by James Tobin
Will was forced to take one wing apart and rebuild it almost from scratch. When several days of “regular French weather” caused the fabric to shrink, he and some helpers built a fire under the wings to dry the cloth. It caught on fire. He worked his fingers raw with sewing, and the muscles of his hands wore out from the effort of stretching the cloth tight on the wings. Then he discovered that the French mechanics hired to prepare the engine had bungled the job so badly that he had to spend most of two days on repairs. “They are such idiots! And fool with things that should be left alone. I get very angry every time I go down there.”
As he went through the crates and assembled the machine, he concluded that Orville and Charlie Taylor not only had done a poor job of packing, but had assembled some parts shoddily and left others out altogether. Screws and wires were the wrong length. Nuts were missing. Bolts were lost. He remained furious at Orville for days. With every lost hour and every scrape of a knuckle he fumed at his little brother a little more. “I have had an awful job . . . ,” he sputtered. “In putting things together I notice many evidences that your mind was on something else while you worked last summer.”
French officials hovered, waiting with increasing impatience. On the Fourth of July, Will went as usual to Bollée’s shop and worked all day on the engine. In these tests, a device for cooling the roaring engine by circulating water through its chambers was used. Because Orville and Charlie Taylor had failed to send the proper rubber tubing, it was necessary to use a poor substitute that was too large for its purpose. Just as Will and Bollée’s mechanics were about to quit for the night, a section of the tubing ruptured, and a spout of boiling water struck Will on the forearm and side. For two or three minutes he was in agony. Bollée quickly applied picric acid, containing the danger of infection. But a blister twelve inches long arose on the arm and another the size of his hand on one side. An incompetent doctor made matters worse by coating the injury in oil, and the problem became worse for several days before it began slowly to improve.
Though the injured arm was useless for the time being, Will continued to work, knowing it made more sense to stay in bed and try to hasten his recovery. But he was now so far behind in preparing the machine that he could not stay away from the shop. The result was to irritate the injury and bring his frayed nerves to the brink of disintegration. Again he unloaded on Orville.
If you had permitted me to have any anticipation of the state in which you had shipped things over here, it would have saved three weeks time. . . . If you have any conscience it ought to be pretty sore. I do not know of a single thing that I have not had to practically make over either because it was injured in shipping, or made defectively, or only partly finished and the hard part left undone. . . . If you had finished the parts, and left the assembling alone it would have saved me a world of trouble.
With an ocean protecting him from his brother’s wrath, Orville responded with a meager excuse and mild regrets. As for the disarray of the machine in its crates, the missing parts, the work left undone, he said only, “The trouble comes at the Customs house.” And, “I hope you are getting over the burns.”
AT ROUGHLY THE SAME MOMENT that Wilbur Wright was scalded in France, Glenn Curtiss was preparing to fly his new aeroplane. Bell, fascinated by the flying insects that swarmed through the Finger Lakes region as spring turned to summer, had named the machine in their honor—June Bug.
In Hammondsport, a crowd of several hundred, including many reporters, turned out to see the great motorcyclist attempt to fly one kilometer to claim the Scientific American trophy. Augustus Herring was strutting through the crowd, bragging of “having a marvelous new machine up his sleeve, an aeroplane so small and efficient that he could pack it in a suitcase.”
And Charles Manly was there. He had established himself as an independent engineer in New York, and was taking an active role in the affairs of the Aero Club.
The Bells had been unable to attend, but their daughter Daisy had come to represent the family—she even climbed into the pilot’s seat before Curtiss was ready—as had her husband, the botanist David Fairchild, who watched with a scientist’s appreciation of fine detail.
After a day of clouds and showers, the sun had come out. Curtiss made one try at suppertime but had to come down after only a few hundred yards; the tail was out of proper adjustment. Reporters and photographers waited in knee-high clover. The Fairchilds stood with Mrs. Curtiss at the edge of a patch of potatoes. David Fairchild felt “an anxiety lest something happen, lest [one] should be on the point of seeing a tragedy . . .” He thought of Otto Lilienthal falling to his death; “it haunted me as I studied the situation.”
About 7:30, with dusk approaching, the engine was restarted. The machine rolled across the bumpy field, gathered speed and left the ground. It passed over the spectators at a height of twenty feet. Fairchild noticed how slowly it seemed to move. “Thirty miles an hour in an auto seems fast going where fence posts and wayside flowers mark the speed,” he said, “but in the air with nothing but the distant hills to go by the passage of this giant flying thing seemed leisurely and graceful.” They watched the wings pass down the valley.
“VISIONS OF GREAT FLEETS OF AIR SHIPS”
Glenn Curtiss at the controls of the June Bug
From the air, Curtiss spotted a photographer whom he thought had “seemed to be pleased rather than disappointed” when the first flight fell short of the mark. So he flew on past the red flag that marked the kilometer, continuing “as far as the field would permit, regardless of fences, ditches, etc,” before coming down in the fields.
“In spite of all I had read and heard,” Daisy Fairchild told her parents, “and all the photographs I had seen, the actual sight of a man flying past me through the air was thrilling to a degree that I can’t express. We all lost our heads and David shouted, and I cried . . .”
On the train bound to Washington, Fairchild wrote a long note for his father-and mother-in-law, recording the events of the day and his own emotions.
The thing is done. Man flies! All the tedious details of perfecting a practical passenger carrying machine are forgotten. Even the previous successes of which you have seen reports mean nothing and with one leap the imagination builds on this positive fact which your eyes are seeing, a whole superstructure of world locomotion. You think of the plovers that hatch their young in the summer of the Arctic Circle, teach them to fly in Labrador and spend the winter with them in the Argentine. . . . You remember the flights of homing pigeons that cover 500 miles in eleven hours and these suggest strange visions of great fleets of airships crossing and re-crossing oceans with their thousands of passengers. In short we cast aside every pessimism and give our imaginations free rein as we stood watching the weird bowed outline pass by.
Chapter Twelve
“The Light on Glory’s Plume”
“A CRACK LIKE A PISTOL SHOT COMING FROM OVERHEAD’
Fort Myer, Virginia, September 17, 1908
WILBUR WRIGHT was confident that in all of nature there was only one way to fly. The birds knew it. He and his brother had discovered it. The essence of flight was the coordinated action of horizontal and vertical surfaces as they encountered the air, and it was embodied in the Wrights’ patents.
So in Will’s mind it was a simple syllogism—if the June Bug had flown as the newspapers said it did, then it infringed on the Wrights’ patents. He wasted little time in issuing instructions to Orville about what to do. Sixteen days after the Independence Day flight at Hammondsport, Orville warned Glenn Curtiss that the June Bug and any airplane like it constituted intellectual theft. He did not say so in those words, but the implication was clear and threatening.
“We believe it would be very difficult to develop a successful machine without the use of some of the features covered in this patent. . . . If it is your desire to enter the exhibition business, we would be glad to take up the matter of a license to operate under our patents for that purpose.”
; Curtiss ducked. The newspapers were mistaken, he said. He intended no exhibition flights—not for money, that is. His work was experimental only.
IN FRANCE, Wilbur slept beside the flying machine, first at the factory in Le Mans of Leon Bollée, the automobile man whom he had befriended the year before, then at a shed near Les Hunaudières, the horse-race track where he had arranged to make his flights. Several French workmen were detailed to help him. “The shed is not nearly as good as those we had at Simms and Kitty Hawk, but while the warm weather lasts I will be reasonably comfortable.” The family at the farm next door provided milk and water. He fixed café au lait for himself each morning on a little alcohol stove. For lunch and dinner, he and the workmen walked down a lane to the inn of one Mme. Pollet, who offered a simple but excellent French table. He made friends with a six-year-old neighbor boy—“a truthful little chap”—who spoke English and German, and with a half-starved stray dog whom he rid of his fleas, fed, and named Flyer.
Will had two principal allies at Le Mans. One was Hart Berg, who made himself indispensable in the dual role of press agent and bodyguard, shooing away nearly all those who came to gawk and question. (Berg sometimes lent a hand with the mechanical work, too, but, “I always tremble when the engine is mentioned,” he wrote Orville, “as I am responsible for the high tension ignition & if there is ever a missfire—well you know Wilbur well enough to know that I occasionally hear of it.”) The other was Leon Bollée, who not only put his shop and his workmen at Will’s disposal but offered friendship with no strings attached. Mme. Bollée, who was about to give birth, became a friend as well. Will promised her he would make his first flight in France on the day her baby was born.
The airmen of France could not resist the lure of the American they had read about for so long. Henri Farman wangled a lunch date—“he is a pretty nice sort of fellow and disposed to be friendly,” Will thought—and Louis Blériot sent a respectful request to be allowed to watch the demonstration flights. “On my part,” Blériot added with pride, “I should be delighted to give you the pleasure of seeing my monoplane apparatus fly, when you wish it.”
The Aéro-Club men and their admirers among the French press were not so solicitous. The furtive flights at Kitty Hawk in the spring had only inflamed their frustration over the Americans’ secrecy. Georges Besançon, editor of L’Aerophile, spoke for many when he said that although he believed the Wrights had flown, he could not fathom the reason for their years-long refusal to do so in public, which had “caused them to be despised in Europe, and had certainly spoiled the market for the sale of their secret.”
When Will suffered his scalding, and it was announced that tests would be postponed during his recovery, one of the Paris papers said: “Le bluff continue.”
A few reporters suspected Will never would fly. But others feared he would take to the air the moment they strayed away, so they kept up a steady vigil. “I think they have had their patience about as nearly tried as mine has been,” Will said. “I have told them many times that they were wasting their time, but they do not believe me.” He assured the newsmen there would be nothing spectacular to see at first, that he planned merely to “potter around” until he was sure the machine would work properly. But expectations were rising. “When it became known that a shed had been erected on the racecourse,” said the Paris Herald’s man, “and that within the Bollée factory the mysterious machine was gradually taking form, attention became focused on the man. Everyone knows who he is now, and there is a very general feeling that in flying near Le Mans Mr. Wright is about to fix the general attention of the world on the town.”
As he worked one day, an Englishman arrived. This was Griffith Brewer, a London patent attorney and balloonist who hoped to meet this prospective client. Brewer handed his card to a mechanic, who passed it to the American. Brewer watched as Wright glanced at the card, looked for Brewer among the onlookers, nodded, and returned to his work. Brewer hung on until the day’s work was done and Wright had disappeared inside his shed. The Englishman was about to give up when Wright emerged and said, “Now, Mr. Brewer, let’s go and have some dinner.” Over supper at Mme. Pollet’s, Brewer carefully avoided all mention of flying. Instead the two men talked far into the evening “on topics of mutual interest,” chiefly “American life and habits.” Brewer perceived that “this complete change must have been welcome after answering the continuous stream of questions about the aeroplane.” Brewer’s tact and good fellowship that evening launched a lifelong friendship with the Wright family.
IN NEW YORK, Will’s hasty departure for France had caused outrage at the Aero Club of America. Most Americans were still digesting the recent news reports from Kitty Hawk, and only beginning to understand their import. Yet Wright was leaving! Departing American shores and taking his machine with him, to make his first public demonstrations not in the United States but in France! Furious, Aero Club organizers decided that if the Wrights were not patriots enough to make public flights in the United States, then someone else would, and they invited Henri Farman to cross the Atlantic. Hasty preparations were made at the racecourse at Brighton Beach, in Queens, and plans were announced for flights no later than the first week of August.
Thomas McMechan, secretary of the Aero Club, took charge of managing Farman’s appearance in America. In spite of the Wrights and Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association, McMechan insisted on promoting Farman’s approaching feats as “the first public flights in America.”
As workers hurried to put coverings over the ditches in the infield at Brighton Beach, so that Farman would have a level field, McMechan blasted the Wrights at an impromptu press conference. “We are disgusted with the conduct of some of the American inventors,” he said.
They have been hard at work, chasing the almighty dollar, and have given secondary attention to solving the problems of flight in a heavier than air machine. Whatever they have discovered they have kept secret. They have guarded against their friends as they have against their rivals. It may be that they have been able to make money from this secrecy—I assume that they have—but they have not advanced the science of flight by it. The American inventors have not been fair to America by this policy. The Aero Club of America sought to induce the Wrights to enter public tests, but they would not. . . . It is on this account that we induced Mr. Farman to come here to make a public test of his machine. We know America and the quality of her mechanics. We know that as soon as we can arouse public interest in the problem of flight and get our inventors at work on it that sooner or later some one will develop a practical flying machine.
Just then Farman came up.
“What is the trouble between you and the Wrights?” a reporter asked.
“There is no trouble,” he said. “The Wrights are piqued—that is all.”
“What do you think of the proposed experiments at Fort Myer?”
“Nothing will come of them. The conditions imposed by the government’s engineers are impractical. The requirements are five years in advance of the present state of affairs.”
BRIEF SYNOPSES of the Wrights’ work—both written by the same authority—appeared in The Independent magazine and the leading German aeronautical publication, the Illustrierte Aeronautische Mitteilungen, in June.
It is now generally conceded that the Wright brothers have accomplished the extraordinary performances claimed by them. . . . They inaugurated negotiations for the sale of their invention to various governments for war purposes, asking, it must be confessed, very high prices. Being somewhat opinionated as well as straightforward, they made two mistakes: the first that the principal market for flying machines would be for war purposes (where cost is no object), instead of for sporting purposes, as more correctly judged by the French, and the second that contracts could be obtained for a secret machine contingent upon making a flight of thirty or forty miles within one hour. Two years were therefore spent in fruitless negotiations.
The writer said the Wrights’ Army trials l
ikely would succeed, “if no disastrous accident intervenes,” but that the military uses of the aeroplane were being vastly overestimated. Dirigible airships would do better in war, he said.
The author of this faint praise of the Wright brothers was Octave Chanute. Orville read it with the same capped frustration that he and Will were growing accustomed to in all dealings with their old friend, whom Orville now believed was “endeavoring to make our business more difficult.”
“I think I will write him,” he told Will.
But he did not. The prospect of a quarrel apparently seemed too painful, and any attempt at a public response to Chanute’s assertions and insinuations would make the brothers look both ungrateful and ungenerous. So they continued to keep quiet.
CHANUTE WAS FAR FROM the only irritation at 7 Hawthorn. Orville, Kate, and Milton were worrying about everything: patents, contracts, competitors. “The Bell outfit” was offering Red Wings for sale at five thousand dollars each—“They have got some nerve.” The brothers were being mistreated by the editor of Aeronautics magazine—“a fool or a knave,” according to Kate. Farman was about to beat Will to the punch at Brighton Beach—“If you don’t hurry,” Orv nagged his brother, “he will do his flying here before you get started in France.” Without their older brother’s calming confidence, Kate and Orville were inflaming each others’ nerves. “We miss you more and more,” Kate told Will. “I am so tired of your being away all the time.”