by James Tobin
On May 14, Arthur Ruhl of the popular Collier’s Weekly arrived. A skilled stylist, Ruhl had been courting the brothers for more than a year, hoping to write the first comprehensive story of the Wright brothers. Assuring them that “Collier’s is deeply interested in your work,” he had visited Dayton and persisted despite their polite rejections.
After a long journey by rail, steamer, and mail boat, the reporters had to brave the final leg of the pursuit on foot through soggy woods infested with mosquitoes and razorback hogs. “Geographically, this may be only four or five miles,” Ruhl said, “but measured by the sand into which your shoes sink and which sinks into your shoes, the pine needles you slip back on, the heat, and the ‘ticks’ and ‘chiggers’ that swarm up out of the earth and burrow into every part of you, it seems about thirty-five.” The reporters were convinced that if they showed themselves, the experimenters would simply refuse to fly. So they tried to stay hidden and spy from the border of the woods and the crowns of sand hills. The men at the lifesaving station were apparently their best sources. They enjoyed watching the Wrights through field glasses, and were happy to pass along information about their doings, substantiated or not.
On the day Ruhl arrived, the reporters crept around the dunes like a ragtag band of sunburned Boy Scouts, debating whether to stay together or move singly; whether to spy from behind a hill or to construct a screen of underbrush. The sun glared from a bright blue sky. A steady wind blew at about fifteen miles per hour, kicking up a haze of sand from the tops of the dunes “like faint smoke from a chimney.”
Finally the reporters crept up to a point about a mile from the camp. Peering across the “open ground and heat shimmer” at the base of the Kill Devil Hills, Ruhl could see “two busy little dots” moving here and there around “a rectangle of hazy gray lines, with a white streak at the top, which might have been taken for the white line a receding wave trails along the beach.”
“THE SAND, THE HEAT, THE ‘TICKS’ AND ‘CHIGGERS’”
Reporters wait for the Wrights to fly at the Kill Devil Hills, May 1908
After a very long wait, the men glimpsed a flicker of motion. “Two whirling circles appeared, and across the quiet distance came a sound like that of a reaper working in a distant field. The circles flashed and whirled faster and faster, then the white streak above tilted, moved forward, and rose. Across the flat, straight for the ambush, it swept, as fast an an express train. It . . . swerved and tilted slightly, righted itself, dipped and rose, now close to the ground, now thirty or forty feet above it. It had come perhaps half a mile when the operator saw, for the first time apparently, a dead tree trunk directly in his path. He swerved, but had to alight, coming down easily with a slight splutter of sand.” More dots swarmed out to the machine—men from the lifesaving station, Ruhl guessed. They inserted carts under the wings, restarted the propellers, and jogged along beside the machine, guiding it back to the launch rail.
The reporters doubtless had seen artists’ sketches of flying machines like this one. But the real thing left them struggling to make sense of it. Large machines of their experience all moved narrow-end forward. Trains did. Ships and boats did. Automobiles did. To see this thing move wide-side forward was strikingly odd. Gilson Gardner could think only of “a runaway street car moving side forward.”
Now the reporters saw the “quaint bird” rise again and come toward them. Hare, the photographer, spotted his chance. He raced out into the open and aimed his camera. MacGowan, remembering his war service, called, “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes!” The reporters watched as the machine banked to the right and “swept grandly by,” then flew on toward the beach, where a few cows grazing in the long grass “threw their heads upward, and whirling about, galloped away in terror, ahead of the approaching machine. It swept on far above them indifferently,” then rose over the swell of a low dune and headed back toward the shed. The reporters heard the distant rattle of the engine stop suddenly, and watched as the machine slid smoothly toward the ground and “alighted lightly as a bird.” They looked at their watches. The aeroplane had been aloft for nearly three minutes. They estimated the distance of the flight at about two miles.
According to Ruhl, the reporters now wrestled with deep emotion and warring impulses—to stay hidden and file their stories, or to run across the plain and “tell two plucky young men how much they admired them.”
They chose professional duty. With just enough time to file that day, they walked the four miles to the weather station at Kitty Hawk, where they cabled the news “to the world waiting on the other side of various sounds and continents and oceans that it was all right, the rumors true, and there was no doubt that a man could fly.”
Ruhl left the Outer Banks the next morning. On his way to Norfolk via Elizabeth City, he dashed off a letter to a young lady friend who was vacationing in the town of Edenton, North Carolina. He had hoped to visit her, but now there would not be time. He was so worn out from his trek across the damnably soft dunes that he could “hardly write an ordinary sentence.” Yet he had seen “a wonderful sight,” he said, “and I felt that I was . . . present at something almost as extraordinary as the first trip of the first locomotive.”
• • •
THE WRIGHTS were only partially aware of the surreptitious presence of the press nearby. A couple of reporters had ventured into their camp. Others had been seen in the distance, and local friends told them that reporters were “hanging about in the woods and crawling through the marsh to get sight of us in flight.” A report in one of the Norfolk papers that they had flown ten miles out to sea appeared before they had made a single trial, reconfirming their belief that some journalists simply made things up. But when reporters appeared and introduced themselves, the brothers behaved cordially, obeying Kate’s admonition to “be as civil as you can to every one. It pays to make friends of as many as you can.” At the same time, they conveyed the impression that if the newsmen tried to come close during the flights themselves, the brothers would close up shop. As Will told the family, “It is a good thing sometimes to have a fierce reputation, like a schoolteacher.”
They had wanted to test the new steering mechanism during calms, but the weather had failed to cooperate, and they regarded their performance so far as only so-so—certainly not the sort of showing they wished to make in France and Washington, before official witnesses. In three days they made eighteen trials. Most covered less than a hundred meters. The up-and-down course of the first flight “beat any roller coaster about Dayton all to pieces.” The new steering controls were effective, but “it will take some practice to get used to them.” And there was little time for that. Will would have to leave for New York and Europe in just over a week.
Perhaps for the first time in their careers as experimenters, they were rushing.
On the morning of May 14 they started especially early. Before 8:00 A.M., with skies clear and the wind steady, Will took Charlie Furnas up for a trip of about six hundred meters. A little while later Orville and Charlie went up again, this flight lasting just over four minutes and describing a complete circle. At one point the wind gusted to thirty miles per hour, and for a few seconds the machine stood nearly motionless in the air, like the gulls poised over the surf nearby.
The wind shifted to the west, and Will made several false starts, catching wingtips in the sand before he could leave the track. After the midday meal he tried again and “got off nicely.” At an altitude of about thirty feet, he passed one landmark after another—the West Hill, the Little Hill, the tree they called the “umbrella tree,” the dried-up ponds. He passed the camp and went into a second circle. He was traveling with the wind at his back at a speed of more than fifty miles per hour. With no warning at all—no sudden turbulence, no catch in the engine—“the machine suddenly darted into the ground.”
A mile away, Orville was watching through field glasses. He saw the tiny figure of his brother pitch forward as the machine struck the ground
nose first and went into a somersault. Then he could see only a cloud of sand. “Somewhat excited,” he and Charlie Furnas stared across the blank expanse. Thirty seconds passed. Then they saw Will stand and wave.
REPAIRS WOULD TAKE far too much time for any more trials, with Will due in Europe in a couple of weeks. After only five days of flying, they had no choice but to quit. They had flown sitting upright and they had carried a passenger, and the new steering apparatus had worked well enough. But with the machine facing its crucial public tests, they certainly would have wanted more practice. And Will was not at all sure why the machine had dived and crashed.
“I do not think the accident would have happened if we had not been so rushed and overworked,” he confided to Kate. “Such a thing as overexerting ourselves before mounting the machine will not occur again.”
Will left for New York, where he would meet with his agents at Flint & Co., then cross the Atlantic to prepare for the tests in France. He would fly the machine that Orville had shipped to France the previous summer for the exhibitions that never had occurred. Orville would stop in Washington to inspect the flying grounds at Fort Myer, then return to Dayton to build a new machine for his own exhibition to the Army.
IN WESTERN NEW YORK STATE, the Aerial Experiment Association was preparing its new machine, and “all Hammondsport seems to be alive to the occasion.” Boys were cutting school each morning and running out to Harry Champlin’s racetrack at Stony Brook Farm, awash in sun and stiff spring breezes. All day they would hang around the AEA’s big tent, watching the men as they tested their roaring engines and fitted strips of wood and sheets of linen into unfamiliar shapes. They were “fine bright-looking boys,” Bell said approvingly, “and I only hope that their teachers will be merciful to them when their hour of reckoning arrives.”
As the new machine neared completion, grown men appeared at the tent, too—reporters and flying-machine inventors and officials of the Aero Club of America, all of them hovering nearby, even skipping meals in town, “for fear the wind would go down during their absence, and they might be absent at the critical time.”
Everyone gawked at the solid, genial figure of Alexander Graham Bell, who moved through the little crowd every day, rapping the ashes from his pipe and “waiting for that blessed wind to go down.” Having missed the Red Wing’s flights, Bell felt “very anxious” to see the performance of this new craft, the White Wing. At stake was his own idea for achieving stability with movable surfaces at the tips of the wings. The lives of his young associates were at stake, too, and Bell was on edge. “The machine is distinctly of the dangerous kind,” he confided to Mabel, “requiring a great deal of skill in the operator. It is unfortunate that such a machine has to be operated—at first—with an unskilled man on board. I have no doubt that it will fly—but whether it will come down safely without injury to the man on board, is a problem which can only be settled by experiment.” The Wrights and Farman and Delagrange had flown safely in such machines, he knew, “so . . . this fact is encouraging. For my own part I should prefer to take my chances in a tetrahedral aerodrome—going more slowly—and over water.”
He remained just as avid for the tetrahedral form as ever. When the breeze continued to blow across the racetrack at ten miles per hour every day, he grabbed the chance to send three kites up for observation. He planned more full-scale tetrahedral experiments at Beinn Bhreagh later in the summer, and he was still chafing at his young friends for their polite lack of enthusiasm. They complained of the kites’ lumbering resistance to the wind, and they seemed no longer willing even to try a tetrahedral device with an engine and man aboard. This offended Bell’s lifelong loyalty to the principle of experimentation. “The bug-a-boo of ‘increased head-resistance’ should not prevent the experiment from being made . . . ,” he grumped to Mabel. “We can try it.” And even if the machine failed to fly as Bell hoped, “the kite,” unlike the dangerous aeroplane, “won’t come down.”
As the controlling partner, he could have ruled out the aeroplane experiments. But he could not bring himself to crush his friends’ hopes, or his own. “I have not the heart to throw a damper over the ambitions of the young men associated with me. I feel that in a very few days now America may be ringing with their praises—and they certainly deserve success, and will obtain it too—I have no doubt.”
When the breeze finally fell to a murmur, the members of the AEA paid the price for their zealous hurry to get into the air. Rolling the machine out onto the racetrack on May 13, they found they had neglected to take certain crucial measurements. The White Wing, larger than the Red Wing, could not move even a few yards without bumping its wings against the elevated walls of the racetrack. They tried to run it over the grass inside the oval, but the wheels broke on the muddy ruts. They raised the machine higher above the wheels for another try on the track. But without a device to steer the craft while it remained on the ground, it blundered from side to side.
On May 18, just before supper, Casey Baldwin nursed the White Wing up to a height of ten feet off the ground and flew ninety-three yards in a straight line. The reporters crowded around Bell. “We had the first very promising spring into the air today, showing that the machine will fly,” he declared. “It was not very much in itself, but a very great thing as showing what it may do in the future.” The next day Selfridge made two short flights, also in straight lines.
Now Glenn Curtiss was to have his first turn at flying. He was not long past an attack of the mumps, but he was eager for his first try, and he appraised the machine with the practiced eye of one with a great deal of experience in managing vehicles at high speed. To bring the machine’s nose down, he shifted some of the machinery forward, and to better see the ground, he removed the cloth shield from in front of the pilot’s perch. He added a fourth wheel under the tail.
On his first run down the backstretch of the racetrack, Curtiss could not make the machine rise. The engine was found to be short of oil. On the second run he sped down the track at close to thirty miles per hour, pulled on the elevator control, and felt the odd sensation of suddenly riding upon air, not earth. The right wing dipped and Curtiss leaned left, activating Bell’s wingtips and restoring balance. “Very much elated,” he steered too high, then too low, and the wheels brushed the ground. (“As is usual in any balancing act,” he said, “the novice overdoes matters.”) But he bounced upward again and found himself staring straight at the vineyard beyond the track. He steered left and missed it. He steered right and resumed his course. Close to the ground, he cut the engine and glided down into a farmer’s field. He had flown 340 yards in nineteen seconds. On a windless day, Curtiss had kept a flying machine balanced with ailerons. Thomas Selfridge fired off a cable to the Associated Press in New York.
A day later, barely in the air, Douglas McCurdy felt a “puff” of wind from his port quarter. The right wing dropped and caught on the rough ground, and the White Wing executed a somersault, dropping McCurdy “gently and without any jar whatever on the ground.” The machine smashed into pieces beyond him.
WITH A SINGLE FLIGHT, Glenn Curtiss had proven himself the most accomplished of the AEA fliers and the canniest among them as a student of the flying art, and now it was his turn to supervise the design and construction of an aeroplane. He went at the task exhilarated and determined. In the air over Champlin’s track he had not traveled even half as fast as he had on a motorcycle. But he had felt in his sinews the electrifying sense of new possibilities in the realm of speed. For here was a medium without friction and a racetrack without limits. The sky beckoned to him. He was already pining for the enormous silver Scientific American trophy, waiting at the Aero Club of America’s headquarters in New York for the man who would claim it. Curtiss decided to try for it. His colleagues agreed, and they began to build a new machine.
WHILE BELL’S BOYS were flying the White Wing in Hammondsport, Wilbur Wright was preparing to leave North Carolina for New York. As he passed through Manteo, reporters accos
ted him with a new urgency. They blurted that Henri Farman, in France, had just issued a public challenge to the Wright brothers: Would they compete with him for twenty-five thousand francs to see who could be first to complete a public flight of five kilometers?
Will rewarded them only with a dry crinkle of a smile and a courteous refusal to be provoked into saying a single word more than he preferred to say. Well, couldn’t he say something? They got another smile. “I will talk to you on any subject except aeroplanes or my plans for the future.”
IN NEW YORK a New York Herald man, acting on a cable from his colleague in Norfolk, met Will’s train, and from then until his ship departed forty-eight hours later, Will enjoyed no peace. He learned that for a week or more, the flights at Kitty Hawk—no better than ordinary by the standards of 1905 at Huffman Prairie—had been the subject of breathless, day-to-day coverage, not only in the great New York dailies but all across the United States and Europe. The little band of writers and photographers sneaking around in the marshy woods had been only the vanguard of a press corps that was now voracious for news of flying machines.
In fact, a tectonic shift in the collective mind of the Fourth Estate had occurred, thanks to an extraordinary convergence of events—the flights of Farman and Delagrange in France; the surprising emergence of American contenders associated with the magical name of Bell; the widely published photographs of men in flying machines that were actually off the ground; and amid all this, the electrifying word that the mysterious Wright brothers had at last emerged from their midwestern redoubt and were preparing to fly again. Suddenly the realization that epochal events were under way crashed into the consciousness of the agenda-setting New York papers, and for the third week in May 1908, they flayed the story for all it was worth. The rest of the country’s papers followed suit. As the editors of the Dayton Daily News proclaimed—with a private twinge of embarrassment, one hopes—“THE WORLD IS TALKING ABOUT WRIGHT BROTHERS.”