by James Tobin
In 1865, at the age of twenty-six, Root took up beekeeping as a hobby. As he gained in expertise, other beekeepers sought his advice. He became the first to devise standardized beekeeping equipment, and by 1880 he was selling to 150,000 customers around the world. Every two weeks he addressed several thousand readers in Gleanings in Bee Culture, a trade journal he founded and edited. It was a small treasure-house of information and advice that went far beyond beekeeping. Topics ranged from “the growing evil of divorce” to the proper method of grafting domestic and wild cherry trees to the effects of “bad air” on the digestive system.
Root was a deliberate contrarian. He liked to be the first to try new machines, even, perhaps especially, if others made fun of him. “No amount of scoffing or ridicule—and he endured it many times—could swerve him from his belief or purpose,” a friend said, “and he went straight to his work without faltering or swerving from the path he had chosen.” Until it began to pay, people in Medina thought Root’s beekeeping was odd. In the 1870s he became the first man in northern Ohio, perhaps in all of Ohio, to own a bicycle. He powered his machinery, including his printing press, with an electrical generator connected to a windmill of his own design. If the wind began to blow hard in the middle of the night, he would rouse his sons to capture the temporary surge in power.
After a long flirtation with the agnosticism of the controversial philosopher Robert Ingersoll, Root became what evangelicals call a professing Christian, and he professed to practically everyone he spoke to, including his employees, who were expected to attend daily prayer meetings on the job. He went about his religion with his congenital zeal, seizing upon all the causes of Christian reform politics. He became a temperance activist, an antitobacco man, and a strict sabbatarian. He was one of the founding benefactors of the Anti-Saloon League and a leader of the Sunday school movement.
All these enthusiasms—gardening, science, beekeeping, technology, Christian reform—were grist for Root’s column in Gleanings in Bee Culture, which by 1904 he had been writing every two weeks for some thirty years. Each article was a lay sermon based on a biblical text. The column ran under the heading “Our Homes” and developed a devoted following. People with no interest in bees took Gleanings simply to read Amos Root. The column was a blend of personal anecdote, useful information, travelogue, news and advice, all delivered to animate Root’s core evangelical message.
One of Root’s pet causes was to persuade fellow Christians to welcome the technological change that was washing over American society—the telephone, electric power, the phonograph, and especially, of late, the automobile. Since buying his Olds Runabout in the spring of 1903, he had devoted roughly equal time to driving it and writing about it.
In 1903 and 1904, most people outside the cities still depended on horses for local transportation, and the problem of automobiles frightening horses was a lively controversy. Farmers tended to regard automobiles as playthings of the rich, and many did not hesitate to roll out whatever Christian artillery they could muster to denounce the new technology. In this context, Root appointed himself the defender of the automobile and took on the task of forging a reconciliation between the new technology and rural Christians. He believed in the gospel of social betterment through technological progress. He often told his readers that technology was as much a gift from God as was the natural world. After a visit to an Oldsmobile factory in 1903, he pronounced the automobile a “wonderful gift to the children of this age from the great Father above.”
Root mentioned the Wrights in his “Our Homes” column of February 14, 1904, telling his readers how he had recaptured the attention of unruly boys in his Sunday school class by describing “two Ohio boys, or young men, rather, [who] have outstripped the world in demonstrating that a flying-machine can be constructed without the use of a balloon.” From the details he cited, several of them inaccurate, it was clear he had read one of the misbegotten accounts of the December flights at Kitty Hawk. Still, he had followed developments in aviation closely enough to recognize the significance of the Wrights’ claims.
Some months later, in July 1904, Root left Medina on a four-hundred-mile automobile trip through central and southwestern Ohio—a trip taken “with the view of studying humanity, and also of considering the question of automobiles on our public roads.” He rolled through some fifteen Ohio towns and cities, including Dayton, and wrote a good deal about the state of the roads, the conflict between cars and horses, and attitudes toward the automobile. Visiting a relative in Xenia, he saw a newspaper story about the flying exhibition planned for the St. Louis World’s Fair. Apparently this reminded him of the preacher’s boys in Dayton, and he determined to find out more.
It’s not clear whether he telephoned or wrote or simply appeared at the door of 7 Hawthorn. But somehow a friendship was begun. Why the Wrights opened up to Amos Root when they were so careful to shut others out remains a puzzle. Possibly they saw him as a future investor, a wealthy man with more than a purely commercial interest in their work, like Octave Chanute himself. More likely they simply responded to Root’s curious charm. He was, after all, a man rather like themselves—intensely curious, fascinated by machines (including the bicycle), and inclined to march against the crowd. He was of a certain type of older man whom the Wrights knew very well—a churchman of the old school—and though they did not trust a churchman simply because he was a churchman, they were comfortable with men of Root’s type. Too, Root was the antithesis of a hurried reporter looking for a superficial scoop, and he already possessed an inkling of the significance of their experiments. Very few people in 1904 knew enough to recognize the significance of a powered machine that could fly without the assistance of a balloon. Root was one who did know. They did not have to make a case; he already was awed by what they were doing.
For all the Wrights’ reticence, we ought to consider how it felt that summer to be unrecognized. They were patient men. Yet even for them, it must have seemed hard, at times, not to crow a little. Amos Root would have been the perfect audience. It is not hard to imagine their feeling a sense of relief, even exhilaration, in telling their news to someone who could appreciate it and wonder at it. Nor is it hard to imagine, given their particular sense of irony, that they relished the prospect of Gleanings in Bee Culture scooping the world.
In any case, Amos Root was the Wrights’ guest at Huffman Prairie on September 20, 1904, when Will planned to attempt the first flight in a complete circle. He would try to fly like a bird from its roost—to go somewhere and return, all through the medium of thin air, without ground or water to offer the inertia and friction that heretofore had been essential to all human locomotion.
FOR MOST OF THAT FLYING SEASON the brothers had been taking turns, as they had at Kitty Hawk. But since Orville’s injury on August 24, Will had been doing all the flying—eight or ten attempts over four weeks, all with the catapult. Charlie Taylor was at the prairie to help.
On his first visit to Huffman Prairie, Amos Root noticed that although the field was in plain view, passers by paid no particular attention. “The few people who occasionally got a glimpse of the experiments evidently considered it only another Darius Green, but I recognized at once they were really scientific explorers who were serving the world in much the same way that Columbus did when he discovered America. . . . Nobody living could give them any advice. It was like exploring a new and unknown domain.” Root was a careful, thorough observer, and he wrote down much of what he saw immediately or soon afterward, combining his account with schoolmasterly explanations derived from his talks with the Wrights themselves. The Wrights had asked him to publish nothing until they finished flying for the season. But he wanted to draft his account while the scenes were fresh in his mind.
He was all questions. Why was the catapult necessary? Why did the operator lie down on the wing? How fast would the machine fly? When the brothers showed him the action of the propellers, which clearly pushed the machine forward, not up, he was puzzled.
Would the same propellers lift the machine if placed horizontally above it? Not at all, the brothers said; in that position the propellers would not lift a quarter of the machine’s weight. Then how, placed vertically, could the propellers possibly keep the machine in the air? “The answer involves a strange point in the wonderful discovery of air navigation. When some large bird or butterfly is soaring with motionless wings, a very little power from behind will keep it moving. Well, if this motion is kept up, a very little incline of the wings will keep it from falling. A little more incline, and a little more push from behind, and the bird or the butterfly, or the machine created by human hands, will gradually rise in the air.” It was an astonishing notion. Root had read more than most people about efforts to build a flying machine. But this was utterly new to him.
Will’s first flight of the day was a thousand meters, the longest yet, but not a full circle. Then Will launched himself again as Root looked on, spellbound.
“The machine is held until ready to start by a sort of trap to be sprung when all is ready; then with a tremendous flapping and snapping of the four-cylinder engine, the huge machine springs aloft.”
The flyer stayed within ten or twelve feet of the ground, unless it was turning. With the Wrights’ tutelage, Root grasped the parallel with bird flight: “If you will watch a large bird when it swings around in a circle you will see its wings are tipped up at an incline. This machine must follow the same rule; and to clear the tip of the inside wing it was found necessary to rise to a height of perhaps 20 or 25 feet.”
Will was down the field and coming back in less than sixty seconds. Root stood with Orville not far from the catapult, directly in the machine’s path. For a moment he felt plain fear. He could not move. “The younger brother bade me move to one side for fear it might come down suddenly; but . . . the sensation that one feels in such a crisis is something hard to describe.” Charlie Taylor told Root he had felt something similar when he first watched the weight of the catapult plunge and the machine rocket forward—“he was shaking from head to foot as if he had a fit of ague.” One’s first sight of a human being in flight was downright unnerving, whether out of fear for the pilot or sheer shock at the sight, or both. Yet Root “said then, and I believe still, it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life.”
He groped for a comparison.
“Imagine a locomotive that has left its track, and is climbing up in the air right toward you—a locomotive without any wheels we will say, but with white wings instead. . . . Well, now imagine this white locomotive, with wings that spread 20 feet each way, coming right toward you with a tremendous flap of its propellers, and you will have something like what I saw.” In fact the 1904 flyer looked nothing at all like a locomotive. Perhaps Root had in mind not so much the flyer’s actual appearance as the complicated emotional response that it provoked. Like a locomotive, the flyer was technological power in motion. Though both machines obeyed their pilots, they could do things their pilots could not do. Men had made them. But they transcended man.
Root found Will’s return to earth almost as enchanting as the flight itself. “When the engine is shut off, the apparatus glides to the ground very quietly, and alights on something much like a pair of light sled-runners, sliding over the grassy surface perhaps a rod or more. Whenever it is necessary to slow up the speed before alighting, you turn the nose [up]. It will then climb right up on the air until the momentum is exhausted, when, by skillful management, it can be dropped as lightly as a feather.”
Root asked Will if he could have flown higher. Yes, he was told, “There was no difficulty whatever in going above the trees or anywhere he chose; but perhaps wisdom would dictate he should have still more experience a little nearer the ground. The machine easily made thirty or forty miles an hour, and this in going only a little more than half a mile straight ahead. No doubt it would get up a greater speed if allowed to do so—perhaps, with the wind, a mile a minute after the first mile. The manager could doubtless go outside of the field and bring it back safely. . . . But no matter how much time it takes, I am sure all the world will commend the policy so far pursued—go slowly and carefully, and avoid any risk that might cause the loss of a human life. This great progressive world can not afford to take the risk of losing the life of either of these two men.”
Root’s appreciation of the automobile was now quite surpassed. If God had been beneficent in providing man with the tools to create a horseless carriage, then His generosity now was beyond reckoning. Root envisioned an extraordinary future. “Everybody is ready to say, ‘Well, what use is it? What good will it do?’ These are questions no man can answer as yet. . . . The time may be near at hand when we shall not need to fuss with good roads nor railway tracks, bridges, etc., at such an enormous expense. With these machines we can bid adieu to all these things. God’s free air, that extends all over the earth, and perhaps miles above us, is our training field. . . .
“When you see one of these graceful crafts sailing over your head, and possibly over your home, as I expect you will in the near future, see if you don’t agree with me that the flying machine is one of God’s most gracious and precious gifts.”
TO AMOS ROOT, the circling maneuver overhead was cause for devotion. To the brothers, it was a fascinating but tricky business, a job of keeping warring aerodynamic forces in balance. Their system of balance and steering—the pilot’s hip cradle, the twisting wingtips, the vertical rudder in back, the horizontal rudder in front—was put fully to the test for the first time.
To initiate a left turn, for example, the pilot shifted his hips slightly to the left. The cradle pulled on various cables, causing the right wingtip to shift to a slightly steeper angle while the left wingtip shifted to a slightly flatter angle. At the same moment, the vertical rudder in back shifted slightly to the left.
The craft began to turn. It was one thing to watch it happen, quite another to put it in words for someone who had never seen it. From the ground, the motion looked natural, organic, all of a piece. Every part of the aeroplane was connected to every other, and they all moved in harmony to produce what seemed to be a very simple maneuver—a turn in the air. Will and Orv held a clear image of the aerodynamics in their minds. But to reduce the process to words was invariably confusing to those who lacked the brothers’ hard-won familiarity with flying.
The shifting wingtips in a left turn, as Will put it years later, “caused the machine to tilt so that the left wing was lower than the right wing, which, of course, in turn, caused the machine to slide somewhat to the left.” Several things were happening. The machine was tipping to the left; thus it began to “slide”—that is, to fall—to the left, just as a sled slides down an icy hill, only this was a sideways slide. The vertical tail in the rear struck the air flat side on, and like a weather vane, tended to twirl the machine around, also to the left. The left wing, with its flatter angle, now enjoyed less lift than the right wing, with its sharper angle. The left wing dipped and slowed, while the right wing rose and accelerated. It was a banking turn, a carefully controlled plunge to one side, an incipient disaster that begins but is never allowed to end. Again, the best comparison is to the turning of a bicycle. The plunge is carefully caught in time and put to work for the operator, who wants not to fall but just to turn. When you saw it happen in the sky, it seemed obvious and natural, because it looked so much like the familiar sight of a bird.
Without seeing the machine, the proponents of “automatic” or “inherent” stability—including Chanute, Langley, and many French enthusiasts—found the Wrights’ theory of control not only hard to grasp but frightening. They were loath to risk a pilot’s life in a machine that depended on that pilot to manage such a tricky combination of forces. Certainly it took practice. But as Will implied, it was no more risky than the safe assumption that a feathered arrow, if dropped on its side, will strike the ground point first.
You had to see it to believe it. Amos Root saw it and believed.
Octave Chanute, for all his intimate correspondence with the brothers, and all his knowledge of aeronautics, visited Dayton that fall only for one day and saw only one meager flight. It was a twenty-four-second, 420-meter hop by Orville that ended in a poor landing—a far less impressive performance than the circle flight Root had witnessed in late September.
Especially in France, Chanute continued to be regarded as the dean of aeronautics. He believed the Wrights’ reports of circle flights, and spoke up for them. Yet he had not seen the thing that instantly rendered the state of the art, as he knew it, archaic. For all concerned—Chanute, the French, and the Wrights—things might have turned out better if Chanute had seen what Amos Root saw.
WITH HANDSHAKES and good wishes and promises to stay in touch, Root departed. Through the rest of September and all of October, Orville made most of the flights. But only once could he match Will’s circuit of the field.
On Tuesday, November 8, the incumbent Theodore Roosevelt won his first full term as president by defeating his Democratic opponent, Judge Alton Parker, in a landslide. The Wrights approved of the president, an eminent bird-watcher and naturalist, and the next day, Will said, “We went out to celebrate Roosevelt’s election by a long flight.” Will flew nearly four times around the field for a distance of nearly three miles—by far their best effort.
His father was watching. So were at least two employees of the Dayton, Springfield and Urbana Railroad. The interurban rumbled to a stop at Simms Station, just across the road, about once every half-hour. The brothers knew the schedule and tried to time flights to avoid been seen. But weather and happenstance sometimes made this impossible. The railroad men and probably some passengers caught sight of the machine in the air and watched.