To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  Will professed to be unconcerned about Farman or the others.

  “If the trials are successful,” he replied, “there will be no trouble with anyone.”

  But he used the word “if” advisedly. In fact, though he kept it hidden from his family, he was deeply worried. “While I was operating alone,” he told Milton later, “there was the constant fear that if I attempted too much and met with a serious accident we would be almost utterly discredited before I could get the machine repaired, with no materials & no workmen. The excitement and the worry, and above all the fatigue of an endless crowd of visitors from daylight till dark had brought me to such a point of nervous exhaustion that I did not feel myself really fit to get on the machine.”

  And if he was feeling this way among the French, wouldn’t Orville, with perhaps less self-discipline, face the same distractions in his flights for the Army? Will sent more cautions across the Atlantic:

  “You should get everything ready at Washington as soon as possible. . . . If you have trouble of any kind . . . cable me, and I will come over. . . . Be cautious about throwing over the screws [propellers] always. . . . Do not attempt to go up without an absolutely reliable means of stopping the motor. . . . Make sure that everything is as perfect as it can be made. . . . Be exceedingly cautious as to wind conditions and thorough in your preparations. I wish I could be home.”

  “GENTLEMEN, I’M GOING TO FLY.”

  Wilbur’s flyer en route to the flying field at Le Mans. Transportability was a condition of the French contract.

  LATE ON THE NIGHT of August 6, 1908, with the reporters and the hangers-on elsewhere, Will and his assistants hoisted the machine onto a cart, hitched the rig to an automobile, and towed it over rutted roads to the Hunaudières racetrack. When the press discovered the move the next day, word went around that a flight was planned. By the afternoon of August 8, a small crowd was lounging in the grandstand. Estimates of the number vary, but it was probably no more than a hundred. Most were from Le Mans and the countryside nearby, but some had made the 125-mile trip from Paris. Will saw the usual reporters, two officers of the Russian Army who had been waiting for weeks, Louis Blériot, and other members of the Aéro-Club, including Ernest Archdeacon himself, who was telling people why the Wright machine would disappoint them. Everyone was watching the American to see what his decision would be about making a flight that day.

  The air was calm, the day “the finest we have had for a first trial . . . for several weeks.” The raw spot on Will’s arm still pained him, and the machine was not quite the way he wanted it. But there were the Frenchmen, watching him closely, the hopeful and the skeptical, and so “I thought it would be a good thing to do a little something.”

  He intended to make only a very short flight to ensure the untried machine was in proper shape for longer trials. For several hours he worked as the Frenchmen waited. He attached the propellers from the 1904 machine and tested them. He walked around and around the machine, checking each surface and cable. He tested the launching derrick. He surveyed the oval field: It was roughly eight hundred meters long by three hundred meters wide, with a belt of trees around the perimeter and other trees dotting the infield, which was bisected by a ditch. He set the launching rail at an angle precisely perpendicular to the gentle wind and checked it carefully. He gave precise instructions to the men who would run along at the wingtips at the launch, to make sure they stayed level. He directed the weight to be raised to the top of the derrick. Hart Berg recalled being struck by Wright’s utter lack of flamboyance—the gray suit, the plain cap, the starched collar.

  Dusk was approaching when he reversed his cap and said quietly, “Gentlemen, I’m going to fly.”

  Men hauled the rope that lifted the launching weight to the top of the derrick. The propellers were spun and the engine started.

  Wilbur lowered his hand to the clip that released the weight. It plunged. The machine leaped forward so suddenly and accelerated so quickly that one of the men assigned to run along at the wingtips failed to take a single step. In four seconds the aeroplane was off the ground.

  One of those watching from the grandstand was François Peyrey, a young journalist who had followed the development of aviation with studious devotion as aeronautical editor of L’Auto. He had some grasp of the theoretical problems of flight and he was an acute observer. He knew the French aspirants. He had watched Farman and Delagrange manage their long takeoffs across the field at Issy les Moulineaux; had seen the French machines inch upward off the ground and make their wide, wide turns in the air, slipping sideways, straining to stay aloft.

  “THE WIND DOES NOT SEEM TO TROUBLE HIM.”

  Wilbur over Les Hunaudières, August 1908

  Now Peyrey stared as Wilbur Wright rose immediately and confidently to a height of thirty feet and “began with the most delicate of all maneuvers in aviation—namely circling.” As the machine rose higher still, Peyrey could clearly see the American ease his control shaft to the side, and the instantaneous and extraordinary response of the wings, one tip twisting downward, the other upward, and the vertical tail, angling in perfect synchrony with the wings—and the equally instantaneous response of the machine as a whole, rolling promptly and smoothly upon its longitudinal axis and sweeping into a tight and graceful turn—not in an alarming way, but under the obvious and complete control of the operator. “To behold this flying machine turn sharp round at the edge of the wood . . . and continue on its course is an enchanting spectacle,” Peyrey reported. “The wind does not seem to trouble him.”

  The truth, obvious and stark before Peyrey’s knowledgeable eyes, was that this man was the first to fly precisely as a bird flew, his machine a “great white bird” with “perfect lateral stability.” “To deny it,” he declared, “would be childish.” He could see that the horizontal rudder had to be carefully controlled with constant small adjustments, but he grasped the essential fact that, “as in the case of a bicyclist, the movements necessary to maintain equilibrium probably soon become instinctive.”

  “The spectacle was marvelous and delightful.”

  And it was immediately clear to Peyrey that no one could any longer question Wilbur Wright’s claim to have flown hundreds of times in America, and at distances of up to twenty-five miles. Clearly, he could do as he pleased in the air.

  It was over in less than two minutes—the first tight half-circle; the race down the backstretch of the track, high above the steeplechase hurdles; a second half-circle; the straight course back to the starting point; then “the descent with extraordinary buoyancy and precision” and a smooth skid along the grass.

  All around Peyrey, people were shouting and cheering. He ran close to the machine and looked hard at the flying man to catch his reaction. “I saw the man who is said to be so unemotional turn pale. He had long suffered in silence; he was conscious that the world no longer doubted his achievements.”

  Perhaps Peyrey really did see some dramatic change in Will’s countenance. Perhaps it was wishful thinking. In either case, Peyrey doubtless was right in perceiving that the scene struck Will with some force. He had believed that his first successful flights would erase all doubts in France. But he could not have been prepared for the emotional uproar that greeted him in the little grandstand. The French spectators were not just convinced. They were simultaneously shocked and thrilled. Even those who had believed the Wrights’ claims were transfixed by the difference between expectation and reality.

  Paul Zens, who, with his brother, Ernest, had tested a powered biplane of their own design just a few days earlier, had been waiting all day. He blurted to a reporter, “I would have waited ten times as long to have seen what I have seen today. Mr. Wright has us all in his hands.” Another reporter grabbed René Gasnier, who was building another biplane. “The whole conception of the machine—its execution and its practical worth—is wonderful,” he said. “We are as children compared to the Wrights.”

  Asked for his opinion, Louis Blériot r
eplied that he was “not sufficiently calm” to express it.

  For a moment, patriotic loyalty withered. Even Ernest Archdeacon lowered the French tricolor long enough to make a brief concession. “For a long time, for too long a time, the Wright brothers have been accused in Europe of bluff—even perhaps in the land of their birth. They are today hallowed in France, and I feel an intense pleasure in counting myself among the first to make amends for that flagrant injustice.”

  THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNDAY, so there was no flight, but the Paris newspapers reported an extraordinary event—“a revolution in the scientific world,” said Le Figaro—and on Monday, August 10, two thousand spectators engulfed the grandstand and stood in chattering crowds. Any Aéro-Club leaders who had missed the Saturday flight were now there, including Henri Kapferer, one of the minority in the Aéro-Club who had supported the Wrights’ claims, and Leon Delagrange.

  In the first flight Will found himself too close to a row of trees and landed after less than a minute. But in the second flight the machine described a figure 8, and the spectators were now simply beside themselves. When a reporter caught up with Delagrange as he prepared to catch his train back to Paris, the flier said simply: “Nous sommes battus.” “We are beaten.”

  On Wednesday, before a crowd of three thousand, Will made one flight of seven minutes and two shorter ones in “violent gusts”—another feat that caused jaws to drop. On Thursday it was eight minutes. But in landing, he mishandled the controls and cracked a wing and a skid. By now most Frenchmen were past the ability to find any fault at all in his performances. “Wright is a titanic genius!” exclaimed a dirigible man who had been a vocal skeptic of the Wrights’ claims. “The little accident is nothing. . . . The broken wing is the punctured tire of the automobile. . . . You see how easily he kept his seat through it all. The machine is beyond criticism—that is to say, I defy anyone for the moment to say how it can possibly be improved.”

  These flights were the first in which the Wrights controlled the vertical tail independent of the wing-warping controls. Will told Orville he “could turn very short curves with the new arrangement, and as soon as I become familiar with it, we will have full control.”

  After nine flights at the cramped racetrack, Will now sought permission to move to a site he had preferred all along—a vast, open field at a nearby French Army post called Camp d’Auvours. The French were now eager to comply with any request, and Will made preparations to transfer flyer, tools, and supplies several miles to the east. Taking time off from his repairs at the end of the week, he wrote his first long letter home since the flights had begun. In his public remarks that week he had been all courtesy and modesty. Now, in the privacy of a letter to his brother, he allowed himself to savor the victory just for a moment.

  After the figure 8 on Monday, he told Orville, “Blériot & Delagrange were so excited they could scarcely speak, and Kapferer could only gasp and could not talk at all. You would have almost died of laughter if you could have seen them.”

  HENRI FARMAN WAS IN NEW YORK, where he made a few short, straight hops at Brighton Beach. Soon after he learned of the flights at Le Mans, he boarded a ship for home. In Paris, not having seen Will fly, he said: “I believe that our machines are as good as his.”

  THE GREAT EUROPEAN NEWSPAPERS and the aeronautical journals alike fell over each other in their scramble to praise the Wrights. All testified to the extraordinary similarity to bird flight, to the machine’s utter obedience to the will of the operator, to its “facility,” “dexterity,” “versatility,” “virtuosity,” and “grace.” In London, the Times, reporting “immense enthusiasm” in France, said the machine appeared “almost as manageable as if it were a small toy held in the hand,” while the Daily Mirror referred to Wilbur Wright’s “perfect control” in flights that showed “the consummate ease and grace of a swallow.” L’Aerophile and Le Figaro were at his feet. Without wishing to denigrate the French pioneers, the reporter Frantz Reichel told the readers of Le Figaro, “One is obliged to recognize that there is a whole world of difference between their machines and the Wrights’. . . . It is enough to have seen it fly, just once, to be convinced by it.”

  Clearly, a new and practical form of transportation had been born. Yet it was not a sense of the usefulness of flight that sprang to the minds of witnesses who saw that first, shocking figure 8, but rather an appreciation of its “incomparable beauty. . . . Nothing can give an idea of the emotion experienced, and the impression felt, at this last flight, a flight of masterly assurance and incomparable elegance.”

  Will told Orville: “You never saw anything like the complete reversal of position that took place after two or three little flights of less than two minutes each.”

  • • •

  HART BERG and the commander of Camp d’Auvours put their heads together to arrange a system of special passes to control the crowds. But Will slowed down for a couple of weeks, partly because of bad weather, “partly because I have not felt like doing much hustling.”

  He wrote to Kate: “You can scarcely imagine what a strain it is on one to have no one you can depend on to understand what you say, and want done, and what is more no one capable of doing the grade of work we have always insisted upon in our machines. It compels me to do almost everything myself, and keeps me worried.”

  THE U.S. ARMY POST OF FORT MYER, Virginia, stood on the heights overlooking Washington from the Confederate side of the Potomac River—not that Confederates ever had occupied this hallowed piece of ground. The property, called Arlington Heights, originally had belonged to the adopted son of George Washington. It passed from him to his only child, Mary Anne Randolph Custis, the wife of Robert E. Lee; then to soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, who moved in after the Lees fled to Richmond when Virginia left the Union in 1861.

  In 1863, General Montgomery Meigs, a Georgian loyal to the Union and quartermaster general of the Army, looked over the property. Meigs and Lee had been friends. Many years earlier, as Army engineers, they had built an ingenious jetty in the Mississippi River that saved the commerce of St. Louis from suffocation by sandbars. Now, deeply bitter toward Lee, Meigs decided the Custis-Lee estate was just the right place to bury Union dead whose families were too poor to have their bodies brought home. By the end of the war, sixteen thousand soldiers were buried on the gentle slope.

  On the heights above, the temporary fortifications became a permanent Army post—Fort Whipple, renamed Fort Myer in 1881. Its high elevation made it the natural home of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Soon the expanse of open ground attracted the eye of General Phil Sheridan, who made it a showcase for his cavalry regiments. This was why, in 1908, Fort Myer was the only Army property in the vicinity of Washington where there was enough open land to accommodate trials of flying machines.

  Charlie Taylor arrived from Dayton on August 19, followed the next day by the crates that held the unassembled pieces of the machine and the unwieldy weights for the catapult—six iron blocks weighing a total of twelve hundred pounds. Orville came that evening, Charlie Furnas the next morning, the engine a day or two later in a crate of its own. Orville and Taylor found the parts “in perfect shape,” and Orv seized the opportunity to tell his brother, a little tartly, that “they were packed exactly as were the goods sent to Europe.”

  The post and the city were buzzing about the achievements of Thomas Baldwin in his dirigible, the California Arrow—a sixty-six-foot-long “car” slung under a 253-pound bag of silk and rubber pumped full of twenty thousand cubic feet of hydrogen. Baldwin had his own contract with the Army and was making trials at the same time. The bag had taken several days to inflate, and there were delays for high wind, but then Baldwin—flying with Glenn Curtiss, the designer and manager of the Arrow’s engine—came close to satisfying all the terms of his Army contract. The two men flew a four-mile speed test at just under twenty miles per hour and a two-hour endurance test at just under fourteen miles per hour. The only mishap occurred when horses of the Thir
teenth Cavalry spooked at the sight of the rising dirigible.

  Brigadier General James Allen, chief of the Signal Corps, was much impressed by Baldwin and doubtful that Orville Wright could do as well. But Baldwin himself, haunting the enormous balloon shed where the Dayton men were assembling the aeroplane in preparation for their own tests, watched with delighted curiosity.

  “Would you really think a thing like that could fly?” he asked a reporter. “It’s a wonderful thing to me. I have been so long and so intimately associated with balloons and dirigibles that they are no longer any more than commonplace, but that—why, that is a wonder.”

  Between Baldwin’s flights, Lieutenant Benjamin Foulois, an enthusiastic young recruit to the new Aeronautical Division, watched Wright and his mechanic work. “They paid no attention to anyone else . . .” he remembered. “They talked only to each other, as if they were on a desert island miles from civilization.”

  The third entrant in the Army trials was nowhere to be seen, but a grand entrance was foretold. Augustus Herring had informed the press in New York that he would not bother to have his aeroplane shipped by train. He would simply fly it from New York to Fort Myer—though he needed a few more weeks to prepare. The Army granted him a month’s extension. Orville told Will: “The Signal Corps does not hesitate to express its skepticism.”

  Glenn Curtiss was not at all skeptical of Herring. Indeed, he had heard talk that made him think Herring might possess a crucial advantage over the Wright brothers. “You have probably seen the photos and description of the Wrights’ [machine],” he wrote to Bell. “They do not seem to have anything startling, but I cannot say as much about Mr. Herring; I believe he employs [a] gyroscope, and I think there are real possibilities in this line. I see no other solution of automatic stability.”