Wright Brothers, Wrong Story
Page 19
A lie, but a self-serving one in the current circumstances. Secretary Langley would be very interested in anything Wilbur Wright had to say. In less than two months, he would launch his vaunted fifty-thousand-dollar aerodrome on the Potomac. He had already tried to go to the Wright camp at Kitty Hawk and had failed after Chanute alerted him to their progress. Essentially, Wilbur Wright had left out of his speech the latest advances he had made in building an airplane that would fly under its own power. He had done this because he knew he was very close to solving human flight and did not want to tip his hand. His hard-found secrets were his, and not for someone to take and beat him to the punch. As any good writer knows, what the author leaves out is just as important as what he puts in. Wilbur had told the audience just enough to whet their appetite for more. He was learning the fine art of public relations. He left Chicago as the man closest to finding the secrets to human flight. Wilbur Wright had just told the world of his progress, and the people in Chicago again would have been hard-pressed to even know the name of his brother Orville. Wilbur rode the train home to Ohio and had no idea that Samuel Pierpont Langley was about to launch his aerodrome and set off a forty-year feud.
Charles Manley smoked his cigarette nervously and looked at the assembled reporters, other scientists, assorted government officials, and family members who had come to see man fly. He stared at the giant aerodrome on top of the houseboat. The fog was light off the river, and he brushed the droplets from the wings. The wings flexed. This bothered him. He had built a 52-horsepower engine to power the aerodrome, and it was heavy. It was more powerful than any engine so far that had been mounted to an airplane.
The aerodrome, according to his boss—the secretary of the Smithsonian, Samuel Langley—should fly like a bird. The model aerodrome had flown very well, and this was just a large version of that model, with floats for landing on water and a small cockpit mounted under the plane. The thing that bothered Langley was the flimsiness of the craft and the position of the cockpit. Even if he could land the plane, he would be underwater. The thought was that he could just swim out, but the water looked damn cold for swimming. Manley finished his cigarette and looked at the men who were waiting for his signal. It was October 7, 1903.
Another man who felt nervous was Charles D. Walcott; he was then the chairman of the executive committee of the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics for the government, and he would eventually take over as secretary of the Smithsonian when Langley died. He had convinced the War Department to give Langley $50,000 to develop an airplane. The money was now gone, and five years had passed. He had been asked more than a few times where the airplane was. Secretary Langley had the dilettante's attitude. His model aerodrome had flown and, in his mind, this proved that man could fly in heavier-than-air ships. This would just put the seal on the bottle. It was the same design, only larger and with a very powerful engine. The aerodrome should lift very easily into the sky, fly in great circles, and then land. Walcott could then tell the War Department its money was well spent. Secretary Langley was so confident, he didn't bother coming out onto the deck of the houseboat to observe. He would be notified by telegraph of the success.
Manley stripped down to his flying suit, dashed his cigarette, and climbed into the cockpit through the guide wires. He started the engine and allowed it to heat up. The engine was so large that it vibrated through the plane and shook Manley's body. He waited. This was the Smithsonian's big moment. Secretary Langley would prove that cutting-edge aeronautics were in the possession of the august institution and would not be in the possession of cranks flying out of garages, in backyards, or across the sands of Kitty Hawk. Manley gave the signal, and the great catapult shot him down the guiding ramps of the houseboat. He felt himself pressed back against the rickety chair in the bottom of the aerodrome, with the engine roaring furiously. Manley reached the end of the catapult track and found himself staring straight down at the water. The aerodrome fell like a sack of cement. The motor screamed in his ears the whole way down. There was no lift at all, just a horrible plunge straight down. It was as if they had built a fifty-thousand-dollar brick.
Manley felt the freezing water like an electric shock. He was beneath the plane under the surface of the icy Potomac. He struggled to get free of the sinking plane and had a moment of panic when he couldn't get free of the cables from the wings. The motor was an anchor heading for the bottom of the river. Manley finally managed to get to the surface, spitting out river water, where he waved to the reporters, family members, witnesses, and government officials who were staring at him from above as if they had just seen a sea creature. Manley could not escape the feeling that they were staring at him as if he were at fault. The term pilot error had not been coined yet, but it was coming.
The man who stared at Manley the hardest was Walcott. This would not do. The War Department was furious. They had spent fifty thousand on a brick with wings. Secretary Langley immediately went into damage control and assured the press that it was a technical glitch with the launching mechanism. The catapult had failed, and that was why the plane took a header into the river. Manley was fished out, and then he smoked a cigarette. He was wrapped in a blanket and later interrogated by Langley. He agreed quickly. He had felt something at the end of the catapult, and that had tripped up the plane. He told Langley that if they would fix that, she would fly like a soaring eagle.
The New York Times ran a headline the next day: “FLYING MACHINE FIASCO Prof Langley's Airship Proves A Complete Failure.” The St. Louis Republic followed with, “FLYING MACHINE BUILT BY LANGLEY AN UTTER FAILURE.” The San Francisco Call wasn't much better: “LANGLEY'S FLYING MACHINE FAILS COMPLETELY.” An editorial in the New York Times went after Langley personally: “The ridiculous fiasco which attended the attempt at aerial navigation in the Langley flying machine was not unexpected, unless possibly by the distinguished Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution who devised it, and his assistants.”1
Brutal. It was all blamed on the launching catapult. Surely it was not the plane itself. On December 8, the aerodrome was ready again. The houseboat was put into anchor at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. The Potomac had ice on it, and a freezing wind punished the assembled reporters. The press had been alerted again, and the shores were lined with reporters, along with boats chartered by newspapers. Secretary Langley was there this time and had brought a party of friends and Smithsonian employees. People drank champagne and smoked cigars. It had the feeling of a holiday. Christmas was coming. Langley was confident. This time, he would show the world what science can do in the hands of a farsighted and competent man like himself. Walcott was not there but was waiting for news. The press has been brutal to him, too, so Walcott's reputation was on the line as well.
The weather was not cooperating. There was ice in the river, and the sky had darkened. Wind gusts kept moving the houseboat out of position. Manley went down to meet with Secretary Langley and others to make sure they would still launch. They had to. The money was gone. Patience was gone. Besides, it would be a brilliant success, and they all would have some brandy by the fire when it was over. And they sure didn't want to be eclipsed by the bicycle mechanics at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Manley stripped down again. This time, he wore a union suit, a cork-lined jacket, socks, and light shoes. He did not want to drown in the Potomac.
He once again climbed into the aerodrome and ran the engine up. He checked the controls and waited for the engine to warm. At 4: 45 p.m., he gave the signal, and once again he shot down the tracks of the catapult. Manley reached the edge, and this time the plane rose quickly, then turned on its back and headed straight down into the icy Potomac. Once again, the engine whined furiously until the great gulp when the plane flipped over, and then silence. Manley felt the freezing water like a thousand knives. His breath went out, his body feeling the shock like a bucket of ice water on a hot day. Manley began to struggle furiously to get free, but he was even farther under water this time.
He emerged again, this time screaming and swearing. The people on the ship once again stared at him as if he were some sort of beached whale that had washed up on the shore. Manley waved his arms, which felt like they were weighed down by lead, and shouted to get him the fuck out of the water. This was at a time when profanity was seen as very bad form. He didn't care. He was freezing while the people stared down.
Manley was fished out of the water again. He was so frozen that his clothes had to be cut off of him. Workers wrapped him in a blanket, and by the time he reached the houseboat, he had drunk some whiskey. When Secretary Langley came over to him, Manley began to curse and didn't stop. The old man Langley had nearly killed him. Manley was shivering uncontrollably and cussing in a way few had heard before. Listening to the blasphemies of his engineer, Samuel Langley knew that his quest for flight had ended, and the great embarrassment was at hand for himself and the Smithsonian.
Walcott got word that the War Department was done funding anything to do with flight, or the Smithsonian for that matter. Langley tried again to pass it off on the launching mechanism, but nobody was buying it. The verdict on Langley came from “army engineers who finally studied the design and realized that the aerodrome was fatally flawed, lacking both sufficient power and sufficient lift. Going from a model to a full-sized aircraft involved computing weight to thrust ratios that aerodynamicists had yet to formalize; with no background in mathematics and scant in engineering, Langley had ignored computations of scale and had never realized it requires eight times the lift to keep a craft double the weight in the air.”2
Secretary Langley pledged to fight on, but the money faucet was shut off. A congressman from Arkansas, Joseph Taylor Robinson, twisted the knife further: “The only thing Langley ever made fly was government money.”3 Fifty thousand dollars was out the window. Secretary Langley abandoned aviation and died three years later, a defeated man who had dragged the reputation of the Smithsonian down with his aerodrome. The aerodrome had been fished out and lashed to the boat like a harpooned whale and towed back to port. The Langley flyer's wings trailed in the water, and the propeller turned from the current. It was as if the flyer wanted to go again.
After Langley's death, when Charles Walcott became secretary of the Smithsonian, his goal quickly became to restore not only Langley's reputation but also the Smithsonian's, and—more importantly—his own. He had egg all over his bearded visage from Langley's folly. This would not do. Something had to be done. The damaged Langley aerodrome was crated and stored in a Smithsonian warehouse with other artifacts. The pilot Manley, of all people, knew Langley's plane was not airworthy, and, had someone told him that it would one day fly, he wouldn't have believed it. He knew a brick when he saw one, and that fifty-thousand-dollar brick had almost cost him his life. Charles Manley didn't understand that there were people who would do anything to turn a brick into a plane. He didn't even know Glenn Curtiss's name.
The year 1903 promised great things. Teddy Roosevelt was president and the swaggering cowboy set a new tempo for the country. The Chicago Tribune declared that times were better than ever and would improve more once “science and new methods and new educations have done their perfect work.”1 Music had found ragtime, and everyone was working. The country was on the verge of greatness and had undertaken the building of the Panama Canal. So, the Philadelphia Inquirer asked, “why so far after so much attention had been paid to aerial navigation, have there been so few results?”2
The man with the answer to that question was staring at the burned ruins of the freight depot at Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Orville and Wilbur stood in their high collars, dark suits, and shined shoes and stared from the station platform with the locomotive hissing steam behind them. This, then, could be the end of the dream of flight. In the charred ruins there might be hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work. Everything that came through the station and was headed for Kitty Hawk passed through the depot. To make matters worse, they thought they saw the carbide can they used for heating. They walked over with the sinking feeling of men descending to the bottom of a pool. The carbide can turned out to be a lard container. They spoke with a freight agent and found that their lumber and the crated goods had already passed through and were at Kitty Hawk. The Flyer was en route.
So, the great catastrophe had not happened. “We were glad to find, on reaching camp, that our groceries and tools had not burned in the depot fire at Elizabeth City,” Orville would later write his sister.3 It was September 23, 1903, and they caught the Ocracoke on a midnight journey to Roanoke Island, arriving at one in the morning on September 25. In Manteo, they hired a steamboat to take them the rest of the way to Kill Devil Hills. Their old hangar/cabin had been lifted from its foundation the previous winter by a 90 mph wind and was “several feet nearer the ocean than when we left last year, and about a foot lower in places.”4
The gale had hit in February, and it reminded the brothers that they were in hurricane season. There would be no early warning for them. No evacuation orders. They would simply have to ride out whatever Mother Nature threw at them. They immediately put the building back in shape and began work on a new building to house the new flyer. Then they took out the old glider and had what Wilbur called “the finest day we ever had in practice…. We made about 75 glides, nearly all of them about 20 seconds’ duration. The longest was 30 2/3 seconds which beats our former records,” he wrote Octave Chanute.5
Dan Tate joined them, and they erected a building of sixteen by forty-four feet for assembling and storing the new flyer. They were still working on the new building when a storm struck with 75 mph winds. Wilbur later wrote his sister Katherine, “The wind suddenly whirled around to the north and increased to something like 40 miles an hour and was accompanied by a regular cloudburst…. The second day opened with the gale still continuing…. The climax came about 4 o'clock when the wind reached 75 miles an hour. Suddenly a corner of our tar-paper roof gave way under the pressure and we saw that if the trouble were not stopped the whole roof would go.”6
Orville then ascended a ladder with hammer and nails and began making repairs in the storm. The storm blew his coat over his head. “As the hammer and nails were in his pocket and up over his head he was unable to get his hands on them or pull his coattails down,” Wilbur related later, “so he was compelled to descend again. The next time he put the nails in his mouth and took the hammer in his hand and I followed him up the ladder hanging on to his coattails.”7
The storm continued for four days, and on the morning of the third day “their doorstep was six inches under water and the water was sloshing against the undersides of the floorboards in their living room.”8 Then the Wrights went out and flew their glider. The wind had suddenly stopped, along with the rain. They were in the eye of the hurricane, but the brothers had no idea. Orville was gliding when a gust threw the plane to the ground, and the wing just missed Wilbur's head. Five ships were wrecked on the Outer Banks that day.
When the storm passed, the men from the Life-Saving station dropped by and were presented with framed pictures of themselves taken the year before. The brothers made many flights with the 1902 flyer on the Big Hill. On October 8, Captain Midgette's sailboat arrived with the crated 1903 Flyer. It was pulled on a sand road along Kitty Hawk Bay and delivered to their camp at Kill Devil Hills. They began work on construction of the plane. The fourth week in October, Wilbur received a clipping from their neighbor in Dayton, George Freight. “I see that Langley has had his fling and failed,” Wilbur wrote in a letter to Octave Chanute.9 “It seems to be our turn now and I
wonder what our luck will be. We will still hope to see you before we break camp.”
The work on the new flyer continued through October, with temperatures beginning to dip. On October 25, Wilbur wrote in his diary, “Rain and wind continued through entire night, forming ponds all about the camp. Temperature lower. Air so damp and cold that we made a stove out of a carbide can and built a small fire, avoiding smoke as much as possible by sitting on the floor. Enclosed small space with carpets to keep out wind.”10
George Spratt arrived and worked on the motor with Dan Tate on October 27. The motor weighed 152 pounds and generated 12 horsepower. The aluminum block was advanced for engine construction of the time while the fuel system was primitive at best: “A one-gallon fuel tank was to be suspended from the wing strut, and the gasoline fed by gravity down a tube to the engine…. There was no carburetor…. Fuel was fed into a shallow chamber in the manifold…. The engine was started by priming each cylinder with a few drops of gas.”11
The temperature continued to dip, and the three men froze in their bunk beds; they “passed a very miserable night on account of cold.”12 More carpets were hung for insulation, and a wood-burning stove was rigged up with one of the carbide cans. Then disaster struck, according to biographer Fred Howard:
By November 5th the machine was more or less in a finished state and Wilbur and Orville ran up the motor for the first time. Suddenly they were faced with a crisis…. The magneto did not produce a satisfactory spark at first and the propeller shafts vibrated ominously at every missed explosion…. All at once the motor racketed away, filling the shed with exhaust, it backfired. The cross arms that connected the propeller shafts to the airframe were jerked loose and one of the shafts were [sic] badly twisted.13