Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  The cross-pollination occurs here. At the very time Chanute was conversing with Wilbur Wright, he was also trading letters with Alexander Graham Bell, who would later thank Chanute for sending him a copy of Experiments and Observations in Soaring Flight, a pamphlet by Wilbur describing the early gliding experiments at Kitty Hawk. By the end of 1905, Bell had built a kite capable of lifting a man and powered by an engine he ordered from Glenn Curtiss.

  The Aero Club planned an aeronautical show in 1906 in New York. Bell was there, as was Octave Chanute. The Smithsonian supplied Langley's model Aerodrome, and the Wright brothers sent the crankshaft and flywheel of their 1903 Flyer. Samuel Langley had died that year, and Wilbur had written a letter earlier to Chanute that would come to haunt him: “The knowledge that the head of the most prominent scientific institution of America believed in the possibility of human flight was one of the influences that led us to undertake the preliminary investigation that preceded our work. He recommended to us the books which enabled us to form some ideas at the onset. It was a helping hand at a critical time and we shall always be grateful.”3

  Glenn Curtiss was there with his engine exhibit for the auto show. Bell, a stout, gray man with a white mustache and dressed in tweed, went on in a booming voice, proclaiming that one day man would cross the Atlantic in a plane. Bell gave a speech proclaiming “the Age of the Flying Machine is not in the future. It is with us now.”4 He broke the news at the exhibition that the Wright brothers had flown twenty-five miles in Dayton, Ohio. He then went home and later ordered a Curtiss engine. Bell and Curtiss probably met at the show, but neither man understood how their lives would intersect again.

  Alexander Graham Bell wanted to pursue flying using the model of Chanute's early biplane, the Chanute I, a goal toward which he would employ the talents of many young men whom he deemed to be on the cutting edge of aeronautics. As Cecil Roseberry explained in Glenn Curtiss: Pioneer of Flight, “A program to gather around himself a team of bright, dedicated young men to help him over the final hurdle of putting a mechanical kite in the air…now he had three promising candidates for the team but he lacked the key person of all—an engine specialist. He considered Glenn Curtiss the greatest motor expert in the country.”5 The Aerial Experiment Association (AEA) was quickly formed, with Curtiss as the man who would put engines on the aircraft. Stationery with letterhead was printed with “Alexander Graham Bell” at the top and “G. H. Curtiss, Director of Experiments,” just beneath. This new title would give Curtiss one more chance to approach the Wright brothers and offer a free engine. He had tried twice before.

  Although he still regarded all fliers as cranks, Curtiss wanted to expand his market. Maybe Bell gave him an idea that the airplane market would be viable. If the Wright brothers did fly, then they probably needed a better motor. He sent off a letter to Dayton in May 1906. It was the first time he would reach out to the Wright brothers, and their fates would be forever intertwined.

  He wrote, “Dear Sirs, We have read of your success with the Aeroplane and thinking we might be of service to you in getting out a light and powerful motor with which to carry on your work we have taken the liberty of writing to you on the subject…”6 He told the Wright brothers of his sale to known fliers of airships and Captain Baldwin and then made his case: “Of course, we understand that your work is of a somewhat different character, but we mention these to prove that our motor has great power and reliability…. We recently shipped to Dr. Bell's Nova Scotia Laboratory a motor designed for Aeroplane work, and we hope that this experience will be of service to you.”7

  Glenn then informed the Wright brothers that he would be in the area the next week and they might meet. Wilbur was not impressed and sent back a reply informing Curtiss that they use their own engines, thank you very much. Glenn never received the letter and headed for Dayton to meet the biggest aviation crank of the age.

  Wilbur had no intention of using anyone else's engine in his plane: “We have never considered light motors the important point in solving the flying problem,” he wrote to Chanute.8 Glenn wired the Wrights from Columbus, “IF CONVENIENT LIKE TO TALK WITH YOU SIX O'CLOCK BELL PHONE.”9 Glenn called, and the conversation didn't go well with Wilbur, who was showing no interest in Curtiss engines. Still, Curtiss said he might drop in but then decided against it. When he returned home to Hammondsport, he found a letter from Wilbur that he had missed. He immediately wrote back: “On my return I find your letter. Trust I did not cause you any inconvenience in getting you to the phone…. Was delayed a day in Columbus and thought of going over to see you. Am glad, however, to have made your acquaintance and hope to meet you at some future time.”10

  Wilbur Wright remained suspicious. He had good reason. Ever since 1903, the world had not yet recognized his achievement at Kitty Hawk. After they had sent the first telegram home proclaiming success to Bishop Wright, the world had only yawned. The first scientific publication to report that man could fly was a magazine on bee culture, Gleanings in Bee Culture. That would not be until March 1, 1904. Amos Root would wiggle into history as the first newspaperman to break the story of flight. His timing was perfect, since Wilbur was about to attempt to fly a full circle around the field at Huffman Prairie.

  Root described for his readers what he saw as the plane flew low to the ground and then turned back toward him:

  When it turned that circle, and came near the starting point, I was right in front of it and I said then and I believe still, it was…the greatest sight of my life. Imagine a locomotive that has left its track and is climbing up in the air right toward you—a locomotive without any wheels…but with white wings instead…a locomotive made of aluminum. Well now imagine that locomotive with wings that spread 20 feet each way, coming right toward you with a tremendous flap of its propellers.11

  Root then described the landing of the plane for his readers: “When the engine is shut off, the apparatus glides to the ground very quietly and alights on something much like a pair of light sled runners, sliding over the grassy surface perhaps a rod or more.” He then predicted what the invention of the airplane will mean to the world: “We shall not need to fuss with good roads nor railway tracks or bridges…at such enormous expense. With these machines we bid adieu to all these things.”12

  Root published his article in January 1905, in Gleanings in Bee Culture, and many papers scoffed at the story. The editor of Scientific American wrote, “If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country on a subject in which almost everybody feels the same profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face.”13

  In other words, Amos Root was not to believed. It was not surprising. The Dayton Journal's editor refused to publish the story offered by Milton at Wilbur's direction. The telegraph operator in Kitty Hawk who had transmitted the cable letting their father know that they had flown had leaked it to the Virginia Pilot, which printed a fantastic story of a long-extended flight that was picked up by several newspapers and then dropped: “FLYING MACHINE SOARS 3 MILES IN TEETH OF HIGH WIND OVER SAND HILLS AND WAVES AT KITTY HAWK ON CAROLINA COAST.”14

  H. P. Moore of the Virginia Pilot, who had taken the story from the telegraph operators and put it on the front page, had then sent it to twenty-one other newspapers. As Fred Kelly wrote in The Wright Brothers, “Of the twenty-one newspapers to whom it was offered, only five ordered the story. They were the New York American, the Washington Post, the Chicago Record-Herald, the Philadelphia Record, and the Cincinnati Enquirer.”15 Three of the newspapers delayed the story, and some didn't print it at all. They simply didn't believe anyone had flown at Kitty Hawk. The morning after the first flight, there was not a single item in the Dayton Journal, even after brother Lorin had seen editor Frank Tunisson, who didn't bother looking up, murmuring the now-immortal words, “Fifty-seven seconds, hey? If it had been fifty-seven
minutes then it might have been a news item.”16

  Orville and Wilbur ended up writing a press release to correct the fabrications printed in the newspapers:

  It had been our intention not to make any detailed public statement concerning the private trials of our power “Flyer” on the 17th of December last; but since the contents of a private telegram, announcing to our folks at home the success of our trials was dishonestly communicated to the newspapermen at the Norfolk office, and led to the imposition upon the public by persons who never saw the Flyer or its flights, of a fictitious story incorrect in almost every detail…we feel impelled to make some correction. The real facts are as follows.17

  The press release to the Associated Press on January 6 then became a dry rendition of the four flights at Kitty Hawk. The AP had previously sent out a 350-word summary of the flight at Kitty Hawk on December 18, complete with the fantastic claims made in the Virginia Pilot that “the machine flew for more than three miles.”18 Many of the Associated Press newspapers did not pick up the brief dispatch. The Wrights’ press release did not fare much better. Finally, on January 17, the New York Herald in its magazine section published an article titled “The Machine That Flies.” It was full of half-truths and fabrications, including “a diagram, showing the two six blade propellers, one behind the machine and one beneath it to give it elevation!”19

  This was during the Wright brothers’ momentous step of closing the bicycle shop and going full-time in an effort to market their invention. Wilbur had thought on this after Christmas of 1903, after enjoying the warmth of family and a porterhouse steak and a “fancy dessert” on his first night home:

  We found ourselves standing at a fork in the road. On the one hand we could continue playing with the problem of flying so long as youth and leisure would permit but carefully avoiding those features that would require continuous effort and the expenditure of considerable sums of money. On the other hand, we believed that if we would take the risk of devoting our entire time and financial resources, we could conquer the difficulties in the path to success before increasing years impaired our physical ability. We finally decided to make the attempt but as our financial future was at stake we were compelled to regard it as a strict business proposition.20

  This was a fork in the road, and an extremely risky one. Wilbur knew what they had, but no one else did and their patent had yet to be approved. He now had to make a living from their invention in a field of study within which no one had ever considered a money-making occupation. Selling planes or flying planes had never been considered for monetary gain. So not only did he have to invent the airplane but then he had to monetize it. This would lead eventually to charges of greed being Wilbur's motivation—and by none other than Octave Chanute. But Wilbur had no fortune to fall back on, and protecting his invention was protecting his livelihood.

  Thus began the era of the great secret at a time when they needed to prove to the world that they had flown, so they could sell their invention. They didn't have a patent yet, and they did not want anyone stealing their secrets. This paranoia would end up in their application for the widest possible patent, which would set the stage for infringement on any airplane constructed: “The value of such a monopoly would be enormous. With no serious rivals in sight, there was no reason for undue haste…. They would continue working toward the production of a practical flyer while guarding the secrets of their technology.”21

  Octave Chanute thought this a grave mistake, showing his view of Wilbur's invention as one of using existing technology in a different way. As Tom Crouch wrote in The Bishop's Boys, “He saw the Wrights as extraordinarily gifted mechanics who had put old ideas into new bottles. Their genius he thought was to be found in the ability to make other men's ideas work…. Simply put they saw things others missed, made correct decisions where others erred, and persevered when others lost faith.”22 Chanute simply didn't believe Wilbur had invented the technology, nor did he believe that “the idea of flexing the wing…was patentable.”23

  This view would tear apart their friendship in the years to come. Wilbur and Orville concentrated on building another flyer in 1904 to fly in nearby Huffman Prairie. As described in an article in Harper's Magazine, “A cow pasture, fairly level, handy to an interurban railway, at Simms Station, eight miles from Dayton…. This field often called the Huffman Prairie, was part of a farm belonging to a Dayton bank president.”24 The press came out to the prairie several times to watch but were unimpressed when the plane didn't leave the ground. An interurban train car passing by gave passengers a glimpse of manned flight in its earliest stages. Wilbur later wrote of the ragged start in the cow field, “We took the machine out Monday but just as we [were] ready the wind died out…. On Wednesday we took it out but were driven in by rain. Again, on Thursday we took it out and again the rain compelled us to take it in, but in the afternoon we again took it out.”25 Then, when they started the flyer, mechanical problems left onlookers unimpressed. “The engine was not working right but there was no time to see what the trouble was then. The machine rose six or eight feet but the power was insufficient and it came down.”

  The Wrights began flying soon, though, and people on the interurban train cars watched in disbelief as a machine circled over Mr. Huffman's pasture. Wilbur's description of flying was now becoming more ethereal. “When you know, after the first few minutes, that the whole mechanism is working perfectly…the sensation is so keenly delightful as to be almost beyond description. 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.”26

  Flying gave him the escape he must have always thought it would. In the air he was fulfilled and earthly cares fell away. He and Orville invited Milton and Katherine out along with friends to watch them fly. The new Flyer III that they built had improvements in the wing design, the tail, and control, and a 25-horsepower engine and allowed Wilbur to circle Huffman Prairie twenty-nine times in one flight. Bishop Wright would write, “I saw Wilbur fly twenty four miles in thirty eight minutes and four seconds in one flight.”27

  People often called the local papers to report what they had seen, but still the press did not take notice. Even Fred Kelly, writing for the Dayton Journal at the time in a branch office at Xenia, did not believe anything had happened there. In his biography years later, he wrote about himself, “Did he investigate the story? No, he didn't need to investigate it to feel sure it must be nonsense. If true, surely it would be in the Dayton papers.”28 Wilbur in the 1904 Flyer was able to make complete circles around the field, but the problem was that nobody saw him do it. The only photos of the flights were taken by the Wrights, and these did not impress anybody. The reason was that people simply didn't believe the Wrights were flying. James M. Cox, the publisher of the Dayton Daily News, summed up public sentiment at the time when years later he admitted, “Frankly, none of us believed it.”29

  Finally, several Dayton newspapers took note, but it was hard to prove anything to a skeptical public. A druggist, W. C. Fouts, was quoted, “When I went out to Huffman Prairie I expected to see somebody's neck broken. What I did see was a machine weighing 900 pounds soar away like an eagle…. I told a friend about it that night and he acted as if I had gone daft or joined the liars club.”30 The Wrights took the unusual position that no one would catch up with them, and so they believed that they were quite safe in taking their time to prove their achievement to the world. This secrecy was based on their business decision: “the entire package, protected by an airtight patent could be afforded to a potential buyer—presumably a national government.”31

  This led to a basic problem of disbelief. The words “alleged experiments” crept into many articles covering the Wrights at this time. The Paris edition of the Herald Tribune headlined an article in 1906, “FLYERS OR LIARS?”32 An editorial in the New York Herald summed it up this way: “The Wrights have flown or
have not flown. They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It is easy to say, ‘we have flown.’”33

  But there were two men who appeared in the Huffman Prairie who did believe the Wrights had flown. As John Kelly described in The Wright Brothers, “The Wrights saw two men wandering nearby fields during most of one day and thought they must be hunters…. The next day the two strangers were seen and finally they came across the field.” One man carried a camera and asked if visitors were allowed. “Yes, only we'd rather you didn't take any pictures,” one of the Wright brothers courteously replied.34

  The man set the camera down, and then they proceeded to examine the machine. The Wrights assumed they were newspapermen, and one man said he had written for some publication, but Charlie Taylor overheard the men talking and later said after they left, “that fellow's no writer. At least he's no ordinary writer. When he looked at the different parts of the machine he called them all by the right names.”35 Later, Orville and Wilbur would identify the man as the former chief engineer for Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institution.

  Then, in 1905, the Wrights compounded the problem of people not believing they had flown by refusing to fly for anyone unless the two brothers had a firm offer in hand for their flying machine. They had made 105 starts in Huffman Prairie and still had no approved patent, and Wilbur was afraid someone would steal their ideas. So, they hid their plane, their knowledge, and their achievements, and they waited for the world to catch up to them. From then on, the business of flying would overtake them, especially Wilbur, who would make it his mission to protect their patents. Others would step into the vacuum of advancing aviation, eventually using what Wilbur had learned and then taking it a step further. Like a man sticking his fingers in the dyke, Wilbur would spend the rest of his life in perpetual litigation, protecting what he had discovered in the sands of the Outer Banks.