To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  On December 1 Orville matched Will’s four-circle flight.

  Yet they still were not really in control of the flyer. Too often, the machine continued its infuriating tendency to bob up and down, despite their best efforts to fight the horizontal rudder for mastery. Of some forty flights after Root watched them on September 20, only three surpassed the distance Will made that day, and seven flights ended in injuries to the machine. Of the five flights that Will recorded in early December, all were less than one hundred meters long and two ended in crunching accidents. They quit on the ninth of December.

  Just before Christmas, Will wrote to Amos Root, telling him he was free to publish his account whenever he wished. He did so in his issue of January 1, 1905. As always, Root introduced his essay with a scriptural text, this one from the Old Testament Book of Numbers, “What hath God wrought?”

  “Dear friends,” the little man began, “I have a wonderful story to tell you—a story that, in some respects, outrivals the Arabian Nights fables.”

  Beyond the subscribers to Gleanings in Bee Culture, no one took notice. Even Root’s readers were not uniformly impressed. They objected to Root’s characterization of the Wrights’ experiments as ground-breaking and historic, citing the flights of Santos-Dumont and many others. Root wrote to the editors of Scientific American, offering his account and giving permission to reprint it. In earlier years, the editors had published several of Root’s submissions. This one they rejected.

  Chapter Nine

  “The Clean Air of the Heavens”

  “THE GRANDEST SIGHT OF MY LIFE”

  Wilbur flying at Huffman Prairie, November 1904

  IN 1899 AND 1900, Wilbur Wright had pursued the problem of flight as a diversion, a hobby, a sport, with only a distant glimpse of the possibility of fortune and fame. His brother had joined in for the fun of it. In 1901 and 1902 the hobby became a hermetic scientific quest. Orville joined in in earnest, and all the brothers cared for was to solve a mystery that obsessed them. In 1903 the quest continued, though with the sense now that they stood on the brink of a historic achievement. In 1904, their singlemindedness encountered complications. If they were to fulfill the promise of their infant success in December 1903, they would have to make their problem the sole focus of all their working hours. That would require them to abandon their livelihood, and thus somehow to make their living from their invention.

  What they wanted most of all was to continue their pursuit of the science of flight. They had known no better days than the autumn of 1901, when they had devoted endless hours to study, theory, and experiment with their wind tunnel, or the autumn of 1902, when they had tested the fruits of their research at Kitty Hawk. “[Will] and I could hardly wait for morning to come to get at something that interested us,” Orville said later. “That’s happiness.” But full-time research would require financial independence.

  To transform their science into business success, they had to sell something to someone. One possibility was to sell the spectacle of flight—that is, to stage exhibitions and charge the public for admission. This they were willing to consider, but a life of exhibitions—“to be montebanks in the montebank game,” as Will put it later—was hardly their style, and such a life would leave little time for science. Another option was to sell the pure achievement of flight—that is, to win cash prizes like the one offered at St. Louis. This they were willing to try for, if the conditions suited them. Certainly a lucrative prize here and there could boost them along toward their goal.

  The least appealing prospect was to manufacture aeroplanes and sell them to the public, as an automobile maker sold automobiles. Was there a market? Probably, at least among a few wealthy sportsmen. But to succeed at this, they likely would need to defend their patent in lengthy and draining legal battles. Neither brother wanted to spend his days running a business. They had found their life’s work. They were explorers, scientists, and engineers. The idea of returning to manufacturing and sales, with stakes far higher and pressures much greater than any they had known in the bicycle business, left them cold.

  Toward wealth for its own sake they felt just as indifferent. Both brothers possessed brains and shrewdness enough to prosper in any field they might choose. Instead, their temperaments and longings had pushed them on a path toward the unknown—never the choice of people who wish to pile up a great fortune. Now they wanted money, but only as a means toward a different end. Money would grant them freedom to experiment further. “Perhaps we could go into the manufacture of these flyers and make a fortune,” Will told a reporter a little later, “but that would involve a lot of work for us, and that is precisely what we are determined to avoid. We want to get enough out of the sale of the first flyer to make us independent of work, so that we shall have leisure to pursue our investigations without having to be constantly pressed for funds or hampered by the necessity of devoting our time to the control of a great manufacturing business.”

  Only one sort of customer might offer them this freedom while sparing them the rigors of business-building and patent fights:

  Nation-states.

  • • •

  IN 1904 THE BROTHERS HAD seldom flown much higher than their shed. But they stayed low only to stay safe. Their machine could ascend to any height the pilot wished, and they had glimpsed the extraordinary vistas that would open before a pilot’s eyes when he ventured near the clouds. The practical uses of such a long-distance view had been obvious at least since Napoleon’s day, when the French had constructed the first military balloons for scouting and signaling. A flying machine with infinitely more mobility than a balloon would be all the more valuable.

  Pondering the implications, the Wrights came to believe that a few flying machines could render an army virtually invulnerable to surprise attack. Thus their invention “would make further wars practically impossible,” Orville said, since “no country would enter into war with another of equal size when it knew that it would have to win by simply wearing out its enemy.” To the sons of Milton Wright, who believed America to be God’s instrument in the perfection of mankind and the coming of the millennium, it was no great stretch to imagine their machine might play a role in the banishing of war. Chanute encouraged the hope. “A fast flying machine will render the enemy’s disposition of forces so easy of observation, and its directing minds so exposed to destruction, that nations may incline more and more to universal peace.”

  Of course, this was the long view. The Wrights were well aware that flying machines would likely drop explosives on their journey to the millennium, and they were not pacifists enough to let that prospect keep them from selling the machine to soldiers. “ We stand ready,” Will told Chanute, “to furnish a practical machine for use in war at once.”

  THE FIRST MILITARY MAN to take the Wrights seriously was Brevet Lieutenant Colonel John Edward Capper, commander of the British Army’s Balloon Section and perhaps His Majesty’s most knowledgeable expert on aeronautics. Just past forty, Capper was known to be “a scientific soldier,” a capable administrator, a strict and able field commander, and a passionate advocate for the founding of a full-fledged Air Arm. Capper had first learned of the Wrights from Patrick Alexander, the British flight enthusiast who had visited Dayton at the end of 1902. In the fall of 1904, on a trip to America chiefly to see the aeronautical exhibitions at St. Louis, Capper took the advice of Alexander and Chanute to swing through Dayton to meet the Wrights himself.

  While in St. Louis, Capper developed a keen skepticism about American claims. “It is of no use whatever pointing anything out to an ordinary American; they are all so damned certain they know everything and so absolutely ignorant of the theory of aeronautics that they only resent it.” Before leaving St. Louis, the Englishman spoke with a reporter about the Wrights and expressed “grave doubts concerning the veracity of even the comparatively modest results they were claiming.”

  Yet only a few days later, the same reporter ran into the colonel in New York and found him
“positively enthusiastic” about the Ohioans. Capper had not seen the machine fly. Of the machine itself he had seen only the engine. He had done nothing more than share breakfast with Wilbur Wright and look at some photographs. Yet Capper came away entirely confident that the brothers had done what they said.

  The Wrights invariably struck people this way. If it had been an act, one might call it “the Wright treatment.” But it was no act. It was merely the impression made by habits of expression and behavior that had developed in the home of Milton Wright. In print, the brothers’ claims sometimes looked astonishing and implausible. But in person, the men themselves never seemed to be claiming more than they could prove. They did not say what they could do, only what they had done. There was no grandstanding or strutting. They barely spoke of themselves at all. They spoke only of the machine, and with the air of a proud but strict father who does not want his talented child to get a swelled head. “We call our invention ‘the Flyer,’” Orville said once, “which is merely a simple name, as we believe more in practical results than in names. The thing will fly as well under any name, so this is not of any importance.” Newcomers found them courteous, reserved, self-effacing, practical, and unusually careful in their choice of words, with a hint now and then of ironic humor. One who met them in 1905 thought Orville had “a face more of a poet than inventor or promoter,” while the elder brother was “even quieter and less demonstrative than the younger. He looked the scholar and recluse.” They were “very modest in alluding to the marvels they have accomplished—looking more to the renown and glory that will surely come to them as the solvers of the problem of mechanical flight, than any possible pecuniary reward.”

  With Wilbur especially, something in his gaze and bearing whispered of genius and inspired absolute confidence, even with total strangers. A British acquaintance said, “One could not help being impressed by his absolute honesty, sincerity and self control, as well as by his obvious intellectual powers. . . . It was impossible to evade the thought that he was a man apart.”

  In his detailed report, Colonel Capper told his superiors the Wrights “have at least made far greater strides in the evolution of the flying machine than any of their predecessors. “I do not think they are likely to claim more than they can perform.”

  WILL HAD TOLD CAPPER that he and Orville were not quite ready to do business. But just two months later, in January 1905, the brothers made their first approaches to two governments—the American and the British.

  On January 3, Will told his story to Dayton’s Republican congressman, Robert Nevin, who offered to help. Nevin asked Will to write him a formal letter, which he would then pass to William Howard Taft, President Roosevelt’s secretary of war; then Nevin could help to arrange a meeting. Will wrote that letter—which summarized the experiments and asked Nevin “to ascertain whether this is a subject of interest to our own government”—and another letter to Colonel Capper, saying the brothers were ready to offer a deal to the British, too, if the British were interested.

  The timing of these approaches was bound up with the Wrights’ concerns about privacy and patents. They believed they needed at least one more season to bring their invention to a state of practical perfection. But with their application for a patent not yet answered, they worried about witnesses. Better to turn the secret over now, win their financial reward, and continue their work in official privacy, far from the eyes of competitors and reporters, than to risk more exhibitions out on Huffman Prairie. The time required to perfect the machine and to train military men in its operation, plus “the increasing difficulty of securing the necessary privacy for further experiment,” made them think they should, as they told Capper, “bring the matter before military authorities for their consideration.” The advantage to the purchaser would be substantial, Will promised: “There is no question but that a government in possession of such a machine as we can now furnish and the scientific and practical knowledge and instruction we are in a position to impart, could secure a lead of several years over governments which waited to buy perfected machines.”

  Until now, the Wrights had had to depend on no one but themselves and their own employee, Charlie Taylor. At this point, for the first time, they needed someone else. The brothers held a powerful bias in favor of self-reliance. What happened next only seemed to vindicate that view.

  Congressman Nevin, as promised, passed the Wrights’ letter to the War Department. But the congressman proceeded to get sick, and so could not apply the personal touch that might have secured a meeting between the War Department and the Wrights—the sort of meeting in which Will seldom failed to impress his interlocutors. No doubt to cover his own credibility in a city where “Langley’s Folly” was still a fresh memory, Nevin endorsed the Wrights in terms that fell far short of enthusiasm.

  I have been [so] skeptical [he told Secretary Taft] as to the practicability and value of any so-called “Flying machine” or “air ship” that I did not give much heed to the request made . . . by the gentlemen whose letter I attach hereto, until I was convinced by others who had seen their experiments . . . that there was really something to their ideas. I do not know whether you, or the proper office of the government to whom this matter will be referred, will care to take it up or not, but. . . . I am well satisfied they have at least succeeded in inventing a machine worthy of investigation.

  Without Nevin’s personal intercession, Taft’s staff simply passed the letter along to the appropriate office—that is, to the supporters of Secretary Langley, the Board of Ordnance and Fortification.

  In the thirteen months since the great aerodrome had made the BOF a laughingstock, nothing had happened to dispose its members any more kindly toward the inventors of flying machines. They glanced over the letter from Dayton and whipped out their form response—sent to Nevin, not the Wrights.

  As many requests have been made for financial assistance in the development of designs for flying-machines, the Board has found it necessary to decline to make allotments for the experimental development of devices for mechanical flight, and has determined that, before suggestions with that object in view will be considered, the device must have been brought to the stage of practical operation without expense to the United States. It appears from the letter of Messrs. Wilbur and Orville Wright that their machine has not yet been brought to the stage of practical operation, but as soon as it shall have been perfected, this Board would be pleased to receive further representations from them in regard to it.

  It need not have ended there. That it did—for the time being—must be blamed on the stiff-necked anger of Milton Wright’s sons when anyone doubted their good word. Obviously, a bit of clarification was needed. The Wrights were not asking for an “allotment for experimental development.” They were offering a product for sale, a product that was close, at least, to “the stage of practical operation.” A little more cajoling from Nevin, plus a few photographs, could have made both of these facts quite clear, and a productive meeting might well have followed. Instead, the Wrights chose to read the letter as no more than an insulting “flat turndown.” They turned immediately to the Europeans—a move that caused Chanute to fire off a fatherly note of concern to Dayton.

  Will had no apologies to make, no second thoughts, and no intention of applying any high-pressure sales tactics. On the contrary, he thought Washington owed the apology. He wrote Chanute:

  Our consciences are clear. . . . It is no pleasant thought to us that any foreign country should take from America any share of the glory of having conquered the flying problem, but we feel that we have done our full share toward making this an American invention, and if it is sent abroad for further development the responsibility does not rest upon us. We have taken pains to see that “Opportunity” gave a good clear knock on the War Department door. It has for years been our business practice to sell to those who wished to buy, instead of trying to force goods upon people who did not want them. If the American Government has decided to spend no
more money on flying machines till their practical use has been demonstrated in actual service abroad, we are sorry, but we cannot reasonably object. They are the judges.

  The Wrights’ reaction was not quite as peremptory as it looked, for this was not the first time the War Department had spurned them. In December 1903, two rich brothers in Boston, Samuel and Godfrey Lowell Cabot, read news accounts of the first powered flights and took them seriously. They whipped off one letter of congratulations to Dayton and a second letter to their U.S. senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, one of President Roosevelt’s oldest and closest friends. Citing the news stories, Godfrey Cabot told the senator, a kinsman, that “this may fairly be said to mark the beginning of successful flight through the air by men unaided by balloons. It has occurred to me that it would be eminently desirable for the United States Government to interest itself in this invention with a view to utilizing it for war-like purposes.” The senator passed Cabot’s letter to the War Department, where it disappeared into oblivion.

  In London, Colonel Capper’s personal assurances induced his superiors to take the Wrights’ claims at face value. But the result was the same as in Washington—no deal. The brothers’ letter passed up the chain of command, and correspondence ensued. The Wrights’ price looked awfully high—twenty-five thousand pounds for one machine. More information was needed. The War Office directed its military attaché in Washington, Colonel Hubert Foster, to go to Dayton and ask for a demonstration. But Foster was assigned not just to Washington but also to Mexico City, and that was where he had scheduled himself to spend the spring and summer of 1905. He would not see any correspondence about the Wright brothers until November. Officials told the Wrights they would hear from Foster later; then they let the matter ride.