To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  The owner of the property was Torrence Huffman, president of the Fourth National Bank of Dayton. No one recorded what the brothers said about their intentions when they asked Huffman if they might rent his prairie. If Huffman had read the newspaper stories, he was not much impressed; he told others he thought the Wrights were “fools.”

  The brothers promptly erected a duplicate of their long shed at Kitty Hawk, and by late May the shed housed a new flying machine. In size it was nearly identical to the 1903 flyer, with a wingspan of just over forty feet and a chord of six and a half feet. They flattened the curvature of the wing a little more. The machine had a new engine and a bigger fuel tank, and it was nearly three hundred pounds heavier, with the center of gravity farther forward than in the 1903 machine. Then they made their abortive first attempts to fly before witnesses and realized there was to be no quick leap forward to the perfection of a practical powered aeroplane. That job was to be no easier than making a good glider.

  AT THE WRIGHTS’ SUPPER TABLE, Milton’s battles within the Church continued to dominate conversation. Bishop Wright had refused to recognize the legitimacy of the decision to expel him from the Brethren in 1903, sued the White River Conference for wrongful dismissal, and demanded ten thousand dollar in damages. He continued his round of duties, traveling to each of his conferences and meeting with leaders and clergy, many of whom supported him. Other leaders declared Wright’s actions to be “revolutionary and productive of a state of anarchy.” The editor of the Church’s Christian Conservator, an opponent of Bishop Wright, said the conflict had grown to “fearful proportions.”

  Undeterred, Milton and his backers prepared for a showdown in the next churchwide General Conference, scheduled for the spring of 1905.

  THE BROTHERS WERE EAGER TO FLY, their eyes on the calendar of the St. Louis World’s Fair where flight demonstrations were planned for lighter-than-air craft, and—so hoped the Wrights—their stunning debut. But for weeks neither the weather nor the machine obliged. With neither a slope to run down, nor a steady, strong wind, they had to lay a wooden launch rail some 250 feet long, scything down grass and smoothing out hummocks to make a level path. If the breeze shifted, they had to pull up the track and lay it all over again. In all of June they could make only a few attempts, none of them anywhere near as long as the fourth flight of December 17 at Kitty Hawk. The machine simply would not stay in the air. Unable to find spruce of sufficient length for the machine’s leading-edge spars, they had substituted white pine. Thus, when the flyer did manage to labor through the air for a few yards—always with the same troubling undulations of the December 17 flights—it often returned to earth to the sound of splintering wood. Under any sudden impact the pine spars shattered “like taffy under a hammer blow,” and each crack-up meant days of repairs. “We certainly have been‘Jonahed’ this year,” Will told Chanute. And they were still only a few weeks into their flying season.

  In St. Louis, many were buzzing about Alberto Santos-Dumont’s plan to fly on the Fourth of July. The Brazilian was well aware of the Wrights’ claims to have flown a powered aeroplane, and of their hope to challenge him. Chanute informed the Wrights that Santos-Dumont “told me that he was not afraid of you, as he knows how tedious and slow was the working out of a new machine.” But then came a reason to suspect that Santos-Dumont was not so confident of his own machine. Late one night near the end of June, someone entered his hangar at the exhibition park and slashed his gas-bag. When the police speculated that the great flyer himself might have done the deed to avoid a humiliating defeat, Santos-Dumont stormed off to Paris to make repairs. In July he sent his regrets, saying it was now too late to finish his repairs in time to return and fly by the deadline of October 1.

  Santos-Dumont may have felt no more relieved than Will, who called the incident “a rather strange affair,” though “I think I will suspend judgment a while.” It seemed “the prospect of a race at St. Louis [with Santos-Dumont] is vanishing into thin air.”

  A lighter-than-air airship man from California, Thomas Baldwin, replaced Santos-Dumont as the sensation of the St. Louis show. His California Arrow dirigible astonished the crowd by making a flight in the shape of an S—an impressive demonstration of control.

  FOR MOST OF JULY the brothers bent over the aeroplane, hoping that small adjustments in design might rid the machine of its tendency to bob up and down across the field. To shift the center of gravity backward, they moved the engine, the water tank, and the pilot. When that made little difference, they made more adjustments. On August 6, both of them managed flights of about six hundred feet, but that was still more than two hundred feet short of Will’s best mark at Kitty Hawk. Moving under its own steam, the machine would grind along the rail, finally lifting off when it reached a ground speed of about twenty-three miles per hour. But for the engine’s thrust to overcome the resistance of the air, they needed an air speed—that is, a combination of speed over the ground against the speed of the wind—of twenty-seven or twenty-eight miles per hour. On these somnolent days at the prairie, that was seldom possible. “It is a pity,” Will said, “we cannot trade a few of our calms to Prof. Langley for some of his windy days that used to trouble him so.”

  Even on good days they could manage no more than four flights, and often it was just one or two—a far cry from the triumphant weeks of 1902, when they could soar dozens of times in a single day.

  And they could not stop breaking things. On August 10 Will bounced on the turf and broke the front rudder, then cracked a propeller upon landing. That cost two days for repairs. In the second of four flights on Saturday, August 13, Will finally beat the Kitty Hawk mark with a flight of thirteen hundred feet. But two flights later he broke the rudder again. Three days after that Orville “shot down” and smashed a rudder support, leaving the machine with its tail sticking up toward the sky. On August 23 a sudden gust brought Orv crashing to the dirt. He bruised a hand badly and was “sore all over,” and escaped graver injury only because the spar at the leading edge snapped just before it came down on his back. So long as the machine was skimming the ground, its dipping and bobbing would bring perpetual crack-ups. Somehow they had to gain more speed in the launch, to get free of the ground.

  IN NOVEMBER 1903, a month before the first powered flights at Kitty Hawk, French aero enthusiasts read a new article by Octave Chanute in the respected Revue Générale des Sciences. Entitled “Aviation in America,” the text described the Wright gliders of 1900, 1901, and especially 1902 in some detail. A proper description of wing-warping was omitted at Wilbur Wright’s request; he knew such publication could invalidate future patents in Europe. But the text was secondary. What struck the Frenchmen like a hammer to the forehead were the ten accompanying photographs of the 1902 glider, including two showing Wilbur Wright actually steering the machine in a banking turn to the right. How he accomplished this feat remained mysterious, but there it was, for the first time—evidence that a heavier-than-air machine could be steered in the sky. Otto Lilienthal had kept his balance by shifting his weight, and died in the act. Here was a man controlling a much larger machine by mechanical means. Not a few well-informed Frenchmen understood this photograph portended a new age. If a motor and propellers could be mounted on such a machine, human flight was truly within reach.

  Then, only a month later, the same Frenchmen read fragmentary news reports that the Wrights had made a powered flight of three miles.

  The early misreporting of the events of December 17—particularly the three-mile claim—did lasting harm to the cause of French aviation. Had the report been accurate, it would have been taken far more seriously. A powered flight of 852 feet would have seemed both marvelous and plausible to knowledgeable French enthusiasts. But they knew enough about progress in gliders to know that any claim of a powered flight of three miles had to be hogwash. The question was little clarified by a report in L’Aerophile that Chanute, in response to a query, had cabled back: “Newspaper accounts considerably exaggerated
.” Either the Wrights were bluffeurs, or the American press was unreliable. In January, L’Aerophile published the Wrights’ own statement to the Associated Press, though the editor appended a skeptical note: The account was “marred . . . by several obscurities.” Uncertainty and suspicion remained.

  Still, there were those extraordinary photographs in the Revue Générale des Sciences, showing the airborne Wilbur Wright in his glider, and the accompanying testimony from the respected Chanute. It could not be denied that the Wrights were doing something, and the bewildering combination of fact and fiction sent the Frenchmen of the Aéro-Club into a state of high anxiety.

  Men unwilling to risk their own lives, but with the money and clout to induce younger men to do so, issued calls for action. Ernest Archdeacon conceded that “the results obtained are considerable,” and said “we must hurry if we wish to catch up.” He called for glider competitions to speed the French advance toward powered flyers.

  “Aviation is a French science,” Victor Tatin declared. Accounts of the Wrights’ efforts should be read “with the greatest reserve.” By no means could “the problem . . . be considered as completely solved” by a flight of under a minute. There must be no “slavish copying” of the Americans. “We still have in France some men of genius capable of successfully carrying out such work without putting ourselves in tow of foreigners.”

  In March 1904, Archdeacon and Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, the oil tycoon whose prize had spurred Santos-Dumont to round the Eiffel Tower in a dirigible, announced the offer of a Grand Prix d’Aviation, soon known as the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize—fifty thousand francs to the first man of any nation to fly a powered aeroplane in a complete circle of one kilometer.

  Ferdinand Ferber, the Army officer who had been the first to try to emulate the Wrights by building gliders of his own, mustered a wan hope that the Americans had mounted a motor out of fears that he would beat them to it. He was soon buoyed by the news that “it is not as wonderful as they say,” “not as grand as we thought.” Still, “it nevertheless represents a new fact,” and a provocation. He went back to work on his latest glider with fresh energy. Ferber gave a lecture on gliding in Lyons, where a twenty-four-year-old student of architecture, Gabriel Voisin, approached him afterward and said: “I have understood the method which you teach, and I mean to devote myself to it.” The next day Voisin left for Paris, where he promptly offered his services to Ernest Archdeacon.

  THE CHILDREN OF DAYTON were preparing to return to school in the fall of 1904 when passers by on the Dayton-Springfield Pike noticed a new structure out on Huffman Prairie. It was a simple, narrow pyramid about twenty feet tall—four stout poles leaning together and reinforced halfway up. From the apex hung a stout rope with a weight tied to the end. The other end of the long rope ran through pulleys and out to the far end of the launching rail, through another pulley and back along the rail to the flying machine. The brothers had built a catapult. They would haul the weight to the top of the tower. When the operator was ready, he would release the weight, which would plummet sixteen and a half feet to the ground, pulling the rope and thus yanking the aeroplane forward and into the air with enough speed to give the propellers a fighting chance to sustain the machine in the air.

  With Kate and her friend Melba Silliman watching, the brothers tried the catapult for the first time on September 7, 1904. The wind was barely breathing. With 600 pounds of weight pulling it, the machine whizzed along the rail—nearly 100 yards in nine seconds—but it flew less than 150 feet. The brothers added 200 pounds to the weight and “almost got a start.” They added 200 more pounds. Now Will shot forward and up, and stayed aloft for just over 2,000 feet. After a week of practice, against a little stronger breeze, he doubled that mark. In the next flight, for the first time in nearly a year—since the last flights of the glider at Kitty Hawk in 1903, and for the first time ever in a powered flyer—he shifted his hips in the cradle and warped the wings. The machine leaned into a banking curve. At Kitty Hawk, in the wonderful glider the brothers built in 1902, they had turned to right or left, proving to themselves the machine could be steered. But no turn had been more than a few degrees. This turn did not stop. Will turned and turned until the craft had described a half-circle and the breeze no longer blew in his face but at his back. In just under a minute, he bumped back to the ground, facing in the direction opposite that from which he had begun.

  No reporter was present to see this flight, the first ever to describe a half-circle. Since the Wrights’ embarrassing exhibition at the beginning of the summer, no reporters had returned to the prairie. Where was the story? A hop across a pasture was nothing compared to Santos-Dumont’s grand excursions over Paris. Surely such dirigible balloons held more promise than winged aeroplanes. Had not Langley’s spectacular failures put that question firmly to rest?

  One of the doubters was James M. Cox, the young publisher of the Dayton Daily News, soon to become governor of Ohio and, in 1920, the Democratic nominee for president. Writing some forty years later, Cox recalled: “It is difficult nowadays to understand the incredulity that possessed the public mind.” Dan Kumler, Cox’s Daily News city editor, said in later years: “I guess the truth is that we were just plain dumb.” But that was only how it looked later. At the time, it was no more “dumb” to doubt that a machine was flying in Dayton than to doubt that a flying saucer had landed there. Kumler’s own brother-in-law was married to one of Katharine Wright’s colleagues at Steele High School, where talk of the flying machine was quite common. Kumler heard these reports and discussed them with Cox, his boss. “Frankly,” Cox said, “none of us believed it.”

  Of course, journalists are supposed to check, and checking certainly would not have been hard for Luther Beard, who split his days between his job as managing editor of the Dayton Journal and teaching school in the village of Fairfield, just two miles east of Simms Station. He was always running back and forth on the train, where, occasionally, he would see one Wright or the other. He knew what they were up to. But to Beard it seemed the charitable thing not to press them about it. “I used to chat with them in a friendly way and was always polite to them, because I sort of felt sorry for them,” Beard said later. “They seemed like well-meaning, decent enough young men. Yet there they were, neglecting their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous flying-machine. I had an idea that it must worry their father.”

  The Wrights chatted with Beard just as amiably, and made no effort to provoke his curiosity about their work. Of course, like any thorough newsman, Beard covered himself.

  “If you ever do something unusual,” he told Orville, “be sure and let us know.”

  JUST ABOUT THIS TIME, another man—a man with an outlook on the world quite unlike Luther Beard’s or Frank Tunison’s—took the trouble to find Huffman Prairie and the brothers at work there. He was a tiny man of sixty-four. He drove a new Oldsmobile Runabout automobile and dressed in well-made touring clothes. His movements were quick and nervous, like a small bird’s. More important, he had capacities with which neither Beard nor Tunison were blessed—capacities for seeing a thing for what it really was, for appreciation and imagination, and for wonder. He met the Wright brothers and asked if he might watch what they were doing. They said he might, and over several days they told him a good deal about it.

  He was Amos Ives Root. As a friend said, he was “remarkable not in one way, but in many ways,” with “a many-sided character, if any man ever had one.” He was the leading citizen of Medina, Ohio, a pleasant farm center in the opposite corner of Ohio, near Cleveland. He was wealthy, with vacation homes in Florida and northern Michigan. In his area of expertise—commercial beekeeping, which, in that presynthetic era, produced all the world’s commercial honey—he was acknowledged to be the leading authority in the world, and the A. I. Root Company was the leading firm in the industry. His definitive manual, Bee Culture, had been translated into several languages.

  By the time Amos Root met the Wr
ights, however, beekeeping was largely in his past. His sons ran his company while he devoted himself to his new passions. These, not necessarily in order, were Christian evangelism and social reform, automobiling, journalism, philanthropy, inventing, gardening, and the close observation of man and his machines.

  “HE WAS ALL QUESTIONS.”

  Amos Ives Root

  Born small and sickly on a farm near Medina, Root grew up helping with the family truck garden, not the farm, so he became a master gardener before he reached adulthood. The garden encouraged an intense curiosity about the natural world and about science, and he read a great deal. He was the sort of person who, when he took an interest in a field, was compelled to learn everything there was to know about it. This was especially true of all things mechanical. “I love machinery,” he once wrote, “and have always loved it from a child.” As a teenager in the 1850s, he developed a passionate interest in chemistry, then electricity. At the age of nineteen he toured the Midwest giving electrical demonstrations. He also learned how to manufacture jewelry, whereupon he built a jewelry factory and made a good deal of money. He married a local girl, with whom he raised five children.