To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  ORVILLE FOUND the Signal Corps officers friendly and hoping for his success. But he immediately conceived a dislike for Thomas Selfridge, who was present as an official Army observer. “He makes a pretense of great friendliness,” he told his family, but “I don’t trust him an inch. He is intensely interested in the subject, and plans to meet me often at dinners, etc. where he can try to pump me. He has a good education, and a clear mind. I understand that he does a good deal of knocking behind my back. . . . He is endeavoring to do us all the damage he can.”

  With the news of Wilbur’s successes in France, reporters assigned to Fort Myer now champed at the bit for their own versions of the Wright story, and he spoke to them with new candor and perfect courtesy, even friendliness. And he allowed photographers easy access to the machine. Following instructions from Wilbur, Orville was now in fact eager to get the details of their design firmly associated with the name of Wright. “We haven’t any secrets now,” he said. “The only ones we ever had were about construction details not then patented.” He explained the machine’s features in detail. The press rewarded his candor with admiring references, and Orville, accustomed to Will being the public spokesman, grew a little proud of his ability to handle himself in the spotlight. “The reporters seem to think I am not in the least uneasy about fulfilling our contract,” he told Kate. “They say that I do no boasting of what I can do; but that they can get but little out of me as to what I expect to accomplish, but that I have the air of perfect confidence!”

  By day, at Fort Myer, scientists waited to have a few words with him. Reporters were a constant presence. People from the neighborhood wandered by to gawk and ask questions.

  “Do you mean to tell me that that bunch of twisted wire and old sheets is going to fly?” one man asked. “I say it won’t.”

  “What do them whirligigs do?” a boy wanted to know. “Cool the engine?”

  “Would you mind telling me,” a young woman asked one of the mechanics, “why you have so many wires about it? I should think it would look much better if you left all those things off and you just had wings, like a real bird.”

  During evenings at the Cosmos Club, the Army-Navy Club, and the home of Alexander Graham Bell’s daughter, he was meeting “stacks of prominent people . . . who are very friendly.” And “I am meeting some very handsome young ladies!” Several approached him with letters of introduction from some mutual friend or acquaintance, while “most of the others I meet in bunches, and I will have an awful time trying to think of their names if I meet them again.”

  “Work goes slowly,” he conceded in a letter to his brother, “with a crowd of people standing about the whole time.”

  This was precisely the sort of thing Will wanted him to avoid. One last time, Will warned him about the dangers of losing his concentration and allowing himself to be rushed.

  Don’t go out [flying] even for all the officers of the government unless you would go equally if they were absent. Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready. Be very cautious and proceed slowly. . . . Let it be known that you . . . intend to do it in your own way. Do not let people talk to you all day and all night. It will wear you out before you are ready for real business. Courtesy has limits. If necessary appoint some hour in the day time and refuse absolutely to receive visitors even for a minute at other times. Do not receive any one after 8 oclock at night.

  A FOUR-POLE LAUNCH DERRICK, thirty feet tall, was erected a short distance from the Fort Myer hospital. Orville positioned the launch rail so that it pointed southeast down a long, gentle slope. This way, as he took off in the machine, the ground would fall away in front of him, leaving a little extra room for error as he tried to get up and away. The field was a carpet of coarse, spindly weeds. The eastern boundary was marked by a low wall of reddish-brown stone and a tall line of oaks. There was room for Orville to fly ovals of about a half-mile in length. This was substantially smaller than the field at Huffman Prairie, and it meant that in the test of endurance, Orville would have to be “turning the entire time,” or just about—a requirement that would force him to “be continually adjusting the tips and the resistances and the levers and be on the keen watchout every minute.”

  For several days he and Taylor and Furnas labored over the engine. He refused to attempt a flight until he was certain it would run without misfiring for extended periods. The separate test of speed, unlike the endurance test, was to take place in a long, straight flight, which meant he would have to fly over uneven ground, with trees and other obstructions. If the engine failed and he was forced down, the machine was unlikely to survive.

  C. H. Claudy, the New York Herald’s man, a reporter whom Orville had come to respect and like, asked how the machine could be useful to the military if an unplanned landing might wreck it. With the patented Wright self-assurance—and, Claudy said, a smile—Orv answered: “I didn’t say I was going to land. If I thought I was going to break my machine up in a tree top, I wouldn’t go. . . . It is not a probability, only a chance, but it is the chance which makes the speed test the more difficult of the two, in spite of the greater individual strain put on me in the hour test. I expect to go through both without difficulty.”

  ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 3 Orville was ready to move the machine from the big balloon shed to a smaller tent at the west end of the parade ground. Twelve men were needed to hoist it onto an Army wagon, which an automobile towed gingerly along the dry, rutted road. The sky was cloudless, the temperature comfortable. But the wind was blowing at a steady fifteen miles per hour. He could fly in these conditions, but with only one machine on hand, and so much riding on its success, he wanted to take no chance of suffering a crippling accident before the official trials.

  Several hundred onlookers waited with him—“all curious, some skeptical”—including Curtiss, Selfridge, and David Fairchild, Bell’s son-in-law; General Allen and Major Squires of the Signal Corps; Augustus Post and Albert Zahm of the Aero Club of America; Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forest Service; a number of government scientists; and most of Fort Myer’s officer corps. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the president’s son, was there. Only the Bell contingent and a few others who had seen Henri Farman’s brief exhibitions at Brighton Beach had seen an aeroplane in the air. Signal Corps men herded all of them into a semicircle behind the machine and back a little ways.

  As suppertime approached, the fort’s snapping flags began to sag. The spectators saw Orville Wright and his mechanics go into a huddle, then speak with the soldiers. Several of them surrounded the ghost-colored machine, found their handholds, and on a signal, hoisted the behemoth off the ground, shuffled in a slow and ungainly maneuver to the launch rail, and set it gently on its little truck. Six men grasped the long rope, turned their backs to the launch tower, and hauled in unison. The iron weights rose to the apex of the derrick, swinging a little, then stopped.

  Orville Wright and the mechanics fussed with the engine. Then Wright took one propeller, a mechanic the other, and they pulled in unison. The engine roared . . . and died.

  After a moment, one of the mechanics broke out of the huddle. The crowd watched as he hustled down to the tent at the far end of the field, then returned at a jog with some tool or part. More fussing with the engine ensued.

  Spectators shifted from one foot to the other, hungry and tired. Several started talking again about bluffs. The only diversion came when the press photographers asked if they could snap the machine from in front as it tried to rise. Orville Wright came over and spoke to them too quietly for the crowd to hear. Afterward they said he had told them that anyone standing in front of the machine ran the risk of being killed, and he couldn’t concentrate on what he had to do if he also had to look out for photographers. So they staked out positions to either side.

  After nearly an hour, things appeared to be ready again. Chatting in the crowd drained away as the battery was attached to the engine. Again Wright and the mechanic yanked the propeller blades, a
nd “a regular and steady bang-bang-bang-bang” filled the field. Horses started and jostled. Spectators could see the whole machine shaking slightly. The engine seemed awfully strong for a structure so light. A moment earlier, the propeller blades had looked oversized and ungainly, but now they were ominous, circular blurs.

  The mechanics backed away and Orville Wright by careful steps climbed into his seat.

  Two movements occurred at once—the black weight falling, the machine lunging. The motion was smooth and fast. Spectators leaned to see—was it off the rail? Yes—because the rail was behind it now—but the skids were clipping the heads of the weeds. The machine seemed to lose speed for an instant. The momentum of the catapult was spent. But the machine did not sink. The slope was dropping away and the machine was skimming straight ahead, clear of the weeds and now beginning to rise.

  The reporter from The Washington Star heard “a long, in-drawn breath from the crowd.” Then came only a faint cheer and scattered clapping of hands. The Star’s man thought this relatively quiet response was odd until afterward, when he heard one man ask another: “Did you cheer him?” And the second man said, “Nope, too busy thinking.”

  By the time the machine was halfway down the field it was twenty feet off the ground or higher. At the far end, the engine noise distant, it passed over the balloon tent and the broad wings tilted, the left tips pointing to the ground as it swept into the same tight circle that Will’s audience had just seen in France—“exactly as a bird’s wings tilt when it is flying in a circle”—and then it was leveling out and coming back toward them, following the line of the cemetery trees and the low stone wall. Its course was far from perfect. It dipped and rose as it came on. When it got close they could see Orville Wright moving the levers and the machine “responding as does a boat or an automobile to the slight touches on one or another of the three levers.” The operator was leaning back in his seat, looking as casual and calm as a motorist in an automobile.

  Now the machine was approaching them and sweeping into another tight half-circle, and people took quick steps backward as if to get out of the way, though it was as far above their heads as a flag on a tall pole.

  Down the first stretch it went again, past the artillery sheds, but it was closer to the ground now and spectators thought it was going to hit the balloon tent. They saw it angle sharply downward. There was a burst of dust. The engine noise stopped. People were alarmed and some started to run. But then they saw Orville Wright getting up and out; he was fine. A skid had been broken in the landing but nobody cared. Stopwatches said the flight had lasted seventy-one seconds. Reporters surrounded the flying man, and a couple of them had wet cheeks.

  “A LONG, IN-DRAWN BREATH FROM THE CROWD”

  Orville over the parade ground at Fort Myer, ca. September 1908

  “I pulled the lever the wrong way,” he said. He had come down to avoid hitting the balloon shed. With “the same quiet smile that has characterized him since he became a familiar figure at Fort Myer,” he reminded them that it was his first time flying this new machine, with new controls, and apart from a few minutes in North Carolina the previous spring, he had not flown at all in nearly three years.

  The reporters turned for comment to the Signal Corps officers. These sober souls were now “enthusiastic beyond the limits of ordinary official conversation,” C. H. Claudy said. “It might not be quite fair to quote all they said in the heat of the moment, but it can be confidently stated that they are more than pleased with this first performance and believe the machine showed better control in the air than the Farman aeroplane.”

  Men mobbed Orville, reaching to shake his hand and all talking at once. The machine was getting jostled, so soldiers were detailed to get a rope barrier around it. A woman pushed through and said: “I don’t know how to thank you for the glory of those seconds. They were wonderful and to be remembered forever.”

  Claudy, the New York Herald man, asked Glenn Curtiss what he thought.

  “Couldn’t have been better,” he said. “If he hadn’t made the mistake and had to come down he would have made several more circles. His turns are fine.”

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS the two brothers generated growing headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. It was an extraordinary display of their prowess, though Orville made the greater sensation. On September 9 he made flights of fifty-seven and sixty-two minutes with several Cabinet secretaries watching. “Have I anything to say?” said Major George Squier, of the Signal Corps. “Well, I should say so. It is just splendid. I hope the news . . . got over to Berlin and Paris right away. We lead the world now in aeronautical supremacy. It is just splendid.” General Nelson Miles was in the crowd; he pushed through to Orville and offered fervent congratulations. The Dayton Journal led the next day’s paper with an enormous double-deck headline: “Orville Wright Conquers Air in Amazing Flight.” The Herald called upon the city to honor the brothers in such a way as to “make them feel until their dying days that the people of Dayton really and truly are proud to call them sons and brothers . . . Dayton may crumble in dust, but the name of the Wright brothers will endure as long as earth endures.”

  On four consecutive days Orville set four consecutive world records for endurance in the air. At long last, Octave Chanute was present. With Lieutenant Frank Lahm, Jr., son of the expatriate American who had pleaded the Wrights’ cause in Paris, Orville set the record for a flight with a passenger. And these were practice flights; the official trials were still to come.

  At Camp d’Auvours, Will read the stories from the United States with pleasure and relief. His newfound friends showered him with another round of congratulations. “Well, it was fine news all right,” he told Kate, “and lifted a load off of my mind.” To Orv he sent a two-word cable: “Très bien.”

  Another telegram came to Orville:

  ON BEHALF OF AERIAL EXPERIMENT ASSOCIATION, ALLOW ME TO CONGRATULATE YOU UPON YOUR MAGNIFICENT SUCCESS. AN HOUR IN THE AIR MARKS A HISTORICAL OCCASION.

  It was signed, “Graham Bell.”

  THE FAMILY was now subscribing to a news-clipping service, so they were able to keep track of nearly everything written about the brothers in the major eastern and midwestern newspapers and magazines and some in France as well. Bishop Wright seems to have read virtually every word. When he learned of Orville’s first record flight at Fort Myer, Milton pondered all that had happened. “They treat you in France as if you were a resurrected Columbus,” he wrote to Will that evening, “and the people gaze as if you had fallen down from Jupiter.”

  Kate thought the bishop was eager to go to Washington. “What would you think if Pop and I came on to see the official trials?” she wrote Orv. “When I suggested it to Pop today he said ‘What good would it do?’ but looked tickled to death at the idea. Do you suppose we could scratch up the cash? Daddy has about a hundred dollars. Anyway he ought to go. . . . You write and ask him to come. It really isn’t right for him not [to] be there. He wants to go very much.”

  They did not go; Milton was scheduled to attend a Brethren conference. But he continued to search for every scrap of news. Pride in his sons and the cautions of his faith apparently battled in his mind. He held a low opinion of the Old World in general and the French people in particular, and thus was pleased, as he told Will, that “your capture of France and Europe . . . seems a strong coup d’état.” At the same time, he could not help but think of lines by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, from which he quoted to his son:

  The world is all a fleeting show

  For man’s illusion given . . .

  And false the light on glory’s plume,

  As fading hues of even;

  And love and hope and beauty’s bloom

  Are blossoms gather’d for the tomb—

  There’s nothing bright but Heaven.

  Yet he believed history’s verdict on his sons was now certain. “You and Orville are . . . secure of a place with Fulton and Morse and Franklin in the temple of fame. ‘Conquerers of the Air.
’ Its extensive results are, as yet, uncomprehended and undreamed of, even by yourselves. Did Fulton have any vision of an ocean greyhound, or Franklin of wireless telegraphy?”

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS after the string of records at Fort Myer, the winds were too strong to permit flights. But Orville now felt he was ready to make the official trials. He had learned the new machine’s idiosyncracies and reaccustomed himself to flying. “I do not think I will make many more practice flights,” he told Kate. “I have now had enough to enable me to complete our contract.”

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON of September 17 the breeze faded to about six miles per hour, and Orville indicated he would attempt the first required trial with Thomas Selfridge as his passenger. Selfridge’s Army superiors were apparently unaware of the brewing patent conflict between the Wrights and the AEA—which made Selfridge’s assignment awkward if not downright improper—and Orville raised no objection.

  The machine was prepared for flight and all was ready to go a few minutes after 5:00 P.M. Orville had thought the propellers were warping, so he had replaced them with a new pair the day before. The light was beginning to fade, and a skim of fog was gathering.

  Orville gave his last instructions to Selfridge and said: “I don’t have to tell you to keep your nerve. You’ve been up often enough to know how to do that. Just sit tight, and don’t move around any more than you actually have to.”

  AFTER THREE SMOOTH ROUNDS of the field at an altitude of something over a hundred feet, Orville heard a light tapping behind him. He glanced back and saw nothing wrong, but decided to cut the flight short. Then came two loud thumps, and the machine shuddered.