To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  • • •

  TALK OF THE CIRCLE FLIGHT at the Statue of Liberty filtered through the city and spread through the nation as the evening papers were bought and delivered.

  “The sad part of it was that a comparatively small number saw it,” one correspondent wrote. “True, the Battery was crowded, there were a privileged few on the army post and many on passing boats. That was all. There was no time for the thousands to gather, no warning to them, no time to give one.” But the official flights were expected the next day. “Then, too, it is up to Curtiss to make good. He has done the talking and the jollying. Wright has merely made history and seemingly forgotten all about it tonight. . . .

  “The sight took your breath away. It was all so new, all so totally different, and more thrilling than one thought it was going to be. There is nothing else like it. It is worth going far to see. It must be worth going half around the world to try.”

  THE NEXT DAY, September 30, outside Berlin, Orville Wright broke his own world record in altitude by flying to a height of nine hundred feet.

  In Buffalo, Judge John R. Hazel of the U.S. Circuit Court ordered the Herring-Curtiss Company and Glenn Curtiss to stop making aeroplanes on grounds that they infringed upon patents owned by Wilbur and Orville Wright.

  In New York, it began to rain, and the wind stiffened. Neither Will nor Curtiss would fly in the threatening weather.

  IN DAYTON, Milton was having trouble sleeping in “these exciting times.” He seized the papers every morning and afternoon and wrote letters of support to Will. “You know I have the greatest interest in what you do.” The latest papers said the weather in New York was poor, and there had been no attempts to fly since the Statue of Liberty flight. “That flight struck some here as sensational, and the applause attending it as overwhelming. But six or seven miles or minutes are small to you.

  “I hope your shop is as usual on Sunday. It gives you immense advantage, whatever is forgone. Trust in God, and be true, and you will have the victory. I have tried it so much, and often. . . .

  “I trust you for the greatest precaution, and the greatest courage and achievements.”

  ONE OF THE WRITERS covering the Hudson-Fulton Celebration was Arthur Ruhl, the Collier’s man who had tracked the Wrights at Kitty Hawk the year before and pleased them with his play-by-play account of reporters fighting the sand and mosquitoes. He thought most New Yorkers had anticipated the pageant with little enthusiasm. It was hard to cheer for events of one hundred and three hundred years earlier. Life in New York was already an uproarious pageant. Plans for the Hudson-Fulton hoopla sounded “like stopping the battle of Waterloo to shoot off a few skyrockets,” and “the ‘regular’ New Yorker effected to be bored by the whole affair.” But the natives’ indifference faded when parades began to move up the avenues and replicas of Fulton’s Clermont and Hudson’s Half Moon appeared among modern naval squadrons on the river. Watching from a high window, Ruhl thought people “seemed to spring out of the pavement and the walls . . . They were like wheat running into and filling the interstices of a grain elevator . . . No one could see these hordes moving at the bottom of the canyon streets and remain indifferent.” Close to the river, hundreds of automobiles crowded together, each seizing a vantage point, with women and children standing on passenger seats to try to see. The autos gave “an impression of something brilliantly strident, the beginning of a new mechanical age that will be as different from ours as ours is from that of Hudson or Fulton.”

  CURTISS’S CONTRACT was due to expire at midnight on Saturday, October 2. He was supposed to leave for an exhibition in St. Louis on Monday. But the wind blew hard all Saturday, and he would not risk a flight. He decided to stay one more day. He knew Will would not fly on Sunday.

  But Sunday morning the wind was still blowing. Curtiss sat at his shed all day, waiting. At 5:30 P.M., as the light was beginning to fade, he had the aeroplane prepared and took off. He turned and headed in the direction of the Statue of Liberty, but then observers saw the aeroplane “swerve and careen as if it were about to fall.” Curtiss swung back around and landed. “I didn’t like it up there,” he said. “I seemed to strike a boiling point in the air. The machine was wobbling and I thought it would feel better on solid ground. I could have kept on flying, but to make the turn would have carried me over the water and I didn’t care for that. I am looking out for Number One.”

  He left the city that night.

  THE WIND STILL BLEW the next morning. Sunday or no, winds or no, the skids of the Wright machine left the sand just before 10:00.

  The machine scooted over the harbor at about twenty feet above the water, heading toward the gap between the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Approaching a great liner, Will rose and kept rising, gaining speed until he reached an altitude of about two hundred feet. Then he banked a little to the right, taking a northward course up the Hudson River.

  This route was not on the Celebration’s official schedule of events; it was his to choose. With the turn up the Hudson it was clear he had chosen the route the Hudson-Fulton planners had assigned to Glenn Curtiss.

  In the harbor, warships of five nations cruised beneath him with countless ferries and pleasure craft and working boats. Sailors stood and hurrahed, though few voices could be heard over the single, “deafening shriek” of ships’ and boats’ whistles and horns. The noise caused a chain reaction that moved swiftly up the Hudson, setting more whistles blowing, which in turn drew people rushing to the river all along the western side of Manhattan.

  He flew against the wind on his way north. Several times spectators saw the machine veer from side to side, as if struggling to regain its control in gusts that squirted out from the canyons of the streets. The machine swung “upwards and downwards like a ship in a gale.” He passed so close to the masts of the British cruiser Drake that people thought the machine would be impaled. But after each wobble the wings returned to level, “as if they were being driven on wheels over a sheet of clear ice.” By the time he reached Riverside Park there were tens of thousands of people there.

  He stayed about two hundred feet above the river, high enough to see meadows beyond the New Jersey Palisades, the stone cliffs that border the river on the west. To the regret of spectators, he stayed close to that side of the river, to avoid the city’s billowing wind gusts.

  Approaching Grant’s Tomb he banked into a great circle, passing over HMS Inflexible, where some sort of massed noisemakers made a din like thunder. He turned and headed south, back down the Hudson.

  With the wind at his back, he made the return trip in roughly half the time it had taken him to get to Grant’s Tomb.

  At Governor’s Island, “a mild form of hysteria” overtook the crowd as the machine came low and skidded across the sand, thirty-three minutes after it had left.

  A circle formed as the aviator got out and circled the aeroplane, touching cables and surfaces. One man said: “He doesn’t seem to give a damn, does he?”

  “It was an interesting trip,” he wrote his father, “and at times rather exciting.”

  IT WAS ANNOUNCED that he would make a much longer flight that afternoon, flying up the East River (including a pass under the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge); up the Harlem River; rounding the turn at Spuyten Duyvil at the far northern tip of the island; and returning down the Hudson to Governors Island with perhaps a swing over neighboring Newark, New Jersey.

  He and Charlie yanked the propellers to crank the engine. There was a roar, then an explosion. A cylinder shot straight upward, tearing a hole in the upper wing, then crashed to the ground a few feet away. He picked it up. Then he faced the reporters, gave a little shrug and smiled.

  “It is all over, gentlemen.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, in his room at the Park Hotel, Will had only a short time before catching a train for Washington, where he was supposed to begin the training of Army flyers. Among his callers was Cass Gilbert, one of the nation’s leading architects, a designer of state capitols,
churches, and great Beaux-Arts residences. He would shortly design the Woolworth Building, the Gothic landmark in lower Manhattan that would be the world’s tallest skyscraper for twenty years. The pretext for his visit was to invite Wright to the annual banquet of the American Institute of Architects, of which Gilbert was president. But mainly he wanted to get a look at the man who had created a new thing in the world.

  Gilbert was the sort of man Will might have become had he gone to college. Nine years older than Will, and a native Ohioan, he had studied architecture at MIT and in Europe, then worked for the great New York firm of McKim, Mead and White for several years in the 1890s before establishing his own practice. With his waxed mustache and elegant dress, he made a sharp contrast to his host.

  They chatted for only a few minutes—about their roots in the Midwest, and flying in cities, and what aeroplanes might mean for the architecture of the future. A couple of hours later, at his office, Gilbert dictated a memo to record his impressions while they remained fresh. He thought that “a generation or two hence,” it might be interesting to read “such a record precisely as we would now be interested in reading of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat.

  “His personality interested me very much,” Gilbert said. His face and clothing were inconspicuous and unremarkable. “There is absolutely nothing romantic or distinguished in his dress, appearance or manner.” He noticed that Wright fiddled constantly with a small card he held in one hand, “as though some physical or mental strain through which he had passed had keyed him up to a point where his hand must be in motion, not at all as though he were impatient of his visitor or eager to leave him. . . . He occasionally looked straight at me with a very frank, clear expression but more often looked slightly to the right and downwards.”

  Very simple and direct and of few words, modestly spoken. He smiled occasionally with a sort of half smile that did not give me the impression of much exuberance of spirit but rather of a provincial boy who had an underlying sense of humor and a perfect confidence in himself but with a slightly provincial cynicism as to how seriously the other man might regard him or his views. He was . . . probably very keenly sensitive, and on the whole rather the type of high grade, intelligent and well read mechanic whom I occasionally meet in connection with building work. He looked like the student and the shop man rather than the man of affairs.

  When Gilbert rose to leave, he put his hand on Will’s arm, and, “looking him straight in the face . . . very seriously,” said: “Mr. Wright, I want to tell you that in common with all of your countrymen we are proud of you and of what you have accomplished and the way you have gone about it. The serious men of this country appreciate that you are working seriously to accomplish a scientific result and hope that you will keep right on. The real men are glad that you don’t make an acrobatic or circus performance out of the machine as some others seem inclined to do.”

  Will said: “I never was much on circus performances, anyway.”

  Gilbert said again that the country was proud of him, and “while I was saying this he shook hands with me warmly and looked me straight in the face evidently deeply appreciating the sincerity with which it was said, and I felt that he fully responded to it although he did not express it in words.”

  EPILOGUE

  “FOR MERITORIOUS INVESTIGATIONS IN CONNECTION WITH THE SCIENCE OF AERODROMICS”

  Charles Walcott, Wilbur, Alexander Graham Bell, and Orville after the Wrights were awarded the first Langley Medal on February 10, 1910

  BEFORE THE HUDSON-FULTON CELEBRATION, there had been some real danger that the mounting achievements of Glenn Curtiss and the European aviators would obscure the Wrights’ claim to be the true founders and pioneers of human flight. But Will’s showing in one of the world’s great cities, with the New York press watching and writing, settled the issue for good, at least in the court of public opinion. Certainly Will himself believed there was little more to prove.

  Perhaps, too, he had sensed that the Wrights’ rivals, Curtiss included, soon would pass them in endurance, altitude, and speed—as, very soon, they did. Better, then, to seize this one critical opportunity to show up his chief rival, and leave the arena as the undisputed champion, than to go on and on, like a fighter past his prime. In 1897, after the flights of the unmanned aerodromes, Samuel Langley had said, “I have brought to a close the portion of the work which seemed to be specially mine.” Then he had tried to do more. Will intended not to repeat the mistake. Soon after his exhibitions in New York, he said he would not fly again.

  He changed his mind only once. On May 25, 1910, he rode as Orville’s passenger for six and a half minutes over Huffman Prairie, the only time the brothers flew together. Then Bishop Wright climbed into the passenger’s seat and went aloft with his youngest son in his own first flight.

  Orville flew often that year, mostly to train pilots for the exhibition team the brothers had established. (Once, finding himself unable to descend from a height of 1,500 feet in a calm sky, he realized he was caught in a broad thermal updraft, one of the invisible elevators ridden by the soaring birds the brothers had sought to imitate—a “most thrilling” sensation.) In the fall of 1911 he returned to Kitty Hawk to test a new glider and set a world’s record for soaring—nine minutes and forty-five seconds—that stood for ten years.

  But by then gliding seemed little more than an antiquarian pastime. Aviation already had charged ahead into an era of spectacles and stunts that simultaneously enchanted and repelled the public. It had begun at Rheims, where Eugène Lefebvre shocked the crowds by diving toward the ground, then pulling up at the last moment to make a soaring ascent. He died in a Wright flyer two weeks later. “He was entirely too daring,” Hart Berg told Will, “and never seemed to look over his machine as I was accustomed to see you do.” Ferdinand Ferber said Lefebvre’s death could not slow the progress of aviation, as “we are too thirsty for air, for space, and for speed to delay the realization of a discovery that history has been waiting for such a long time!” Ferber himself was dead a month later, crushed under the engine of his Voisin machine. Leon Delagrange was killed just after New Year’s 1910 when his Blériot monoplane crashed before thousands of spectators in Bordeaux. Many more pilots died soon, including several members of the Wrights’ exhibition team. Flight was thrilling to pilots and spectators alike, and the crowds yearned for feats of daring. It was hard for young men to exert the scrupulous care with which the Wrights had tempered their physical courage.

  FRIENDSHIPS DIED, too. On the day that Will circled the Statue of Liberty, George Spratt, brooding at his home in Pennsylvania, wrote the brothers “to ask if you do not think I can claim a share of your success?” He had persuaded himself the Wrights owed him far more credit than he had received for ideas about the simultaneous measurement of lift and drag in their wind tunnel experiments. Will, “a trifle hurt,” acknowledged Spratt’s contribution but reminded him they had used his basic idea in a device quite different from the one he had envisioned. In return, Will pointed out, the brothers had given Spratt their entire store of wind-tunnel data—a treasure chest that contained the keys to flight. “Has your idea yielded you yourself tables as comprehensive and accurate as those you received through us?” He asked Spratt to “believe me ever your friend,” but the relationship was beyond repair. Years later, when Orville requested copies of the brothers’ early letters for a book he hoped to write on the invention of the aeroplane, Spratt refused. The Wrights had spurned his appeals for a three-way partnership, or at least for due recognition. Therefore, “I do not see how you can give a correct account of this without bringing yourselves into open censure.” Orville let the matter drop, “not wishing to add to the sorrow of an already unhappy life.”

  The brothers’ relations with Octave Chanute, after years of “secretly nursed bitterness” on both sides, collapsed in a terrible exchange of letters in 1910. Again, the chief issue was proper credit for ideas about flight that now, it was clear, had been not onl
y important but historic. When Chanute said, “I am afraid, my friend, that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth,” Will, incensed, unleashed his own litany of grievances against Chanute and said: “As to inordinate desire for wealth, you are the only person acquainted with us who has ever made such an accusation.” When, after three months, no response had come from Chicago, Will tried to heal the wound, saying, “My brother and I do not form many intimate friendships and do not lightly give them up.” Chanute, in failing health, responded in kind, saying he hoped “to resume our former relations.” But he died soon afterward, in November 1910. In a memorial article, Will said “his labors had vast influence in bringing about the era of human flight. . . . In patience and goodness of heart he has rarely been surpassed. Few men were more universally respected and loved.”

  CREDIT WAS also on the mind of Alexander Graham Bell—not for himself, but for his late friend, Samuel Langley. Soon after the Wrights’ epochal flights in 1908, Bell helped to inaugurate a program by which the Smithsonian would award an annual Langley Medal for “specially meritorious investigations in connection with the science of aerodromics and its application to aviation.” The Wrights were chosen as the first recipients, and two identical gold medals were struck at the Paris Mint. Yet when Bell was chosen to speak at the awards ceremony at the Smithsonian on February 10, 1910, the inventor barely mentioned the recipients’ names. He congratulated the Wrights for bringing “the aerodrome” to “the commercial and practical stage,” just as Langley had predicted someone would. But it was Langley himself, Bell declared, who must be recognized as “the great pioneer of aerial flight”; who had divined “Langley’s Law,” which “opens up enormous possibilities for the aerodrome of the future”; and who had constructed “a perfectly good flying machine” that failed to fly only because of its faulty launcher. “Who can say what a third trial might have demonstrated?”