by James Tobin
After six years, they possessed “a machine of practical utility.”
WITH THE FIRST HINT of autumn in the air, the brothers began to invite guests to Huffman Prairie. Lorin and his wife, Netta, had seen a flight or two. Now they came back with their children. Kate came on October 4, though it was a school day, and saw Orville fly more than twenty miles. Torrence Huffman came again, as did a number of friends and neighbors. Among them were the brothers’ landlord on West Third, Charles Webbert, and his brother, Henry, who was Charlie Taylor’s father-in-law. Bill Weber, a plumber, came; and Ed Ellis, an old friend from the Ten Dayton Boys club who was now assistant auditor of the city of Dayton; Bill Fouts, a druggist and friend of Orville’s, and Fouts’s friend Theodore Waddell, an employee of the U.S. Census Bureau who happened to be in town; and C. S. Billman, secretary of the West Side Building Association, who brought his wife and three-year-old son, Charlie.
It’s not clear how many of these people came simply out of curiosity, and how many were specifically invited. Ellis, for one, was invited. In any case, several proved in time to suit the brothers’ needs precisely—they were respectable, sober citizens whose eyewitness accounts would be taken seriously, yet who knew nothing about aeroplanes, and thus would be unable to give away the technical secrets hidden in the machine.
The flights were now so long that it was impossible to avoid stares from passing trains. Enough talk went around town that reporters began to show up. At one point Will asked William Werthner to stand out at the road and tell any reporters who appeared that cameras were not welcome. Still, the Daily News carried a story on October 5, and it was picked up by the Cincinnati Post. Finally, the patient Luther Beard of the Journal was moved to visit Huffman Prairie, where he learned that his reserved fellow passengers on the interurban had been doing “something unusual” all along.
On that day, Will stayed in the air for nearly forty minutes and flew nearly twenty-five miles.
Then the brothers locked the machine in the shed. They had hoped to make flights for another week or ten days, but they were still waiting for approval of their application for a patent, and “we were frightened at the number of people from Dayton which the flight was beginning to attract . . . ,” Orville said later. “Three [trolley] cars passed us that day during the flight. There were more spectators than ever before. We feared that the next day there would be a crowd perhaps of photographers. We had always taken the greatest care to prevent photographs being taken.” The machine “had proved the principle necessary to prove. It was only the day previous to the last flight that we had perfected the means of maintaining equilibrium whatever winds might be blowing aloft. . . . When that was proved nothing but the principle remained.”
THEIR ABILITY TO CONTROL the aeroplane became rather marvelous. In one of the last flights of the season, the engine became overheated, and Orville had to cut it off while still in the air at the far end of the field. With the engine silent, he glided all the way back to the shed. He came to a stop just outside the door. Ed Ellis was struck by the pilots’ obvious control of the craft. “It looked like a monstrous bird in the air,” he told a reporter soon afterward, “and flew like one, too, its motion being steady and not in the least wobbly. . . . When it alighted it was as gently as the glide of a bird to the ground after its flight and with as little shock.”
The Daily News buttonholed the druggist, Bill Fouts, and found him a bubbling fount of enthusiasm—much to the Wrights’ dismay. “I wouldn’t believe it myself until I saw it,” Fouts said. “I went out to Huffman’s prairie half expecting to see somebody’s neck broken. What I did see was a machine weighing nine hundred pounds soar away like an eagle. When they were about 60 or 70 feet in the air they pointed its nose to a horizontal line and sailed around like a great bird. No wavering. No ducking up and down. It just sailed around that ring as if it had been running in a groove. I told a friend about it that night and he acted as if he thought I had gone daft or joined the liars’ club. I got permission from the Wright boys and next day I took him out with me. He groaned and shook his head when he saw the machine, but when it flew up in the air and began to circle gracefully around like an eagle, his grin turned to a look of amazement.”
Fouts’s friend was Theodore Waddell, the Census man. Waddell was especially struck by the extraordinary means of moving the flyer around on the ground. On the day he was at the prairie, one of the flights ended prematurely at the other end of the field. He asked one of the brothers if he could give a hand in hauling the machine back to the shed. He could come if he wanted, he was told, but he didn’t need to help. As Waddell watched, “They walked down the field to where the ship was sitting, poured the gasoline into the tank, and, starting the engine at slow speed, let the machine lift itself clear of the ground and walked it back to the [shed]. It was about the most uncanny sensation I ever experienced, except the other sensation of seeing that machine with a man aboard flying around in circles over our heads.”
“It was beyond my comprehension,” Charles Webbert said. “I took off my hat and sat down.”
HOWEVER DAZZLED, some witnesses still could not foresee a practical purpose. Torrence Huffman, who watched the long flight over his pasture on October 5, asked Will afterward what the machine would be good for.
He got a single word in reply:
“War.”
THE ACCOUNTS of these long flights of the autumn of 1905 that one would most like to read do not exist. If Kate wrote down what she saw, or anything about her feelings, the evidence does not survive. Bishop Wright was typically laconic. In his diary on the evening of October 5 he wrote simply: “In forenoon, at home writing. In the afternoon I saw Wilbur fly twenty-four miles in thirty-eight minutes and four seconds, one flight.”
The brothers themselves spoke carefully about the sensations of flying. They may have worried that if they reported their experiences too vividly, they might cause thrill-seekers to make reckless attempts to fly. In the coming months, when reporters became desperate to know what this extraordinary new experience was like, they made it a point to answer with maximum understatement—for the fun of it, one suspects, and certainly with an eye toward establishing their bona fides as serious experimenters. “We put many months of study and many more months of practical work on a machine which was mathematically certain to fly, and when we made the test were not disappointed,” one of them, probably Will, told the New York Herald. “The fact that we had to formulate our own principles as well as work out entirely new formulas gave us the keener satisfaction when we found our ideas were sound in every particular. It was not the surprise to us it was to others when our machine fulfilled all of our promises.”
“I am afraid I cannot describe the sensation as I should,” Orville told another reporter, “for flight came slowly, at the beginning in short, gliding flights near the ground, then gradually extending when power was added until I became so accustomed to it that I was at last unconscious of being thrilled.”
“Is it difficult to guide the machine?” he was asked.
“No more difficult than guiding a bicycle. I could teach any young man within three days.”
Occasionally they were more candid, especially with those who shared their obsession. When a reporter asked Will if he had ever gone aloft in a balloon, he said he had not. He doubted it would match the experience of flying a heavier-than-air machine. In the reporter’s paraphrase, he said flight had left him “intoxicated,” and “after flying once there was little inclination to turn to anything else.”
Just before Christmas 1905, in a private letter to the Italian soaring enthusiast Aldo Corazza, Will said: “There is no sport in the world quite equal to that which aviators enjoy while being carried through the air on great white wings. Compared with the motion of a jolting automobile is not flying real poetry?”
The fullest statement about the pleasure of the experience that either of them ever made came from Will a couple of years later, at a time when he was much more e
ager, for strategic reasons, to establish the brothers’ names and accomplishments in the public mind. Clearly, he had thought a good deal about the matter. Writing in Scientific American on the subject of “Flying As a Sport—Its Possibilities,” he said:
There is a sense of exhilaration in flying through the free air, an intensity of enjoyment, which possibly may be due to the satisfaction of an inborn longing transmitted to us from the days when our early ancestors gazed wonderingly at the free flight of birds and contrasted it with their own slow and toilsome progress through the unbroken wilderness. Though methods of travel have been greatly improved in the many centuries preceding our own, men have never ceased to envy the birds and long for the day when they too might rise above the dust or mud of the highways and fly through the clean air of the heavens.
Once above the tree tops, the narrow roads no longer arbitrarily fix the course. The earth is spread out before the eye with a richness of color and beauty of pattern never imagined by those who have gazed at the landscape edgewise only. The view of the ordinary traveler is as inadequate as that of an ant crawling over a magnificent rug. The rich brown of freshly-turned earth, the lighter shades of dry ground, the still lighter browns and yellows of ripening crops, the almost innumerable shades of green produced by grasses and forests, together present a sight whose beauty has been confined to balloonists alone in the past. With the coming of the flyer, the pleasures of ballooning are joined with those of automobiling to form a supreme combination.
ONE DAY THAT FALL, the brothers saw two unfamiliar men walking in the fields nearby. They thought they were hunters, but they came back the next day—one of them with a camera—and asked if they could watch. The brothers said it was all right, but they asked that no photographs be taken. The man carrying the camera deliberately set it on the ground, far to one side. Apparently he did not introduce himself, or used a false name. He asked to look in the shed. The brothers agreed. Was he a newspaperman? they asked. He said no, though he sometimes wrote for publication. As they talked, he used the proper aeronautical terms for various parts of the machine.
Some time later, Orville saw a photograph of the same man in a New York newspaper. It was Charles Manly. The Wrights never suspected him of any bad motive. Apparently he had visited Huffman Prairie simply because he had wanted, at last, to see a machine fly.
AFTER THEY TOLD THE REPORTERS they were through for the season, the brothers, in fact, planned one last outing. They wanted “to put the record above one hour,” and to have Chanute, for the first time, see a really first-rate powered flight. No witness would carry more credibility around the world.
Chanute was all for it. It depended on the weather. On Monday, October 30, the brothers shot a telegram to Chicago: “TRIAL TUESDAY”—Halloween. Chanute caught the train for Dayton that night. But a big storm blew in, and again the brothers’ friend missed his chance.
Chanute would continue to talk and write about the Wright brothers with the air of a patron, a teacher, and an inspirer, for a time. Then, increasingly, his tone would turn critical. Yet he still had not seen them fly with their newfound mastery, banking around the field with the confidence of a hawk. And he still did not understand how they did it.
NEWS OF SPECTACULAR FLIGHTS at Dayton reached aeronautical circles around the world. In France there was little faith in the reports. The Wrights summarized the flights in a letter to Ferdinand Ferber. When he told his Army superiors, they treated him as “a mild lunatic,” since it was ridiculous to think a French artillery captain would know of such an event when the major American newspapers did not.
The Wrights also sent an account to L’Aerophile, which published it. An uproar ensued. Ernest Archdeacon announced that “whatever the respect I feel for the Wrights—whose first experiments without a motor are undeniable and of the greatest interest—it is impossible for me to accept as historical truth the report of their latest tests, which have not been witnessed, and about which they have voluntarily maintained the most complete obscurity,” their reports to Ferber and L’Aerophile notwithstanding. Such experiments, if they had been made, must be tentative at best, leaving the French plenty of opportunity to solve the problem themselves. “Let two or three men of real ability tackle it, and its final solution will only be a question of months, perhaps of days.”
Various newspapers sent correspondents to Ohio to track down the story. Robert Coquelle, of L’Auto, was quickly convinced. “The Wright brothers refuse to show their machine,” he cabled his editor, “but I have interviewed the witnesses, and it is impossible to doubt the success of their experiments.”
IN PARIS, a wealthy American expatriate, balloonist, and Aéro-Club member grew tired of the uncertainty. Frank Lahm sent a cable to his brother-in-law, Henry Weaver, a businessman in Mansfield, Ohio. The cable caught up with Weaver in a hotel room in Chicago. It read: “VERIFY WHAT WRIGHT BROTHERS CLAIM, IF NECESSARY GO TO DAYTON, PROMPT RESPONSE CABLE.” Weaver had no idea what any Wright brothers claimed. Then, vaguely, he recalled news reports of flying-machine experiments in North Carolina. He tracked them down and arranged a meeting with Orville, who “promptly told me he would do all he could to satisfy [Lahm] and me that all he reported as accomplished was the truth and nothing but the truth. His very appearance though would disarm any suspicions to the contrary.”
Orville told Weaver the whole story; took him to Huffman Prairie; introduced him to several witnesses, who confirmed everything; then took him to 7 Hawthorn, where he met Wilbur. Weaver asked if the brothers were married. “As Mr. Wright expressed it,” Weaver told Lahm, “they had not the means to support ‘a wife and a flying machine too.’”
“They told me of their correspondence with Capt. Ferber, who I understand is a member of your Aero Club, and laughed over his assertion that there ‘was not a man in all France who believed they had done what they claimed.’”
Lahm, like Ferber, did believe them. But he was nearly laughed out of the Aéro-Club de France when he said so.
ONE EVENING IN WASHINGTON about this time, a dinner was arranged to provide Samuel Langley with the comradeship and the talk of science that he dearly loved. Among those attending were Alexander Graham Bell, Octave Chanute, the astronomer Simon Newcomb, and Bell’s son-in-law, the botanist David Fairchild. When the conversation turned to aeronautics, Bell got his chance to cross-examine Chanute about the extraordinary claims of the Wright brothers. But the old engineer left no room for debate.
“What evidence have we, Chanute, that the Wrights have flown?” Bell asked.
Chanute replied: “I have seen them do it.”
Many years later, David Fairchild recalled that Chanute’s words sent a thrill though the company. “To hear from Professor Chanute that man had actually flown made Aladdin’s wonderful lamp seem simple child’s play,” Fairchild wrote. “There are few moments in my life which have compared to that in interest and excitement.”
Of course, what Chanute had actually seen the Wrights do and what they now told him they had done were quite different. Chanute did not doubt them. Nor did Bell. But the brothers’ claims, far from dampening Bell’s enthusiasm for the subject, appear only to have stoked it.
Bell, like Chanute, believed the Wrights’ machine might be no more than an exciting step forward—and not precisely in the right direction. Bell feared the Wrights were risking their own lives and the lives of any who followed them in machines that depended on the operator to stay in balance. Yes, their work was a magnificent beginning. But he found no reason to conclude that simply because the Wrights had found one solution to the problem, none other was possible. He believed the future of the flying machine—the true breakthrough that would inaugurate a new epoch of transportation, just as the telephone had forever changed communication—lay in a very different machine.
Once when a reporter was visiting his summer estate in Nova Scotia, Bell pointed upward and said, “See that hawk up there? He has learned to fly, but he has never risked his life. I don’t be
lieve there is any necessity in risking human life in learning how to fly heavier-than-air machines. I have always considered the experiments of the Wright brothers very dangerous.”
ON JANUARY 20, 1906, near the end of a long evening, Bell stepped to the speaker’s rostrum of a raucous banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. The occasion was the close of the week-long New York Automobile Show, sponsored by the Automobile Club of America. Behind Bell stood two American flags draped in yellow forsythia. He looked out over a sea of tables festooned with four-foot-tall American Beauty roses. For dessert, balls of white ice cream had arrived on a parade of toy automobiles. The guest list of four hundred was crowded with the names of wealthy New York sportsmen and their escorts, many of them preparing to leave the city that night by midnight train for a week of auto racing at Ormond Beach, Florida, then a second week of racing in Cuba.
These were the elite enthusiasts of the dawning age of the automobile, full of the belief that autos were becoming indispensable, yet savoring the fact that few outside their own class so far could afford to own one. Keen for speed and mechanical novelty, they should have been prime recipients of Bell’s message. But they had been imbibing and dining for some three hours by the time he rose to speak, and according to a reporter seated close to Bell, “a lot of promiscuous enthusiasm” made it all but impossible for most people to hear.
“Well, you’ve got your auto time down to thirty-five seconds for a mile,” Bell began. “You’re beginning to crawl. The other day I talked to a friend in Chicago and was back in half an hour. You’ve got something to beat in the telephone.”
The joke failed to make much headway against the general noise. Bell gamely plodded forward into a brief review of aeronautical progress in Europe, then said:
“The age of the flying machine is not in the future. It is here. We already have a practical flying machine for the first time developed, and America has done it.”