If Langley had been listening or reading Wilbur's speech in Chicago, he would have realized that Wilbur had given him some valuable advice on powered planes: “A flying machine that would fly at a speed of 50 miles an hour with engines of 1000 horsepower would not be upheld at all at a speed of less than 25 miles an hour.”6 Wilbur was pointing this out because the lift calculations were all wrong; therefore, brute power would only work in limited situations. He then said to the world that the science of flight was the problem, not the mechanics. “The flying problem was left over to the 20th century because in this case the art must be highly developed before any flight of any considerable duration at all can be obtained.”7
In other words, the numbers must be right.
Wilbur worked many nights past midnight, with the gasoline engine clattering away. The work being done above the bicycle shop would set the bar for all aviators to follow. The tests illustrated that the cause of the poor lift of the 1900 and 1901 gliders was due to an incorrect Smeaton value. Wilbur continued to write to Chanute and forward his data. During that autumn, Chanute went from mentor to pupil. His pupil had eclipsed him by so much that Chanute had a tough time grasping the new data: “If your method and machine are reliable you have done a great work and have advanced knowledge greatly. Your charts carry conviction to my mind and your descriptions and comments are very clear. I must commend the system by which you went about to ascertain the best form of surface, instead of trying haphazard experiments.”8
Then Wilbur took a strange detour. The bishop had ended up in a tussle with his church over the admittance of Masons. The liberals in the church wanted to admit the Masons, and Milton led the radicals against it. The liberals won, and the bishop's role in the church was greatly reduced. He was incensed, but he went back on the road, plotting his revenge. He saw an opportunity when he suspected Reverend Millard Keiter of embezzling $7,000. He asked Wilbur to examine the church books and find out what Keiter did with the money. Wilbur swung into action and quickly deduced that the books were a sham and that Keiter had used funds for his home, clothing, and insurance. Milton brought this evidence to the board of trustees, but they declined to prosecute, citing mismanagement over fraud. Wilbur kept going over the books and found even more fraud. Bishop Wright had Wilbur write it all up, and he launched his attack against Keiter, going public and accusing the reverend of criminal conduct.
The church turned against Reverend Wright, and Keiter sued him for libel. Wilbur stayed on it and issued a tract in defense of his father. Eventually, Milton would be exonerated from the libel charge and Keiter would leave the church. Here is the takeaway: Milton had turned to the son he thought most capable of handling a dangerous situation. His very livelihood and reputation were on the line. Orville was much more the man of business than Wilbur, but Milton instinctively had Wilbur, with his laser focus, dissect the church books and then mount his defense. In his father's eyes, Wilbur had the ability to do anything, while Orville was but a shadow beside a very brightly burning light.
When Wilbur stopped the experiments to handle his father's fight with the church and return to the business of manufacturing and selling bicycles, Chanute suggested he take some investor money from Andrew Carnegie: “I very much regret in the interest of science that you have reached a stopping point…. If however, some rich man should give you $10,000 a year to [words missing here] on, to connect his name with progress, would you do so? I happen to know Carnegie.”9
Chanute wanted Wilbur to keep working on his aeronautical experiments, but the lone inventor was not ready to take on an investor, surely sniffing the tethers that would come with it: “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to devote my entire time to scientific investigations and a salary of ten or twenty thousand a year would be of no insuperable objection, but I think it possible that Andrew too hardheaded a Scotchman to become interested in such a visionary pursuit as flying.”10
Chanute offered his help then as a mathematician: “You will need to publish a table for each form of surface and aspect. I shall be quite at your service.”11 Chanute worked on the computations for the next six months and wanted to get them published. The new data went into the new glider that would be constructed after the bicycle season ended, but none of Chanute's hard work on tables ever saw publication. The world would have to wait until the summer of 1902 and the return to Kitty Hawk to see what Wilbur's wind tunnel had wrought.
Chanute waited outside the large office. The august building smelled of old wood and the dust of time. Here men of science had plied their craft and set their names down in the annals of history. Octave tapped his foot and felt some grit down in his socks. The sand of Kitty Hawk was everywhere. It was in his luggage, in his glass case, on his papers, in his hair, in his shoes, on his toothbrush, in his razor, and even in his teeth. The food the Wright brothers had provided him at Kill Devil Hills was very good fare for being in a shed in the middle of nowhere, but the sand crept into the biscuits, the water, the bacon, and the eggs. That grit crushed between his teeth, and at night he felt like he was grinding his teeth.
Now his skin was dried out, windburned, and sunburned. His beard also had sand in it, and his eyes watered incessantly. He arthritis had kicked up from sleeping on the stiff cots, and now he had a cough. But it was an amazing time. He had seen the Wright brothers glide like no men before. Wilbur did most of the glides, but then Orville had done some, too, though Octave had only seen Wilbur. There had been an accident before he arrived: “My brother after too brief practice with the use of the front rudder,” Wilbur had written him before he arrived, “tried to add the use of the wing-twisting arrangement also, with the result that, while he was correcting a slight rise in one wing, he completely forgot to attend to the front rudder, and the machine reared up and rose some twenty five feet and sidled off and struck the ground.”1
Apparently, Orville was not hurt, but this set them back days. Octave's opinion of Orville Wright was of a man who did not talk much and seemed to wait to see what his brother thought. Why risk the machine with a man who was just learning to fly? Octave shifted in his chair. He looked at his pocket watch. Langley would make him wait, of course. Chanute had come from spending a week with four men in a large hangar, and he still felt the luxury of sitting in an upholstered chair.
Spratt had been there, and another Wright brother, Lorin; and, of course, Chanute had brought Augustus Herring with him to fly his own triplane. Chanute shivered at the Smithsonian. He still felt a chill, even though Wilbur had written him beforehand: “You should bring warm clothing and not less than the equivalent of two heavy double blankets for bedding, as we may have cool nights in October. We will arrange to have the necessities of life in the way of food but as our food was selected according to our tastes, it may be that it may lack what you prefer.”2
Chanute had brought more blankets, and the six men had slept in the loft like sardines packed tightly together with their cots touching. The wind had shaken the hangar and came through the cracks in the wood. The ocean's roar seemed to be in that wind at times, and the cold scent of dead fish crept into the damp building. Chanute had awoken in the night, hearing the men snoring, and had thought it was odd that something as monumental as attempting to fly like the gods would be brought about by men sleeping in a shed on the edge of a sand dune. It was a long way from the rarified air of the Smithsonian, where he now sat, waiting for Langley. The early, bracing cold of September and then October had let Chanute know they were playing with Mother Nature, with northeasters and hurricanes possible any moment. Wilbur and Orville had taken in stride the wind that shook the shed to its foundations. That these men had spent time in a tent two years before seemed incredible to Chanute.
Chanute moved his legs and felt the pain in his hips. He would give anything to sink into a hot bath, but he wanted to see Langley first. He wanted to see him while the inspiration was still hot on him. In his mind, Wilbur Wright had solved the problem of flight. A breakthrough—the addit
ion of a hinged rudder—had apparently occurred before Chanute had arrived. It was the problem of well digging, as the brothers called it.3 It was the tendency of the plane in a turn to descend with the leading wing pointing down. Wilbur had then connected the hinged rudder to the cradle controlling the wing warping. There were now the three axes of control between the elevator or pitch for going up or down, the wing warping or roll for banking, and the rudder controlling yaw for turning. Chanute didn't know it, but this basic mechanical setup of control would set the bar for modern aviation for the next hundred years.
Chanute's own triplane had been a total disaster, and Herring had been rather unpleasant and jealous of the tremendous glides the Wright plane was making. Many of the glides were not over 200 hundred feet long, but the plane was making perfectly executed turns. Control of the air had been wrestled from the heavens, and Wilbur's glides resembled the soaring buzzards Chanute had observed over their camp. He had only been there for a week, but it was enough time for him to understand that Wilbur Wright was close to solving the problem of manned flight in a heavier-than-air machine. You could not watch that large glider cutting the sky, with Wilbur in full control, and not think that they were peering into a new age, a new world.
The door opened. “Mr. Langley will see you now.”
Chanute popped up from his chair and walked across the marble floor. He couldn't help but feel that he was trailing sand behind him. Langley's office was so large that the Wright flyer might have fit inside it. Standing up behind the desk was Samuel Langley, a bearded sixty-eight to Chanute's seventy-two. He knew Langley was well funded and the Smithsonian was ramping up to produce the first airplane. Ever since the success of Langley's model aerodrome, he had been the undisputed leader as the man with the best chance to fly a plane under its own power.
The men shook hands, and then Chanute told him plainly what he had seen in Kitty Hawk. Langley kept his hands together under his chin and listened attentively. He gave Chanute no sign of his own progress, but that didn't surprise Octave. He was used to the paranoid secrecy of Secretary Langley and the Smithsonian. Langley listened with little visible reaction as Chanute finished.
He thanked Chanute for his time and saw him to the door. When he turned around, Langley felt a strange panic. It was like looking over your shoulder and seeing someone behind you who had seemingly come from nowhere. If what Chanute had said was true, then there was no time to lose. He would tell Manley, who was overseeing construction of Langley's own flyer, to continue with all deliberate speed. They must not be eclipsed by some bicycle mechanic. Secretary Langley sat back down behind his desk, pulled out some stationery, and picked up his pen. He immediately began writing a letter to Wilbur Wright, care of Kitty Hawk Post Office, Mr. William Tate.4
Orville was staring up from his cot. Around him the men were snoring and the wind banged against the walls of the hangar. Below the loft where they were sleeping was the glider, freshly rebuilt after his accident. He had flown. He had flown on a tether and then he had flown in free flight. That was the disaster. Thirty feet up and the plane headed for the ground when he used the wing warping. He would later write, “I thought I must have worked the twisting apparatus the wrong way…the result was a heap of flying machine, cloth, and sticks in a heap, with me in the center.”1 Death. Yes, he saw it with the plane rushing for the ground, and then he was buried in canvas and wires and sand. Wilbur told him he forgot to use the elevator when he turned and the plane had slid down to the earth sideways. Three days of repairs.
And this was the improved plane. When Wilbur flew it, the plane was amazing. He flew off like a bird and seemed to control the sky. It was bigger, with a wing surface of 32 by 5 feet, and two tail fins or rudders. Everything was built according to the data tables from the wind tunnel. The camber, or the curve of the wing, was all vastly different. It was a new plane, but there was still the problem of well digging. When the plane turned, it pivoted on the wing and dug a hole in the ground. Orville looked at Spratt and his brother. They were peacefully sleeping, but he had drunk too much coffee; he just couldn't understand the tendency of the plane to head down and slip sideways when they turned. It was vexing. The rudders should have taken care of that, but there was something they were missing. Orville tossed and turned.
Here a legend was born. The Kelly biography paints the picture this way: “Then one night Orville drank more than his customary amount of coffee. Instead of going to sleep as usual the moment he got into bed, he lay awake for several hours. Those extra cups of coffee may have been important for the future of practical flight for, as he tossed about, he figured out the explanation of the phenomenon caused by the tail.”2
The story goes that Orville awoke to an epiphanic moment. The rudder should be hinged. The story continues that his brother Lorin had come down to visit, and, while they were sitting around breakfast, Orville brought it up to Wilbur, expecting a fight: “Orville fully expected his suggestion to be brushed aside with an ‘oh yes, I was already considering that.’…Instead Wilbur listened attentively and remained silent for a moment or two.”3 Then, without hesitation, he not only accepted the change but startled Orville by proposing that they connect it to the wing warping as well. So now when the pilot shifted his hips to turn the plane, the rudders moved in tandem. The three axes of control had just been achieved, and this would be the plane handed down to history.
In this story, Orville comes to the forefront as the man who made the breakthrough while Wilbur agreed and connected it to the other controls. Lorin is there to hand the baton to Orville as well, and the story seems to be traced back to Lorin with Orville's surprise at Wilbur's acquiescence. The problem with this is that none of it seems to be true. The true sequence of events will be made clear in a patent speech Wilbur will soon make. But what is true now is that they had arrived at Kitty Hawk on August 28 and made improvements to the shed while getting the new glider ready. They slept in beds up in the rafters now, and the kitchen had been well stocked and improved. They sunk a deeper well, filled in the cracks of the building, and built a bicycle that could run over sand and enabled them to go to Kitty Hawk to get supplies. So now it took them only one hour to get there and back, instead of three. The locals had accepted the brothers, and Kitty Hawker John T. Daniels summed up the locals’ observation of their inventiveness this way: “They built their own camp, they took an old carbide can and made a stove of it, they took a bicycle and geared the thing so it could ride on sand.”4
For the next week, they worked on the new glider, and on September 19 they flew it as a kite, then took it to Kill Devil Hills, where they flew fifty times in three days. Brother Lorin came to the camp. And they were expecting Chanute and Herring and Spratt. Here is where it would get interesting. For the first time, Orville began to glide. But there is some question as to how far he was gliding. In his diary, Orville said he made several short glides to learn the new method of working the front rudder. We know he did have a free glide that ended up in a crash. Was Wilbur yelling at him when he went down in a heap from thirty feet high? Did he let him fly again? The pictures of the 1902 glider flights are all of Wilbur, with only one of Orville. Would Wilbur have shut him down to keep him safe, and then covered it all with his father's admonishment that we are all one against the world?
Orville's account of the crash shows that he was in serious trouble:
I was sailing along smoothly without any trouble at all from the fore and aft control when I noticed that one wing was getting a little too high and that the machine was slowly sliding off in the opposite direction. I thought that by moving the end control mechanism an inch or so I would bring the wing back again to its proper position…By this time I found suddenly that I was making a descent backwards toward the low wing from a height of 25 or 30 feet…. The result was a heap of flying machine, cloth, and sticks in a heap, with me in the center without a bruise or scratch.5
This began three days of repairs, with Spratt and brother Lorin arriving in
camp, and this sets up the whole hinged-rudder scene, complete with a wink to brother Lorin before Orville launched into his polemic. But immediately there are contradictions to this, beginning with Wilbur and the source of Orville's recollection. As Fred Howard wrote in Wilbur and Orville: A Biography of the Wright Brothers, “Wilbur's version appears in the deposition he made in a patent suit in 1912 and attributes the discovery of the cause of the well digging phenomenon to both brothers. The solution is not arrived in a single sleepless night but in the course of several days, during which they experimented to make sure that the fixed vertical tail was the cause of the difficulty.”6
It gets even stickier when the source of Orville's story is none other than the authorized Kelly biography, which was written almost forty years on and which was heavily edited by Orville himself. The transcript of Wilbur's deposition then ends up in the Kelly biography as quoted by Orville. The patent deposition is all Wilbur, and he adopts the plural, spreading the credit to Orville as well. First Wilbur gives an explanation of well digging: “When the wings were warped to recover balance with the low wing having a greater angle of incidence than the upper wing, a still greater drag was produced upon the low wing with a result that its speed was further decreased…. These flights ended with a disaster to the machine in what is today called a tail spin.”7
Then he explains the solution:
Our first change in the machine…was to remove one of the vertical vanes in the rear of the machine…. We found that this only slightly mitigated the evil influence of vanes. After a good deal of thought the idea occurred to us that by making the vane in the rear adjustable, so that it could be turned so as to entirely relieve the pressure on that side toward the low side of the machine, and to create a pressure on the side toward the high wing equal to or greater than the differences in the high and low wings…While this change to make the vane adjustable was being made the idea came to us of connecting the wires which operated the rudder to the cables which operated the wing warping, so that when the wings were warped the rudder was simultaneously adjusted.8
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