by William Boyd
The honour of piloting the Flyer had been decided by a toss of a coin and it was Orville, dressed in his usual business suit, with stiff collar and tie, who lay down beside the motor on the bottom wing and hooked his shoes behind a strut on the trailing edge. His hips were fixed in a wooden cradle that could slide laterally to and fro, a movement that activated the “wing-warping” devices that allowed the pilot to control the direction of the Flyer. His hands were on the control lever that operated the front horizontal elevator. The whole 600-pound flying machine rested on a plank which in turn was supported by a small wheeled trolley (with wheels made from bicycle hubcaps) which ran along the launching rail, which was pointed in the direction of the prevailing wind.
At 10.35 the restraining wire was slipped and the Flyer began to clatter slowly along the launching rail. It was moving so slowly that Wilbur—who was holding the struts on the right-hand wing tip to keep the machine level—had no difficulty jogging alongside. As the Flyer reached the end of the track Orville pulled the control lever to turn the big front elevator up and the machine rose abruptly into the air, the plank on its trolley falling away from the skids into the sand. The Flyer’s speed was approximately thirty miles an hour at this stage but, because of the stiff headwind, was actually moving through the air at about seven mph. Wilbur, loping alongside, easily kept pace with the machine’s undulating progress through the air. Orville, now some ten to fifteen feet above the ground, was having difficulty controlling the big elevator. He would raise it, and the Flyer would surge upwards, he would lower it and then it would dip suddenly towards the sand. This sinuous vermiculate course was maintained for about twelve seconds until an oblique gust of wind coinciding with a downward dip caused one of the skids beneath the machine to hit the sand and the Flyer came suddenly to earth with a severe jolt some 120 feet along the beach from the point where it had risen from the launching rail.
One small miracle, besides the larger one that was achieved that day at Kill Devil Hills, was that John Daniels, the big surfman from the coastguard station, had remembered to press the rubber bulb that activated the shutter release of the camera as the Flyer took to the air, thereby inadvertently producing one of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century. It’s not just that the camera recorded one of those moments that changed the world irrevocably but it is also, or so it seems to me, a wonderful photograph in its own right: perfectly exposed, wonderfully sharp, and a poignant and moving tribute to the human spirit; values enshrined not so much in the fragile beautiful white machine lifting itself slowly into the air but rather in Wilbur’s figure to the side—tautly poised, legs apart, staring at his younger brother prone on the lower wing, his arms half crooked, expectant, almost willing the machine into its new element. Of all the many photographs the Wright brothers took of their flying machines in their months at Kill Devil Hills, and some of them are superb, this adventitious snapshot by John Daniels must rank as one of the most memorable images of all time.
One wonders, also, what Wilbur would be thinking at that moment, at the culmination of this intense but comparatively brief interest in powered, heavier-than-air flight. It is hard to say: neither Wilbur nor Orville Wright seemed to be expressive or forthcoming men; there is no trace in their writings of much exhilaration or indeed of any romantic notion of being the first men to fly. They were a redoubtably practical pair, modest, capable and dogged, and it seems almost as if they were drawn to the challenge of powered flight out of a sense of whim rather than adventure, of a need to find some beguiling way of passing their time rather than being driven by obsession.
They were members of a large family: there were two other older brothers and a younger sister, and Wilbur’s birth, in 1867, the third child, preceded Orville’s by four years. Their father was a bishop of a nonconformist Protestant sect called the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, but neither Wilbur nor Orville “got” religion, their only concession to their father’s faith was that they would not fly on a Sunday. The atmosphere in the family home was close and folksily fun. Wilbur and Orville, neither of whom married, appeared to have a twin-like communication and understanding with each other. Neither drank or smoked. Both were averagely tall and lean, Wilbur was quite bald by his thirties, Orville was balding but wore a bold moustache that caused some to liken him to Edgar Allan Poe. He had a reputation in the family of being something of a dandy, though by any other standards than those of the Wrights such foppishness is hard to detect, though it is true that in one photograph of the two of them Orville is wearing a pair of snazzily checked socks.
When the cycling craze hit America in the 1890s the two brothers, who had initially gone into printing as a profession, opened a bicycle shop in downtown Dayton that was soon a flourishing business where they manufactured and sold their own brand of bicycle. It seems that the ease with which they had triumphed in this area of transportation caused them to look elsewhere for another challenge. And aerial navigation, as it was then referred to, was what took their fancy.
The myth has it that it was newspaper reports of the death in 1896 of Otto Lilienthal, the famous German glider, that concentrated the brothers’ minds on flying machines. Lilienthal did indeed do much to pave the way for powered flight with his scientific formulations of surface pressures and wing construction but powered flight, by the end of the nineteenth century, seemed as remote a possibility then as turning base metal into gold was in medieval Europe. H. G. Wells however, in a celebrated essay in 1901, predicted that the first aeroplanes would take to the air long before the year 2000: 1950 was his educated guess.
So the Wright brothers applied their minds to the problem of powered flight and sent off to the Smithsonian Institution for whatever literature on the subject was available in May 1899. The Smithsonian duly responded and sent along four slim pamphlets, free of charge. In this context of almost total ignorance the fact that just four and a half years later the Wright brothers’ own powered flying machine took off from the sands of Kitty Hawk almost defies belief and is perhaps the most effective testimony to the cool practicality, the commonsensical thoroughness of their unique cast of mind.
For they were not alone: in France, Germany, England and the USA would-be aviators were all trying to make the next step from manned gliders. Lilienthal had made over 2,000 glides; Englishman Percy Pilcher had glided 750 feet from the top of one hill to another, in the States Samuel Langley had successfully flown thirty-pound steam-powered model aeroplanes and Octave Chanute was developing manned gliders to carry on from where Lilienthal’s premature death had left the science.
Broadly speaking, all these experimenters were making a conceptual error about the prospect of flight. They tended to view the air much as they would the sea: something to be ridden much as a boat rides the waves. Langley hoped his flying machines would harness the “internal work of the wind” and even be able to circumnavigate the globe without landing. Chanute built a six-wing glider with wings that could move as the air currents buffeted them. The pragmatic Wrights, however, approached matters differently. They saw everything as a fundamental problem of control, that there was little purpose in providing any kind of glider with power if you didn’t know what to do if and when you suddenly found you were flying. The first models they made in 1900 were large kites and then they quickly evolved into building unmanned gliders which they flew with ropes attached and finally manned gliders, taking to the air on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, making many glides of over 200 yards and staying aloft for half a minute at a time. Back in their bicycle workshop in Dayton they analysed the information they had gleaned and, as they built a new flying machine each year, steadily modified its design.
Because they concentrated on controlling the flying machine the brothers quickly encountered the key inherent problems of sustained flight. Control has to be organized around three axes, lateral, vertical and longitudinal, or, put in nautical terms, the pilot has to be able to control pitch, yaw and roll. What the Wright brothers achieved, to simplify drastica
lly, during their gliding experiments in 1901 and 1902 at Kitty Hawk was a method of controlling movement in these three dimensions. Only by controlling all three dimensions, for example, is it possible to make a banked turn in a flying machine. In the gliders of Lilienthal, Pilcher and Chanute the only way of exercising control was for the pilot to hang by his arms and thrash his body around to disturb the centre of equilibrium. A dangerous manoeuvre in any event as both Pilcher and Lilienthal died in gliding crashes. In the powered “hops”—where the flying machine left the ground for a second or two—of such pioneers as Langley and Maxim there was simply no time to demonstrate control.
But in 1902 in the dunes of Kill Devil Hills Orville and Wilbur Wright were turning and banking their big glider right and left with remarkable consistency. They were able to do this through the process they called “wing-warping,” a precursor of the modern aileron, where cables controlled by lateral movements of the hip cradle twisted the ends of the wings, pulling one into a positive angle and the other into a negative, or vice versa, with wind pressure then causing the wing with the positive angle to lift, and the wing with the negative to dip—and so the turn begins.
In the course of their four years of work the brothers made many discoveries about the mystery of flight, and, amongst other achievements, built their own four-cylinder engine and tested wing cross-sections in their own wind tunnel, but it was their development of the three-dimensional system of aeroplane control—the basic system that still operates all winged transportation today—that really marks them out as the great progenitors, the first true flyers.
The epochal day of 17 December 1903 did not end with Orville’s sinuous 120-foot flight. In true Wright fashion the damaged skid was swiftly repaired and the Flyer carried back to the launching rail for another attempt. Three more flights were completed, the third being the most remarkable. This time Wilbur piloted the Flyer and by now he had become more accustomed to the sensitive front elevator. The Flyer took off, its course through the air less undulating, and puttered off across the sandy plain at a speed of no more than ten miles an hour. Wilbur had flown nearly 300 yards when, once again, a slightly over-enthusiastic adjustment of the controls brought the machine down to earth, badly damaging the front struts that held the elevator. That was that for the day, and for 1903, as it turned out, for the Flyer was further damaged when, as the men were replacing it in its shed, a powerful gust of wind flipped it over on its back.
In many ways the fourth flight of that December day deserves the real prominence in the history of aviation. It lasted fifty-nine seconds and covered 852 feet and if anyone ever doubted that the Flyer was capable of sustained flight then Wilbur’s effort at the end of that memorable day would have quashed them completely.
Of course the 1903 flights were only the beginning of the Wright brothers’ story. New Flyers were built and tested and by 1905 the Flyer III was capable of staying aloft for half an hour at a time and flying many miles. As news of the brothers’ achievements began to be broadcast to an incredulous world so too did the atmosphere of envy, malice, bad faith and cupidity that attends most great innovators begin to gather round them. Sceptics at home and abroad refused to believe these taciturn bicycle makers from Ohio had conquered the air; former colleagues strove to hog the limelight; less successful aviators stole their ideas. Lawsuits, patent battles, controversy, claim and counter-claim continued to dog their lives for many years. Even in the 1930s there was a systematic effort to discredit their achievements when the so-called “lost” flights of Gustave Whitehead (it was suggested, quite fraudulently, that he had flown half a mile in 1901) were advanced as the true precursors of aviation history. But the Wright brothers, true to their natures, worked on relentlessly, steadily perfecting their flying machines until the technology they had initiated eventually superseded them. Wilbur died in 1912 of typhoid fever. Orville lived on until 1948, the grand old man of American aviation, surviving long enough to see the astonishing progress of his invention and see what contribution—good and bad—it had made to the history of the twentieth century.
Such speculation risks entering the realm of banality and sentiment, but, as we idly cruise the upper atmosphere in our jumbo jets pondering the wisdom of a second Bloody Mary before lunch, and, elsewhere, Stealth bombers wreak pinpoint destruction by laser beam, it is worth reflecting on that winter day at Kill Devil Hills when the five men from Kitty Hawk watched the two brothers in their white muslin flying machine lift off the ground and chug erratically through the air over the chilly sand dunes. It was such a short time ago and feverish hindsight makes one want to invest the occasion with monumental significance. But, reportedly, John Daniels, Will Dough, Adam Etheridge, W. D. Brinkley and Johnny Moore were not overly impressed—they had seen the brothers make much longer and more graceful flights in their gliders in previous years. Even the brothers, when they cabled the news that evening to the family that the flights had been successful, seemed more concerned to let them know that they would be home in time for Christmas. However there was an eyewitness the following year when a new Flyer made the first ever circling flight and with a little effort of imagination one can gain some vicarious sense of the sheer strangeness of the phenomenon, as it must have seemed then, and share a little of the moment, a sense that the world would never be the same again:
The machine is held until ready to start … then with a tremendous flapping and snapping of the four cylinder engine, the huge machine springs aloft. When it first turned that circle, and came near the starting point, I was right in front of it; and I said then, and I believe still it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight of my life. Imagine a locomotive that has left its track, and is climbing up in the air toward you—a locomotive without any wheels, we will say, but with white wings instead … coming right toward you with the tremendous flap of its propellors, and you will have something like what I saw. The younger brother bade me move aside for fear that it might come down suddenly; but I tell you friends, the sensation one feels in such a crisis is something hard to describe.
1993
Anthony Burgess 1917–93
About eleven months ago in Edinburgh, so I have just been told by a friend who was there, Anthony Burgess turned to the audience he was addressing and said quite calmly, “I have only a year left to live.” There was a shocked silence and then Anthony, apparently, carried on without a care in the world.
I knew, we knew, that he was not in good health latterly, but the last time I saw him he did not seem much changed. He was smoking, inevitably, and we had a drink or three. He was participating in whatever book business had brought him to London with his usual heroic energy and benign composure, and, for all I know, was writing a novel, a book review and a concerto in his idler moments. All the same, the news of his death comes as a huge shock perhaps because one always thought that, having cheated the grim reaper once, Anthony’s prodigious energy would continue to defy mortality as long as he felt it was worth it.
I refer, of course, to the now legendary moment in 1959 when Anthony was diagnosed as suffering from an inoperable brain tumour and was told he would be dead before a year had run its course. In the time he had left remaining to him, or so he tells it, to provide some sort of legacy for his soon-to-be widow, he wrote four novels, non-stop, one after the other. And when the diagnosis blessedly proved to have been false he carried on working with that same restless creativity. From the outside it seemed as if Anthony’s artistic momentum was indeed a kind of life force, sustaining and vivifying, and that as long as he was there working he would outlive the lot of us.
He was an exemplary writer in many senses. He was the towering example, for instance, to all late starters, not writing his first novel until he was in his forties. He was an intellectual, a polymath, at home in many languages, with a cultural sweep that was awe-inspiring, but at the same time he avoided all pretension and elitism, equally happy to let frivolity and fun—in the form of movies, soap operas, TV, c
hat shows, beach blanket best sellers or whatever—benefit from his shrewd and enthusiastic evaluation. And he worked hard, worked hard for his living, writing novels and criticism, screenplays and libretti, almost anything he wanted to do and could turn his pen to.
In this sense he seems to me to be a very British writer. If there is one thing that characterizes the British writer, from the eighteenth century onwards, it is that by and large he or she writes a lot, is very productive, is professional. Writing is both a serious calling and a serious career, and Anthony, in the twentieth century, embodied that attitude with more style and panache and consistent high standards than anyone else I can think of. But in many other senses he regarded himself as something of an outsider. A cradle Catholic, a northerner, non-Oxbridge, with a working life spent largely abroad, he considered himself, I believe, beyond the pale of the metropolitan literary world. And so much the better for him: he is the perfect example of the non-parochial in British literature. If ever the British novel is described as being cramped and confined by this cramped and confined little island Anthony Burgess can provide the flourishing counterpoise.
I remember on the occasion of his seventieth birthday celebrations him saying cheerfully on television that he never expected to be honoured by his native country. “You have to be a footballer or a jockey to be recognized by the establishment in Britain,” he said. And of course it is the usual matter of shame and a sad reflection on our inherent philistinism that someone as special and worth celebrating as Anthony should have been ignored. But he would know, as would any person of sense, that what matters in the end is the work done rather than any bauble conferred, and the work will continue to fascinate and beguile in all its multitudinous facets. Amongst the thirty-odd novels he wrote the consensus would probably be that Earthly Powers is his masterpiece and it is hard to argue against its huge and confident sweep. But my own particular favourites, the ones I re-read, are the Enderby novels, Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside, which are about the life and extraordinary times of a minor English poet—wonderfully rich and funny novels. I first read these books twenty years ago at university and read them again when I had the chance to meet Anthony many years later. Enderby, eccentric, unworldly, insouciant, obsessed by his art, but fully caught up in the physical pleasures of this world, brings Anthony’s unique and vital spirit forcefully to mind. I shall go and read them again now, and think how lucky I was—how lucky we all were—to meet and know their remarkable creator.