The men began to run with Wilbur. He was heading toward the cliff of the dune and felt the lift pushing up under his arms. He reached the edge of the Big Hill and felt the glider lift him off the ground. Wilbur pulled himself up and lay down inside the wing. The wind whistled through the wired struts as the rising air floated the glider up toward the sky. Wilbur moved his hips and took the handles as the sand dunes became small and suddenly the ocean appeared. It was just the wind now. Silence for a few seconds. Flying now. Wilbur moved the elevator when the glider nosed down, and he rushed toward the yellow, glaring plane as the sand rose up to meet him.
Wilbur bashed his nose on the elevator and felt the wind go out of his lungs. He could have been killed if he had gone higher. The glider had nosed down into the sand after a few yards. The elevator was not working the way it should. “The operator having taken a position where the center of gravity was supposed to be, an attempt at gliding was made,” Wilbur later wrote in his article “Experiments in Gliding.”18 “But the machine turned downward and landed after only going a few yards. This indicated the center of gravity was too far in front of the center of pressure. In the second attempt the operator took a position several inches further back but the result was much the same.”19
Wilbur kept moving back on the wing, not unlike a man on a teeter-totter, trying to compensate for the glider's continued nosing toward the ground. Finally, he was almost on the very back of the wing when “the machine sailed off and made an undulating flight of little more than 300 feet. To the onlookers this flight seemed very successful but to the operator it was known that the full power of the rudder [elevator] had been required to keep the machine from running into the ground.”20 As Wilbur would later write to Chanute, “In the 1900 machine one fourth as much elevator has been sufficient to give much better control. It was apparent that something was radically wrong.”
Huffaker later recorded in his diary the flights made on that day in August:
A number of excellent glides were made, Mr. Wilbur Wright showing good control of the machine in the winds as high as 25 miles an hour. In two instances he made flights curving sharply to the left, still keeping the machine under good control—length of flight in each case 280 feet. Longest flight 335…. On the occasion of the last flight made while skimming along about a foot above the ground, the left wing became depressed and in shifting his body to right to bring it up again he neglected the fore and aft control and plunged suddenly into the ground. He was thrown forward into the elevator, breaking a number of the rudders ribs and bruising his eye and nose.21
Wilbur had decided it was all his fault. And once the glider fell backward to the ground. “Screams from the ground sent the pilot scooting rapidly forward toward the leading edge. To everyone's relief, the glider pancaked straight down from an altitude of twenty feet, landing without injury to pilot or machine.”22 Each time, Wilbur had a sinking feeling of loss of control and a panicky thought that he might be in danger. The sands of the Outer Banks saved his life more than once that day. Nothing was working the way it should. “In one glide the machine rose higher and higher till it lost all its headway. This was the position from which Lilienthal had always found difficult to extricate himself,” Wilbur later wrote.23
These stalls were the death zone in 1901 and are still a pilot's nightmare. Lift ceases and the plane falls like a stone. Even large, modern airliners, with all their electronic equipment to detect stall conditions, have stalled. The nose goes high, and the airflow across the wings ceases. For the first time, there was real fear that Wilbur might kill himself. The front elevator took the brunt of the nose dives and possibly saved his life, but the 1901 glider was much less controllable than the 1900 glider. And it was much more dangerous. Huffaker was clueless and wrote later that a glide by Wilbur of 315 feet was the best he had ever seen. Wilbur knew something was terribly wrong. The lift coefficients were all wrong. “The adjustments of the machine were way off,” Orville explained in a letter.24 Essentially, the curve of the wing—the camber or lift—was wrong. As the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum explains it, “a key term in the lift and drag equations was Smeaton's coefficient, which accounted for the density of air. A value for the coefficient of 0.005 had been widely used since the 18th century. Using measurements obtained from their glider tests at Kitty Hawk and the lift equation, the Wright brothers calculated a new average value of 0.0033. Modern aerodynamicists have confirmed this figure to be accurate within a few percent.”25 Essentially they had adopted Lilienthal's equations, but Wilbur began to suspect the numbers were wrong.
Wilbur went back to the drawing board and reshaped the wings in the shed. Author Tom Crouch wrote of this period, “As in 1900 they decided to pause and gather a full range of data while flying the glider as an unmanned kite before risking any further damage to craft or pilot.”26 Wilbur then took off again, with much better results. He wrote later of his glides, “The operator could cause it to almost skim the ground, following the undulations of its surface, or he could cause it to sail out almost on a level with the starting point, and passing high above the foot of the hill, gradually settle down to the ground.”27
Huffaker speculated that history would soon be made. Wilbur wrote to his father that there was much more work to be done: “Mr. Huffaker remarked that he would not be surprised to see history made here in the next six weeks. Our opinion is not so flattering. He is astonished at our mechanical facility and as he has attributed his own failures to the lack of this, he thinks the problem solved when those difficulties…are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretic nature which must be met by mechanical designs.”28
In other words, Wilbur knew instinctively the complex problems that were presented by flying a glider under control. Huffaker and other men were thrilled to see anything resembling manned flight since their own experiments had yielded dismal results. But like the painter or the writer or the scientist who is bent on the completion of the project, Wilbur knew how far they must go: “As we had expected to devote a major portion of our time to experimenting in an 18 mile an hour wind without much motion of the machine, we find that our hopes of obtaining actual practice in the air reduced to about one fifth of what we hoped.”29
Out of all the men present in Kitty Hawk in 1901, Wilbur alone was flying the gliders, and he alone was risking his very life in a field that few knew anything about. They installed a hip cradle to try out the wing warping and immediately stumbled into a fundamental problem of control. “We found [ourselves] completely nonplussed.”30 When the warping was applied for a short time, the plane could be righted quickly, but when a turn was sustained, “things began to fall rapidly apart…[as] Wilbur sensed the machine was turning, skidding, really, to the wing that presented the most surface to the air.”31 Flying was proving to be more hazardous than he initially thought. “It was a very difficult thing to put your finger on,” he later explained. “To the person who has never attempted to control an uncontrollable flying machine in the air, this may seem somewhat strange, but the operator on the machine is so busy manipulating the rudder and looking for a soft place to alight, that his ideas of what actually happens are very hazy…a peculiar feeling of instability.”32
Wilbur's own glider experiments had given him the suspicion that aeronautical science might all be founded on flawed data that he must correct, or quite possibly it would kill him. Necessity was the mother of invention, or at least survival. Chanute soon arrived at their camp and was impressed with Wilbur's long-sustained glides. One gets the feeling that these men, while well-schooled in the science of flying, were not sure man could fly. Certainly, Chanute thought he might not see it in his lifetime. It was as if the true reality of flying was not to be taken seriously. Progress toward the goal was acceptable, but to solve the problem of flight, well, that was still a fantastical idea.
But to see Wilbur Wright soaring over the dunes and breaking the wide blue sky and blazing white sand, with the figur
e of his glider and his prone body soaring toward the heavens, it must have seemed like so much magic. Wilbur was really the one who thought man could fly and control the air. It is a bit like the one person who sees success as not a hope but as a realized dream. Theory is one thing, but to see a man fly was, in 1901, still quite astounding. The men who watched Wilbur lift into the sky were stupefied that someone—who was not on a bobbing contraption or in a rocket—was flying in a controlled way that was unseen on Earth up to that moment.
The pictures of these glides are still as amazing as Wilbur had found them when he returned home to his darkroom. He would later tell the Western Society of Engineers.
In looking at this picture you will readily understand that the excitement of gliding experiments does not entirely cease with the breakup of camp. In the photographic darkrooms at home we pass moments of as thrilling interest as any in the field when the image begins to appear on the plate and it is yet an open question whether we have a picture of a flying machine or merely a patch of open sky.33
But Wilbur had detected another severe problem while careening across the sky. The wing-warping system, the gold nugget of their aeronautical discoveries, did not seem to be working at all. Another crash illustrated the problem. While skimming close to the ground, the left wing dipped unexpectedly, and Wilbur pulled hard on the elevator to get some altitude, but it was too late. The glider nosed down, and Wilbur felt himself catapulted forward like a human missile. He went crashing into the elevator, bruising his ribs, blackening his eye, and nearly breaking his nose. If it were not for the sand, the crash would have been far worse. But Wilbur was back to thinking that nothing was behaving as it should, and he had a nagging feeling that “there was a fundamental problem with the information they had inherited from Lilienthal and others.”34
Still, Chanute was impressed, and he wrote in his diary on August 9, “A number of excellent glides were made, Mr. Wilbur Wright showing good control of the machine in winds as high as 25 miles an hour. In two instances he made flights curving sharply to the left, still keeping the machine under good control.”35 Clearly Chanute was impressed and left Kitty Hawk two days later feeling that Wilbur was on the right track. To Wilbur, though, he saw the “new difficulty with lateral control was even more disturbing…. The realization that there was some mysterious problem with the warping mechanism was the worst blow.”36
The rain came for four days, and the Wrights felt it was time to go home. Wilbur got a cold. Spratt left, and then Huffaker—but not before helping himself to one of Wilbur's blankets: “When we came to pack up I made the unpleasant discovery that one of my blankets that had lived with me for years on terms of closest intimacy…had abandoned me for another.”37 Wilbur and Orville left on August 20. Once home, Wilbur wrote Chanute of his disappointment in being able to control the glider:
We left Kitty Hawk at daybreak Tuesday morning and reached home this [Thursday] morning. It rained four days in succession after you left and then blew straight from the South till our departure…. The last week was without very great results though we proved that our machine does not turn toward the lowest wing under all circumstances, a very unlooked for result and one which completely upsets our theories as to the causes which produce the turning to right or left.38
Orville would later say that Wilbur groused on the train, “man would not fly for a thousand years.”39 Actually, he said fifty years. Either Fred Kelly changed it or Orville exaggerated.40 So why would Wilbur say such a thing, and what was it he saw that his brother and others did not? The answer is he alone was flying. He alone knew how far he had come and how far he had to go. He was risking his life, and what he felt up in the air was the total lack of control, which had to send shivers down his spine. Flying without control was not flying: “That was the heart of the control problem; How to govern the movement of pressure around the center of gravity.”41
In gliding, the two points came together when flying straight: “The elevator and wing-warping controls enabled the pilot to alter the position of the center of pressure.”42 In other words, one must control the air, and Wilbur seemed to be the only one who knew how far they had to go. Others assumed flight was like a train running down a track that was fundamentally stable. Wilbur believed that flight was unstable and had to controlled. He had come to believe that they had to start over and throw out all previous assumptions about flying. The mistake on the camber line (the curve of the wing) had led him to believe that Lilienthal's death, while unlucky, was also the result of a “problem with the information they had inherited from Lilienthal” himself.43 The German simply did not understand the next step in controlled flight, and he had paid the ultimate price. Wilbur felt that men who flew without science were truly suicidal. Like the engineer, he had to understand the physics of controlled flight before actually flying.
Once home, the Wright brothers settled back into a routine. Katherine wrote her father, who was again on the road, “The boys walked in unexpectedly on Thursday morning. They haven't had much to say about flying. They can only talk about how disagreeable Mr. Huffaker was. Mr. Chanute was there for a week. Will is sick with a cold or he would have written to you before this.”44
The sister was covering for the brother to keep her father happy. Wilbur didn't write, and he didn't talk about flying. There was nothing to say. He had left Orville long ago in the science of flying, and now he would leave even Chanute. But Chanute would prove invaluable still by funneling all known information to Wilbur, including secretive information from Samuel Langley: “Since beginning this letter I have received one from Prof. Langley in answer to one of mine some weeks ago. I enclose it herewith and beg that you will return it when you have absorbed his data for a surface very similar to yours. It is as he says confidential, i.e., the data are not to be published.”45
Chanute was a sort of clearinghouse for Wilbur, who would return the Langley letter and say that his data differed, but one must imagine the sheer volume of information passed on by Chanute that made its way into Wilbur's final calculations. And yet Wilbur was down. A decade later, he recalled his feelings at the end of the 1901 experiments in Kitty Hawk: “Although we had broken the record for distance in gliding, and although Mr. Chanute who was present at the time, assured us that our results were better than had ever before been attained, yet when we looked at the time and money which we had expended, and considered the progress made and the distance yet to go, we considered our experiments a failure. At this time, I made the prediction that men would sometime fly, but that it would not be within our lifetime.”46
Wilbur felt in his mind that he simply had to start over. He would have to finally break the tether of Chanute, Langley, Lilienthal, and others, and leap into the unknown to find his own answers.
Wilbur stepped off the train in Chicago at seven thirty in the morning on September 18, 1901. It had been eight years since he had been to the Windy City when he and Orville had gone to the Columbian Exposition at the World's Fair of 1893. He had been amazed at the beautiful white buildings and the well-dressed people who had attended the fair. In 1893 there was an Aeronautical Conference at the fair run by Octave Chanute, but there is no reason to believe the Wright brothers attended. Likewise, Wilbur and the people there didn't know that a madman named H. H. Holmes outside the fairgrounds would become famous a hundred and ten years later, when a bestselling book declared Holmes to be the first modern serial killer.
Chicago outside Union Station was grimy and gray. Coal from furnaces and dynamos coated the sidewalks and muddied the air. The steam engines belched black smoke, and horses dropped manure. Horses competed with electric cars and new gas-powered runabouts. People hurried by without tipping their derbies. Foul smells rose from the Chicago River as Wilbur walked across the Wacker Street Bridge and mixed with the Union Stockyards that reminded urbanites that on the south side, thousands of creatures were being slaughtered daily.
Few urban environments in America resembled Chicago. It was a rud
e city to Wilbur's Ohio sensibilities, and he wondered again if he should have come. “I have been talking with some members of the Western Society of Engineers,” Chanute had written Wilbur upon his return.1 “The conclusion is that the members would be very glad to have an address or a lecture from you on your gliding experiments. We have a meeting on the 18th of September and can set that for your talk. If you conclude to come I hope you will do me the favor of stopping at my house.”
Wilbur was reluctant: “After your kindness in interesting yourself in obtaining an opportunity to address this society, for me, I hardly see how to refuse, although the time set is too short for the preparation of anything elaborate or highly finished.”2 Katherine had urged him to go, writing the bishop, “Through Mr. Chanute, Will has an invitation to make a speech before the Western Society of Civil Engineers, which has a meeting in Chicago in a couple months. His subject is to be gliding experiments. Will was about to refuse but I nagged him into going. He will get acquainted with some scientific men and it may do him a lot of good.”3
Wilbur ate in a diner by himself. His clothes were tight. “We had a picnic getting Wilbur off to Chicago,” Katherine wrote her father. “Orv offered all his clothes so off went [Wilbur] arrayed in Orv's shirt, collars, cuffs, cuff links and overcoat. We discovered that to some extent clothes do make the man.”4 Orville had stayed back, as it was Wilbur Chanute had asked to speak. Chanute had written him in a letter from Chicago, “The Secretary of the Society and the Publication Committee are greatly pleased that you consent to giving the Western Society of Engineers a talk on the 18th.”5
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