatever they had done, it was no match for the image in his mind—the image of a man-made butterfly, hovering safely and stably in midair, oblivious to the wind. If he could turn the image into reality, the Wright brothers would sink back into obscurity.
COMMENTATORS COULD NOT resist the spectacle of the high-minded “professor” coming to smash. Langley’s debacle brought to life ancient folk images of the brilliant but foolish intellectual (this one with his head all but literally in the clouds)—how he seeks to rise above the dictates of common sense and receives his just comeuppance. The Chicago Tribune’s editorialist was among the most scathing:
It seems as if it had been sufficiently demonstrated that Prof. Langley’s aerodrome will do nearly everything except what the professor intended it should do, thus once more illustrating the total depravity of inanimate things. It will shoot through space a distance governed by the ordinary laws of momentum and initial energy. It can point its nose upward and then turn a neat somersault. It can then turn its nose downward and dive like a duck . . . the principal difference being that the duck comes up without ruffling a feather, while the aerodrome stays down in the mud and is dragged up piece by piece. It can do such tricks as these, but it cannot fly. That seems to be settled as well as the likelihood of any further congressional appropriation for the costly experiments.
“HE WOULD NOT BE CONSOLED.”
Clifford Berryman of The Washington Post draws “Langley’s Folly”
Not finished with Langley, the Tribune asserted that “even if a machine could be made to fly, no one would wish to fly with it,” then signed off with the usual theological declaration: “Nature has fitted us with appliances for getting short distances through the water, also with appliances for getting over the ground short and long distances, but no trace of a wing can be found or anything that indicates nature intended us to navigate the air. There is little possibility of that until we become angels.”
Soon politicians began to have their say, with intentions more serious than one day’s sport. Several used Langley’s failure as a weapon with which to attack excessive federal spending. “You can tell Langley for me,” one congressman told a reporter, “that the only thing he ever made fly was government money.”
Despite the onslaught, Langley went back to the Board of Ordnance and Fortification in March 1904 with a plea for more money. The financier Jacob Schiff and other men of wealth had offered to underwrite further experiments. But Langley refused to accept private aid for a project intended solely for the public good. To the board, he insisted the launching mechanism had caused the accident, that “the machine itself is probably well fitted for its purpose,” and that “a cessation of these experiments at this point will be unfortunate.” With another twenty-five thousand dollars, he could construct “a new launching apparatus, which might possibly be used upon the land rather than over the water,” make “some slight change” in the aerodrome, then bring “the experiments . . . to a successful conclusion.”
Langley was not reading the newspapers, friends said, but the BOF’s members were. They acknowledged his assertions and denied his request.
FOR A TIME, Langley bore up pretty well. An old Boston friend said “his patience and rare philosophy in meeting that phase of his career were among the noblest traits of his character.”
The secretary had worked in Washington long enough to know that journalists and politicians are paid to complain loudly and in public, and though he was a poor politician himself, he was enough of one to know there had been little chance of more funding from the War Department. What crumpled his spirit as the months passed was the quiet disdain of his fellow scientists, the only community of equals Langley recognized. Scientists do not conduct their politics as politicians do. Ill will toward Langley, simmering for years, would have been expressed in quiet conversational asides and discreet private letters. John Brashear, his old friend and aide from Pittsburgh, found him one day in a state of despair. The secretary took Brashear’s hand in both of his and said, “Brashear, I’m ruined, my life is a failure.” Langley took from his desk two small pieces of steel. They were the pieces that had fouled the launch, he explained—the sole cause of his downfall. Brashear stood helpless as Langley “cried like a child.” He reminded Langley of his achievements in astronomy, “but he would not be consoled.”
According to Cyrus Adler, a number of scientists undertook a quiet campaign to remove Langley from his post as secretary “on the ground that his mind had given way, that he was endangering the fair name of the Institution by a series of foolhardy experiments which could never result in anything.” Langley’s friend Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, broke this grim news to the secretary one day in his Castle office. At that moment, Adler said, “I shall never forget how Mr. Langley looked. He was a fine looking man and held himself very well. He closed his eyes and said: ‘My yea
rs in Washington have been the happiest of my life; I have enjoyed the work here and the opportunities; I like the place as Secretary of the Smithsonian, but I shall never fight for it. If anybody is going to fight and have it taken away from me, well and good. I shall not lift a finger.’”
He didn’t have to. Behind the scenes, Adler and other friends fought on his behalf and quashed the attempted coup. But Langley was now drained of confidence and energy. In Boston, his aged aunt, Julia Goodrich, perceived his depression.
“Samuel,” she said, “don’t bother about what they are saying about you now. Some day they will erect a monument to you for what you are doing.”
“Aunt Julia,” he replied, “what do I care about a monument, if they would only let me alone now.”
OCTAVE CHANUTE’S RESPONSE to the flights of December 17 depended on whom he was addressing. His letters suggest warring emotions—admiration, pride, pique, and perhaps at least a touch of envy. To the Wrights, at first, he telegraphed that he was “immensely pleased at your success.” But in a letter to Langley, who had asked Chanute for accurate details of the Wrights’ flights, Chanute said the Wrights’ success had been distinctly limited. “As you surmise, the Wrights have not performed what the pesky newspapers credit them with.” They had not flown three miles, but only fifty-nine seconds, and only a few feet off the ground. This was no more than “a bare commencement,” Chanute said—“encouraging,” but very far from the ultimate goal of an aeroplane with automatic stability. “I think that this success brings out but one type of flying machines [sic],” he told Lawrence Hargrave, the Austrialian box-kite experimenter. “There are others which can probably be driven by a light motor.” Perhaps the Wrights were now in the lead, but they had done no more than create a dangerously unstable machine, and the true prize was still up for grabs. He said much the same to Francis Wenham, the aged Englishman who had designed the first wind tunnel many years earlier. The Wrights had achieved something new, to be sure, Chanute told Wenham, but “the uses will be limited.” They had flown, but only in a kind of dangerous gymnastic trick. (As for Langley’s disappointments of the autumn, Chanute signed on to the party line: “I was much distressed at the accidents with your launching gear which prevented you from testing your own machine. If I can be of any use to you as an advisor please command me.”)
In their statement to the Associated Press, the brothers had said: “From the beginning, we have employed entirely new principals [sic] of control; and as all the experiments have been conducted at our own expense without assistance from any individual or institution, we do not feel ready at present to give out any pictures or detailed description of the machine.” The brothers intended that last sentence to mean that since they had “paid the freight” for their experiments, they “stood on quite different ground from Prof. Langley, and were entirely justified in refusing to make our discoveries public property at this time.” But the words “without assistance from any individual” stuck in Chanute’s craw. Thinking of the dozens of letters he had exchanged with Will, he wrote: “In the clipping which you sent me you say: ‘All the experiments have been conducted at our own expense, without assistance from any individual or institution.’—Please write me just what you had in your mind concerning myself when you framed that sentence in that way.”
It was the first unpleasant word that had passed between them, and Will responded to it carefully. They had meant financial assistance, he said. The point was to guard against any suggestion that they owed anyone a full accounting. This was needed, he said, only because of “a somewhat general impression” in the press at home and abroad “that our Kitty Hawk experiments had not been carried on at our own expense, &c.” He restrained any impulse to remind Chanute that he himself was the one who had spread this impression, especially in France.
Chanute let it drop, though he would pick it up again.
His letter to the French experimenter Ferdinand Ferber was strange indeed, coming from a professed friend of the Wrights. Chanute urged Ferber to press on with his own experiments despite the Americans’ success, “for it’s very possible that the Wrights will have an accident and that it will be you who are destined to perfect a flying machine.”
AT A DINNER MEETING of the Aéro-Club de France on February 4, 1904, Victor Tatin, one of the senior enthusiasts and one of the most respected, rose to speak. Because the reports of powered flights in America were so sketchy and contradictory, he said, it made sense to be skeptical. In any case, “The problem cannot be considered as completely solved by the mere fact of someone having flown for less than a minute.” The real glory remained to be claimed, and Frenchmen must claim it.
Must we one day read in history that aviation, born in France, only became successful thanks to the Americans; and that the French only obtained results by slavishly copying them? . . . It is in France that the first journey by a flying machine must be made. We need only the determination. So let us get to work!
EIGHT MILES EAST of the Dayton line, the brothers found a rare open space that was not being farmed. What they wanted was not so much secrecy as peace—the ability to do their work without interruptions and annoyances. Most scientists did their work behind closed doors, but this was not indoor science. The brothers went to the owner, whom they knew—Torrence Huffman, president of the Fourth National Bank of Dayton—and asked if they might rent the property for their experiments. He said they could use it for nothing, as long as they moved his cows and horses out of the way.
They built a shed like the ones at Kitty Hawk, and by the latter part of May they were ready to test their new machine—a slightly heavier and stronger version of the 1903 flyer. They planned a trial and invited family and friends, including Chanute, and reporters from all the Dayton and Cincinnati papers. Chanute was detained in Chicago. Despite rain in the morning, the reporters came out, and Kate and Milton, and Lorin and Netta and the children, and twenty or thirty other friends and neighbors, all of them standing in the wet grass and prickly weeds.
At first there was too much wind, then, quite suddenly, not enough, which was hard to explain to the visitors. And the engine was running poorly. But because people had come a long way, the brothers felt they ought to try. They ran the machine down the hundred-foot launch rail. It slid off the end and bumped to a stop in the soft dirt. The spectators returned to town.
Two days later they prepared to try again but were rained out. By the next day the crowd had dwindled to the bishop and a couple of reporters. With the engine still performing poorly, the machine rose to a height of six or eight feet and flew just thirty feet or so. No one bothered to measure.
The reporters were polite in their brief articles. But they saw no reason to go and watch again. They left the two brothers alone in their field.
Chapter Eight
“What Hath God Wrought?”
“WE MUST LEARN TO ACCOMMODATE OURSELVES TO CIRCUMSTANCES.”
Orville’s sketch of the flying field at Huffman Prairie
WORK WAS THE Wrights’ play. Their progress on the flying machine had been so rapid in part because they seldom stopped working. Even in their time off, they were forever puttering with a fence in the yard or writing letters or running the lathe or developing photographs or making a toy for a niece or a nephew. Even on Sundays, abstaining from work, they were busy. If they were sitting, they were reading, not to relax but to learn.
The summer of 1904 was thus an exercise in repressed energy. They spent much of it on their rear ends.
Hour after hour, they waited on a makeshift bench at the eastern end of their makeshift flying field, listening to the drone of bees, watching the impossible gymnastics of swallows and wrens, and thinking of the dependable Atlantic winds of Kitty Hawk. They kept an eye on the far end of the field, watching for the distant grass to bow in a breeze that might help them get up in the air. If they saw that telltale ripple, they were up and at the machine in a second. But too often the breeze died, and they sank back on their benc
h to wait. Or they sat in the shed watching rain drip from the roof. On many days they could make no attempt to fly at all. The sun baked the still air to eighty-five and ninety degrees, and their shirts and trousers clung to their skin.
A RETURN TO KITTY HAWK had been out of the question. Constant work with a homemade gasoline engine demanded machine tools close at hand, and Charlie Taylor’s expert assistance. That much had been proven the previous fall; there could be no more emergency runs halfway across the country to fix a broken propeller shaft or any of a hundred other parts. And the wind-driven sand would foul their engine. They needed a new place to fly.
Someone in the family mentioned a particular pasture east of town. Probably it was Orville; he knew the place from school field trips he had made as a boy. Dayton teachers still took children there to see one of the last remnants of genuine prairie left in Ohio, a tiny finger of the grasslands that rolled westward across Illinois to the Great Plains. A layer of clay lay close to the surface of the soil, keeping the ground squishy-wet much of the year. Frost heaves made hummocks all across the field. That meant few trees could grow there. The tract had never needed to be cleared.
Two or three months after their return from Kitty Hawk, Will and Orv stepped off the train at a little depot called Simms Station to look around. The pasture lay kitty-corner from the station, across the junction of the Dayton-Springfield Pike and the Yellow Springs Road. It was about a hundred acres in a seven-sided irregular polygon, full of bristly grasses—big and little bluestem, Indian grass, rough dropseed. Trees stood along the western border, forming a bit of a barrier against the prevailing breezes. The interurban rail line ran along the northern border. To the east and south, farmland lay open and flat. A barbed-wire fence ran around the perimeter, confining some cattle and a dozen horses. A few farmhouses stood off in the distance. Here and there a lonely tree stood in the way, and the ground sloped a little toward the east—a disadvantage for flights launched into the generally westerly breeze. Will thought it looked like “a prairie-dog town”. But a heel pressed into the loamy, black soil showed it was unusually soft—not like the dunes at Kitty Hawk, but with enough give to cushion a hard landing. That was one good thing. Better still was the site’s convenience. From West Dayton, they could get there on the train in about forty minutes. It was pretty big and pretty open—and very few such properties close to Dayton were not under tillage. Probably it was the best they could find, and “we must learn to accommodate ourselves to circumstances.”