To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  The writers of headlines delighted in the developing story. After the first day or two of breaking news—“WRIGHT AEROPLANE SUCCESS” . . . “WRIGHT BROTHERS MAKE FLIGHT IN WAR AIRSHIP”—they put their interpretive powers to work. Some chose the historical angle: “THE WRIGHT BROTHERS HAVE AT LAST SOLVED THE GREAT PROBLEM OF SAILING IN THE AIR.” Others chose metaphor: “CLOUDLAND TRIP MADE IN AIRSHIP” . . . “LIKE A GIGANTIC BIRD IT SAILS THROUGH SPACE.” Some even became blasé: “FLYING EASY IF YOU KNOW HOW.” Then the pleasant fact that each day brought a new mark for distance called forth the sportswriter’s impulse, and though the longest flight was only eight thousand meters, or 4.97 miles, that was no impediment to the newspapers’ claims: “WRIGHTS FLY 2 MILES” . . . “WRIGHT AEROPLANE GOES THREE MILES”. . . . “BIG WRIGHT AIRSHIP FLIES EIGHT MILES” . . . “WRIGHT AIR SHIP FLEW 32 MILES.”

  Then came a delicious plot twist—Wilbur’s accident, translated as: “BUNGLING” . . . “DISASTROUS WRECK” . . . “COLLAPSES IN MIDAIR” by the prospect of out-and-out international competition: “AERONAUTS OF FRANCE ARE CONFIDENT” . . . “MR. FARMAN’S CHALLENGE UNANSWERED BY WRIGHTS” . . . “ORVILLE WRIGHT DESCRIBES AIRSHIP HE SAYS WILL WIN.”

  The Wrights’ desire to work in private contributed to wild errors—the most outrageous was the report that they had flown ten miles out to sea and back—but it also whetted the press’s hunger for juicy details. “They are so afraid that somebody may seek by illicit means to discover their ideas as embodied in the aeroplane,” one reporter whispered, “that they never leave it unguarded and sleep by it with a rifle at hand.” (This was probably true, as the Wrights had brought firearms to Kitty Hawk before—though for shooting game, not thieves.) “On account of the mystery attached to the Wright machine, the public appears vastly more interested in it than in Farman’s or Lagrange’s.” If that was not true of the public, which was only beginning to learn of all this, it certainly was true of the American press.

  Through it all came the sense that the Wrights were hardly rogues or charlatans but quite real and legitimate figures who, it now seemed, must be precisely what they claimed to be—the inventors of the first practical flying machine.

  Of course, this epiphany did not tend to shed glory on the nation’s newspapers, most of which had entirely ignored the brothers for five years. So, without quite neglecting to mention the brothers’ earlier and more impressive flights, the press managed to convey the understanding that these few trials at Kitty Hawk were somehow the Wrights’ first real flights, if only because they had been seen by some few of the men designated to record and recognize the notable events of America’s public life. On May 14, the likable Byron Newton of the New York Herald explained the new sense of things this way: “Today’s performance, while not equal to hundreds of flights the Wrights have made, will place them on a new footing before the world, because it will be the first time that a considerable number of disinterested outsiders have ever seen them in any flight and doing what they had told others they could do. There is no longer any chance for questioning that they stand at the head of the world’s inventors and operators of a dynamic flying machine.”

  THE FRENCH were in no mood to agree. In Paris, newsmen besieged the Aéro-Club, buttonholing airmen for comments on the reports from America. Most maintained a discreet silence. But Ernest Archdeacon could not let such an opportunity pass. “In my opinion,” he said, “the brothers Wright have certainly made serious flights, but that they have accomplished more than we have in Europe I am not prepared to admit. My own opinion, or if you prefer, my theory, is this: The brothers Wright, being Americans, are essentially business men. For some years they have been experimenting with an aeroplane, and have undoubtedly obtained certain results. What those results are I am not prepared to say. In fact, it is upon this point that I believe the Wrights have bluffed.” As “business men desirous of finding a market,” they had said over and over that their machine was practical. Yet look what had just happened in North Carolina, he said. “In the first time that it apparently made a serious attempt at flight it met with an accident.” And this was quite like the accidents the French airmen had suffered. Therefore it was clear the Wrights were no closer to a final solution than Farman, Delagrange, and the others. Their patents could not be upheld and they knew it, Archdeacon ventured—why else the cloak of secrecy?

  WHEN THE NEW YORK REPORTERS cornered Will in the lobby of the City Club, where the Flint men had put him up, or outside the offices of Flint & Co., he alternated between pure taciturnity, a little fun, and a point or two he had been wanting to make in public.

  What was his purpose in New York?

  “Business.”

  What response would he make to Henri Farman’s twenty-five-thousand-franc challenge?

  None.

  Why had he and his brother left Kitty Hawk after so few flights?

  “A horde of newspapermen drove us out.”

  What was his opinion of the report that Casey Baldwin and Thomas Selfridge had just made flights of nearly one hundred feet in Hammondsport?

  “I think that is very plausible.” (Did the newsmen catch the irony?) But then: “It will not do to believe what one reads concerning airships. I find frequently that the published accounts of flights made by others are fully as inaccurate as some of the accounts said to have been made by my brother and myself.”

  Were the brothers, as rumored, about to publish a full description of their machine?

  No, but, “I will say for the aeroplane we have perfected that it is practicable. It is the only machine perfected as yet, in our opinion, capable of doing the work expected of it.”

  And what did he think of Mr. Augustus Herring’s claim to have built an aeroplane engine that weighed only one pound per horsepower?

  “I would rather have one that weighed five pounds to the horse power. A motor for flying machine purposes has to be built to stand the work. In fact this whole question resolves itself into the making of a machine that will do what is required of it against the buffetings of the wind.

  “You can cross a pond in a tub, but you can’t cross the ocean in a tub. If the question were one merely of buildng an airship that would behave well in calm weather it would be easy. How best to overcome the action of strong winds, which always must be expected and guarded against, is the real question. Our theory is that an extremely light motor cannot be built sufficiently strong to withstand the strain that must come on it in practical operation in strong winds.”

  IN DAYTON, people were stopping Kate and Lorin and the bishop on the street to ask for the latest news. Stories of Wilbur’s accident inflamed the uproar. (The family had learned to be wary of alarming reports. “We were worried although we did not believe that the smash-up was as bad as it was reported to be,” Kate said.) They all scoured the papers, local and out-of-town, to pick up details. The Daily News and the Journal had turned downright proprietary about “the boys,” and were quick to defend them against all criticism, real or anticipated. Kate was especially tickled by one local writer’s analysis of the crash. “To read what Anderson had to say,” she told Will, “one would almost imagine that you intentionally slammed into the ground, just to see if you could!” She relished the daily work of searching the mail and the papers for new friends and new enemies. One writer would win her affection for “a very nice letter,” while another “makes me sick. . . . He is the worst little whipper-snapper.”

  Milton was astonished and delighted when a woman friend called to say that her minister had delivered a sermon the day before on the achievement of the impossible, citing the examples of Columbus, Robert Fulton, “and the Wright Brothers.”

  As letters and cables and callers arriving at 7 Hawthorn increased by a factor of ten, it became more and more clear to the family that the two brothers were no longer private creatures of West Dayton, Ohio, but de facto citizens of the world, which was pulling them into a vast realm of affairs far beyond any of their imagining. The family had long
ago moved beyond any misgivings about the worth of the inventors’ strange work. But still, this was new.

  Kate was thrilled, and adapting quickly. For Bishop Wright, reading article after article about “the Wrights and their Flyer,” the experience brought sheer wonder and a bit of unease. Proud as he was, he could not help pondering his sons’ estrangement from the Church. Amid this astounding new fame, could he believe that they were nonetheless the true representatives of his faith? He sought grounds for reassuring himself. In a letter to Orville, he reported the particulars of an eastern newspaper’s profile. “It says that you are ‘slim, sedate and placid,’ ‘the very antithesis of one’s idea of what an airship sailor should be’, ‘nothing daring, nothing devilish about them,’ ‘They look like a pair of clerks in a village hardware store, whose pleasure it is to attend the Wednesday night prayer meeting,’ &c. &c.

  “How sadly they miss the devotional tendency! Yet largely you owe your training and standing to the church.”

  WHAT WILL HAD TOLD the New York reporters about an impending article by the Wrights themselves—that “we have, neither of us, authorized the publication over our signatures of any matter pertaining to our aeroplane, nor have we written anything about it”—was technically correct. But Will meant to see that this would not be so for long. The rush of publicity and the consciousness of rivals in hot pursuit had reinforced his conviction that it was high time to end their public silence with a bang. In the buzzing confusion of news reports, even a conscientious and fair-minded reader would now find it impossible to judge which of the airmen, if any, had a clear claim to priority in the matter of invention; which flights deserved close attention and accolades; and most important, which machines actually could fly like a bird. The brothers’ entire claim to being the true inventors of the practical flying machine was at stake, and thus so was the value of their patents. Among the reporters, Will had shrugged off the news of the AEA’s flights in the White Wing. But in his own mind he was troubled by the particulars.

  On his second day in New York he broke away from his other obligations to visit the office of The Century magazine, whose editors, like others, had been courting the brothers. He told them that although he was going abroad and would not have time to write the story of their work, his brother might do so. That night he sent a stack of press stories to Orville and urged him to start writing.

  We need to have our true story told in an authentic way at once and to let it be known that we consider ourselves fully protected by patents. One of the clippings which I enclose intimates that Selfridge is infringing our patent on wing twisting. It is important to get the main features originated by us identified in the public mind with our machines before they are described in connection with some other machines. A statement of our original features ought to be published and not left covered up in the patent office. I strongly advise that you get a stenographer and dictate an article and have Kate assist in getting it in shape if you are too busy.

  Inside the Flint offices, Will spoke with his agents about the coming exhibitions in France, and the question of what impact the flights of Farman and Delagrange might have upon the brothers’ contract in France. He spent a few minutes with General Nelson Miles, the war hero who had approved the appropriation of federal funds to Samuel Langley. The old Indian fighter had toppled from power years earlier. But it couldn’t hurt to win his goodwill before their flights for the Army in Washington.

  Charles Flint himself had made arrangements for a quick automobile trip to the West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory of Thomas Edison. But a heavy rain swept in, and the meeting had to be canceled.

  Will wrote a last stateside letter to Kate, apologizing for the reporters’ hectoring antics in Dayton and teasing her for her haste in packing his things for the overseas trip. “I do sometimes wish . . . that you had raised the lid of my hat box, which was not locked, and put some of my hats in it before sending it on. However, a man can buy hats almost anywhere. . . .

  “Good bye to ‘sterchens’ for a few months.”

  On the morning of May 21 he boarded the French liner Touraine and steamed out of the harbor, bound for Le Havre, “in a fog so dense that we could scarcely see the vessel’s length.”

  AS WILL MADE HIS seven-day crossing of the Atlantic, the press storm shifted from the dailies to the popular weekly magazines. Collier’s published Arthur Ruhl’s funny narrative of the reporters’ pursuit of the brothers at Kill Devil Hills. Orville, delighted with the story, called it “the most interesting thing I have ever seen concerning our experiments.” Ruhl wanted to write more, and wrote to Dayton to say so. And he had another piece of business, he told Orville. His publisher, Robert Collier, wanted to purchase a flying machine.

  Responding warmly, Orv noted Ruhl’s regret that the Herald had broken the story of the Wrights’ design, and he observed the odd fact that no reporter had thought to write the same story many months before on the basis of their American patent, which had been lying undisturbed in a file at the U.S. Patent Office since 1906. Indeed, the ways of the press perplexed Orville. “I have never been able to discover exactly what is the ‘secret’ of which the newspapers so often talk,” he said. “The great mystery surrounding our work has been mostly created by the newspapers. They have told so many contradictory stories, that people are inclined to doubt all of them.”

  As for Collier’s desire to buy and fly a Wright machine, Orv said the pressure of current business would keep the brothers busy for several months. “If Mr. Collier is then interested, we would be glad to furnish him a machine. I do not think he would have any more trouble in learning to operate it than he had in learning the automobile. As a sport, I think flying is far superior.”

  ON THE Touraine, with “few distractions of any kind,” Will brooded. He worried about finding competent assistants to help him assemble the flyer that had been sitting in storage since the previous summer. He worried about Orville’s ability to juggle the crucial tasks he faced at home—inspecting the flying field at Washington; writing the article for The Century; filing new patents; building a new machine for the Fort Myer trials. He worried about his brother’s tendency to take on too much, to take too long, to keep matters to himself. He fired off instructions and entreaties. From New York he had warned Orville that “it always takes more time to do things than is expected.” Now he reminded him: “Do not attempt more than time will allow.” And he asked Kate to watch for trouble. “If at any time Orville is not well, or dissatisfied with the situation at Washington, especially the grounds, I wish you would tell me. He may not tell me such things always.”

  And he thought again and again about the bad moment at the Kill Devil Hills, when the machine had inexplicably darted downward toward the sand. “The more I think of the circumstances immediately preceding the accident at Kitty Hawk the less I can account for it,” he confided to Orville. “I cannot remember that there was any indication of the approach of any disturbance such as I had noticed at other times. I do not think there was any upward turn such as had preceded some of the darts at Simms [Huffman Prairie]. On the other hand, I feel pretty sure the trouble did not result from turning the rudder the wrong way.”

  On Will’s sixth day out of New York, Leon Delagrange made a flight of two thousand meters in Rome. Three days later, at a field near Ghent, France, Henri Farman offered Ernest Archdeacon a seat beside him and flew for a kilometer before a great crowd.

  ARRIVING IN PARIS, Will was distressed to find no news of Orville, either in the papers or in letters from home. “The fact that the newspapers say nothing of a visit to Washington leads me to fear you did not stop there in returning home [from Kitty Hawk]. It is a great mistake to leave a personal inspection of the grounds go till the last minute.”

  Will went immediately to work. He met with Hart Berg; toured the countryside to find a suitable field for demonstrations; made arrangements to work at the automobile factory of a new friend, Leon Bollée. There was still no word from Orville.<
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  Will began to seethe. He himself was writing to Dayton nearly every day. “Does he not intend to be partners any more?” he asked Kate. “It is ridiculous to leave me without information of his doings and intentions.” Anticipating this complaint, Kate said “Bubbo” was doing his best, though with so many visitors and so much to do, “He doesn’t [write] as much as he would otherwise.” She promised to pitch in with correspondence.

  By the middle of June, Will was ready to open the long wooden crates that contained the flying machine that Orville and Charlie Taylor had packed in Dayton the previous year and sent to France in expectation of an exhibition. Yet when he lifted the lids, instead of finding smaller boxes inside, each with its own cargo of parts carefully cleated down and wrapped to prevent damage in shipping, Will found an ugly jumble of metal, wood, and fabric. Inside the assembled wings he found ten or twelve ribs cracked and the white linen smeared and “torn in almost numberless places.” The radiators were “badly mashed.” He pulled out a broken magneto, damaged coils, a bent axle, and squashed tubes. The seat was broken. The mess would cost him many days of extra work, and he let Orville have it.

  “I am sure that with a scoop shovel I could have put things in within two or three minutes and made fully as good a job of it. I never saw such evidences of idiocy in my life. Did you tell Charley not to separate anything lest it should get lonesome?” He catalogued the damage for his brother and issued strict instructions for next time: “Hereafter everything must be packed in such a way that the box can be dropped from a height of five feet ten times, once on each side and the other times on the corners. . . . Things must be packed at least ten times as well as they were last time.”