To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  With no lightweight male available, Mabel, at 115 pounds, volunteered to fly. So eager was Bell for a successful test that he was willing to send his beloved wife aloft in a freezing wind. They went down to the snow-covered Kite Field together, but the wind fell slack, and Mabel turned back to the house. But moments later, as she was having the trunks hauled down the stairs, Bell exploded into the great house, waving his Kodak camera over his head and crying, “Develop! Develop! We’ve got him, and if the photos don’t come out I’m not going today!”

  He had hastily summoned a few men from around the estate, only one of whom was trained to handle the Frost King. They managed to get it well aloft, and Neil McDermid, the lightest man in the group at 165 pounds, was chosen to take the ride. With others anchoring the kite, McDermid, still on the ground, grasped one line and walked toward the kite until the tension was strong enough to lift him. Then, quite unexpectedly, he was rising—not on the rope ladder, as planned, but suspended by his arms. In a second he was hanging thirty feet off the ground. It was no flight in any sense. But Bell was elated by the demonstration of the kite’s strength, not to mention by the sheer spectacle. He clicked his shutter three times. Davidson, the photographer, snapped several frames of his own.

  “MY KITES FOR SOME REASON ARE PERFECTLY STABLE.”

  Bell’s Cygnet I at Beinn Bhreagh

  Across the bay at Baddeck, the steamer’s whistle blew; the crew was preparing to leave. Bell got McDermid back to the ground, shoved five dollars into his hand, thanked him, and rushed off toward the house. At Beinn Bhreagh, Bell thrust the camera at Mabel and rushed her to the darkroom. She found that “the servants had been there washing it out and it took some time to find our things which increased the excitement.” Finally the developing powders were discovered. With Davidson assisting, Mabel carefully and calmly went about the necessary tasks “in spite of Mr. Bell popping in and out the door, jumping about like a boy.” Before their eyes three clear images emerged. They showed Neil McDermid “just clear of the ground. However that was enough, and there was rejoicing.” Mabel went off to see the trunks out the door, leaving Davidson to develop more images that would show McDermid at his peak altitude of thirty feet. When Mabel returned she found Davidson “almost literally tearing his hair and very certainly slapping his thigh, and shaking himself in high disgust and indignation.” He had accidentally “spoiled his beauties.”

  Still, Mabel said, “The power of the kite and its great steadiness and strength is demonstrated.” She urged Bell to stay another day and try for better pictures. But for all his ardor, he was afraid to run the risk again. “You’ve no idea how high up he was,” he told her later. “You don’t know how high thirty feet is. It’s more than twice the height of the telegraph poles, and if the rope had broken or anything on the kite had given away and Neil had fallen he would have been killed or seriously injured.”

  “Mr. Bell is so happy and so excited, underneath a quiet demeanor,” Mabel wrote a close friend. “It means so terribly much to him—it is an achievement he has known he could do, but has not demonstrated for years, and lately it’s been a tremendous pull. We’ve just lived for this moment.”

  BELL’S ENTRY into the race to conquer the air was coming very late. Nearly three months earlier, the last, long flight at Huffman Prairie on October 5, 1905, had given the Wrights confidence to take their machine to market. As the morning dews on Huffman Prairie turned to frost that fall, they packed away the paraphernalia of experimentation and turned their minds fully to business. They would not fly again for a long time.

  Their aim was to sell everything, including their patents, for $250,000. They wanted a contract that both parties would sign before the Wrights made a single demonstration flight. This condition would protect them from window-shoppers who wanted to see the machine with no real intention of buying. The buyers would be protected by a clause saying no money would actually be paid until the Wrights made fully satisfactory demonstrations. This condition was a hard one for governments to accept, as the brothers soon learned. But they would not back down from it easily. They were determined that no detail of their design would be stolen. The only way to secure their treasure was to keep the design secret until their compensation was guaranteed. They had applied for patents but the patents had not yet been granted. And in any case, they believed that the secret of flight, if sold to the right party, would gain more of what they wanted than patents and manufacturing ever could—not just money but freedom, too. Better to get their price for the whole ball of wax—machines, designs, patents, and training—than to burden themselves with a patent war.

  At the present time the most obvious practical use of a flyer is military, [Will wrote Georges Besançon, editor of L’Aerophile.] Prompt acquaintance with ways and means of flying is many times more valuable to a government than patents could be to a private commercial company. We are merely carrying our invention to the best market—a market in which patents would reduce instead of increase the value of what we offer. By selling to governments we also avoid burdening our future with business cares and vexatious law suits, without which a valuable patent can not be maintained. We wish to have our time free for purely scientific work.

  The brothers believed any nation that agreed to their price for the technology of flight would find itself richly rewarded. If anything, the price was arguably very low, if only the buyer had imagination. The United States and Great Britain remained their customers of choice, but they were prepared to sell elsewhere, too. They approached the entire process as hard-nosed businessmen, confident in their product and fully willing to wait for the customer who would meet their terms. But they did not intend to sign a contract that would entitle any nation to sole possession of the secret. “The idea of selling to a single government as a strict secret has some advantages,” Will remarked to Chanute, “but we are very much disinclined to assume the moral responsibility of choosing the proper one when we have no means of knowing how it will use the invention. And then it is very repugnant to think of hiding an invention of such intense human interest until it becomes stale and useless.”

  THEIR FIRST STEP was to write a series of letters to key officials, contacts, and journalists at home and in Europe, to say their product was now complete and for sale.

  To reignite the possibility of a deal in the United States, they swallowed their pride for once and sent a letter directly to Secretary of War Taft: “We do not wish to take this invention abroad, unless we find it necessary to do so, and therefore write again, renewing the offer.”

  Back from Washington came another exasperating reply, not from Taft but from the Board of Ordnance and Fortification: No “financial assistance” was available for “the experimental development of devices for mechanical flight” until such a device had been “brought to the stage of practical operation without expense to the United States.”

  The brothers restrained their irritation. “We have no thought of asking financial assistance from the government,” Will said. “We propose to sell the results of experiments finished at our own expense.” He asked what conditions the BOF would set for the performance of a useful flying machine, and promised that “proof of our ability to execute an undertaking of the nature proposed will be furnished whenever desired.”

  This letter ran into a wall of incomprehension. BOF members advised staff to tell the Ohioans they did “not care to formulate any requirements for the performance of a flying-machine or take any further action on the subject until a machine is produced which by actual operation is shown to be able to produce horizontal flight and carry an operator.”

  These responses were “so insulting in tone as to preclude any further advances on our part,” Will said.

  At this point a little give-and-take, a little compromise, might have saved them a good deal of trouble, and would hardly have stained their characters. Accusations of self-righteousness—so like the ones often aimed at their father—began to be heard, and they had some merit. But
the brothers’ unbending style as businessmen was also in part the product of a deep-seated aversion to self-promotion—a strange attribute for visionary inventors, perhaps, but nonetheless real in the Wright brothers. It sprang from a certain church-bred humility, a sense of the proper way to do your business and conduct your life. You did the work at hand as well as you could, then offered it. If others did not want it, that was entirely their affair. You did not push yourself upon them. They had learned this ethic as children and were reminded of it now, for their father was determined that as fame overtook them, they must be moral exemplars. He often warned them to beware of scoundrels and false friends, and “amid it all, be men—men of the highest type. Personally, mentally, morally, and spiritually. Be clean, temperate, soberminded and greatsouled. See two worlds & live for both. You can in humility and simplicity have an influence that will bless multitudes. The world is longing for one merely human example.”

  THEIR PROGRESS OUTSIDE THE U.S. was mixed. The British would not offer a contract until they saw a flight, and the Wrights would not offer a flight until they saw a contract. The brothers’ overtures to France and Germany arrived in Europe as the two nations were approaching war over competing interests in Morocco, and the crisis quickened interest in the Wrights in both countries. But hackles rose in Berlin when one of Will’s letters—poorly translated into French—referred to Kaiser Wilhelm as being in a “truculent mood,” and the Germans backed away.

  A tentative deal was struck with a private French syndicate, leading in turn to a secret visit to Dayton by a delegation from the French War Ministry. The brothers showed photographs and asked for another round of testimony from the Huffman Prairie witnesses, whereupon the investigators departed as true believers. But by the time they returned to Paris, the Morocco crisis had cooled, and the War Ministry had begun to think there was no point in paying a million francs for a pig in a poke when French experimenters were promising to overtake the Americans soon.

  If, indeed, the Americans had flown at all. When the Times of London published a British engineer’s letter avowing his belief in the Wrights’ claims and his intention to duplicate their efforts, the editors hastened to add a disclaimer: “It is not to be supposed that we can in any way adopt the writer’s estimate of his undertaking, being of the opinion, indeed, that all attempts at artificial aviation on the basis he describes, are not only dangerous to life, but foredoomed to failure from an engineering standpoint.”

  The story about Kaiser Wilhelm caught the eye of some U.S. editors, and not to the Wrights’ benefit. The editors of Scientific American, who fancied themselves the ultimate arbiters of engineering progress, had ignored the eyewitness account that Amos Root sent directly to their attention a year earlier. But they now published an elaborate sneer at “The Wright Aeroplane and Its Fabled Performances.” The article presented a growing and not implausible reason for doubt:

  If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face—even if he has to scale a fifteen-story sky-scraper to do so—would not have ascertained all about them and published . . . long ago?

  The same doubt began to nag at Bell, though he blamed the inventors more than the press. “It seems strange,” he told Mabel, “that our enterprizing American Newspapers have failed to keep track of the experiments in Dayton, Ohio, for the machine is so large that it must be visible over a considerable extent of country. . . . This seems to be due to the desire of secrecy. . . . I do not understand how it is that so little attention has been payed to this matter by the American Press. I am now studying carefully the details published.”

  The brothers knew of such doubts but were disinclined to argue with people. “If they will not take our word and the word of the many witnesses who were present at one or more of the flights,” Will said, “we do not think they will be convinced until they see a flight with their own eyes. A few months more time will settle any reasonable doubt.”

  • • •

  IN FRANCE, “l’incident Wright” of 1905, whether one believed in aeroplane flights over Ohio or not, at least “had the advantage of shaking our aviators out of their torpor,” said L’Aerophile. A dozen or more experimenters now were laboring on gliders and powered machines, some with two wings and some with only one. But the most exciting new fact was the conversion of Alberto Santos-Dumont from lighter- to heavier-than-air experiments.

  The Brazilian’s star had faded a bit in recent years, but it brightened with his announcement that he intended to compete for all aeroplane prizes. He hired Gabriel Voisin and Voisin’s brother, Charles, as his codesigners and builders, and for six months he dropped out of the Paris social scene entirely. In the spring of 1906, a very large, white apparatus emerged from his workshop for testing. It looked like, and in a sense was, an assemblage of box kites—two rectangular box-kite wings; a long, boxlike fuselage with a propeller and fifty-horsepower engine; and in front, a box-kite rudder.

  The earliest experiments appalled even his friends. First, to test the craft’s balance, Santos-Dumont suspended it from an overhead tight-wire, then pulled it along behind a donkey. Next, to test the controls, he attached the machine to the underside of his dirigible No. 14 and attempted to fly this enormous hybrid in a scene that descended into chaos.

  But Santos-Dumont and the Voisins kept at it, and in September 1906, in a great field in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, with Archdeacon and many Aéro-Club members watching, his wheels left the ground for a few meters—this was confirmed by men who threw themselves on the ground to see the distance between the wheels and the turf.

  In late October Santos-Dumont tried again. A crowd of a thousand stared as he rose two meters, maybe three, off the ground. With no means of balancing, the craft immediately began to lean to its left, thus entering what one reporter called “a graceful curve.” Santos-Dumont cut the engine and dropped with a smack, crushing his wheels. Members of the official measurement committee were too flummoxed to do their job, but it was agreed that the machine had been airborne for roughly sixty meters. The crowd erupted in euphoria. Paris’s newspapers announced the first flight in history. One declared: “MAN HAS CONQUERED THE AIR!”

  Some Frenchmen of the Aéro Club, testy as always about the preeminence of the Brazilian in their midst, remarked that they could do better. One said that with Santos-Dumont’s powerful engine a grand piano could have flown for sixty meters. But in the roar of acclaim there was no room for technical quibbles. Santos-Dumont was again the hero of the hour.

  • • •

  THE WRIGHTS, meanwhile, seemed little closer to a sale by the fall of 1906 than they had been a year earlier when they locked their shed at Huffman Prairie. Their patent applications had been approved in the United States, France, Belgium, and Germany. They had gained representation in the Manhattan offices of Charles Flint & Co., organizer of trusts and facilitator of American arms sales to many nations. Flint’s man Hart Berg, a debonair American with high-level contacts throughout Europe, would be their agent across the Atlantic. But they were still without a deal.

  Even sympathizers suggested they were being foolish by setting such a high price while refusing to fly. When a reporter asked Orville about it on a trip to New York, he replied:

  It seems to be the opinion of all that we are secretive and making a mystery of our flying machine. That is all wrong. We would be pleased to give a public demonstration of what we have and have tried to do so, but as we are situated that is impossible. We do not know whom we will finally close with, but if it should be some government, then the fact that it is a secret would greatly enhance its value.

  We are not wealthy men and have put years of work and study into this machine. We have withdrawn from all other business and given our entire attenti
on to the flying problem, and we have succeeded. We also believe that we are the only men who have succeeded. Now, here we are, with something that is either worth a good price or it isn’t worth a penny. The public can call us fakers or even crazy. We don’t care. We know what we have got and others know, too.

  IN MARCH 1907, they thought of a new way to let lots of people know what they had. The six-month-long Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition was scheduled to open in Virginia on May 1, 1907. It had been planned originally as a celebration of American culture and the “the industries of peace.” But the program had been transformed into “the grandest military and naval celebration ever attempted in any age by any nation,” “a continuous and varying scene of martial splendor” featuring “the greatest gathering of warships in the history of the world.” The eminent social worker Jane Addams and a host of progressive reformers and pacifists were aghast. But as the Wrights looked at the exhibition calendar, then at a map, they saw an opportunity to shake up their stalled sales efforts and make a deal with their own government, as they had preferred to do all along.

  At the exhibition’s opening, much of the U.S. fleet would steam through Hampton Roads, the great naval crossroads where the broad James River flows into Chesapeake Bay at Norfolk. This point lay only some forty miles from Currituck Sound, at the back door of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Wrights’ admirers often praised them for their high-minded rejection of showmanship and feats of daring. But that image would have been forever altered had the plan they now conceived worked out.

  One brother or the other suggested that they assemble a flyer on floats at Kitty Hawk, then “take an unexpected part in the parade” at Jamestown, flying over the fleet and perhaps skimming the surface of the harbor at Norfolk alongside some American battleship. This, surely, would show the members of the Board of Ordnance and Fortification—or at least their colleagues in the Navy—that a machine had indeed been “produced which by actual operation is shown to be able to produce horizontal flight and carry an operator.”