Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  Wilbur fell back into his old mode of reading while the invalid Orville slept. Wilbur had done so with his mother for three years, and now he used the hiatus to uncover the thoughts of other men who had contemplated taking to the air. He continued, and, as Orville recovered, he gave the books to his brother. Did Orville take to these dense studies of birds and theories on flying? Maybe. But it's telling that Orville left no paper trail of any interest in flight at this point. The bicycle shop was booming, and one cannot imagine Orville taking too big a detour from being the enterprising Yankee to go solve the problem of flight. He probably thought Wilbur's interest in flight would pass; besides, they had a new line of Wright brothers bikes to get out the next year. But Wilbur took the next step.

  It is one of those moments when a path is chosen. Reading books on birds and ruminations on winged flight is one thing, but to pass from the amateur to the professional systematically approaching a problem to be solved speaks of secret intent. A cool day found Wilbur alone in the house. The clock on the mantle ticked, the locomotives were whistling and clacking as they hauled freight into the interior of the country. It was the last year of the nineteenth century, 1899, and the last day of May. His father, Milton, and his sister, Katherine, had left to put flowers on Susan Wright's grave in Woodland Cemetery. Orville was at the bike shop, of course.

  Wilbur slid down into a chair and faced his sister's slant-top desk in the parlor. He picked up the fountain pen and positioned the stationery emblazoned with Wright Cycle Company. The sun slanted in the West and drummed across the wide-plank floor. He was in his high collar and tie and a plain gray vest. He had exhausted the books he could get his hands on, and he needed more. Research cries out for volumes, the thirst for knowledge where there was none before. By trade he was a bicycle manufacturer and mechanic. A high-school dropout. A man who had veered from life for three years with no plans and then followed the whims of his brother half-heartedly. That was it. He only possessed the keen intellectual curiosity that is the hallmark of any man or woman who pursues the life of the mind. He began to write, his fountain pen scratching the rude paper.

  I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes after the style of Caley's and Penaud's machines. My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practical. It is only a question of knowledge and skill just as in all acrobatic feats…. I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language…I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.14

  Wilbur then asserted his belief “that simple flight is possible at least to man and that the experiments and investigations of a large number of independent workers will result in the accumulation of information and knowledge and skill which will finally lead to accomplished flight.”

  The letter went off to the Smithsonian and ended up on Richard Rathbun's desk. He was an assistant to Secretary Samuel Langley, and since the flight of the aerodrome, the Smithsonian had been besieged with letters from would-be aviators. Wilbur was requesting anything on aeronautics, “such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.”15 It is amazing Rathbun replied to the letter that had been drafted on Wright Cycle Company stationery. A bike mechanic who wants to fly. Sure.

  A reply came back from Rathbun, who had passed the letter on to a clerk who supplied a list of books and pamphlets on aviation:

  They were reprints of articles originally published in the Smithsonian Annual Report: Louis-Pierre Mouillard's Empire of the Air; Otto Lilienthal's “The Problem of Flying and Practical Experiments in Soaring”; Samuel P. Langley's “Experiments in Aerodynamics”; and E. C. Huffaker's on “Soaring Flight.” Rathbun also suggested James Howard Means's the Aeronautical Annual.” The Langley could be purchased for one-dollar postage included.16

  Wilbur placed the order for Langley's Experiments in Aerodynamics. These writings were those of Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley. Both men would be the twin pistons of Wilbur's future. One man would open the world for him while the other would be the lynchpin to a descent into darkness. Langley had funding and had managed to launch his model-sized steam-powered insect with wings from a catapult atop a houseboat, and the invention flew amazingly for a half a mile. Langley was convinced he was close to solving manned flight. All he had to do was build a bigger aerodrome and put a man aboard.

  Wilbur learned that the great minds of the country were working on the problem of flight. Many were eminent scientists, with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison heading the list. They all had money and resources that Wilbur Wright could not possibly hope to possess. Another possible inventor, Hiram Maxim, had sunk a cool $100,000 into developing a flying machine that crashed on takeoff. It is worth noting here that the lack of money will be Wilbur's greatest advantage. It brought caution, methodology, and the slow cracking of the nascent science of aeronautics. There could be no frippery, because Wilbur couldn't afford any. Efficiency was uppermost. He had to isolate the central problem of flight before attacking the whole. This was the machine age, and men believed that a powerful engine could solve all problems. They went right past the central problem of lift. After all, since birds flew from rapidly flapping wings, it would follow that if a machine flapped just as rapidly, it should fly. Some pursued this idea and were immortalized a hundred and ten years later in YouTube videos of jumping cars.

  Also, people tended to die while trying to fly; and this, along with the contraptions that kept crashing, going into the sea, or falling apart on takeoff, kept the art of flying squarely in the lunatic fringe category. Death ended most of the nascent aviators’ short careers. The science of aeronautics was not advanced, because there was no methodology. Like the trapeze artist in the circus, the man attacking flight in the late nineteenth century took the flying leap first and worried about the science of flying not at all. It was a mechanical problem that would be solved by trial and error. The error was costly and usually deadly. It was as if manifest destiny of the skies had been declared. If the birds could fly, so should the white man. All he had to do was leave the ground and figure it out as he flew through the air. Such hubris would sink the Titanic a dozen years later. But who would risk life and limb on something so foolish and dangerous? Technology was crude, and this led to machines shaped like ducks and one that had nitroglycerin pellets being ignited for thrust. Nothing worked, and—after the notices of another aviator's death—the newspapers of the time declared: “It is a fact, that man can't fly.”17

  But this was also the age of invention, and with the new century came innovations that would change everyday life. A man named George Eastman had perfected an everyday camera called the Kodak, and Isaac Merrit Singer came up with the first electric sewing machine. People could now go high up in buildings in New York because the Otis Elevator Company had produced something called an elevator that hoisted people up to the heavens. Motorcars were being built all over America, and manufacturing in general was taking off with mass production and a populace ready to buy on easy credit. Change was in the air, and exploration was still the passion of the time.

  In the letter sent to the Smithsonian there is no mention of Orville Wright. There is no use of the plural “we” that would later be applied to all correspondence. As the historian Tom Crouch would write in The Bishop's Boys, “In later years the brothers would claim that Wilbur had simply written ‘I’ when he meant ‘we’ but Wilbur was aware of Orville's touchiness about an equal division of labor, profits and credit. Had aeronautics been a joint interest in 1899, Wilbur would have spoken in the p
lural.”18

  The truth is that the letter was from Wilbur because it was his desire to fly. His brother had no interest in flying. Even in letters to his father announcing his intention to go to Kitty Hawk, there is no mention of Orville. Why should there be—it was not Orville's idea or his quest. He wrote to the Smithsonian, “I have been interested in…. I am about to begin…. I wish to obtain”19 His father would maintain that Wilbur had “drawn” his brother into the “flying problem.” Wilbur was thirty-two years old in 1899. He poured over the known data of flight from the Smithsonian, reading Chanute's, Huffaker's, and Langley's findings. He obtained a copy of Chanute's Progress in Flying Machines; located copies of the Aeronautical Annual for 1895, 1896, 1897; and read through the back issues of popular magazines in search of articles on flying machines.

  Wilbur Wright was a man on a mission. He would jump off where others had left off. The problem was that a lot of the information contradicted data gathered by one aviator to the next. He would later write, “Thousands of pages had been written on the so-called science of flying, but for the most part the ideas set forth, like the designs for the machines, were mere speculations and probably ninety percent was false. Consequently, those who tried to study the science of aerodynamics knew not what to believe and what not to believe.”20

  The school of one was in session. Langley and Chanute had some success with planes that had flown in brief spurts, but they did not really know how they did it. The man reading in Dayton, Ohio, the bicycle mechanic, wanted to know how a wing provided lift. What was the math behind it, the equation that would tell him how a wing lifted itself into the air? How did it work? Wilbur wanted to know how a plane could then be controlled. Secretary Langley just assumed stability was a given, and other “aeronautical investigators regarded flight as if it were not so different from surface locomotion except the surface would be elevated…the flying machine remained essentially level in the air…leaning or rolling to one side seemed either undesirable or did not enter into their thinking.”21 Octave Chanute was not sure anything would fly and believed in slow, methodical planning. Wilbur read on, looking for answers.

  For now, his letters led with the singular “I.” The plural “we” that would punctuate later Wright correspondence is conspicuously absent. It is a slipup that Orville would correct forty-five years later.

  The century had turned, and Glenn Curtiss finished the last adjustments to his motorized bike. Hammondsport, Steuben County, New York, was a small, tranquil town in the first year of the new century, with summer breezes flapping green awnings over the general store. Down on Main Street, everyone was waiting for the show. Glenn Curtiss ran the bicycle shop over on Pulteney Street. He had dropped out of school in the eighth grade and never looked back. He liked anything mechanical. He loved bicycles, and riding faster than the cars puttering down the street gave him a thrill. All bikes went faster than cars in 1900.

  The awning flapped again in the summer wind, undulating G. H. CURTISS—BICYCLE SUPPLIES—SPORTING GOODS. Glenn leaned over the bike. He was a muscular, lanky, quiet young man of twenty-three with a bushy mustache, and he was perpetually reading about engines and electricity, anything that moved something along. People always thought he was chewing, ruminating, trying to figure out how something worked and how to improve on it. The early twentieth century offered up to young men a fountain of inventive spirit, with bold strides in mechanics, electricity, and that outlier—flight—being made every day. Glenn was a natural mechanic and perfectly suited in demeanor and intellect for his time.

  Curtiss stood up and wiped his brow. He finished up with the bicycle that was now motorized with an engine he had built from some mail-order engine castings. People would stroll into the shop and watch him tinker with the engine, trying to improve and modify the power plant for the bicycle. “The thing did not even come equipped with a carburetor, and so he made one out of a tomato can and a gauze screen. More tin cans were soldered into service for other uses, attached, wherever there was a place for them to hang.”1

  Glenn pushed the motorcycle out the door. Proprietors and customers emptied out of the stores to watch. Dust blew up from the street. Glenn fitted his goggles, got on the bike, and began to pedal down the street; he intended “to pedal the transmogrified bicycle up to a speed where the motor could be started by engaging the transmission belt.”2 Glenn pedaled and pedaled around the park square, but the engine did not engage. People began to laugh at the long-legged man pedaling then stopping to adjust before pedaling again.

  Glenn stopped by the post office and adjusted the spark. He was hot and sweating profusely. He saw some people returning to their stores. There were all sorts of cranks out there with automobiles that broke down all the time, or the hilarious accounts in the papers of men who tried to fly with jumping cars, chicken wings, or jet packs of rockets on their backs. Newfangled ideas were just that, and here was another one.

  Glenn started to coast on a small downgrade and engaged the engine again. There was a backfire as the engine beneath his legs coughed to life and, like a demon, the engine shook the bicycle and then took off. Glenn felt the acceleration along with the wind as the engine with no throttle blasted along, just a wide-open, spitting hellcat screaming out a staccato of explosions, with the bike increasing in speed. The motorcycle was now tearing down the street for Lake Keuka. Glenn felt his hair blow back and the sweat cooling on his brow; he was trying to keep the handlebars straight while the motor shook and gulped air through the tin can, leaving behind a thick stream of blue smoke roiling in the summer light. This was amazing. He was flying along and not using any of his own power. He simply wanted to go faster and faster, and the bike was obliging, but there was one slight problem: no brakes.

  The lake was now directly in front of him and Glenn had no choice but to jump off his motorcycle or take a swim. He rolled in the dust and watched his creation crash in the street, with the motor shooting out a series of final blasts before silence. The people along the storefronts stood open-mouthed, and little boys came running down the street. Glenn was now picking up the motorcycle. He had already decided to wheel it back to the shop and put on brakes—and then put on a bigger engine. He couldn't get over the feeling of whipping through the air on the bike.

  Glenn Curtiss began to build more motorcycles with better engines. That was really his thing. He loved to make engines go faster by increasing the horsepower. People still laughed at him, until he began to win the motorcycle races. He went 64 miles per hour—at a time when an average speed of 30 miles per hour was considered fast. Glenn loved speed. The faster, the better. He won the endurance ride from New York to Cambridge, Maryland. His motorcycle motors became better and better. When he was thirty-one, he started his own company. He saw all technology as there for the taking. If he read or heard about someone's idea and it sounded good to him, then he used it. He was in the vein of inventors like Henry Ford, who used a basic mechanics approach to all problems and never thought about any idea or any innovation belonging to any one person. Innovation was in the air, the ether of the young century blowing down the hot summer streets of his hometown. That was how ideas were improved upon. One man took another's and made it just a little better. You couldn't trademark an idea or a technology. It was there for the taking. If a man wanted to use a soup can for a carburetor, then no one could tell him he couldn't do so just because someone else had done it before. That would be ridiculous. Nobody owned an idea. That would be like someone saying, “You owe me money for using my idea.” To Glenn Curtiss, that made no sense. Ideas came to him in the dusk when he was working on his motors in his shop. He sure didn't expect someone to pay him for an idea. They could pay him for the motor, maybe, but ideas, like the wind, were free. This is at a time when other men were being paid for their inventions, and being paid very well.

  Secretary Langley was now the preeminent man of science and aeronautics. The steam bug had flown over the Potomac. It was now just a matter of time before the
secretary of the Smithsonian proved to the world that man could fly. Propulsion was everything now. Power was everything. Aerodrome No. 5 had proven to Alexander Graham Bell and others that Langley was the man who would solve the puzzle of flight. It was just a matter of size. Langley was feted from one celebratory dinner to another. Bell extolled his virtues. The Smithsonian saw it as a great feather in their scientific cap that the very leader of the institution should solve the problem of flight. It was the motherlode of recognition that the Smithsonian was truly the repository of all known science.

  All Secretary Langley had to do was find an engine big enough and powerful enough to carry a man over the sparkly, green Potomac. The $50,000 the government had given him had come at an opportune time. Aerodrome No. 5 had flown just after the battleship Maine had blown up in Havana Harbor. The army and the navy saw war on the horizon and wondered if Aerodrome No. 5 might lead to an airplane that could be useful in the coming war. The army and the navy departments both agreed to kick in $25,000 for future experiments, not realizing the war would end as quickly as it did. Nonetheless, President McKinley wanted the experiments to go forward and the US Army Ordnance Department put in the full $50,000.