Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  There is very little written about this encounter but, it may be speculated, however, that Wilbur Wright took this occasion to tell Chanute of his two articles, “Angle of Incidence” and “The Horizontal Position During Flight.”12 As the editor of The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright speculated, Chanute probably encouraged Wilbur to “publish more details of their experimental work, and especially the results of the 1901 season, then about to begin and the germ of the idea probably started here of having Wilbur Wright address the Western Society of Engineers.”13 This would come to pass later in the year.

  The importance given to Chanute's visit by Wilbur is really shown by the Wright housekeeper Carrie Kaylor Grumbach's recollection fifty years later of an incident involving dessert. Katherine Wright had “decided on melons for dessert and gave instructions that if one melon on cutting proved to be better than the other, Carrie was to make sure Mr. Chanute got a piece of the better one.”14 Carrie saw only partially ripe melon and decided to parse it up into bite-sized portions for everyone. So, Chanute ended up with a grape-sized piece. Katherine was not happy, as she knew how much for Wilbur was riding on this visit.

  Milton saw outsiders as invaders, and already others were entering their lives. The boys had hired Charlie Taylor to run their business because they were heading back to Kitty Hawk again. Milton didn't like this. People were leaving. He was leaving, and that was fine; but others should remain home to keep the hearth fires burning. He was doing God's work. He was doing important work. He was not trying to fly, which God did not intend man to do. And now they were bringing in this farm boy to run the bicycle business.

  What Milton didn't know, but the Wrights recognized, was that Charlie Taylor was a crack mechanic with an intuitive sense of how things worked, and he could make up something on the spot to fix a problem. Wilbur valued this ability above all else. Charlie smoked cigars one after another and irritated their sister with his braggadocio, but he could work like hell and was fully capable of handling the business, though he and Katherine would clash.

  In the history of flight, the hiring of this man—who had quit school in seventh grade, owned his own machine shop, fathered two children, and had worked at several places before doing freelance jobs for the Wrights—would be almost as important as Wilbur's first letter to the Weather Bureau. He was to the Wrights as Charles Manley was to Langley or Glenn Curtiss was to Baldwin, though they didn't know it. Charlie would eventually be put to task building a motor that could go on the Wrights’ airplane, and he would have to do it from scratch. He would not spend the thousands that would be used in the pursuit of the latest technology to power Secretary Langley's machine. He would build the machine for less than a hundred dollars.

  Years later, Charlie Taylor would look back on his entry into the world of aeronautics, and it was not the story of Langley searching out the best and the brightest among the top schools that he remembered: “There were just the two of them in the shop and they said they needed another hand. They offered me 18 a week. That was pretty good money; it figured up to 30 cents an hour. I was making 25 cents at the Dayton electric company, which was about the same all skilled machinists were getting. The Wright shop was only six blocks from where I lived.”15

  American ingenuity and resourcefulness seemed to be rich commodities in the early years of the century. Ford, Edison, Westinghouse, and Wright, but now Wilbur had Octave Chanute sitting at his kitchen table at 7 Hawthorne Street. It was June 26, 1900, and Milton, Wilbur, Orville, and Katherine were eating lunch. Chanute was impressed with the two young men in front of him. There are no records of the conversation, but Chanute's view that flying would be solved by a team of men came through. He believed young, enthusiastic men who were bright and innovative could collectively solve the riddle of flight. He did not believe a lone individual like Wilbur could do it on his own.

  It was during his two-day visit that he told them about Edward Chambers Huffaker. A devotee of Langley's, he had worked for the Smithsonian before feeling that he had to go out on his own. Huffaker was no slouch; as Tom Crouch cited in The Bishop's Boys, he was “one of the most experienced and best educated aeronautical engineers in the United States.”16 He continued, “Huffaker was a graduate of Emory and Henry College and held an MS in physics from the University of Virginia.” The total of degrees between Huffaker and Chanute was easily four or five. The Wrights had not even graduated high school, and yet Chanute had latched onto Wilbur's letters and was now sitting in his home. What had he seen in the short correspondence that led him to bother with a man who could be another crank trying to ascend to the sky?

  Huffaker was building Chanute a glider, and the Frenchman wanted him to bring it to Kitty Hawk to join the Wrights. It is amazing that Wilbur did not reject this out of hand, and it shows that he was very careful not to antagonize Octave Chanute. What was coming together at the table in Dayton was the hub of a wheel, and on each spoke were men working toward a common goal. Wilbur needed to be on that wheel to get the cross-pollination he required. Another man working with Chanute was George Alexander Spratt, who had written to Chanute and professed his desire to fly. He was a young physician with absolutely no experience in gliders, but Chanute saw something in him.

  Chanute believed in his intuition regarding the men who would solve the problem of flight. He felt that Wilbur Wright was onto something, and Huffaker, through his guidance, might produce a flyable airplane. Who knows, even Spratt might hold the magic key. Wilbur took all of this in and did not say no to either man coming to Kitty Hawk. Chanute was a bit like a gambler betting on a lot of different horses but not sure which one could really cross the line. The Huffaker glider did not work out; Chanute recognized the faulty design and suggested that Wilbur fly it at Kitty Hawk as a kite. He offered to send Spratt and Huffaker to assist the Wrights in flying the glider.

  Wilbur Wright did not need assistance, but he did need Chanute. And so, he managed a diplomatic letter after Chanute had left. “As to Mr. Huffakers [sic] trip to Kitty Hawk I do not feel competent to advise you…. If however, you wish to get a line on his capacity and attitude and give him a little experience with a view to utilizing him in your own work later, we will be very glad to have him with us.”17

  In other words, Spratt and Huffaker could come if this would ensure the relationship with Chanute, which Wilbur desperately needed. The truth was that Wilbur had latched onto a group of men who were in the forefront of aeronautics. He would surpass them all, but on the eve of the second trip to Kitty Hawk he needed to be in the loop before he left them all behind. In a letter to Octave, he explored the idea that someone coming to their camp might appropriate their ideas if not their technology. This was after Chanute assured him that the men would be discreet. Wilbur immediately wrote back that “we [he and Orville] do not think the class of people interested in aeronautics would naturally be of a character to act unfairly…. The labors of others have been of a great benefit to us in obtaining an understanding of the subject and have been suggestive and stimulating. We would be pleased if our labors should be of similar benefit to others.”18

  This is just a glimmer of what would later become a full-blown obsession with keeping their invention secret. Wilbur was willing to risk someone taking his ideas on wing warping or the position of the pilot or the angle of incidence if it meant keeping the door open. His mind was still hungry for what others knew in a field that was entirely new. At this point, the relationship between Wilbur and Chanute bordered on teacher/mentor/student. Lilienthal, Spratt, Huffaker, Chanute, and even Langley and Charlie Taylor all were faculty at the university of Wilbur Wright with its one student. This would change after the third trip to Kitty Hawk, but for now the letters would flow between them even more furiously. The school of one was in full session and would convene in the sands of Kitty Hawk.

  Wilbur was eager to get back to Kitty Hawk. “Owing to changes in our business arrangements we shall start on our trip much earlier than we had expected, probably n
ot later than July 10th,” he wrote to Octave Chanute, who planned to join them.1 He wanted to get back on the hot sand. The dragonflies crackled in the weeds along with the smell of dead fish and sand crabs skittered by, then disappeared into holes. The ocean rose and fell. Here was the edge of the country, and beyond the ocean was Europe. In 1901, there was just the sand, the ocean, the silence, the heat, and the rain.

  Chanute quickly wrote back promising to bring the anemometer Wilbur had requested. The Wrights left for Kitty Hawk on July 7, 1901. They arrived in Elizabeth City in the middle of a hurricane with 93 mph winds. “We reached Kitty Hawk several days later than we expected owing to the greatest storm in the history of the place,” Wilbur wrote Chanute.2 Octave Chanute, Edward Huffaker, and George Spratt were to join them at their camp. Their camp would be not in Kitty Hawk but in Kill Devil Hills, where Wilbur had flown the year before. “The practice ground at the Kill Devil Hills consists of a level plain of bare sand from which rises a group of detached hills…. The three which we use for gliding experiments are known as the Big Hill, the Little Hill and the West Hill,” Wilbur would write later.3

  Four miles from Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills was where Wilbur would crack the code of manned flight in 1903, but “Kitty Hawk” rolled off the tongue easier, and it stuck. The memorial to flight is in Kill Devil Hills and not Kitty Hawk. This is one of many misnomers regarding the Wright brothers. But they had to get there still. For two days they waited out the storm and then started across the sound, but not before Wilbur wired instructions to the three men who were to join them: “Leave Norfolk at 10 AM Monday, Wed or Saturday arriving at Nags Head the same day…. Nags Head is eight miles South of Kill Devil Hills where we camp. If notified in time we can meet you at Nags Head if weather is favorable, otherwise you can get conveyance there. Our freight arrived in Elizabeth City this morning and will go down to Kitty Hawk with us.”4

  The Wrights spent the first night at the Tates’, then loaded all their lumber and equipment into a beach cart and began the long, wet trek to Kill Devil Hills. The rain was incessant and lasted for seven days. They could do little but wait. They were two men in wool pants, vests, high-collar shirts, and hard shoes. There were no tennis shoes or shorts or t-shirts or floppy hats. They were cut off from civilization and could only wait out the rain in their tent. Orville later wrote to his sister:

  After fooling around all day inside the tent, excepting on a few occasions when we rushed out to drive a few more tent pegs our thirst became unbearable, and we decided upon driving the Webbert pump, no well where we could get water being within a mile! Well we got no well, the point came loose down in the sand and we lost it! Oh misery! Most dead for water and none within a mile excepting what was coming from the skies. However, we decided to catch a little of this and placed the dish pan where the water dripped down from the tent roof; and though it tastes somewhat of the soap we had rubbed on the canvas to keep it from mildewing, it pretty well filled a long felt want.5

  Finally, they could begin work on their hangar on Monday, July 15. Work proceeded for three days: “The building is a grand institution with awnings at both ends; that is, with big doors hinged at the top, which we swing open and prop up, making an awning the full length of the building at each end…. We keep both ends open almost all the time and let the breezes have full sway.”6 And then Edward Huffaker arrived. They watched the heavily bearded man huff across the sand dunes like a lonesome traveler cross the Sierra. Huffaker immediately took shelter in their tent, not offering to lend a hand on the construction of the shed. The author of the pamphlet On Soaring Flight had been a protégé of Langley at the Smithsonian.7 His epiphanic moment was when he took strands of Chinese silk and waved it in to the wind to prove that “birds soared on currents of rising sun-heated air.”8

  After this high point, Huffaker was a man who spat tobacco juice in a spittoon with his feet on his desk while reading documents. When he came to work for Chanute, Langley had given him high praise but was probably glad to be rid of the chewing, spitting scientist. But Huffaker did write in his diary to record his observations upon arrival: “The Wrights reached here about the 10th of July and proceeded to erect a tent and workshop. The latter is 16 × 25 in horizontal dimensions and 6 1/2 feet in height, with low pitched roof, covered with tar paper. The ends are closed with falling doors, hinged on a level with the eaves, and both can be closed and opened at will…. In this building the machine is to be put together and housed in bad weather.”9

  While the Wrights finished up their hangar, Huffaker gave them lectures on morality while using their box camera for a stool. Wilbur detested the man but said little, later writing, “He is intelligent and has good ideas but little execution. His machine, which he built at Mr. Chanute's expense, is a total failure mechanically.”10

  Huffaker worked on Chanute's glider and complained about the weather in his diary: “The weather has been so warm that work in the afternoon has been out of the question.”11 With Huffaker came a black plague swarming down from the skies. They had just finished the hangar, and the construction of the glider was next, but the sun was suddenly blotted out by a mighty swarm of mosquitoes fueled by the recent rains. In the Outer Banks, the mosquitoes were only supposed to strike en masse once every ten years. This time they came in 1901. Orville would later say it was the worst experience of his life, and that included fighting off typhoid fever:

  The agonies of typhoid fever with its attending starvation are as nothing in comparison. But there was no escape. The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything were crawling with them. They chewed us clean through our underwear and socks. Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hens’ eggs. We attempted to escape by going to bed, which we did at a little after five o'clock. We put our cots under the awnings and wrapped up in our blankets with only our noses protruding…. The wind which until now has been blowing over twenty miles an hour, dropped off entirely. Our blankets then became unbearable. The perspiration would roll off us in torrents.12

  The three men then set up their cots beneath mosquito netting out in the open. “We put our cots out on the sand twenty or thirty feet from the tent and the house and crawled in under the netting and bedclothes, Glen Osborne fashion, and lay there on our backs smiling at the way we got the best of them. The tops of the canopies were covered with mosquitoes,” Orville later described to Katherine, “until there was hardly standing room for another one, the buzzing was like the buzzing of a mighty buzz saw. But what was our astonishment when in a few minutes we heard a terrific slap and a cry from Mr. Huffaker announcing that the enemy had gained the outer works.”13

  They abandoned their cots and “fled from them, rushing all about the sand for several hundred feet around trying to find some place of safety.”14 The men then tried to find refuge again and were forced back to their wool blankets. They considered that they might have to abandon camp until they began to burn old stumps to drive the mosquitoes away. “We proceeded to build big fires about camp, dragging in old tree stumps which are scattered out over the sands at about a quarter mile from the camp, and keeping up such smoke that the enemy could not find us.”15

  During this siege, Chanute's second protégé, George Spratt, arrived. Not able to handle the smoke the other men were sleeping in, he set his cot out in the open air: “Mr. Spratt after getting in bed with the smoke blowing over him before long announced that he could no longer stand the fire and dragged his cot out in the clean air. A few minutes later he returned, saying the mosquitoes were worse than the smoke.”16

  Spratt, while much more amenable to the Wrights, had no real credentials other than a desire to fly. He turned out to be a hard worker who had studied the problem of flight. Chanute had billed him as a man who had a medical background, but this turned out not to be true. He was one of many men of the time who dreamed of flying but had no real methodology or science to work toward the goal. Aviation attracted drifters in 1901. It was an unreal science that promised man the abil
ity to leave the earth, and for this there was no shortage of fabulists who glommed onto men like the Wright brothers or Octave Chanute. In this new field, the lack of structure, the roll of the dice, and the very absurdity of flight were the lights for the moths of discontent. Octave Chanute had probably taken on Spratt based on his youthful zeal, which the old man felt he needed in order to get a plane off the ground. Spratt also had a streak of melancholia that Wilbur tried to help him with since he had his own three years of depression. Even with his lack of credentials and psychological deficiencies, Spratt was much preferable to Huffaker, whom the Wrights identified as a shirker and a poser.

  There were four men now living in the hangar, and Orville did a lot of the cooking. They created a gas stove out of metal barrel, “and shelves lined with canned goods, Arm and Hammer Baking Soda, Chase Sanborn Coffee, Royal Purple Hand Picked Tomatoes, Gold Dust Green Gage Plums. Fresh butter, eggs, bacon and watermelon had to be carried on foot from Kitty Hawk.”17 Huffaker made a habit of using other people's personal items and probably took more than his share of the food. He had abandoned his own plans to fly Octave Chanute's glider, which was slowly being covered with sand. Still, he was no help at doing dishes or pitching in on the general duties of camp. It is a testament to Wilbur Wright's respect for Octave Chanute and his desire to keep that relationship steady that he allowed someone like Huffaker to camp with them in the wilds of the Outer Banks.

  Between dissertations on character building, the slovenly Huffaker dimly realized that he was out of his league. He saw how far Wilbur Wright had come, and he was ready to watch history in the making. On July 27, the glider was ready and the day was clear. Wilbur stood in the cradle on the glider, breathing the heat just below. Sand stung his eyes and peppered his cheeks. He faced the edge of the Big Hill, with Orville holding one wing and Spratt holding the other. Huffaker, William Tate, and Tate's half brother, Dan, were there to help. The wind was blowing at 25 miles per hour, with the ocean blue in the distance. The beach road beyond the dunes was a long, slim gray line, and the cloudless sky was a stunning cerulean expanse. It was a perfect day to fly.