To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  This view, already well rooted among Langley’s friends, spread to others in aeronautical circles, especially those who resented the Wrights’ insistence on claiming a financial reward for their work. One carrier of the legend was Charles Manly. When Manly died in 1927 at the age of 51, he was still planning that third and successful trial of the great aerodrome, with his son in the pilot’s seat. Another loyalist was the perpetually late Stephen Balzer, who also went to his grave believing in the Langley machine, though not in Charles Manly. In 1931, The New York Times reported that Balzer, “strong and active” at age 70, was “still confident that if a man with some knowledge of the air had been chosen to fly the ill-fated Langley machine instead of an engineer it might have been the first to fly.” Of course, in the fall of 1903, no one but the Wright brothers had possessed such knowledge.

  THE WHOLE aim of Will’s efforts from 1905 to 1909 had been to avoid “business cares and vexatious law suits” so that he and his brother could concentrate on science. In fact, “business cares and vexatious law suits” were precisely what he got.

  Soon after the Hudson-Fulton flights, the brothers incorporated the Wright Company and began to manufacture aeroplanes for sale. In the end, their plan of selling to governments had not made them independent of business cares, and they concluded they must once again be builders and sellers, not experimenters. They designed a large, lovely home, to be called Hawthorn Hill, in the Dayton suburb of Oakwood. But there was little time to enjoy their new affluence. Business worries pressed in on them, yet business came second to their legal battles, chiefly against Glenn Curtiss. Will assumed the leading role in the boardroom and the courtroom alike. It was harsh, exhausting, nerve-racking work. He pursued Curtiss with a sense that he had no alternative, but with deep regret for years wasted. “We had hoped in 1906 to sell our invention to governments for enough money to satisfy our needs and then devote our time to science,” he wrote to a friend in France in January 1912, “but the jealousy of certain persons blocked this plan, and compelled us to rely on our patents and commercial exploitation. . . . When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments, we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.”

  Four months later, after many weeks away from home, Will became ill in Boston. When he returned to Dayton, doctors diagnosed malaria, then typhoid fever. He died early on the morning of May 30, 1912.

  “A short life, full of consequences,” his shocked father wrote that night in his diary. “An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadfastly, he lived and died.”

  ORVILLE AND KATE blamed Curtiss for Will’s death. They believed the legal battles, which they attributed chiefly to Curtiss’s avarice, had weakened their brother’s constitution and made him susceptible to the fever that took his life. Pressing forward in court, they won a final victory early in 1914, when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared the Wrights’ patent to be not only valid but a pioneer patent, and thus entitled to the broadest possible protection, covering ailerons as well as wing-warping. The Wright Company announced it would charge a 20 percent royalty on every aeroplane manufactured in the United States, though Orville said he would follow a “policy of leniency” with every company but one—Curtiss’s.

  Curtiss responded with an extraordinary maneuver. He asked and received permission from Charles Walcott, Langley’s successor as secretary of the Smithsonian, to haul the great aerodrome out of storage and fly it. This, he hoped, would prove the machine had been capable of flight and thus undermine the pioneer status of the Wrights’ patent. In the summers of 1914 and 1915, Curtiss succeeded in making several short, straight hops over the lake at Hammondsport. He and his collaborator, Albert Zahm, a friend-turned-foe of the Wrights, claimed the trials had been made “without modification” of the original design except for the addition of pontoons. Photographs alone—not to mention the detailed report of Lorin Wright, whom Orville sent as an observer—showed that Curtiss and Zahm in fact had made many modifications, chiefly to improve the shape and strength of the wings. Yet Charles Walcott accepted the trials as conclusive. It became an article of faith in Smithsonian literature—and on the label of the aerodrome on display in the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building—that Langley had built “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.” The Smithsonian granted that the Wrights had been first to fly, but not the inventors of the aeroplane. And it was the inventing, not the flying, that really mattered to Orville. “There were thousands of men who could have taken our 1903 machine into the air for the first flight,” he told one correspondent, “but I believe there was no one else in the world at that time beside Wilbur and myself who possessed the scientific data for building a machine that would fly.”

  For Curtiss, the “capable of flight” controversy became irrelevant soon after his hops in the souped-up aerodrome. His chief interest was money, and he got all he could have wanted with the coming of World War I. From 1914 to 1917, he built planes without ailerons to avoid the Wrights’ patent, then shipped them to Canada and England, where ailerons were attached. When the United States entered the war, the government ordered the pooling of all U.S. aeroplane patents, freeing Curtiss of the Wrights’ shadow at last. Thousands of Curtiss planes were sold to the Allies, and his JN model, fondly nicknamed the “Jenny,” became the darling of aviation. At the age of 40, Curtiss found himself a multimillionaire and a captain of industry. He lost interest in aviation after the war and shifted to real estate, becoming a major player in the south Florida land boom of the 1920s. He died in 1930.

  FOR ORVILLE and Katharine, the Smithsonian’s distortion of history became the consuming focus of their lives. Orville, utterly uninterested in corporate leadership, had sold his stake in the Wright Company in 1915. What mattered to him now was not the future but the past—to defend his and his brothers’ claim to history. For years he lobbied to induce the Institution’s leaders to change their position, or at least to submit the dispute to an impartial board of inquiry. When they refused, he took the extreme step of sending the 1903 flyer abroad for permanent display in the Science Museum of London. “I had thought that truth eventually must prevail,” he told the press, “but I have found that silent truth cannot withstand error aided by continued propaganda. . . . I regret more than anyone else that this course was necessary.”

  He made that decision alone. His father had died in 1917, and Kate no longer lived at Hawthorn Hill.

  In 1925, at the age of 50, she fell in love with an old friend from Oberlin College, Henry Haskell, who had become editor of the Kansas City Star. She had corresponded for years with Haskell and his wife. But two years after his wife died, Haskell told Kate he had loved her since college, setting off the great crisis of her life. Through weeks of daily correspondence that alternated between exhilaration and anguish, she accepted his approach—though she had come to believe “that men were not the least interested in me, except as a friend”—and concluded that she loved “dear Harry” as well. For a time she could bearly bring herself to consider a new life. “I don’t see how Orv could get along without me. And it would break my heart not to stay by him after all he has been to me.” She kept the affair secret, with her “terrible conscience” telling her that to leave Orville would be to betray him. She told Haskell:

  It hasn’t been the usual sister and brother relation. I am sure we have been more to each other than many husbands and wives and that our obligation to each other is really different from the usual one. I feel sure Orv would feel the same way if the same thing came up with him. Orv built this house with the idea of my being here with him just as much as any husband builds for his wife. Everything has been planned for the future with the idea that we would be together always.

  She worried about Orville’s he
alth, never robust since the accident at Fort Myer; about the strain of the Smithsonian problem; about the effect on Orville if she married Haskell; about the effect on Haskell if she remained with Orville. Yet she kept her composure. “Altogether, Harry, my world is in a state of great disquiet and uneasiness. But I am not discouraged or unhappy. In the background there are all the things that are ‘true and lovely and of good report’—the real things that Will and Orv did and what they were and Orv is. Nothing can touch that and I am going to get along with this awful trouble as well as I can.”

  Still, her worst forebodings about Orville came true. When she decided to marry Haskell and broke the news to her brother, Orville refused to give her his blessing or to attend the wedding. She made a new home with Haskell but apparently never escaped a deep despair over the break. When Kate’s closest friend in Dayton pleaded with her to visit, she replied: “I can’t go to Dayton yet. . . . I don’t see how I ever can. . . . In my imagination I walk through that house, looking for Little Brother, and at all the dear familiar things that made my home. But I never find Little Brother and I have lost my old home forever, I fear.”

  In 1929, on the eve of a trip to Europe, she became ill with pneumonia. Haskell sent a pleading telegram to Orville, who reached her bedside before she died.

  ORVILLE LIVED nearly twenty more years, dividing his time between Dayton and his summer home in Canada, on Georgian Bay. He enjoyed the company of close friends and of his nieces and nephews and their families. He jousted with the Smithsonian. With bored distaste, he handled the massive correspondence that came to him as the sole surviving “father of flight.” When in Dayton, he drove each day to the laboratory he had built in the old neighborhood, but he did little more than tinker with household gadgets. If any more proof was needed of his brother’s dominant drive during their years together, it became obvious in the quiet, uneventful days of Orville’s life after 1912.

  He watched the proliferation of airplanes—he called them “aeroplanes” long after the public had discarded the early usage—with astonishment. During World War I he had told a reporter that “Wilbur and I always thought that the principal use of the aeroplane for a number of years would be military, yet had we been told . . . that hundreds of thousands of aeroplanes would be used in a single war, we would have been as skeptical of that statement as some of the rest of you were of the aeroplane itself.” Nearly thirty years later, days after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he told a friend, “I once thought the aeroplane would end wars. I now wonder whether the aeroplane and the atomic bomb can do it.”

  For years, Kate had begged him to write a history of the brothers’ achievements. After her death, others did, too, including Charles Lindbergh, who became Orville’s friend after his solo flight of the Atlantic in 1927. They served together on the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the precursor of National Aeronautics and Space Administration. When Lindbergh learned that Orville had suppressed the manuscript of one biography and tried to suppress another because they were “too personal,” he urged the older man to write his own version. Orville said he still might do it someday. Writers’ attempts to capture the early days of flight in words were “never quite accurate,” he said, as “no one else quite understands the spirit and conditions of those times.” Finally Orville agreed to a biography by Fred Kelly, a journalist and friend. But he never wrote his own book.

  In 1942, Smithsonian Secretary Charles Abbot—no longer the young astronomer who trembled whenever Samuel Langley summoned him—agreed to publish a clear, official statement that the Wrights, not Langley, had invented the airplane. Six years later, on January 30, 1948, Orville died of heart failure. Only then was the 1903 flyer brought back to the United States. Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was moved from the central position of honor in the North Hall of the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building, and the flyer was hung in its place. In 1976 the machine was moved to the new National Air and Space Museum, where it hangs in the center of the main hall, overlooking the grassy Mall where Samuel Langley, coattails flying, once chased his flying toys.

  At the original ceremony to dedicate the flyer on December 17, 1948, the brothers’ oldest nephew, Milton Wright, was invited to describe what his uncles had done.

  “The aeroplane means many things to many people,” he said. “To some it may be a vehicle for romantic adventure or simply quick transportation. To others it may be a military weapon or a means of relieving suffering. To me it represents the fabric, the glue, the spruce, the sheet metal, and the wire which, put together under commonplace circumstances but with knowledge and skill, gave substance to dreams and fulfillment to hopes.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IF THERE’S A PLACE where overwriting is common and entirely called for, it’s at the end, where acts of assistance and grace are noted. Restraint and subtlety don’t seem right when an author needs the words to say what he feels for the people who helped him write his book. To all those who helped me, take my word for it: I’ve thrown in all the adjectives, adverbs, and hyperbole I can muster, but they don’t do justice to the way I feel.

  To the Lukas Prize Project, a joint program of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, I offer thanks for its J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. All who care about good nonfiction owe a debt to Linda Healey and the Project itself for working to preserve the memory of that peerless writer, journalist, and historian.

  Books bring new friends. Nick Engler of the Wright Brothers Aeroplane Company, West Milton, Ohio, was unfailingly generous in sharing his encyclopedic knowledge and deep insights about the Wright brothers, gained through years of extraordinary work in replicating and flying the Wrights’ machines. The greatest fun in all my research came when I watched Engler’s replicas fly, and those moments were enormously helpful to my effort to bring the Wrights to life. Several of his ideas found their way into the narrative, and his critique of the manuscript saved this neophyte of flight from committing numerous errors. Whatever merits the book may have owe much to this one-of-a-kind historian, craftsman, author, and educator.

  I also had the good luck during this time to become friends with the great Wright authority Fred Howard, author of Wilbur and Orville, who sent good tips and lent good books, then applied an eagle eye to the manuscript, much to my benefit.

  I was equally lucky in an old friendship. At the beginning, Jonathan Marwil talked me through the planning. At the end he offered insights that led to many improvements, small and large.

  For assistance with research, thanks go to Adam Pasick, Ceceile Kay Richter, the uncompensated but effective Emily Wilson-Tobin, and especially to Devon Thomas, an ever-ready and expert librarian-researcher who delivered results at express speed. For tracking down difficult questions in Dayton, and catching errors, thanks go to Louis Chmiel, a tough and tireless detective on the trail of the Wrights.

  The aviation historian Charles Gibbs-Smith once said that “bothering librarians is perhaps a legitimate and inevitable proclivity of writers the world over; but I think we all tend to take their long-suffering and ever-willing co-operation too much for granted.” In that spirit of appreciation for unsung heroes, I sing wholehearted thanks and praise to these archivists and librarians: Dawne Dewey and John Sanford of Wright State University; Leonard Bruno of the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress; Tracy Elizabeth Robinson, William Cox, and Alan Bain of the Smithsonian Institution Archives; Kristine Kaske and Patricia Williams of the National Air and Space Museum Archives; William Baxter of the National Air and Space Museum Library; Randy Neuman of the United Brethren Historical Center at Huntington College; Bryan Skib, Donna Bradshaw, Anne Beaubien, Deborah Heiden, Barbara Beaton, Judy Avery, and the staff of the Buhr Shelving Facility, all of the University of Michigan Libraries; John White of the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Terry Hoover of the Research Center of the Henry Ford Museum
& Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Michigan; Nancy R. Horlacher of Carillon Historical Park in Dayton; and Tom Hilberg of the Medina County (Ohio) Historical Society.

  Among all these, special appreciation is due to John Sanford at Wright State for his expertise in the Wright’s archives, his patience with my questions, his speed in responding to my requests, and his generosity in sharing his own research on the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.

  Ellis Yochelson of the National Museum of Natural History, biographer of Charles Walcott and paleontologist, gave freely of his vast knowledge of the history of the Smithsonian Institution. Other scholars, researchers, and authorities who answered questions and suggested leads include Patricia Whitesell, director and curator of the University of Michigan’s Detroit Observatory; Dr. John Shy and Dr. Arlene Shy of the University of Michigan; Dr. Tom D. Crouch and Dr. Peter L. Jakab of the National Air and Space Museum; Darrell Collins, historian of the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina; Dr. Robert V. Bruce of Boston University; Dr. Ross Petty of Babson College; Susan Bushouse Foran; Ann Honious and Bob Peterson of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park; Dr. Joe W. McDaniel, of Dayton; Betty Darst, of Dayton; Mary Ann Johnson, of Dayton; and Lucy Johnson of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

  Special thanks to Kim Holien, historian of the U.S. Army’s Fort Myer and Fort McNair, for sharing many items from his files of Wright memorabilia; to John Root, Kim Flottum, and Jim Thompson, of the A.I. Root Company in Medina, Ohio, for helping me learn about the remarkable life of Amos Root; and to the pilot and hang-gliding champion Dudley Mead, for telling me how it feels to glide in the Wrights’ machines.