To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  In France, Berg had negotiated a more complex deal with a private syndicate, which would give the Wrights a half-million francs, stock in the new company, and payments for additional aeroplanes—also after successful trials.

  * * *

  I. Bell’s design prefigured R. Buckminister Fuller’s invention of the geodesic dome in the 1940s. Fuller knew nothing of Bell’s work. “I was astonished to learn about it,” he told an interviewer in 1978. “It is the way nature behaves, so we both discovered nature. It isn’t something you invent. . . . You just take two spheres and they just touch one another—that’s all. You nest a third one down between the two and you get a triangle. Then you nest another on top and you get a tetrahedron . . . So it seems to be fundamental to nature” (Dorothy Harley Eber, Genius at Work: Images of Alexander Graham Bell [New York: Viking Press, 1987], 9–10).

  Chapter Eleven

  “A World of Trouble”

  “BELL KNEW THE PRESS WOULD PAY ATTENTION.”

  Curtiss, Baldwin, and twenty-two others with the AEA’s Red Wing

  BELL’S YOUNG MEN worked very quickly. To acquire experience in the air, they built a biplane glider and took it out to a hill. Like Lilienthal, they flew the glider with their bodies suspended from the lower wing, and kept the craft balanced by shifting their weight. They tried no other method of balancing, but they were quick students and fine athletes, so they managed longer and longer glides—about fifty over several weeks. When they reached a distance of one hundred yards, they decided they were ready to build a powered machine.

  Selfridge was chosen to direct the design and construction of the AEA’s first powered aeroplane, though all the members contributed ideas. Bell himself had to make suggestions from afar, as he was staying in Washington with Mabel, who was ill. Selfridge pored over all the aeronautical information he had assembled and wrote to the Wrights to ask for more. Their polite reply referred him to several articles describing their machine and to their U.S. patent, under which it would be permissible to make use of the Wrights’ devices, though for experimental uses only.

  Selfridge told the Wrights he already had a copy of their patent. That became obvious when the AEA machine emerged from Curtiss’s improvised “aerodrome shed.” It embodied the fundamental structure the Wrights had invented during the period from 1900 to 1903—a biplane machine with a horizontal elevator in front and a vertical tail in back. There were differences, too. The tips of the wings were squeezed together to form a “bowstring” truss resembling “a sidelong pair of parentheses.” Baldwin hoped this configuration would help with control. The machine carried one propeller, not two. It would take off and land on sled runners on the ice of Lake Keuka. And there was no device for twisting the wing surfaces. The horizontal surface in front would make the machine go up and down. The vertical surface in back would turn it to right or left—though there was apparently little expectation of attempting any turns. The operator would sit in the middle, next to a powerful Curtiss engine. The surfaces were covered with red silk left over from Bell’s kites. So it was named the Red Wing.

  By the first of March 1908, after only seven weeks of design and construction, the machine was declared ready for a test. But strong winds intervened. They waited.

  Bell left Mabel for a quick run to Hammondsport to look over the preparations. There he found Selfridge jittery and ill. Having lost a kidney earlier in his life, the soldier had received orders to report to an Army hospital for treatment of a mild case of jaundice. But he was desperate to try the machine before leaving.

  “It is a beautiful machine substantially similar to Farman’s,” Bell reported to Mabel, “and poor Selfridge is very anxious to try it before he goes off to the hospital in Washington. He . . . really should not be here at all but I sympathize with his desire to try it . . . I see see no reason why his machine should not do all that Farman’s has done—but only wish it gave promise of actual stability. . . . Although I do not like to see experiments made with a man on board with a machine of this kind—in which undoubtedly some risk is involved—still I do not think that anything serious could result from an accident.”

  When high winds continued, Bell and Selfridge both departed, after which the wind promptly calmed down. Ice at the southern end of Lake Keuka was melting, and the rest of the lake would break up soon. Curtiss said they didn’t dare wait for Selfridge to return. They had to go now. The others agreed, and Baldwin was chosen as pilot.

  On March 12, a good portion of Hammondsport’s population gathered to watch Baldwin roar across the ice, rise to a height of ten feet, then slide sideways and clatter back to the ice, crunching a wing. He had flown a little more than a hundred yards.

  Bell understood the value of publicity. He knew the press would pay attention to any endeavor to which his name was attached. So he made sure reporters were told about the flight of the Red Wing, and he knew just how to characterize the flight to ensure that any coverage would be given prominent play. The reporters leaped at the bait. Front-page items in The New York Times and The Washington Post included the same key sentence, just as Bell had framed it: “This is declared to be the first successful public flight of a heavier-than-air flying machine in America.”

  “First successful public flight?” To anyone who knew something about the Wright brothers, the words must have caused eyebrows to rise. An editor at the Post, for example, inserted this attempt at clarification: “The flight was witnessed by a number of people from Hammondsport.” But if the presence of spectators made the flight public, as it did, then surely the presence of spectators at Huffman Prairie had made the flights of 1904 and especially of 1905 public as well.

  WITH SELFRIDGE BACK IN HAMMONDSPORT, the AEA boys were eager to fly the Red Wing again before the ice broke up for good. So on March 18, still without Bell, they ignored a snow shower and plowed up Lake Keuka aboard the steam tug Springstead. Searching for a place to make a landing on solid ice, they passed an endless line of ducks, geese, and gulls perched at the margin of the water. A wind of about twelve miles per hour was blowing. The snow turned to rain, and the fabric of the flying machine was soaked through, adding a good deal of weight. It was now about as bad a day to fly as could be imagined. But these were four young men in their twenties, three of them under twenty-five, and they meant to fly, rain and ice or no. Selfridge and Baldwin tossed a coin, and Baldwin won. Curtiss, in charge of the engine, revved it higher than in the first flight, to compensate for the extra weight of the drenched wings.

  The men released the machine. It slid across the ice for fifty feet, then rose. As Curtiss told Bell, “It immediately became evident that we were not proficient enough in designing and handling an aerodrome to handle the machine in so much wind.” The machine leaned into a sickening roll to its left, exposing its entire underside to view. The wing struck the ice at a forty-five-degree angle. Again, Baldwin emerged all right, but the machine crumpled into “a shapeless mass.”

  The ignominious end of this public flight of the Red Wing went unannounced by the Aerial Experiment Association.

  IT WAS JUST AS BELL had feared. Curtiss had spotted it the instant the Red Wing began to roll. No doubt all the AEA boys understood it now. Their machine could not keep its balance. Without balance, they would be like Samuel Langley and Charles Manly, waiting endlessly for absolute calm.

  An idea occurred to Bell—“moveable surfaces at the extremities of the wing piece.” He put this immediately in a letter to Casey Baldwin, and elaborated: “It might be worth while considering whether the protruding ends [of the wings] might not be made moveable and be controlled by the instinctive balancing movements of the body of the operator.”

  In the same letter Bell said: “In voluntary control by moveable surfaces what we want to do is reef one wing and extend the other.”

  That was something different than changing the angle of the wing. “Reef” is a nautical term, meaning to reduce the surface of a sail. The idea of reducing the surface of a rising wing so
as to lessen its lifting power—and thus restore balance—had occurred to Chanute and others. This was the idea that Wilbur Wright had rejected upon close observation of West Dayton’s pigeons.

  Bell’s proposal of movable wing tips could be adapted to strategies other than reefing. In fact, it’s possible that one of the members of the AEA already had conceived of using wingtips to change the wings’ angles. For by this time, according to Glenn Curtiss’s later sworn testimony, “We were familiar with the warping wing system of the Wrights and we hoped to develop some other system of balance.”

  This was a sticky intellectual wicket. If Curtiss’s testimony is correct, then the members of the AEA understood—at least in some rudimentary way—that a flying machine could be balanced by altering the angles of its wings. If they were to claim an independent solution of the flying problem, they could not simply duplicate the Wrights’ system of wing-warping. The answer lay in using Bell’s “moveable surfaces at the extremities of the wing pieces” to create small, separate, winglike surfaces whose angles could be changed independent of the wings themselves. In France, the same idea had occurred to Robert Esnault-Pelterie, though he had been unable to put it to good use. The French term for Esnault-Pelterie’s device was “little wing”—aileron. Eventually, ailerons would become standard features of airplanes of all shapes and sizes.

  Recalling all this a few months later, Bell said he was not sure how the AEA youngsters in Hammondsport had happened to develop the device, since he had been in Washington at the time. But “if, as I have reason to believe, their adoption was due to a suggestion of mine that moveable wing tips should be used, contained in a letter to Mr. Baldwin, I may say that this suggestion was made without any knowledge upon my part of anything the Wright brothers may have done. They had kept the details of construction of their machine secret.”

  Here, without being obvious, Bell may have been trying to make a very fine distinction. The principles of the Wrights’ system of balance were contained in their patent, which had been issued in 1906 and available for public inspection ever since. As to the finer details of that system of balance, the patent, it is true, was not specific. So Bell may have reasoned that a different method of changing the angle of the lifting surface may have constituted, in Curtiss’s phrase, “some other system of balance.” But it cannot be true that Bell conceived the aileron “without any knowledge . . . of anything the Wright brothers may have done.” Bell surely had read Wilbur Wright’s article, “Some Aerial Experiments,” which set out the principles of wing-warping. Selfridge, Bell’s new protégé, possessed a copy of the Wrights’ patent, which also spelled out the idea. Bell knew very well how to read a patent, and he was voracious for information on the means of flight. Selfridge, Bell, and the other members of the AEA met regularly to discuss crucial matters of aeroplane design. What the AEA conceived in the aileron was not an entirely new and different system of balancing, but a new device for putting the Wrights’ system into practice. The principles themselves were unchanged. They had been divined in Dayton in the summer of 1899, and made the basis of a practical flying machine over the course of the next six years.

  But that might well be forgotten if the Aerial Experiment Association surged ahead of the Wrights in making flights and gaining public attention.

  THE WEALTHY BARONS of the Aero Club of America in New York were delighted that a new and attractive group of Americans was pushing forward, and with none of the strange secretiveness of the obscure Ohioans, who had refused to fly for nearly three years now—if they had ever flown at all.

  Every month brought fresh news of flights in Europe. The British were reported to be working on their own machines. Henri Farman was flying. On March 21 came news that Farman and Leon Delagrange had boarded Delagrange’s machine and made a hop together. The distance was only eighty feet, but it was arguably the first two-passenger flight in history. Then Farman bested his own distance in the Deutsch-Archdeacon trial in January, flying nearly two miles in a circular course.

  The Wrights’ continuing refusal to fly was causing temperatures to skyrocket in the American aeronautical community, especially in the Aero Club in New York. Its members wanted to see someone—anyone—fly an aeroplane, and as soon as possible they wanted to fly themselves. If the Ohioans refused to show what they could do, they would learn the art from the French, or from Bell’s young men.

  At the offices of Scientific American, editor Stanley Beach was now among the Wright believers. He sensed that flight was the coming thing in science and technology, and he wanted to have his magazine strongly associated with it. He began to organize a Scientific American Prize competition. The winner would have to be victorious in three separate tests over three years, beginning with a public flight of one kilometer before official witnesses. He hoped this would lure the Wrights out of hiding and bring Farman and Delagrange from Europe—and he was confident the Wrights would win.

  “There is a great deal of interest in aviation here at present,” Beach told the brothers, “and everybody is interested and anxious to see a machine in the air.” Delagrange might soon cross the Atlantic to make a demonstration in the United States, he warned. “It seems to me now that the opportunity presents itself to practically demonstrate that you are capable of flying . . . You should do this and thus forestall a foreigner coming over here and showing us how to fly.”

  But when Beach’s letter arrived in Dayton in the last week of April 1908, the Wrights were not there to receive it. Kate replied on their behalf, telling Beach she would forward his letter to her brothers—at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

  THEIR CONTRACT IN FRANCE would require the Wrights to make two flights of fifty kilometers, each in less than an hour. The U.S. Army wanted separate demonstrations of speed and stamina. The machine had to show that it could fly at an average speed of at least forty miles per hour over a five-mile course. It also had to make a flight of at least an hour with a pilot and one passenger aboard—seated, not prone—plus enough fuel for a flight of 125 miles. The Army wanted a machine that could be transported in one of its wagons and assembled in under an hour. It had to be able to take off from any sort of terrain “which may be encountered in field service”—a tall order indeed—and “land in a field without requiring a specially prepared spot and without damaging its structure.” The Wrights had exceeded the Army’s requirements for speed and distance many times. But they had never made a flight with two men aboard, nor had they made flights with the pilot in a sitting position. For this they had to design new controls for operating the wings, elevator, and tail, and “their operation had to be completely relearned.” And of course neither brother had flown since the fall of 1905. They needed “a little practice.”

  In 1905, the attention of reporters and spectators had brought the spectacular flights at Huffman Prairie to a premature end. The brothers believed that once again they needed the privacy they could find only on the Outer Banks. They decided that Will would go first and prepare the camp, with Orville to follow in a week or two.

  AT THE KILL DEVIL HILLS Will found a gloomy scene. Since December 18, 1903, the old camp had been standing neglected, subject to wind, rain, ice, and marauding boys. Now it lay “in ruins.” One shed was still standing, but without a roof or doors. The other had blown down entirely. Most of it lay under a foot and a half of drifted sand. The ribs of one of the old gliders, stripped of their linen skin, stuck out of the sand like the skeleton of a fish, and as Will worked, he stumbled upon “various relics of the 1901, 1902, and 1903 machines.” Most of their old Kitty Hawk friends had scattered, and Dan Tate, their striking workman of 1903, had died. “Kitty Hawk seems to be being deserted.”

  The surviving shed was unlivable, so Will had to stay at the lifesaving station, where the men were friendly but the accommodations primitive and the food nearly unbearable. Grumpy and harried by delays in the delivery of lumber, he dragged himself through his work amid storms, strong winds, and a spell of diarrhea. “I will expec
t you to arrive with relief Saturday,” he wrote Orville. “I am not sure I can hold out much longer than that.”

  “I am making every effort to push things as fast as possible but there are many delays,” he told his father.

  Charlie Furnas, a Dayton mechanic whom the brothers had hired to help out, arrived before there was a place for him to sleep. But a new shed was nearly complete when Orville walked into camp on April 23.

  The first reporters arrived about a week later.

  ON May 13, in Rome, Leon Delagrange took off in a Voisin biplane and flew nearly eight miles.

  THAT AFTERNOON, at the Kill Devil Hills camp, the Wrights saw a man walking across the dunes toward them. He introduced himself as a journalist and told them what he had learned via telegraph about Delagrange’s flight at Rome. Wilbur Wright “manifested considerable interest in this performance but no anxiety.”

  “We are not worried,” Will told him. “We have already tripled the distance made by Monsieur Delagrange this morning. Our confidence in our leadership rests upon the essential difference between our machine and those used in Europe. We have a practical aeroplane capable of flying in the wind.”

  For several days, reporters had been moving furtively around the edges of the Wrights’ flying field, staying out of sight for fear of scaring the notoriously shy inventors back into inactivity. The circumstances now differed mightily from the fall of 1905, when the story struck Dayton’s press as incredible. Now, it had not only credibility but the vast advantage of international rivalry and drama. The Wrights were now widely believed to be carrying a secret worth knowing. They were either geniuses or frauds, and either case would make a great story. And the eight or ten men who arrived in the Roanoke Island town of Manteo in May were not the indifferent and undermotivated reporters of the Dayton press corps. They were experienced, resourceful, and determined professionals. One was P. H. MacGowan of London’s Daily Mail, a veteran foreign correspondent. Another was James Hare, a Collier’s Weekly photographer who had shot wars all over the world. Gilson Gardner, who had written a competent account of the Wrights’ work for Technical World magazine as early as 1905, was there representing one of the Chicago papers. The representative of the New York American walked into the Wrights’ camp disguised as a hunter. Byron Newton of the New York Herald stayed clear of the camp, seeking his information from the men at the weather station instead.