The twisted shaft would have to be repaired, and the other shaft reinforced. Charlie Taylor, who was back in Dayton, had to do the repairs, so Spratt left with the shafts to go with Captain Jesse Ward of the Life-Saving station, who was leaving that afternoon for Manteo. The day after Spratt departed, Octave Chanute arrived. It was a miserable, cold, wet day, and the hung carpets did little to improve the heating situation in the new hangar. The wind was so uneven that they couldn't even show Chanute the progress they had made with the 1902 glider.
There was nothing to do but huddle around the stove. “Storm all day with rain. We hardly got out of the building at all, but spent our time in conversation with Mr. Chanute, who told us of some of the plans he hoped to carry out this year,” Orville wrote Katherine.14 Chanute showed the brothers photos of Langley's first crashed plane. Wilbur stared at the plane in the Potomac as a sad testament to the years that Langley had spent trying to get to that moment. Chanute had passed through Washington on his way and snapped the photos prior to his arrival at Kitty Hawk. Chanute then told them he was looking to buy a plane built by engineer and inventor Clement Ader in France. The steam-powered plane looked like a bat and did not look like a machine that could leave the earth.
Octave Chanute wanted Wilbur and Orville to repair and fly Ader's plane. The machine was from 1890 and posed a serious risk for anyone who chose to fly it. Chanute, like many men when confronted with real genius, did not recognize how far Wilbur had come. He had been corresponding with Wilbur for three years, and long ago the pupil had surpassed the teacher, but Chanute had recently given a talk at the Aero Club de France, where he referred to the Wrights as his “devoted collaborators.” The impression he left with people was that the Wrights were completing “his” work.
Now he wanted them to repair and fly an old plane, completely not understanding how close Wilbur was to heavier-than-air flight powered by an engine. Wilbur would later fume to his sister, “He thinks we could do it! He doesn't seem to think our machines are so much superior as the manner in which we handle them. We are of the reverse opinion.”15
Chanute would never be able to get his hands on the plane he talked about, since it was given to a Paris museum and heralded as the first machine to ever fly until official test results proved it wasn't. Still, this little incident shows the blind spot that would fester between Wilbur and Octave Chanute and would later lead to a split between the two men. For now, all they could do was wait for the repaired propeller shafts to arrive from Dayton.
Octave Chanute left several days later, glad to get to some place where he didn't have to wear five blankets and keep a fire burning to stay warm. He would not see the first twelve seconds of manned flight. The fact that Chanute left showed his assumption that Wilbur was not close to solving the problem of manned flight. Had he really thought Wilbur Wright might fly, he would have never left Kill Devil Hills. The truth was that Chanute still viewed Wilbur Wright as his protégé, not the man who would crack manned flight.
Besides, visitors slowed down progress. It was good that Chanute left, because now Wilbur could turn to the final preparations for the first attempt at powered flight. They didn't even know if their launching system would work at this point. “Mr. Chanute left with Mr. Dough of the Kill Devil Station in the sailboat for Manteo at eight o'clock,” Orville recorded in his diary.16
On our return to camp we began work in planning down the starting track. A breeze of ten meters soon sprang up from the North. We decided to test our method of starting from the track with the old machine, so we took two rails to Big Hill. Five starts out of six were successful…. The flights, however, were very irregular and made in some danger. Probably as a result of the fire we keep in the building, the cloth and trussing seemed very loose allowing the surfaces to swing considerably in twisting the wings…. After four or five flights we took the machine back to camp. Spent most of the afternoon chopping wood and reading.17
So now the launching system of two rails with bicycle hubs for wheels had proved reliable. They only needed the propeller shaft to launch their plane. Skim ice had already appeared in puddles around the cabin, and water in their basin had frozen overnight. It was November in North Carolina, and the weather was only getting worse. It was November, and time was running out.
Spratt had decided not to return after handing off the damaged shafts in Norfolk to be sent on to Charlie Taylor. Snow began to fall on Kill Devil Hills, and the temperature dropped even further. Now the water in their basins froze every night. It snowed again before Thanksgiving Day. The temperature dropped to below 20°, and the wind howled and pressed through the boards of their shed. The smoke poured from the stovepipe in the corner of the frame structure. Soot literally dropped off the rafters.
“We are now alone again, the first time for about a month,” Orville wrote Katherine.18 “The past week and half has just been a loaf, since we have nothing to do on the machine until the shafts come. The weather has been fairly cold at times but with a half cord of wood on hand we have not suffered any.”19 They hung the machine from the rafters to see if it could support the weight of a man. They made last-minute adjustments and checked the controls, but there wasn't anything to do until the shafts arrived. Some days it was just too cold to do anything. “We found it very cold trying to work, so soon gave it up. Spent time in fixing up about the beds so as to keep them warm…. About midnight wind shift to the north bringing a rain which continued throughout the morning…. On arising found ponds around camp frozen.”20
On November 23, Orville wrote to Charlie Taylor that the new, heavier propeller shafts arrived: “After a loaf of 15 days we are down to work again. The shafts arrived day before yesterday noon.”21 If someone looked across the dunes of this blustery gray day on November 27, they would have seen two forlorn gray buildings against a great plain of sand, with smoke wisping out of the corner of the smaller one. They would not know that inside were two men trying to determine when would be the best day for them to be the first humans to undertake controlled powered flight.
The Wrights had done everything they could think of while waiting for the propeller shafts. They had put together the launching track and fit the 1902 glider onto it and tested the running and speed of the bicycle hubs. They had conducted thrust tests on the propellers using fifty-pound buckets of sand and grocer scales. They tested the flyer's hip cradle and put on extra padding. They would have done more gliding with the old glider, but the weather was not cooperating and the carbide stove had dried out the satin canvas, so it was no longer safe. They ran the motor the day before Thanksgiving and did another load test with the plane suspended and 440 pounds on the wings. She was ready.
So, it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when they rolled the Flyer out of the shed and looked up at the sky. It began to rain. They took a quick picture, then rolled the plane back in to wait for the weather again. They passed time by making a crude flight-data recorder. On Saturday they started the motor again, with the flight data recorder attached, and immediately they saw that something was wrong with the propeller. “We spent morning in testing speed of engine,” Orville wrote in his diary. “After six or seven runs from two to three minutes, we discovered something wrong, which turned out to be a cracked propeller shaft. Went to Kill Devil Station and made arrangements for going to Manteo Monday Morning.”22
One of the shafts had cracked, and there was no choice but for Orville to go back to Dayton and get it replaced as fast as possible. They decided to go with solid shafts of high-grade steel. “One of the shafts twisted off in the middle and Orville has gone home to make new ones, leaving me to keep house alone,”23 Wilbur wrote George Spratt on December 2. Orville had left for the Kill Devil Life-Saving station and departed on November 30. The man who had begun the quest to fly was now alone with his plane in the middle of nowhere.
Wilbur chopped wood to pass the time. He practiced German. “I am sorry to find you back at your old habit of introspection, leading to a fit of the
blues. Quit it! It does no good,” he had written to Spratt.24 This went all the way back to a time when he, too, had gone down into the dark place. Now he was alone with nothing to do but wait. One wonders if he was telling Spratt or himself to not be introspective. He also recognized that this was their “Langley moment.”25 He didn't know Langley had tried again and failed. But their plane would not go into the Potomac; worse, it might never leave the sandy loam of Kill Devil Hills. There would be no newspapers deriding his effort; there would simply be the indifference of silence.
Spratt suggested in a letter that he might go work for the Smithsonian, to which Wilbur replied, “I doubt whether your friendship with us would be a recommendation in the eyes of the Secretary…. The fact you are acquainted with some of our ideas need not stand in the way so far as I can see, for it is now too late for Langley to begin over again.”26 It is interesting to note that even in this early stage Wilbur recognized that Langley might well take their ideas but that he had had his shot and was essentially done with aviation. Wilbur knew that a man has only one big chance to test his theories, and if he failed mightily, as Langley did, then it might be over for him as well. They were at a similar juncture where failure would mean basic assumptions had proven false.
Orville did a quick turnaround and was back on the train headed toward Kitty Hawk with the propeller shafts. He had picked up an old newspaper and read of Professor Langley's second and final attempt to fly. The plane had plunged into the Potomac, but the newspaper did not say if it had been recovered. It went on to say that the total spent on Langley's aerodrome was $50,000.27 Orville marveled at the sum and, while he was on the train, totaled up every single dollar they had spent on their flyers, including transportation. It was less than a thousand dollars; such was the difference between private enterprise and government effort.
Langley had spent $50,000 more on human flight and an incalculable amount in human capital. He would die a fallen man two years later. The playing field had been cleared for the man waiting patiently for his brother back at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. There would be no reporters, no champagne, no cigars, no government officials, just a few men and a boy, and a camera.
On December 14, they signaled the life-saving crews. John T. Daniels, Robert Westcott, Thomas Beacham, W. S. Dough, and “Uncle Benny” O'Neal helped to get the 750-pound glider to the launching site. They used the launching track to move the glider, laying track in front and then picking it up from the rear and putting it back in front again. The bicycle hubs on the bottom of the Flyer had ball bearings that allowed it to roll along like a train from the future.
They reached the Big Hill and laid the track out, then Wilbur started the motor. He warmed it up and then walked over and faced his brother. The wind made their eyes water, burned their cheeks, and numbed their fingers. The ocean moved in the distance. The Flyer rocked in the wind. They said a quick prayer, then Wilbur fished a coin out of his pocket.28
The destiny of humankind taking flight was now up in the air with a piece of copper revolving in a 25 mph ocean wind. Orville watched the flipping copper disc.
The coin landed back on Wilbur's palm. He moved his hand.
It was a moment in time. He won the toss.
Wilbur lay down on the Flyer with the engine running and the propellers blasting sand behind him. The plane was vibrating horribly and straining against the rope that was keeping it from taking to the sky. The men from the Life-Saving station had to push the Flyer back to release the pressure. The thrust of the propellers was not allowing the Flyer to take off. They had brought the Flyer to the Big Hill by laying track the whole way and finally, Wilbur was facing down the track that ran down the Big Hill. They would use the assistance of gravity to launch their plane.
Orville held the right side of the wing tip. When the rope released, the Flyer took off down the hill. Wilbur stared straight into the wind that made his eyes tear and bit his cheeks with cold. He was a human cannonball at the long end of a motor churning the wind furiously with two giant wooden propellers. The Flyer was moving agonizingly slowly, and it seemed to have no lift; the biggest sensation Wilbur felt was the vibration of the engine in his belly. The end of the track was approaching. If he did not lift off, the plane would auger into the sand. At the end of the track, Wilbur pulled hard on the elevator; the plane lifted, and he felt the free motion of being above the earth. Then the sand rushed up to meet him as the plane nosed down and landed in the sand after flying a hundred feet. Wilbur forgot to shut off the motor, and the plane pivoted around in the sand and splintered a strut, a brace, and a spar. Wilbur had flown all of 3.5 seconds and had gone fifteen feet up into the air. The silence was deafening when the motor ceased.
Orville would later write to his sister that he barely had time to grab hold of the plane. He described the first test to her: “We tossed up a coin and to make the first trial, and Will won after getting adjustments of the engine ready I took the right end of machine. Will got on. When all was ready, Will attempted to release fastening to rail, but the pressure due to weight of the machine and the thrust of screws was so great he could not get it loose. We had to get a couple of men to help push back the machine until the rope was loose.”29
The plane then started down the track. “While I was signaling the man at the other end to leave go but before myself was ready, Will started machine. I grabbed the upright the best I could and off we went. By the time we had reached the last quarter of the third rail the speed was so great I could stay with it no longer. I snapped watch and the machine passed the end of the track…. The machine turned up in front and rose to a height about 15 feet from the ground at a point about 60 feet from the track.”30
For Wilbur, though the flight was short, it was all he needed. He wrote to his father that night:
We gave the machine first trial today with only partial success…. The real trouble was an error in judgement in turning up suddenly after leaving the track, and as the machine had barely enough speed for support already.”31
In other words, pilot error.
It was a nice landing for the operator. The machinery all worked in entirely satisfactory manner and seems reliable. The power is ample but for a trifling error due to lack of experience with this machine and this starting the machine would undoubtedly have flown beautifully. There is now no question of final success.32
Wilbur had flown first, but two things happened. One, the flight was very short, lasting only 3.5 seconds in duration and traveling a distance of only 105 feet. The second and biggest reason this flight was not regarded as the first moment of powered flight is that there was no photographic record. This, going all the way back to Lilienthal, was crucial for proving to the world that flight had occurred. Even with the photographic record, the world was skeptical, but without it there was literally no proof.
The plane had been damaged, but not severely, from Wilbur forgetting to shut down the engine: “The machine swung around and scarped the front skids so deep in sand that one was broken and twisted around until the main strut and brace were also broken, besides the rear spar to lower surface of front rudder.”33
It would take a couple of days for repairs, and then it was Orville's turn. It was eleven days before Christmas, and the weather had turned very cold, with a strong 30 mph wind off the ocean. The winter weather was quickly moving in, and if the Flyer was not put into the air soon, then it would have to wait until spring or summer.
The repairs took two days. They laid the track just outside the two buildings this time so that they didn't have to take the Flyer so far. Taking off from a flat plain would also prove that the plane took off under its own power, with no help from an incline. On December 16, they were ready to try again. “Wind of 6 to 7 meters blowing from west and northwest in morning,” Orville wrote in his diary.1 “We completed repairs by noon and got the machine out on the tracks in front of the building ready for a trial from the level. The wind was gradually dying and by the time we were ready was blowi
ng only about 4 to 5 meters per sec. After waiting several hours to see whether it would breeze up again we took the machine in.”
On December 17, the wind was blowing at 20 miles per hour, and they hung a white sheet on the side of the shed as a signal for the men at the Life-Saving station. They waited for the men to arrive so they could transport the Flyer. They were two men and a flying machine next to two sheds in the middle of nowhere. Wilbur saw a man crossing the sand toward them. The stranger crossed the sands along the desolate coast of Kitty Hawk. He had seen a contraption in the distance and wondered what it was. He approached the two men who were dressed in ties, high collars, and dark suits. What is it, he wanted to know. It is a flying machine, they answered. Did they intend to fly it? he persisted. Yes, as soon as they have a suitable wind, Wilbur answered. The stranger stared at the contraption with the track laid out in the sand. “Well it might fly,” he conceded, “if it had a suitable wind.”2 He then continued across the sand and disappeared. No one in history would ever identify the man.
John T. Daniels, Will Dough, and Adam Ethridge came from the Life-Saving station, along with a dairy farmer named W. C. Brinkley and an eighteen-year-old boy named Johnny Moore, who had heard about the flying machine, and Bob Westcott watched from the station with a spyglass. He wanted to be sure he did not miss the flight if the brothers succeeded. The men laid the track down 100 feet west of the camp and faced the freezing wind. They positioned the Flyer on the track as Orville and Wilbur huddled together, brim to brim, their suit coats too thin for the 30° wind.
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