Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  Wilbur finished his breakfast, then walked north to Chanute's brownstone on the near north side. The class of homes improved, Wilbur noticed, as he neared the north-side enclaves of the well-to-do Chicagoans. Brownstones and graystones dropped granite stairs to the sidewalks, and it seemed fitting to Wilbur that Octave Chanute should be in the gentrified part of the city. Chanute had made lantern slides for Wilbur's speech on the two gliders and his experiments at Kitty Hawk. It was a primitive PowerPoint that would enhance Wilbur's speech, and there were also pictures of Lilienthal's gliders and Chanute's own double-decker planes. Wilbur could give an overview of the progress of aeronautics as he gave his speech.

  He dined with Chanute that night in his elegant brownstone. “Mr. Chanute entertained him at his house and took him up to his study which Will declared was ten times dirtier and more cluttered than yours ever was,” Katherine wrote to her father.6 “It seems he has models of flying machines suspended from the ceiling so thick that you can't see the ceiling at all.” They discussed his speech. Chanute told him to not worry about getting too technical. Wilbur could not help but be technical, but it gave him great relief to have a man like Chanute tell him he would be fine. The title of his speech was “Some Aeronautical Experiments.”7

  The next day, Wilbur was nervous as he waited to go on. His collar was too tight and his hands were clammy. He had tried to tamp down any enthusiasm for speaking to the assembly: “I must caution you not to make my address a permanent feature of your program as you will understand I make no pretense of being a public speaker.”8 Katherine told her father that she had asked Wilbur if his speech was to “be witty or scientific and he said it would be pathetic before he got through with it.”9

  Chanute was talking and explaining what had happened at Kitty Hawk. He spoke of two gentlemen, but of course he had only asked one gentleman to speak to the Western Society of Engineers. It was September 18th; four days before, President McKinley had been assassinated and Teddy Roosevelt became the youngest president in history. Wilbur felt the world had been off-kilter ever since, and now, waiting to speak to the august body of engineers, he wondered if the earth might just fly off its axis.

  Octave Chanute stepped back, and Wilbur walked slowly to the podium, like a man moving underwater. The lights were dimmed for his lantern slides of the glides at Kitty Hawk. And then he was at the podium, facing the men and their wives. Wilbur Wright began to speak, and his audience did not move. Later, the speech would be quoted in Engineering Magazine, Scientific Magazine, Scientific American, Flying, and the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. Chanute would order three hundred copies of the speech. “Some Aeronautical Experiments” would become a bible of aeronautics of the early twentieth century.

  How did this happen when a relatively unknown bicycle mechanic had gone down to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for some glider experiments? The answer was that no one else was taking the methodical approach to flying that would solve the problem of controlled flight. Wilbur proceeded to explain that it was one thing to theorize how a bird flew but quite another to become that bird. He basically gave a speech on empiricism. He pointed out that a steamship would glide in the water once power was stopped to the propeller, but a plane would drop if power was cut. “However, there is another way of flying which requires no artificial motor and many workers believe that success will first come by this road. I refer to the soaring flight, by which the machine is permanently sustained in the air by the same means that are employed by soaring birds.”10

  He then showed a lantern slide of himself soaring in a glider. It is an amazing picture, with the sun shining down on the wings and the glider tilted at an angle much like a hawk. He related his own excitement in discovering these pictures in his darkroom behind the house: “In looking at this picture you will readily understand that the excitement of gliding experiments does not entirely cease with the breaking up of [words missing]. In the photographic darkroom at home we pass moments of as thrilling interest as any in the field when the image begins to appear on the plate.”11

  The experience of flying trumped the science of flying because one could not learn to tame the air if one did not attempt to fly. The high point of the speech came quickly. Wilbur held up a blank piece of paper in front of the crowd. “If I take this piece of paper, and after placing it parallel with the ground, quickly let it fall,” Wilbur dramatically dropped the paper from his hand and pointed out the way it twisted and turned and flipped over. “It would not settle down as a staid sensible piece of paper ought to do, but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse. Yet this is the style of steed that men must learn to manage before flying can become an everyday sport.”12

  This was central to his view of flight. Flying was inherently unstable, and therefore control was everything. It was not like a train that would continue down the track, but more like a ship in a stormy sea. Wilbur took the horse analogy further and pointed out that there were two ways to train a horse:

  One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may best be met, the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds, but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.13

  There it was. The dividing line between he and his brother was there for all to see at that moment. It was Wilbur Wright's credo. The difference was the man who actually dared to fly. This left his brother and Octave Chanute behind, since neither man had ever ascended in a glider. Wilbur then praised Lilienthal and Chanute but pointed out that for all his gliding, Lilienthal had spent only five hours total in the air, and that was not enough. But he had flown, and that was the only way to tame the air. Chanute had made great advances with his biplane, and Wilbur told the audience their own glider at Kitty Hawk was based on advances pioneered by Chanute, a declaration that would later come to haunt him. What he didn't tell the audience was that he and Chanute had carried on a lively correspondence over the past year during which he worked out the science and theory of flying. He didn't tell them that over the next three months he would write to Chanute once a week, with many letters running nine pages.

  Simply put, Wilbur Wright held a seminar, and he explained to the audience that flying was one thing but control was everything. “As long ago as 1893 a machine weighing 8000 lbs demonstrated its power both to lift itself from the ground and to maintain a speed of from thirty to forty miles an hour; but it came to grief in an accidental free flight, owing to the inability of the operators to balance and steer it properly.”14 He was referring to Sir Hiram Maxim's flying machine that was wrecked in 1894. It was a shot across the bow to Langley, who was proceeding on the same assumption that power equaled flight.

  Wilbur aimed to control the air; he aimed to make a plane do what he wanted and take out the guesswork and the deadly experimentation that had killed Lilienthal. But first he doffed his hat to the German pioneer, saying he was on the right path: “Herr Otto Lilienthal seems to have been the first man who really comprehended that balancing was the first instead of the last of the great problems in connection with human flight. He began where others left off…he demonstrated the feasibility of actual practice in the air without which success is impossible. Herr Lilienthal was followed by Mr. Pilcher, a young English engineer and by Mr. Chanute, a distinguished member of the society I now address.”15

  Wilbur didn't tell the audience that he had come to suspect that Lilienthal's and Chanute's data was horribly flawed regarding lift, and that when he returned to Dayton he would have
to establish a new baseline. He then dated his own interest in flight to Lilienthal's death in 1896: “The brief notice of his death which appeared in the telegraphic news at that time aroused a passive interest which had existed from my childhood and led me to take down from the shelves of our home library a book on Animal Mechanism.”16 The interesting part of this admission is there is no mention of his brother's interest. He then teased the audience with a general description of his wing-warping system. “Our system of twisting the surface to regulate the lateral balance was tried and found to be much more effective than shifting the operator's body.”17 The whole concept of remote control or a plane with actual controls to regulate flight was novel to the audience.

  He then debunked Langley's theory of a powerful motor being the essence of getting a plane to fly: “Some years ago, Prof. Langley called attention to the great economy of thrust which might be obtained by using very high speeds and from this many were led to suppose that high speed was essential to success in a motor drive machine.”18 Wilbur's thesis followed, taking on the secretary of the Smithsonian, who was in the process of spending fifty thousand dollars of government money on an experimental plane. “However, there is another way of flying which requires no artificial motor and many workers believe that success will first come by this road.”19

  He was talking about gliding. He was saying that power had nothing to do with flying and if flight was understood, a man could fly with only the wind. There it is. Everyone who had tried to fly had been on the wrong track. Lilienthal, Chanute, Langley—none of them had tackled the science of controlled flight or had cracked the code that allowed birds to rise effortlessly. No one understood the science of flight, yet. But Wilbur had one on all the aeronauts of his time: he knew the assumptions were wrong. He knew what he didn't know. He didn't know what would work in terms of flying, but he knew what wouldn't work. In this he had an advantage over others who assumed the known data on flying was correct.

  Wilbur then described the experiments at Kitty Hawk, complete with pictures of himself flying. The audience was astounded to see the man in front of them also on the screen in an airplane soaring through the air. Wilbur wound up the lecture by defining the central Rubik's Cube of flight that had yet to be cracked: “They [birds] spread their wings to the wind, and sail by the hour, with no perceptible exertion beyond that required to balance and steer themselves. What sustains them is not known, though it is certain that it is a rising current of air. But whether it be a rising current or something else, it is as well able to support a flying machine as a bird, if man once learns the art of utilizing it.”20

  The art of utilizing it. Wilbur knew that rethinking the science of aeronautics was required to discover the secret that allows birds to stay in the air, but there is an art to flying as well. There is something beyond human comprehension that must be considered, and it is this blending of art and science that will produce the plane that can fly in a sustained manner and be controlled. Wilbur knew that if the correct design could be discovered, a machine could ride the wind indefinitely. It was a vision beyond his contemporaries’ at that time.

  The people who watched Wilbur Wright that night in Chicago did not listen to a lecture by the Wright brothers; they listened to a lecture by a lone inventor named Wilbur Wright. The men and women of the Western Society of Engineers left filled with wonder. They did not talk about the Wright brothers. When they wrote about that night or thought about it or explained it to others, they talked about Wilbur Wright. He had gone down to Kitty Hawk and flown gliders. He was going to take the next step after Lilienthal and Chanute. He was the man who had dropped a piece of paper and explained that the capriciousness of air currents was his enemy and that he intended to tame them. They did not speak of his brother Orville Wright. Octave Chanute knew who was really going to get a heavier-than-air machine to fly under its own power. It was not Orville Wright. The majority of people who attended Wilbur Wright's speech that night in Chicago in 1901 didn't even know Wilbur had a brother.

  After every speech there comes a relief. It is the giving away of information and then the satisfaction that comes from an audience that is held in rapt attention. Surely Wilbur, making his way back toward Union Station, saw himself as the man who would solve flight. It was there in the hall as a testament to how far he had come. It was his vision. It was his quest. And, riding back to the east, he must have been excited. He was at the jumping-off point and was ready to leave Octave Chanute and all known science behind. He had confirmed to himself that the known science of aeronautics was all wrong.

  The artist must destroy what comes before to produce the new art. The engineer who solves what has not been solved must go in a radical direction. The genius cannot look aslant but must look forward and see nothing but the trail that must be blazed. The train clacked along toward the east, carrying the young man who now knew his charge. He would simply have to rewrite aeronautical science by starting over with the wings. Control the wings, and you control the sky. Like many pioneers, he realized that if he was going to solve the problem, he would have to do it entirely his way and ignore the work of others. Wilbur went home to find a new way to fly.

  The chief engineer of the United States Navy, Rear Admiral George Melville, did not believe flight was possible. He had looked around and assessed the various efforts and saw no clear path. In 1902, he wrote an article for the North American Review, stating, “A calm survey of certain natural phenomenon leads the engineer to pronounce all confident prophecies for future success as wholly unwarranted, if not absurd. Where, even to this hour, are we to look for the germ of the successful flying machine? Where is the preparation today?”1

  The rear admiral would have had his answer had he visited the room above the Wright Cycle Company in Dayton, Ohio. Up there, two men had built “a small scale wind tunnel—a wooden box 6 feet long and 16 inches square, with one end open and a fan mounted at the other end, and this powered, since the shop had no electricity, by an extremely noisy gasoline engine. The box stood about waist high.”2

  The problem was lift and the Smeaton coefficient, which was a number determined by the equation for lift. This equation and coefficient, which had been used by Lilienthal and others, were wrong. Wilbur had based his own calculations on Lilienthal's data. He first performed a simple test by mounting Lilienthal's wing on his bicycle and pedaling like mad. It was a crude wind test of the wing, with the power of his legs creating the wind on the bicycle. He wanted to see if the 5° angle with a Lilienthal-cambered airfoil would remain stationary. He was testing the curve of the wing or the amount of lift the wing created. Basically, if the wing moved the mounted bicycle rim on his front handlebars, then it would show that there was too much lift or too much drag. If it didn't move, then it was the correct design. As he expected, the rim moved. This movement showed that Lilienthal's basic computations were incorrect on lift and, more specifically, that the Smeaton coefficient was wrong.

  It was a mechanical age. Men worked out things with their hands, and mechanical problems were resolved in the physical space. The twenty-first century would be a digital age in which problems would be solved on computers. Wilbur sniffed a theoretical glitch in the mechanics of flying that was making his gliders, and all gliders, act like bucking broncos on which all the pilot could do was hang on and hope it didn't kill him.

  After speaking in Chicago, Wilbur went to the room above the bicycle shop with his brother Orville. He had not told the engineers in Chicago that all the data that flying was founded on was wrong. He had told them about his methodology for solving the problem of flight. But now he had to tackle the physics of flight. So, there was Wilbur in the cold scent of oil and metal and wood and gasoline. He would build a mechanical device to solve a theoretical problem that would solve a mechanical one. If he had had a computer, he surely would have used it but, since those would not come into existence for many decades, essentially, he would have to build his own computer to simulate wind conditions for a f
ixed wing.

  The wooden box with a fan mounted on the open end and powered by a loud engine was crude technology trying to solve very sophisticated problems, but it was all they had. The wind tunnel stood on four legs, and Wilbur began testing, using hacksaw blades cut up in various shapes to simulate the curvature of wings. He was trying to build a better mousetrap or a better wing, with Orville assisting. This went on for three months, with Wilbur shipping all the data to Chanute, who was amazed with the results. “You are evidently better equipped to test the endless variety of curved surfaces than anybody has ever been,” Chanute replied.3

  Even though Orville helped with the testing and construction, it was clearly Wilbur's wind tunnel and his computations:

  My brother Orville and I built a rectangle-shaped open-ended wind tunnel out of a wooden box…. Inside of it we placed an aerodynamic measuring device made from an old hacksaw blade and bicycle spoke wire. We directed the air current from an old fan in the back-shop room into the opening of the wooden box…. An old one-cylinder gasoline engine supplied the power to turn the fan. This was because there was no electricity in our shop. In fact, even the lights were gas lights. It took us about a month of experimenting with the wind tunnel we had built to learn how to use it effectively…. Occasionally I had to yell at my brother to keep him from moving even just a little in the room because it would disturb the air flow and destroy the accuracy of the test.4

  Then the Wrights went after Langley. In a moment that presaged the future, they re-created a sharp-edged wing that was preferred by the secretary of the Smithsonian. They went over his data tables in Experiments in Aerodynamics and found the data flawed; in some cases, the data was grossly wrong. Lilienthal's data was much more accurate. Langley and Lilienthal had differed on many points. As the editor of The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Marvin McFarland, explained, “Lilienthal believed and had demonstrated experimentally that curved surfaces possessed considerable advantages over flat planes. Langley, while admitting that curved surfaces offered slight theoretical advantages, maintained that in practice, they were more apparent than real.”5