by James Tobin
Among people who could hear, this drew some applause.
“The Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio, have flown 25 miles on their machine carrying a man and a motor . . .”
There was too much noise. The banquet chairman rapped for attention, but he was competing with “bursts of laughter from far corners . . . where someone had told a good story.”
• • •
AT ABOUT NOON on Wednesday, November 22, 1905, Samuel Langley was ascending the main staircase of the Smithsonian Castle when he appeared for a moment to lose consciousness. He was helped to his office, where he managed to dictate letters to his aunt, Julia Goodrich, and to his brother, John Langley. Cyrus Adler joined him for lunch, as he often did. Adler noticed that Langley had trouble pouring the tea, and that there was “a slight crookedness in his face.” When it became clear the secretary’s entire right side was paralyzed, Adler suggested that an ambulance be called to take Langley home. But the secretary said, “I will go home in my customary way,” whereupon his carriage was summoned. He soon found it difficult to speak, and it became clear to friends that his memory was impaired. He had suffered a severe paralytic stroke.
Langley’s personal physician, Dr. W. B. Pritchard, of New York City, at first saw little hope of recovery. “His usefulness as an executive chief is at an end,” the doctor advised Adler, “especially in a publicly official capacity.” Richard Rathbun stepped in as acting secretary of the Smithsonian.
But Langley rallied. Fighting melancholy, he soon discovered he could move and exercise his right leg, and he began to write with his left hand. Charles Walcott found that “his interest in all matters pertaining to scientific research and investigation was just as active and just as near to him as ever.” Dr. Pritchard, examining him again, was surprised and encouraged. “Mr. Langley will never be our old friend, the stalwart,” he told Adler, “but he will walk again and talk again and his thinking machine will do very good work again. His arm will never be of very much use to him, and certain defects of speech and memory will remain, but on the whole, the final net outcome is and will be much better than I had looked for.”
Pritchard recommended that Langley spend several months away from Washington in a place where he could be out of doors. So, accompanied by his niece, Mary Herrick, he went to a small hotel in the crossroads hamlet of Aiken, South Carolina. There he rested, wrote to friends, and began a memoir of his childhood.
One day his niece brought Langley a letter from the Aero Club of America, which had endorsed a resolution honoring his contributions to the cause of flight. Its authors included Charles Manly. Knowing of Langley’s unpredictable opinions of publicity, it was probably Manly who suggested the resolution be sent to Langley for his approval before the club released the document for publication. The text was all the secretary might have wished. It said “an accident in launching his aerodrome” had prevented “a decisive test of the capabilities of this man-carrying machine, built after his models which flew successfully many times,” and it expressed the members’ “sincerest appreciation” for “the contributions of Dr. Langley to the science of aerial locomotion.”
Langley’s niece asked what should be done with the resolution. He said: “Publish it.”
• • •
ON FEBRUARY 27, 1906, congressmen on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives were discussing appropriations to the Army. When Representative Edgar Crumpacker, Republican of Indiana, excoriated the committee on military affairs for wasting millions on such projects as flying machines, its chairman, John Hull, Republican of Iowa, rose in self-defense. It was not his committee, he said, but the House appropriations committee that had given funds for flying machines.
“I regard flying machines as absolutely absurd,” Hull said. “I am not a scientific man, but a machine that will fly to the bottom of the river—”
Laughter drowned him out.
LATER THAT DAY, Langley suffered a second stroke and died.
NEWSPAPERS ALL OVER THE NATION reported the story. Langley’s achievements as an astronomer and as secretary of the Smithsonian were all but forgotten. The failure of the great aerodrome was recalled only too well.
Like Langley himself, Wilbur Wright was struck by the fact that history seemed to have turned on the malfunctioning of a tiny piece or two of metal. Nothing had changed Will’s mind about the aerodrome’s ability to achieve true flight. He was sure it could not. But he also believed that even a single straight-line “hop” would have saved Langley’s reputation. And as one of the few people in the world who fully understood Langley’s deep desire to fly, Will grieved.
“No doubt disappointment shortened his life,” he remarked to Chanute. “It is really pathetic that he should have missed the honor he cared for above all others, merely because he could not launch his machine successfully. If he could only have started it, the chances are that it would have flown sufficiently to have secured to him the name he coveted, even though a complete wreck attended the landing. I cannot help feeling sorry for him.”
IN WASHINGTON, services were held at All Souls’ Church, where Langley’s friend, Edward Everett Hale, delivered a brief eulogy. The body was taken by private rail car to Boston, where Langley was buried beside his mother. Among the pallbearers were Richard Rathbun; the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Harvard astronomer E. C. Pickering, Langley’s old friend; Richard Olney, a regent of the Smithsonian and former secretary of state; and Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell stood to pay tribute. He chose not to restrain his bitterness.
“We are parting from one of the great men of the world,” he said. “Professor Langley was not simply a man whom we have loved. He was a man whose name is written imperishably on the history of our times. . . .
“He wanted to give man control of the air. A few years ago he led the way for the first time by giving artificial flight to a body one hundred times heavier than the air. I myself have seen his enormous machine making a flight of a mile and a half over the Potomac.
“It fell—yes, it fell. But Professor Langley was only beginning his experiments. The newspapers met those experiments with ridicule. They did not treat Professor Langley with fairness. Ridicule shortened his life. He was not permitted to make his preliminary experiments quietly and in peace. His flying machine never had an opportunity of being fairly tried. His perfected apparatus was never launched in the air. It would have flown. . . .
“Ridicule, I repeat, shortened his life. We have looked upon his face for the last time, but the man and his works will permanently endure.”
The elderly Julia Goodrich, Langley’s devoted aunt, thanked Bell “with all my heart and soul” for telling the world “the facts that prevented his last ship to be a success. You understand that it cost him his life. . . . I wish most sincerely that you may succeed in all your undertakings . . . and that you may be wholly satisfied with the success you gain for all humanity.”
Chapter Ten
“A Flying Machine at Anchor”
“OH HOW I WISH THAT YOU MAY HAVE SUCCESS AT LAST.”
Mabel Bell measures the pull of one of her husband’s kites
SOME SKEPTICS SUGGESTED that perhaps the Wrights could fly when others could not because they possessed special gifts in gymnastics, like circus acrobats. The view was that even if they were flying, it was just a kind of stunt, marvelous to see but no good to anyone else. A trapeze artist might astound a crowd, but he did not inspire people to take up the trapeze as a good way of crossing the street.
Of course, there was skill involved in what the Wrights were doing, and they knew it. But they believed the skill could be taught to virtually anyone, just as anyone with a little training and practice could learn to ride a bicycle.
“As to our being abnormal in any acrobatic sense,” Will told a reporter, “that is the exact opposite of the truth. We are both too nervous to be good flyers. Any mile-a-minute bicycle rider could take our machine and b
eat us completely.”
Of course, no bicyclist could go a mile a minute. He was talking about motorcyclists. In fact, he may have been thinking specifically of the great motorcyclist Glenn Hammond Curtiss, a manufacturer of fine internal combustion engines whose motorcycle sprints had won him the title of “fastest man in the world.”
The brothers and Curtiss met in the summer of 1906, in Dayton. Curtiss was there to help his friend, the airship pilot Thomas Baldwin, who was making an exhibition flight. The brothers helped the two men chase down Baldwin’s runaway airship, then had a long, friendly talk about engines and propellers and aeroplanes. Curtiss had questioned the Wrights closely. By the time they next met, Glenn Curtiss had taken up aeroplanes in earnest, and Will believed he was trying deliberately and literally “to take our machine and beat us completely.”
The Wrights’ competition with Samuel Langley and Charles Manly was a contest between gentlemen, conducted at a respectful distance. The brothers and Langley never met, and neither side wished the other ill. Indeed, they scarcely acknowledged that a contest was under way. The Wrights had questioned the secretary’s judgment but never his honor, and Langley had respected the Wrights as worthy seekers of the same truths he sought. With Glenn Curtiss it would be different. The contest would be face to face and deeply personal. The stakes would be of the highest order on both sides—for Curtiss, a fortune; for the Wrights, their claim on history. In Curtiss the brothers saw their own Millard Fillmore Keiter—a scoundrel who must be shown up at all costs.
Yet the Wrights and Curtiss were set on a collision course by events that lay quite outside their own lives. These events were rooted in another man’s marriage, and in a woman’s determination to save her husband from a quiet despair.
MABEL GREENE HUBBARD contracted scarlet fever as a child of five in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The disease left her totally deaf. Her father, a wealthy businessman, could afford the best teachers for her, and eventually he hired Alexander Graham Bell, the son of a Scottish pioneer in the treatment of the deaf and himself widely known as a gifted and devoted teacher. Mabel was fifteen. Bell was twenty-five. Two years later, in 1875, he realized he was “in deep trouble.” As he told Mabel’s mother, “I have discovered that my interest in my dear pupil . . . has ripened into a far deeper feeling.”
His timing was atrocious. Not only were his affections inappropriate, but they added complications to his own life when he least could handle them. By day he was teaching the deaf—and falling in love with Mabel—while by night he was conducting the experiments that would lead to the invention of the telephone. He first wrote to his parents about his feelings for Mabel on the night before he uttered the famous first words over wire: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”
At first Mabel was put off by the romantic attentions of this hulking adult. But Bell persisted; she allowed matters to gather steam; and finally she agreed to marry him, saying she loved him more than anyone but her mother. From that dubious endorsement grew an ardent and lifelong love affair and a marriage of unusual mutual dependence.
Their relationship began in the process by which Alec literally taught Mabel to speak, a peculiarly intimate form of pedagogy that continued for many years. To address the problem of her speech—she had trouble making herself understood by people who did not know her well—he examined her mouth and throat closely as she spoke, and directed her to examine his. In the face of his fierce desire to improve her articulation, she alternately resisted and accepted insistent offers of aid such as this:
I will help you if you will not hate me for doing so. I will work for you—if you will work too. I have been waiting and longing for you to show some wish in the matter—and I think it is growing. Will you let me try to help you—by doing what I advise. A more distinct articulation will open the door of many a new friend for you in the future—and bring you into closer communion with all who love you—Help me to help you.
I have studied your articulation and see very clearly wherein it is deficient. The chief cause of the difficulty many persons have in understanding you is on account of the peculiarity of your voice. This I alone can remedy—you cannot well correct it by yourself.
As the couple matured and raised two daughters amid the fame and wealth that came with the success of the telephone, it became clear that he depended on her at least as much as she did on him. Dividing their time between their handsome home in Washington and their summer estate in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, they were quite often apart, and he longed for her. “Let us lay it down as a principle of our lives, that we shall be together,” he told her once. She was equally bereft during his absences. “You are the mainspring of my life,” she told him, “and though when it is gone the other wheels go on by themselves for a time, it is very languidly and more slowly, and I want you back to give me an interest in life.”
Yet he was also terribly preoccupied with his work. She could not abide his incurable habit of working late into the night—the only time, he said, when he could “retire into myself and be alone with my thoughts”—and then be unable to rise at a conventional hour in the morning. “I have found by experience that I can only deal with one thing at a time. My mind concentrates itself on the subject that happens to occupy it and then all things else in the Universe—including . . . wife, children, life itself, become for the time being of secondary importance.”
“I wonder,” she asked him once, “do you ever think of me in the midst of that work of yours of which I am so proud and yet so jealous, for I know it has stolen from me part of my husband’s heart.”
Still, as they grew older, she realized his work was not his mistress but his master, a stern obsession commanding him to prove (perhaps to himself as much as to others) that his early, phenomenal success had been more than a lucky fluke, and that he was capable of giving mankind a second great gift. “I can’t bear to hear that even my friends should think that I stumbled upon an invention and that there is no more good in me,” he remarked as early as 1879, only three years after he patented the telephone.
All appearances suggested anything but that Bell was a troubled man driven by self-doubt. From the 1880s onward, he was a statesman of science whose views were constantly sought and quoted. In Washington, D.C., his chosen home, he was beloved among wide circles of friends for his warmth, for his support of the arts and education, and for an all-encompassing and contagious curiosity. He dominated any room he entered, not by bombast but by “an indefinable sense of largeness,” both physical and intellectual. By 1900, at 53, he looked like a virile Santa Claus. Above a great beard and “extraordinary eyes, large and dark,” his forehead sloped to a wavy crown of iron-gray hair. His voice was deep and rich, and as a master teacher of elocution, he spoke, as a friend said, with “clear, crisp articulation” that “made other men’s speech seem uncouth.” When entertaining, he drew out his guests with thoughtful questions. His interests were infectious. One of his sons-in-law said: “He always made you feel that there was so much of interest in the universe, so many fascinating things to observe and to think about, that it was a criminal waste of time to indulge in gossip or trivial discussion.”
One had to watch Bell at work to see clues of his demons. His father-in-law had once commented on “the tendency of your mind to undertake every new thing that interests you & accomplish nothing of any value to any one.” If this was harshly unfair—in fact, Bell helped many, and never strayed from his dedication to the deaf—it also identified a troublesome pattern. It showed in his laboratory in Washington, filled with devices of so many diverse types that a visiting reporter was reminded of the U.S. Patent Office. It showed in his preferred bedtime reading material, Johnson’s Encyclopedia, and what he wrote about it: “Articles not too long—constant change in the subjects of thought—always learning something I have not known before—provocative of thought—constant variety.” It showed in his shelves and shelves of lab notebooks, crammed with ideas and sketches that never became more. It showed in
his restless movement from one project to another—a device to transmit speech by light waves; a way of duplicating phonograph records and photographs; an effort to condense fog into water, for use on lifeboats at sea; an ancestral version of the iron lung. The telephone had been conceived in a great, concerted rush of work. When a problem would not yield to this approach, Bell had trouble remaining calm and committed to the long haul. He would veer between jubilation (“A new invention has been born”) and brooding (“Will not attempt to note ideas for fear of another sleepless night”). Several of his projects were promising, and a couple yielded solid results. But when a new idea failed to develop quickly into a phenomenon to match the telephone, he moved on. He took a certain joy in this intellectual restlessness, but it also gnawed at him. “I have got work to do,” he said once, “so much work on so many subjects that I want many more years of life to finish it all.”
But Bell’s harried search for a focus ended when he fully embraced the problem of flight in the early 1890s. He had flirted with it for years. “From my earliest association with Bell,” said Thomas Watson, the gifted machinist who had been the inventor’s principal aide on the telephone, “he discussed with me the possibility of making a machine that would fly like a bird . . . I fancy that if Bell had been in easy financial circumstances he might have dropped his [telephone] experiments and gone into flying machines at that time. . . . He made me promise that, as soon as the telephone business became established, if it ever did, I would leave it and start experiments with him on flying machines.”
Like many other flight enthusiasts, he had been fascinated by soaring birds of prey as a child, in Scotland. His interest in flight lay dormant for many years while he taught the deaf, worked on the telephone, and waged a long legal war in defense of his patent. Samuel Langley reawakened it. The secretary’s aerodromes, even the tiny hand-held versions that stayed in the air only a few seconds, astonished Bell, and he predicted that Langley would confound his critics and learn how to fly. But Bell had no intention of leaving all the fun to his friend. Seizing his notebook just after seeing one of Langley’s hand-held models fly, Bell wrote: “I shall have to make experiments upon my own account in Cape Breton. Can’t keep out of it. It will be all UP with us someday.”