Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  Hard to know what was said. Wilbur was giving the instructions. It was his plane, and he was telling his brother to not pull up on the elevator too quickly, as he had done. He was telling him to be sure to keep the wings level and concentrate on keeping the plane in the air. He had positioned his Gundlach Korona V 5 × 7 glass-plate camera with the pneumatic shutter 30 feet from the end of the rail and had given John Daniels instructions to press the bulb when the Flyer passed. This would be their only chance to prove that they had flown.

  “After running the engine and propellers a few minutes to get them in working order I got on the machine at 10:35 for the first trial,” Orville later wrote in his diary.3 The whole plane was shaking from the drive chains turning the propellers, with the motor creating a deafening, clattering racket and the propellers churning the air like giant fans. The December wind was stiff and cold at 27 mph. Orville stared down the track with his hard shoes bottom up, his tie on, and his eyes blurring from the gusting, freezing wind off the ocean. “On slipping the rope the machine increased to probably 7 to 8 miles an hour.”4

  Wilbur walked along with the wing, keeping his left hand on the edge. His footsteps in the sand were less than twenty. He walked with the Flyer and, like a parent letting his child go, the Flyer lifted from his hand. Orville would later write, “The machine lifted from the track just as it entered the fourth rail. Mr. Daniels took a picture just as it left the track. I found control of the front rudder quite difficult on account of it being balanced to near the center.”5 Orville would later characterize the flight as “extremely erratic.”6 “The Flyer rose, dipped down, rose again, bounced and dipped again like a bucking bronco when one wing struck the sand.”7 The distance flown had been 120 feet—less than half the length of a football field. When asked if he was scared, years later, Orville replied, “Scared? There wasn't time…. It was only a flight of twelve seconds and it was an uncertain, creeping sort of a flight at best, but it was a real flight at last.”8

  As the plane reached the end of the monorail, Wilbur was walking briskly, and maybe he had just begun to jog when the plane lifted and Daniels squeezed the camera bulb. The camera shutter opened, and in came the image upside down. The emulsion was exposed, and even though it was cold, the silver crystals burned with the light. Etched into the chemical plate for all time was the image of two men: one with his arm akimbo against the plain of sand and another lying down in a contraption that had two wings and was slightly tilted. Then the shutter slammed shut, with its frozen history once again in darkness.

  The picture would remain a secret until the Wright brothers returned home. Then, in the darkroom in the back of their Dayton home, the image would emerge under a safety light in a bath of developer. The image would change history for all time, and, ten years later, the glass plate would survive two days underwater in a flood in Dayton. Other pictures would be lost in the flood. It was a stubborn image of a moment in time, and it would define Orville, Wilbur, and the history of powered flight.

  In the darkroom back in Dayton in late December, the photo that would change the course of history began to develop. The photographic paper slowly emulsified under the translucent developer, and first there were shadows, then a man with his arm slightly up and another man lying down in the middle of a plane, with the soles of his shoes visible. The plane is ten feet above the sand, with propellers slightly blurred and wings slightly titled. It is the first twelve seconds of flight, and the year is 1903. Historians have grappled with this photo ever since, and many would describe it in the barest terms. As stated in The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright:

  The starting rail, laid in a south to north direction on the level ground some 25 to 30 yards west of the camp buildings and 1000 feet north of Big Kill Devil Hills was constructed of four fifteen-foot two by fours, topped with a thin metal strip. The truck which supported the skids of the plane during take-off is visible in the sand at the end of the starting rail…. Orville Wright is at the controls of the machine, lying prone on the lower wing with hips in the cradle which operated the wing-warping mechanism. Wilbur Wright, running alongside to balance the machine, has just released his hold on the forward upright of the right wing.9

  We do see Orville lying down with the soles of his patent-leather shoes facing the camera. The exposure was slow enough that the propellers’ revolution is visible. The short length of the takeoff into a wind of “20 to 27 miles an hour”10 is apparent from Wilbur's footprints in the sand. The plane is slightly tilted, with “the horizontal rudder tilted up to its extreme position.”11 There is the stool for keeping the wing off the ground and the C-clamp to keep the plane level before launch. The coil box and trailing wires for starting the motor are in front of a shovel, a bucket of nails and tacks, and a hammer.

  But the footprints in the sand show Wilbur walking, then jogging along with the plane he had conceptualized. The footprints go straight, then veer right and then stop, and it is here that history is recorded as the plane lifts off. It is Wilbur, though, who is caught in time. He is running with one hand by his waist, with his suit coat open, and he is watching the plane lift off the ground, barely—but his plane is flying. He is watching something that began after a three-year depression. He should have been on the plane, but Orville was there, and if John Daniels had not snapped the picture, and if the photo had not been exposed, then the world would not have seen Orville flying. In fact, Wilbur would fly next and longer. Had that photo been the first one, then Wilbur would have been etched into history as the first man to fly. This made the Gundlach Korona V one of the most important things on the dunes of Kill Devil Hills, besides the Flyer itself.

  Without the historic photo, December 17, 1903, would not have mattered. It would have been the telegram sent to their father from Kitty Hawk: “Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one-mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas.”12

  The importance of a photograph cannot be understated. It is the flag raising on Iwo Jima that was snapped by the photographer and later stood for more than all the men who had died there. In this image, the photo shows Wilbur staring as the plane passes him in flight, and all that would follow and who would claim they flew first would have to contend with that photo of two men on a desolate sand dune and a white-winged plane with propellers spinning furiously to lift itself into the air and leave the earth. It is the record of man finally freeing himself from the terrestrial plane. It is the record of Wilbur's dream born out of the dark agony of an existential crisis. It is the white pennon flapping out of the darkness.

  This more than any other photographic moment in history would usher America and the world from the nineteenth century into the modern age of aviation, electricity, electronics, computers, television, space travel, and the atomic bomb. It is no mistake that a piece of the Flyer would go with Buzz Aldrin to the moon.13 It was the bridge between the old world of people who lived and died in a contained world of farms or city blocks and the new world of modern globalism. The photo, the moment frozen, was a recording of that first step out of the darkness of superstition and suspicion into the bright light of science. Man could now look down from a high perch and see the world below. This sea change was evident in the stranger asking what that machine was in the sand. It was a flying machine. It was a spaceship. It was a time machine. The stranger had to know that, as he walked across a sand dune in the year 1903 and saw two men dressed in their Sunday best, bright and clean, with a white flying machine—he must have intuited that this new century would be very different from the last. The flying machine had flown.

  After receiving Orville's telegram from Kitty Hawk confirming the successful flights, Katherine Wright fired off a telegram to Octave Chanute at once. His star pupil had just cracked the Gordian knot. “Boys report four successful flights today from level against twenty-one-mile wind. Average speed through air thirty-one miles. Longest flight fifty-se
ven seconds.”14 How did Chanute take this news? Did he understand that the world had just changed? Did Joe Dosher, the lone telegraph operator in Kitty Hawk, understand the importance of the keys he was pressing? We rarely understand a momentous event until later. Still, man had flown, and the men from the Life Saving stations had cheered. A man could throw a ball farther than Orville had flown, but still….

  Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute two weeks later and summed up the flight:

  The conditions were very unfavorable as we had a cold gusty wind blowing, almost a gale. Nevertheless, as we had set our minds to be home by Christmas we determined to go ahead. Four flights were made, the first lasting about 12 seconds and the last 59 seconds. The “Junction Railroad” worked perfectly and a good start was obtained every time. The machine would run along the track about 40 ft propelled by the screws alone…. It would then rise and fly directly against the wind at a speed of about ten miles an hour…. One of the most gratifying features of the trial was the fact our calculations were shown to have worked out with absolute exactness…. Orville and I alternated in the flights according to our usual custom.15

  Wilbur did fly after Orville. He “went off like a bird”16 for 175 feet, then Orville flew again for 200 feet, and then they made a final test in which Wilbur flew a half a mile for almost a minute. The final flight was really where sustained controlled flight occurred. We can only imagine his excitement at creating a machine that actually could be controlled in the air. In his letter to Chanute, he continued: “The controlling mechanisms operated more powerfully than in our old machine so that we always turned the rudders more than necessary…. The machine possesses greater capacity of being controlled than any of our former machines.”17 This letter is interesting because Wilbur does not specify who flew first; he says only that they alternated.

  “At just 12 o'clock Will started on the fourth and last trip,” Orville wrote in his diary later.18 “The machine started off with ups and downs as it had before but by the time he had gone over three or four hundred feet he had it under much better control and was traveling on a fairly even course. It proceeded in this manner till it reached a hummock out about 800 feet from the starting ways…the distance was 852 feet in 59 seconds.”

  The first three flights were literally up and down and over in seconds. The final flight with Wilbur was the first moment of controlled flying. If a photo had been taken of that fourth trial, it would have had the moniker, “the First 59 Seconds of Controlled Flight” instead of “the First Twelve Seconds of Flight.” But there was no photo of this flight, and when Wilbur writes to Chanute and describes the control of the plane, he is talking about the 59-second flight.

  But here is what Wilbur doesn't know. The exposed plate inside their camera will be revealed in the darkroom in Dayton, and that will change the narrative entirely. The four flights will be immediately reduced to one by the photograph. The photo will alter history and will put Orville in the Flyer in the historic moment of flight, not the man who was the guiding force for breaking the mystery of flight. The plane had flown, and Wilbur was willing to spread the credit around, not knowing a photo would put his brother front and center as the man who had been first in human flight. Even the telegraph announcing to the world that man had flown would not be signed by Wilbur, although both were there. It is Orville who is listed as the sender.

  It is a cruel joke on Wilbur and would allow historians from Kelly on to say that Orville Wright was just as instrumental in the creating of the first modern airplane. He had flown first. If the photo had been overexposed or if John Daniels had missed the moment, then Wilbur could have given his version, which could have easily pointed to the 59-second flight as the first controlled flight. In this case, history was determined by the emulsion-based glass plate of a Gundlach Korona V, and that not only superseded any account Wilbur could put forward but also would be a powerful arrow in the quiver that the Wright brothers were equal in every way, and that Orville had made history.

  Wilbur's untimely death would be the nail in the coffin of the truth of December 17, 1903, that Orville's short flight in reality was similar to Wilbur's three days before. Control was not there yet in the 12 seconds of flight that John Daniels had captured, and control is the essence of being the first to fly. In his diary, Orville would later affirm this lack of control: “The machine lifted from the track just as it was entering the fourth rail…I found the control of the front rudder quite difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center…. A sudden dart when out about 100 feet from the end of the track ended the flight.”19

  In fact, Orville nosed back into the sand a second after the photo was taken, when one wing struck the ground. It was not a landing but a controlled crash: “The lever for throwing off the engine was broken and the skid under the rudder cracked.”20 Again, it wasn't until Wilbur took over and worked out the problems again (in the way he had with the gliders) and flew the new Flyer for almost a minute that the first controlled flight occurred. That was truly the first 59 seconds of powered flight during which man had tamed the air.

  This accounts for the tone of Wilbur's letter to Chanute in which the 12-second flight is given no real precedence over the other flights. In a 1913 Flying article after Wilbur's death, Orville would characterize the December 17, 1903, 12-second flight as, “the first in history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air of full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started.”21

  Others would not see it that way.

  After Wilbur's final flight, the flying for that day in 1903 ended abruptly. Orville would later write:

  After removing the front rudder, we carried the machine back to camp. We set the machine down a few feet west of the building, and while standing about discussing the last flight, a sudden gust of wind struck the machine and started to turn it over. All rushed to stop it. Will who was near one end ran to the front but too late to do any good. Mr. Daniels and myself seized spars at the rear but to no purpose. The machine gradually turned over on us. Mr. Daniels having no experience in handling the machine of this kind hung on to it from the inside and as a result was knocked down and turned over with it as it went.22

  Daniels was caught inside and turned over with the Flyer. Amazingly, he was not hurt. But the plane that had flown first was now a wreck. “The engine legs were all broken off the chain guides badly bent, a number of uprights, and nearly all the rear ends of the ribs were broken.”23

  The amazing events of December 17, 1903, were over. The wrecked Flyer was put back into the hangar, and the Wrights began a long, cold walk to Kitty Hawk to report to the world what had happened. The 1903 Flyer, now twisted, bent, broken, and sand-covered, would never take to the air again and would be shipped back to Dayton, Ohio, to be crated and stored in a shed behind their home. There it would sit for ten years, moldering and rotting, until it was submerged in the great flood of 1913. Then, in 1928, it would cross the Atlantic Ocean and leave America.

  “Nobody who has not experienced it for himself can realize it. It is a realization of a dream so many persons have had of floating in the air. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace.”

  —Wilbur Wright 1905

  1940

  Near the Village of Corsham, England

  They moved the Flyer one hundred miles out of London and put it in an underground storage facility near the village of Corsham. The Luftwaffe was bombing every night now. The pilots high above in the night sky, using radar to hone in on London, were letting their bombs go. They used their rudders and their ailerons and throttled up their engines and their elevator flaps and didn't have any idea that below them and deep underground was the reason they were able to fly through the night and drop 500-pound bombs on a city. They used the very controls that were encased in the crates marked 1903 WRIGHT FLYER.

  The shockwaves passed and maybe dust pu
ffed off the wings. It had been thirty-seven years since Orville had lifted off for the first twelve seconds of flight and then had come back to Earth. Thirty-seven years since Wilbur flew for almost a minute and then landed back on the sand. As the bombs fell on London, it was too risky to try to bring the plane across the ocean again. Besides, Orville Wright didn't want the Flyer to come back to America. Yet.

  Captain Baldwin's dirigible had taken off on its own. He was all set to perform for the crowd when the balloon suddenly became unmoored and went sailing off into the windy, dusk-laden evening. Wilbur had come with his brother to the Dayton fair to watch Baldwin fly, and now the two men watched the giant balloon take flight, with its ropes dragging through the dust, toward the cornfields. Wilbur and Orville leapt to their feet and ran after the dirigible. They grabbed onto the trailing ropes, along with Glenn Curtiss, who had come to perform maintenance on his motor for Baldwin.

  The brothers manhandled the dirigible back to its moorings. Wilbur later wrote Chanute on September 4, “Captain Baldwin is at the fair this week, but the wind has been too strong to attempt a flight…. Mr. Curtiss who is building the motor for Prof. Bell's experiments this fall, called to see us.”1

  The dirigible taking off is a perfect metaphor for what would happen to Wilbur and Orville in the years after 1903. Wilbur's fine sense of control slipped away over the years, and here we have a moment in time during which the three men who would seek to destroy each other in future years are all trying to pull an errant dirigible down from the wind that wanted to take it away. But once man had ascended to the skies, there was no turning back. It would be a fateful night for all involved.

  Hours later, Glenn Curtiss walked through the summer night with Captain Baldwin at the Dayton County Fair. He was kicking dust up with his hard shoes, and he watched the dirt float and settle back down. He might have been just a supplier of motors for hot-air balloons, had it not been for the Aero Club of America. In 1905, the Automobile Club spawned an offshoot called the Aero Club of America, with luminaries Colonel John Jacob Astor, William K. Vanderbilt, and Alexander Graham Bell. The inventor of the telephone and many other innovations had long been interested in flight. Thomas A. Watson, his aide in the invention of the telephone, remembered: “From my earliest association with Bell he discussed with me the possibility of making a machine that would fly like a bird. He took every opportunity that presented itself to study birds, living or dead…. I fancy, if Bell had been in easy financial circumstances, he might have dropped his telegraph experiments and gone into flying machines.”2