To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  IN THE FERVENTLY PATRIOTIC Third French Republic, there was no Col. Capper to vouch for the Wrights’ character or to argue that they were men to be taken in deadly earnest. Instead, a deep and frantic skepticism was taking hold.

  Immediately after the Kitty Hawk flights, Ernest Archdeacon had envisioned catching and passing the Wrights quickly and easily. First he or some other Frenchman would master the Americans’ gliding technology. Then, they would leap ahead by taking advantage of France’s commanding lead in light automotive engines. So, early in 1904, Archdeacon commissioned a hasty replica of the 1902 Wright glider, based on descriptions and drawings supplied by Octave Chanute. Archdeacon believed it was “exactly copied” from the American machine. But Chanute, as usual, had provided more smoke than light. In fact, Archdeacon’s version was smaller, had greater wing curvature, and lacked any device for balance and steering. Piloted by Gabriel Voisin in April 1904, it flew only twenty meters.

  A month later, the engineer Robert Esnault-Pelterie tested his own “exact copy” of the Wright glider, this one with wing-warping. It, too, was a failure, and Esnault-Pelterie promptly pronounced wing-warping dangerous.

  In March 1905, Archdeacon hitched another glider of the “type de Wright” to an automobile and towed it into the air. It crashed immediately.

  Yet to Archdeacon and Esnault-Pelterie—and many other French enthusiasts—the performances of these “exact copies” were cause for something like celebration. The Wrights’ reported results could not be replicated; therefore, they were liars, and the field remained open to the French!

  In a lecture in January 1905, Esnault-Pelterie told the Aéro-Club that his machine had been “exactly like that of the American experimenters” (except for “some questions of construction and detail”); that “the disposition of the controls was exactly that indicated by the Americans.” Yet he quickly “proved that no suitable experiment could be attempted with this machine.”

  Archdeacon drew the obvious conclusion in a letter to the Wrights themselves. Chanute once called Archdeacon “a genial enthusiast whose only fault was that he talked too much.” This was certainly one such case. With a patronizing sneer, he dared the Wrights to invite him to “risk a voyage to America to see your apparatus, if I am permitted to see it and to see it operate—unless you yourselves think well of coming to France to show us that which you know how to do.”

  The results which you have already obtained, if I am to believe the accounts rendered by yourselves and published in different French newspapers, are absolutely remarkable; so remarkable that they even create in my country a certain incredulity.

  That incredulity results from two reasons: First, from the long time which has elapsed without new results since your memorable experiments of December, 1903; and on the other hand from the mystery [with] which . . . you surround yourselves to give you time for securing your patents.

  On that point, I have been a little astonished; in the sense that for my part, I do not believe in patents; and that, on the other hand, if you really have in your apparatus any novel devices you have taken a long time in getting the said patents.

  Archdeacon concluded with his nose higher still. “If you are our masters in aviation, we certainly are the masters in the matter of light motors. . . . You can find motors with us weighing two kilogrammes per horse power, which you certainly do not have with you.” And he challenged them to compete for the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize: fifty thousand francs for the first flight of a kilometer in a closed circle.

  In Dayton, the Wrights found this both hilarious and revealing. Such a missive from a man who clearly could not fly showed them precisely how far behind the French were. If Archdeacon did not believe they had flown, it meant he understood very little about gliding as the true path toward powered flight.

  “Mr. Archdeacon will find more compliments than information in our answer to his letter,” Will told Chanute, “as we are more ready to congratulate him upon the interest in aviation he has succeeded in arousing in France, than to show our machines and methods.” As for the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize, he said they might get around to it later, “when our other arrangements will permit.”

  “They are evidently learning that the first steps in aviation are much more difficult than the beginnings of dirigible ballooning, and are skeptical of what others are reported to have done in that line. It is not surprising. They have much to learn.”

  The Wrights were keeping a close eye on developments in France. They subscribed to L’Aerophile (which Orville translated) and saw clippings from other papers. So far, they saw nothing to make them think their lead was in danger. They did worry that Frenchmen would be hurt, though their reading tended to confirm their father’s bias against the French as a group. When the aero enthusiast Alexandre Goupil took a potshot at Chanute in print, Will called the gesture “little and contemptible. It displays gratitude for [Chanute’s] kindness in a truly French manner.” Certainly they had no intention of offering helpful advice. One reason for closely guarding their secrets, Will told Chanute, was “to give the French ample time to finish and test any discoveries of the secrets of flying which any Frenchmen might possess, and thus shut them off afterward from setting up a claim that everything in our machine was already known in France.”

  They did not care for the increasingly common hints “that in France the Americans are not to be believed upon their mere word.” Privately, Will said the brothers regarded “all such intimations with great amusement and satisfaction.” He did not mean it in a friendly way.

  AS THE BROTHERS SOUGHT to perfect the control of their flyer in the air, their father regained control of his church, and the Wright family put to rest the trouble that had hung over them for more than thirty years.

  The General Conference of the Church of the United Brethren (Old Constitution) was to be held in the town of Caledonia, Michigan, 330 miles north of Dayton, in the middle of May. The meeting would decide Milton’s fate once and for all. Wilbur set aside his work for a week to accompany his father, and his tract on the Keiter struggle was distributed to the delegates. It may have helped, but Milton’s assiduous campaign of letter-writing already had won a majority in his favor, and he knew it. His foes charged that he “dominated the conference with an iron hand equal to that of any political despot.” Still, debate was heated. On the third day, Bishop Wright’s supporters moved that his expulsion from the Church be declared null and void. The vote in his favor was overwhelming. Milton immediately declared his intention to retire at the close of the conference.

  Back at home, Will told Chanute: “It was the decisive battle in the contest of which you have heretofore heard us speak. We won a complete victory; turned every one of the rascals out of office, and put friends of my father in their places. It will be a relief to have that matter off my mind hereafter.” As for Millard Fillmore Keiter, he and a few supporters broke away from the Brethren and attracted followers in several states. The followers reversed course when Keiter was found to have embezzled two thousand dollars from one of his supporters and was arrested for land fraud.

  The Wright brothers had seen the vindication not only of their beloved father, but of his life’s method, as well—to grasp the nettle, no matter how difficult, and not let go. There is a parallel to the brothers’ success in aeronautics.

  Samuel Langley perceived the problem of balance for twenty years, but held back from wrestling with it. He hoped to circumvent or at least postpone the inevitable confrontation by the application of sheer power. The Wrights perceived the same problem, seized it immediately, and never let go until they solved it, which they now proceeded to do, once and for all, in the late summer and early fall of 1905. As ever, the solution had little to do with their engine and everything to do with their mechanisms of balance. “The best dividends on the labor invested,” they said, “have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.”

  CHARLES MANLY, however, refused to give up. Staying on as Lang
ley’s aide in aerodromics, he declared himself determined to renew the trials, “if not immediately, at the earliest time possible.” He ensured that all the necessary equipment—tools, engines, the launching car and derrick—was safely stored, ready for new uses at any time. Rather than sell the great houseboat, he scouted the Potomac riverfront for a suitable place to moor it indefinitely. He oversaw the careful repair and storage of the aerodrome itself. He considered alterations in design and strategy, concluding the wings should be superposed and trials made over land.

  And he worked on his chief’s fallen spirits. “I take this occasion,” Manly told Langley in June 1904, six months after the disastrous test the previous December, “to again repeat that I have full confidence in the ability of the machine to fly if given a fair trial, that I think the expense of giving it a fair trial over the land will not exceed ten thousand dollars, and that I am determined that in some way or other a fair trial and the success it deserves must be had.” Others echoed Manly. Octave Chanute, never reluctant to back more than one horse in a race, believed for many months that the War Department could be persuaded to pay for new trials, for “to do otherwise would be to confess that the Board of Ordnance did not know what it was about in providing funds.”

  But Langley had had enough. As soon as he learned his appeal to the War Department had been rejected, he began to gather the wastebooks and diaries and letters that recorded his twenty years of aeronautical experiments. He did not intend to seek out new paths to explore, but to compile a history. It was over.

  He maintained his busy schedule of social engagements, often seeing such luminaries as the Bells, Secretary of State John Hay, even the president and Mrs. Roosevelt. His most intimate friendships meant more to him than ever. Eliza Orne White, an old acquaintance, encountered him one day probably about this time and “thought how changed he was, how old, and gray.” Yet just a week later, when Mrs. White happened to see Langley again at the home of the popular writer Edward Everett Hale, she watched as the secretary practically bounded up the Hales’ steps and, “with his face positively illuminated,” announce that Hale had just invited him for an extended visit that summer—“and that if he ‘really meant’ it, he was coming.” Mrs. White said: “I never saw so complete a transformation in anyone; the years seemed to have dropped from him, and the old man of a week before was the embodiment of life and joy.”

  In March 1905, Charles Manly, “with very great regret,” left the Smithsonian to begin a career as a consulting engineer in New York. Thanking Langley for “the many personal kindnesses which you have shown me,” Manly, now nearly thirty years old, restated his belief “that the work can be brought to a successful completion. . . .”

  While you have chided me for my optimism, yet I think that if you will review the records or your earlier work with the aerodromes, you will agree with me that it was only optimism and a determination to overcome apparently insurmountable difficulties, which enabled you to achieve the most noteworthy results which you have done in the field of aerodromics.

  While the aerodrome itself has been judged a failure by the general public, who are dependent on garbled newspaper reports for their information, yet the data, and the information on what not to do, that has been obtained is certainly most valuable, and I feel very certain that were it possible to continue the work, the success which it rightly deserves would be achieved. At the same time whether the work is ever completed or not, the very great thing which you have done in having made it respectable and safe to be reckoned as a believer in the possibility of flying machines, certainly deserves the highest praise, and this I think is recognized even by the misinformed public.

  The houseboat was sold. The Army requested the return of items it had loaned to the Smithsonian, including four ladders, six pairs of oars, and fifteen feet of firehose. There was no request for the great aerodrome.

  THREE MONTHS LATER, on Saturday, June 3, 1905, N. W. Dorsey, a Smithsonian clerk, came to Richard Rathbun and told the assistant secretary that the Institution’s account at the Treasury Department had been reported as overdrawn. Rathbun sent Dorsey to find William Karr, the Smithsonian treasurer, and alert him to the problem. Dorsey found Karr at home, too drunk to say anything intelligible.

  First thing Monday, Karr, now sober, said there must have been a mistake at the Treasury. He would see that it was corrected. The next day, Dorsey and a colleague sought out Cyrus Adler and told him something was gravely wrong in Karr’s office. Adler went and found Rathbun. Together they went to Langley, and “a hasty examination of certain papers showed that there might be a discrepancy in the Smithsonian Institution account of something over $40,000.”

  The Institution’s attorney was summoned while Rathbun borrowed the secretary’s carriage and went looking for Karr. A search of the treasurer’s favorite haunts led back to his home, not far from Langley’s, some twenty blocks north of the White House. A friend who was already there came to the door and told Rathbun that Karr was threatening suicide. After some parleying, Karr agreed to speak with Rathbun. The two men sat in Karr’s parlor. He was calm but still speaking of suicide, “as he could not stand the humiliation.” He handed over the keys to his office safe and desk, saying it was “all up” and that “he would soon be beyond any investigation.”

  Rathbun said it appeared that forty-five thousand dollars was missing. Karr said, “It is nearer sixty thousand.” He explained that at first he had meant to pay the money back, “but getting deeper and deeper into it, he saw there was no hope.” The assistant secretary asked how long the embezzlement had been going on. Karr said fifteen or twenty years; he could not remember precisely.

  It could not have been twenty years, for Karr had been appointed clerk in charge of disbursements only seventeen years earlier, six weeks before Langley was named secretary. Some were led to the inescapable suspicion that Secretary Langley’s preoccupation with the pursuit of flight had given William Karr a golden opportunity.

  Langley informed the regents he would accept no further salary so long as he served as secretary.

  • • •

  IF KITTY HAWK IN 1903 had been “too sandy and too far from machine shops,” then Huffman Prairie in 1904 had proven “too small and too public. We have thought some of hunting a prairie location in the West.” But any field in Kansas or Nebraska that was lonesome enough for the Wrights would lie as far from a good machine shop as the camp at Kill Devil Hills. In the end, they returned to Huffman Prairie for the experiments they planned for the 1905 season.

  Once again they had a new machine. Only the engine survived from 1904. The craft was more imposing than its predecessors. The horizontal rudder reached farther out in front of the wings than it had in the 1904 model, and the vertical tail stretched out farther in the rear. The wings stood higher above the skids, and the construction was stronger and heavier, to prevent time-consuming breakages. To the uprights of the horizontal rudder in front, the brothers attached two new vertical vanes in the shape of half-circles. They hoped these “blinkers” or “blinders”—named after the horses’ eyewear, which they resembled—would prevent the sideways sliding that had vexed them at unpredictable moments the summer before. Finally, they detached the control of the vertical tail from the wing-warping controls. The pilot would now control three elements independently—wing-warping with the hip cradle; the forward rudder with one hand lever; the tail with another hand lever.

  In June and July 1905 they made only nine flights. None was promising, and Orville’s attempt of July 14 ended in a frighteningly sudden plunge to the ground nose first. He “was thrown violently out through the broken top surface but suffered no injury at all.”

  Charlie Taylor came to the field most days. Sometimes they were helped by William Werthner, a colleague of Kate’s from Steele High, who would help to re-lay the launch rail or to steady a wing during launchings. “The good humor of Wilbur, after a spill out of the machine, or a break somewhere, or a stubborn motor, was always reass
uring,” Werthner said later. “Their patient perseverance, their calm faith in ultimate success, their mutual consideration of each other, might have been considered phenomenal in any but men who were well born and well reared.”

  Heavy rains flooded the prairie. The brothers added still more heft to the horizontal rudder, increasing its surface area more than half again and extending it to nearly twelve feet in front of the wings. Outside the shed, they had to jump from hummock to hummock to keep their feet dry.

  It was the last week of August before the field dried out. The new horizontal rudder took some getting used to—“a very comical performance,” Will said of Orville’s first try—but then, suddenly, things were much better. As they had hoped, the changes reduced the front rudder’s hypersensitivity. The sharp bobbing and dipping leveled out, and the frightening darts to the ground were curtailed. On September 7, Will chased a flock of birds in two circles of the field. The next day Orville flew the first figure 8. They altered the shape of the propellers, which improved their performance still more.

  “Our experiments have been progressing quite satisfactorily, and we are rapidly acquiring skill in the new methods of operating the machine,” Will told Chanute. “We may soon attempt trips beyond the confines of the field.” They thought better of that idea. But they decided they were indeed ready to see just how far they could fly.

  On Tuesday, September 26, they brought their father with them on the interurban trolley. Will went up and began to circle the field, again and again and again. They lost count of the times; they thought it was sixteen. He glided to the ground only when the gas tank ran dry. He had been up for nearly twenty minutes and covered roughly eleven miles, beating their previous record by a factor of three.