So now the brothers were together. Two young men from Dayton, Ohio, in a tent at the bottom of a sand dune in the middle of nowhere. Orville's correspondence with his sister spoke of a man who was on a vacation: “This is a great country for fishing and hunting. The fish are so thick you can see dozens of them whenever you look down into the water. The woods are filled with wild game, they say even a few ‘bars’ are prowling about the woods not far away.”1
He goes on to describe several storms for his sister and then sums up their flying this way:
We spent half the morning yesterday in getting the machine out of the sand. When we finally did get it free, we took it up a hill and made a number of experiments in a 25 mile an hour wind. We have not been on the thing since the first time we had it out, but merely experiment with the machine alone, sometimes loaded with 75 pounds of chains. We tried it with tail in front, behind, and every other way. When we got through Will was so mixed up he couldn't even theorize. It has been with considerable effort that I have succeeded in keeping him in the flying business at all. He likes to chase buzzards, thinking they are eagles, and chicken hawks, much better….2
What can we take away from this letter from Orville in 1900? Orville never flew on the glider in 1900, yet he wrote, “we have not been on the thing.”3 Not exactly the scientist. But he goes on to say that Wilbur is so frustrated or mixed up that he has to keep him in “the flying business”4 and keep him from killing time to “chase buzzards, thinking they are eagles and chicken hawk.”5 Orville paints a picture of himself as the man who is really interested in flight while Wilbur is in danger of giving it up.
We see early on that Orville is very concerned with making sure he has weight in the “flying business” equal to his brother. The letter to Chanute from Wilbur after returning to Kitty Hawk tells a different tale: “The machine had neither horizontal nor vertical tail. Longitudinal balancing and steering were affected by means of a horizontal rudder projecting in front of the planes. Lateral balancing and right and left steering were obtained by increasing the inclination of the wings at one end and decreasing their inclination at the other. The short time at our disposal for practice prevented as thorough tests of these features as we desired, but the results obtained were very favorable and experiments will be continued along the same lines next year.”6
The scientist working out his experiments comes though with a firm declaration to continue. This is at odds with the almost-comical scene Orville paints of a man who would rather be chasing chickens. So what did happen in Kitty Hawk? The truth of the time in North Carolina in 1900 was theory meeting reality. What had begun in the dark years of Wilbur's depression was now coming to fruition in the sands of Kitty Hawk. Orville did write to his sister that they were ready to try the glider. The first time they took it to the beach, a thirty-mile-an-hour wind took hold of the glider and with Orville and Wilbur holding onto it the double-winged creature tugged to go higher. “It naturally wants to go higher and higher…. When it gets too high, we give it a pretty strong pull…to which it responds by making a terrific dart to the ground.”7
Wilbur recorded none of these first glides, but one time the glider took control and was caught by a wind and threw Orville, who had been hanging on to the rear spar, twenty feet away. He was unharmed, but the glider was badly damaged: “The right side of the machine was completely smashed. The front and rear struts were broken in several places, the ribs were crushed and the wires snapped.”8 They dragged it back to camp and considered leaving but then decided they could fix it and try again. Wilbur had not ascended in the glider at this point, and we can only imagine the angst he was feeling. Nearly six weeks in Kitty Hawk with nothing but a few kite glides and a freak accident to attest for his grand experiment. He had to come back with something tangible in order to continue. He was not unlike the artist who needs some sort of success to continue pursuing what many think is plainly crazy.
Orville did not feel this angst. If things didn't work out and the flying machine didn't leave the ground, then he would simply return and continue manufacturing bicycles. It is the difference between the assistant and the doctor. Wilbur must solve his itch, his desire that was born in flying the kite in Dayton; and he must do it before they leave.
For three days, they worked on the glider while trying to keep warm at night. Two men freezing in a canvas tent on the edge of a sand dune with a glider tied up nearby. This was the cutting edge and the beginning of manned flight in the first year of the twentieth century. The unintended consequence was the therapeutic value of their trip into the wilds of the Outer Banks. Their laboratory was beautiful. Wilbur had found a prime location to bend the elements and decipher the invisible air currents. It was such a primitive place for humans to conquer the final obstacle to traveling about the earth. A spiritual presence did seem to be in Kitty Hawk with the two men. Like any great scientist, the inventor needs a shield from the world to tackle and solve what others cannot. Kitty Hawk proved to be this shield for Wilbur Wright.
What he needed, though, was a better launching pad, a place where the wind could take hold of the glider and they could get a running start. Wilbur was going with his glider based on the Lilienthal model, with a cambered wing (curved for better lift) and a double-decker design based on the 1896 Chanute Herring experiments near Chicago. He was basing the design of his wing on the aeronautical data on lift published by Lilienthal.9 It was as if he was baking the perfect cake—a little salt from here, a partial recipe from there, some flour from somewhere else. Even the trusses on the wings were braced by wires in their own version of Chanute's modified Pratt truss.10 The forward rudder was mounted in front of the wings as a means of protection against a nose dive, much like the kind that had killed Lilienthal.
All Wilbur now had to do was take a run into the wind and jump off the side of a hill. They would take the glider to Kill Devil Hills: “A cluster of three prominent sand dunes that Tate in his letter of August 18 had described as ‘not a tree or bush anywhere.’…The view from the Big Hill was spectacular in all directions. Three quarters of a mile to the east beyond the beach was the great sweep of the blue green Atlantic Ocean.”11 It was where Wilbur would make his first flight, but first they had to get there.
William Tate secured a horse and a wagon, and on October 3 they began the four-mile trek with the glider to Kill Devil Hills. It was sunny with a light wind and perfect for flight. Anyone passing the men on the sandy road would have stared at the two men in high collars and ties, with the giant glider resting across the wagon, and sunburned William Tate in his large straw hat at the reins next to the men who were sweating in the high heat of midday. What in the hell…? would be a typical response to someone seeing a flying machine in the remote shoals of the Outer Banks in Kitty Hawk. The proverbial flying saucer would elicit no different reaction in the year 1900.
Once the small caravan reached Kill Devil Hills, they trekked up the giant sand dune, huffing and puffing and fighting the increasing wind. The dune gives a bird's-eye view of Kitty Hawk, the ocean, and the sky. There was a strong wind, and Wilbur tried the glider as a kite again and was satisfied with the control. Wilbur then turned around and looked out from the Big Hill and could see Albemarle Sound, where he had crossed with Israel Perry six weeks before. He turned around, and there was the rich blue of the Atlantic. The salty ocean breeze fairly slapped his cheek with a fine grit of sand that lifted from the giant dune. A man could bound down the dune in great leaps, but he would have to trudge back up. Wilbur had come all this way to prove that he could make an advancement in manned flight and that he wasn't some floundering bicycle mechanic with grand dreams. Now was the time to prove to himself that he was more than the world had given back to him. He would fly.
They positioned the glider on the hill. Orville and William Tate held on to each wing with two fifteen-foot ropes that were attached to both sides of the wings for control. Wilbur climbed inside the cutout of the lower wing, with his feet on the ground.
He was the airplane's wheels. He grasped the spars in front of him and stared into the wind. Now was the moment. Wilbur paused, then looked at his brother and William Tate and nodded. The three men trotted forward into the stiff wind until the wings began to lift.
Wilbur then ran in the sand, staring straight ahead, and felt the craft rising around him like a creature rising from the dead. The wind lifted the wings further, and he was lifted from the earth by his arms. He quickly scrambled onto the wing and stretched his feet out to the T bar below and grabbed the elevator control. The glider lifted higher as the hill fell away, with the men playing out the lines rapidly. Wilbur Wright felt the wind against his cheeks, blurring his eyes, and heard only the musical pitch of wires. The silence of flight was transforming, a mystical quiet with only the wind, and Wilbur felt himself suspended above terrestrial cares. The ocean was in the distance, the land flattened out, and he heard a strange whistling in the air as a feeling of absolute peace settled on him. Simply, he was flying.
Then the plane began to bob up and down as Wilbur moved the elevator control to no effect. “Let me down!”12 The two men pulled on the ropes, and “the craft settled gently back into the sand.”13 Orville ran to him, his hard shoes digging into the dune, and asked why he had come down when he was just beginning to fly. Wilbur looked at his brother. “I promised Pop I'd take care of myself.”14 Was this true? Milton ruled absolutely, and Wilbur was caught between his father's world and a yearning to go his own way. The bishop was all about restraint, about controlling emotions, desires, feelings. The world was evil, and to be out there was to possibly fall and fail like his two older sons. Could flying, with all it promised, be an escape from the ecclesiastical cage of father Milton and the great evil of the world?
Though Wilbur had denied fame and fortune as motivating factors, they had crossed his mind and would certainly set him free. He would have proven to Milton, to the world, and to himself that he was not crazy. He would fly away from himself into a freedom few dared to dream about. But just when he was lifting off, the long arm of the father knocked him back to Earth. He would have to fly higher than fifteen feet to get away from the bishop.
But this was the first of a series of flights that Wilbur made on that day, with some going 300 to 400 feet in length and speeds on landing of nearly 30 or 40 miles an hour.15 Interspersed with these flights were tests with chains loaded on the glide, and a small derrick was erected and the plane tethered to it to test the wing warping. They then took the fifty-pound glider and literally threw it into the air several times to see what would happen. Patching and splinting the glider back together over a series of days kept them testing. Orville described these thrown glides this way to his sister: “It would glide out over the side of the dune at a height of 15 or twenty feet for about 30 feet, gaining, we think, in altitude all the while. After going about 30 feet out, it would sometimes turn up a little too much in front, when it would start back, increasing in speed as it came, and whack the side of the hill with terrific force.”16
Wilbur was able to run down the giant dune and lift himself into the glider and fly twice as fast as he ran. He was flying, and no amount of testing or data could compare with the sensation. As Fred Howard wrote in Wilbur and Orville, “It was one thing to dangle by the forearms from a pair of wing-supported horizontal bars like Lilienthal. It was another thing altogether to lie motionless between a pair of seventeen-foot wings on a sea-scented updraft, using hands and brains to maintain an equilibrium rather than instinctive body movements. For the first time outside of dreams, a man had been carried through the air in a prone position on a pair of wide white wings just as surely as the squeaking gulls—and had survived.”17
Years of thinking, theorizing, and building had come together in the form of a machine that could leave the ground; and, while not completely controllable, it had the seeds that would blossom into the 1903 Flyer. The tall, angular man who spoke little had pushed flight along unknowingly, with a simple theory that balance and control were the keys to man taming the air currents and being able to soar like the hawks he observed for hours on end. A year later, he would summarize it this way: “Although the hours and hours we had hoped to obtain finally dwindled down to two minutes…we considered it quite a point to be able to return without having our pet theories completely knocked in the head by the hard logic of experience, and our own brains dashed out in the bargain.”18
Wilbur wrote using the plural “we,” but it was he who flew. Orville did not. Orville was helping his older brother mount a glider and take off. The question is then: Why didn't Orville fly at least once in the glider? Some might say it was a promise to their father to keep Orville safe, though there is no evidence such promise was ever made. The real reason Orville did not fly is that flight was Wilbur's domain in the same way that the printing business was Orville's and to a large degree the bike business was as well. Wilbur had initiated the foray into manned flight, and he had pursued it all the way to Kitty Hawk.
It was Wilbur who wrote to the Smithsonian to inquire about current literature on flight and to the US Weather Bureau to inquire about the wind conditions across the country; and then he consulted with the Smithsonian Institution in search of a testing ground. It was Wilbur who reached out to Octave Chanute and then decided Kitty Hawk would be the best place to try out his glider that he had designed and primarily built. It was Wilbur who went down to Kitty Hawk alone.
Once in Kitty Hawk, the brothers’ relationship was clear. Orville joined Wilbur there later in a support mode, but from his letters to Katherine one can see he was more interested in the domestics of camp life at this point. Orville and William Tate helped Wilbur fly by holding onto the plane and making sure they could pull him back down if he got in trouble. Wilbur was clearly the pilot, and if there was any role for Orville, it was one of mechanic at this point. It may not have stayed this way, but in 1900 it was all Wilbur's show before Kitty Hawk and at Kitty Hawk.
As Larry Tise wrote in Conquering the Skies, “Of the inseparable pair, Wilbur was the adventurer, the explorer, the pathfinder…. He framed the challenges they faced and established their goals…. Unlike Orville, who thrived on mechanics, applied mathematics, drafting and the sciences of materials, Wilbur was a man of ideas and ideals, of dreams and drama.”19
One thing Wilbur did find was that the most efficient and comfortable way to fly the glider was to lie down, putting the final nail in the coffin of the Lilienthal method of using body weight to navigate. The pilot was born here, a man who would ride in the machine rather than be part of the machine. He would later write, “we found the position far more comfortable than hanging by the arms; the action of the machine was much steadier and landing was effected in the soft sand at speeds of twenty to thirty miles an hour, without any injury whatever to operator, or breakage of the machine.”20
Before they left for Israel Perry's boat, the Wrights took the plane back to the dune and gave it one last toss off the top. It came to a landing in hollow of sand, and there it stayed. Wilbur stripped off the sateen covering and gave it to William Tate's wife, who made two dresses out of it. When he would return in 1901, the struts of one wing would still be protruding from the sand. A gale would later obliterate the last remains of man's first attempt at controlled flight.
Wilbur Wright returned from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where he had flown tethered, with Orville and William Tate holding ropes to keep the wings stable, and then had flown untethered. Wilbur had now joined Lilienthal as one of the few men to know the feeling of leaving the earth and floating on the air. The German Lilienthal must have had magical moments of elation as he soared in his glider, kicking his legs one way and then the other to make turns and to remain stable. Wilbur, Lilienthal, and a few others had managed to fly—if only for seconds. The man who had returned to a bicycle business in need of attention, a frazzled sister, and a demanding father, now had a bigger problem. He had left the earth and flown…but he wanted to do it again.
&n
bsp; If Wilbur had failed, then there might have been a turning away, although like Teddy Roosevelt who would become president that year, Wilbur Wright seemed destined for something greater. The taste of flight was too much to put the genie back in the bottle. Like the addict who has had just a taste, Wilbur wanted to return as quickly as possible to Kitty Hawk. But first he had to understand what had happened in the hot sands of the Outer Banks. He needed to go back to the school of one, and that did not involve his brother Orville.
Wilbur did not sit down with Orville and theorize. Orville was a mechanic, but Wilbur needed to understand how the gilder flew, how he could control it, and how he could improve on it. He was the visionary, the savant who had to get to the top of the mountain, and he could not find that path by talking with his brother. He needed someone else, an intellect equal to his in knowledge, inquisitive reasoning, and logic—and at least as up to date on the latest aeronautical data.
What exactly had happened on the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk? Wilbur had loaded the glider with a fifty-pound chain and flown it. He had flown off of Kill Devil Hills. They had run around in the sand and chased the glider thrown off the edge of the dune. He had built a glider above his bicycle shop, and then he had lain down on the wings and flown for several minutes combined. Now he was sunburned and tired, and the regular world demanded attention. Wilbur was not unlike an astronaut returning from a trip into space.
So he had returned and taken the bicycle business in hand and suffered through Milton's admonishments to keep a warm and happy home for him. Katherine was relieved of her duties and could focus on teaching, and Orville was once more engaged as the bicycle entrepreneur; now Wilbur could sit in the parlor with the Gibson clock and pick up pen and paper and write to the one man who could help him, Octave Chanute:
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