The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Crouch, Tom D.

  A sudden gust caught the left wingtip, lifting it and sending the craft into a broad, sweeping turn from which Lilienthal recovered with a powerful throw of his legs. He swooped low over the fields at the base of the hill, “kicking at the tops of the haystacks as he passed over them.” Approaching the ground, he kicked forward to raise the leading edge of the wing, brought his craft to a dead stop in the air, and dropped easily to earth.

  The young reporter found it difficult to contain himself. “I have seen high dives and parachute jumps from balloons,” he exulted, “… but I have never witnessed anything that strung the nerves to such a pitch of excitement, or awakened such a feeling of enthusiasm and admiration as the wild and fearless rush of Otto Lilienthal through the air.”12

  Toward the end of the afternoon, having witnessed ten flights, Wood wanted to try his hand at gliding. Lilienthal agreed and ordered the machine taken only a dozen yards up the slope. Wood quickly discovered that simply standing in one place balancing the glider was so difficult as to give him a feeling of “utter helplessness.” “As you stand in the frame, your elbows at your side, the forearms are horizontal, and your hands grasp one of the horizontal cross-braces. The weight of the machine rests in the angle of the elbow joints. In the air, when you are supported by the wings, your weight is carried on the vertical upper arms and by pads which come under the shoulders, with the legs and lower part of the body swinging free below.”13

  The weight of the machine was reduced with each step as he ran downhill into the wind until, suddenly, he was airborne. “I was sliding down the aerial incline a foot or two from the ground. The apparatus dipped from side to side a great deal…. The feeling is most delightful and wholly indescribable. The body being supported from above, with no weight or strain on the legs, the feeling is as if gravitation had been annihilated….”14

  Wood left the Rhinow Hills that evening prepared to write the finest account of Lilienthal’s personality and experiments available in English. But there would be no opportunity for follow-up interviews. The following Sunday, August 9, Otto Lilienthal stalled and fell from an altitude of fifty feet while flying a standard monoplane glider. He died the next day in a Berlin hospital.

  News of Lilienthal’s death, coming in the wake of the extended coverage of Langley’s successful flights over the Potomac, drew wide attention in the American press. The German experimenter was portrayed not as a fool who had tossed his life away to no purpose but as a martyr to science. The newspaper reading public was treated to its second aeronautical hero of the summer of 1896. A third was still to come.

  chapter 11

  OCTAVE CHANUTE

  June~September 1896

  When Octave Chanute arrived in Miller, Indiana, aboard the eight o’clock train from Chicago on June 22, 1896, Samuel Langley’s triumph over the Potomac was still very much in the news. Otto Lilienthal had less than two months to live.

  Chanute supervised four young assistants as they loaded an assortment of boxes and crates filled with camping gear and the parts of two disassembled gliders into a wagon bound for the wild dune country bordering the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

  He was sixty-four years old. With his short, stocky figure, decided paunch, fringe of gray hair, and neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard, he bore a remarkable resemblance to William Shakespeare—or so Wilbur always thought.

  A native of Paris, born on February 18, 1832, Octave was the eldest of Joseph and Elise Sophie Debonnaire Chanut’s three sons. In 1838, Joseph accepted a position as vice-president of newly established Jefferson College in New Orleans. Six-year-old Octave went with him. He would not see his native France again for forty years. Sophie, now separated from her husband, remained behind with her two youngest sons.

  Joseph was extraordinarily protective, refusing to allow his son to mix with American playmates. Tutored at home, the boy did not learn English until he was eleven. This sheltered upbringing deprived Octave of much of the normal cultural baggage picked up by most boys of his generation. He was an undeniably prudish adult, who did not drink, smoke, dance, or swear. In later years, his two daughters enjoyed poking fun at their father’s ignorance of such common slang expressions as “fourflusher” and “ace in the hole.” Card games and colloquial English were lifelong mysteries to him.

  Octave Chanute, a leading American civil engineer, led a group of young glider enthusiasts into the Indiana Dunes in 1896.

  Joseph and Octave remained in New Orleans until 1844, when the father resigned his college position, packed up, and caught a train for New York. There Octave finally entered school. It must have been a difficult time for a sheltered boy with a thick French accent. There is evidence of that even in his name—when schoolmates insisted on dubbing him the “naked cat” (chat nu), he changed the spelling to Chanute, suggesting the correct pronunciation.1

  In 1849, having decided on a career in engineering, the ambitious seventeen year old traveled to Sing Sing, New York, and presented himself to Henry Gardner, the chief engineer of the Hudson River Railroad. Told that there were no jobs available, Chanute offered to work for nothing. Impressed, Gardner put the young volunteer to work as a chainman, the lowest-ranking member of a surveying team.

  Chanute rose rapidly in the profession. Before and after the Civil War he moved through positions of increasing responsibility with one Western railroad after another. Like most of his colleagues, he was not a company man, but was employed to perform a specific job, usually the extension of a rail line farther west. When the task was complete, there was always another railroad ready to bid for his services.

  In 1867—the year in which Wilbur Wright was born—Chanute moved his growing family west to Kansas City, where, in addition to continuing work on his current railroad contract, he supervised the construction of the first bridge across the Missouri River. Its completion in 1869 firmly established the thirty-seven-year-old Chanute as an engineer with a national reputation.

  Other major railroad and construction contracts were to follow. Chanute served as chief engineer and superintendent of the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Railroad Company during the early 1870s. In addition, he designed and supervised construction of the Union Stockyards in Kansas City in 1871, and offered essential advice on water, sewer, gas, and transit problems to growing Midwestern cities. His contributions to the urbanization of the West were substantial. It seemed only fitting that one of those towns—Chanute, Kansas—was named in his honor.

  Chanute reached the pinnacle of his career in 1873, when he was named chief engineer of the reorganized Erie Railroad. At the time, Western newspapers were filled with tributes to his character and achievements. The Leavenworth Daily Tribune praised him as “a gentleman in every respect,” while the Parsons [Kansas] Sun protested “against New York taking from us one of the ablest and best brain men in the state.” One Illinois journal termed him the “ablest as well as one of the most popular men in the West.”2

  He spent ten difficult years working for the Erie. The railroad had suffered during the previous decade under the management of the most outrageous band of stock manipulators in American history—“Uncle Dan’l” Drew, “Jubilee Jim” Fiske, and Jay Gould. By the time Chanute arrived, the road was bankrupt and in receivership. Nevertheless, as chief engineer Chanute was able to complete several important modernization programs, including a double tracking of the entire line.

  He was also heavily involved in the work of professional societies during this period, serving as president of both the revitalized American Society of Civil Engineers and the engineering section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as chairing important ASCE technical committees.

  In 1875, close to collapse, Chanute treated his family to a four-month vacation in France. He returned to America refreshed and relaxed—and interested in aeronautics. During the course of his European trip he apparently read a few articles on the subject in European journals. He found the work of the English engineer Francis He
rbert Wenham particularly interesting. In 1871, Wenham and a colleague, John Browning, had conducted the first experiments with a “wind tunnel”—a device that enabled them to study the reaction of a series of small test surfaces placed in an artificially induced flow of air inside the wooden tunnel.

  Chanute recognized that this was solid engineering research at its best. Quite apart from any bearing on the flying-machine problem, these studies could be of extraordinary value to a working engineer. Chanute himself had long been puzzled by the way in which certain roof designs were susceptible to destruction in high winds. A better understanding of the impact of gusting winds on suspension bridges might prevent tragedies such as the catastrophic loss of Charles Ellet’s Wheeling, West Virginia, bridge in 1854. The study of air resistance might also lead to more efficient locomotive design.

  But there was little time in his life for anything as frivolous as aeronautics. Always the practical man of business, he would keep his growing interest in the flying machine a careful secret for another decade. At a Kansas City dinner party in the 1880s, a friend asked Chanute how he spent his leisure time. “Wait until your children are not present,” he replied, “for they would laugh at me.”3

  He finally retired from the Erie in 1885. Rejecting lucrative contracts for work in Latin America and Asia, he established himself as a consulting engineer in Kansas City. From 1880 to 1885 he had chaired an ASCE committee on the problems of wood preservation, a major concern in view of the nation’s increasing dependence on railroad ties and telegraph and telephone poles. By 1890 Chanute’s reputation in the new field was so well established that he settled permanently in Chicago and founded a firm specializing in wood preservation. Within five years, with his business running smoothly, he could relax and spend some time on the problem that had intrigued him for twenty years.

  Chanute began to gather information on aeronautics in about 1884. He scoured bookshops and libraries, subscribed to newspaper clipping services, and launched into correspondence with virtually every major flying-machine experimenter in the world. Twice, at Buffalo in 1886 and at Toronto in 1889, Chanute sponsored major aeronautics sessions at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. While controversial, the Buffalo meeting was responsible for drawing Samuel Langley to the subject. On both occasions Chanute was careful to maintain the discussion on a high professional level, and to avoid any appearance of “enthusiasm.”

  In 1893, encouraged by the professional response to the Toronto session, Chanute agreed to organize an International Conference on Aerial Navigation, to be held at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For the first time he would be going beyond a professional society and speaking to a larger public.

  Beginning with London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, the history of the nineteenth century had been punctuated by a series of great international fairs. Vienna, New York, Philadelphia, and Paris—each in turn had mounted a stunning display of the scientific, mechanical, and artistic wonders of the age. In honor of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, Chicago planned a fete that would dwarf all predecessors.

  A great “White City”—a collection of neoclassical buildings, broad avenues, and canals—rose from 686 acres of reclaimed marshland fronting Lake Michigan. From the top of the enormous wheel that would immortalize the name of its designer, George Ferris, to the midway dive where Little Egypt captured the hearts of a generation of American males with her “hootchy-kootchy dance,” the World’s Columbian Exposition was a marvel.

  Milton Wright was passing through Chicago on October 20, 1892, and witnessed the great Columbian Exposition Parade that marked the opening of the fair. Wilbur and Orville made the trip to Chicago to “do” the fair in the spring of 1893. Neither of them left an account other than to remark to friends that they had enjoyed the bicycle exhibits. It was the first time either brother had ever been away from home, and they probably saw as much of the fair as Milton did when he returned on October 24 for a complete three-day tour.

  The bishop visited twenty-seven of the state exhibit buildings, sixteen of the foreign pavilions, the Art Gallery, the government fisheries display, and the Electrical Department. He rode the Intramural Railway for an hour; admired a giant Redwood plank and the exhibition of polished woods in the Forestry Building; saw a live gorilla; and visited the “aboriginal villages.” In all likelihood, he passed up Little Egypt.

  The opportunity to attend a session of the Congress of Religions was the high point of Milton’s visit. This was only one of a number of congresses designed to add a touch of intellectual class to the great fair. Leaders in a variety of fields—scientists, writers, artists, philosophers, engineers, and theologians—were invited to hold international meetings on the Exposition grounds. The object was to explore the state of the art in their disciplines, and lay a foundation for future work.4

  The most newsworthy of these congresses was officially known as the International Conference on Aerial Navigation. Held on August 1–4, 1893, the meeting was the work of Octave Chanute and a colleague, Albert Francis Zahm, a young Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in physics who was teaching at Notre Dame. Zahm had conceived the notion of a congress devoted to aeronautics and worked to overcome Chanute’s initial reluctance to take part. Ever conscious of his reputation, the older engineer agreed to cooperate only if fair officials promised to assist him in avoiding “publicity and cranks … by all possible means.”5

  It was an overwhelming success. Chanute was able to convince some of the nation’s leading engineers, men whom he knew to be interested but hesitant to write on the subject, to offer papers. Moreover, it provided an opportunity for him to introduce a number of the young engineers who had conducted experiments to a wider professional audience.

  To Chanute’s surprise, the public was equally enthusiastic. The Pittsburgh Dispatch’s, response was typical: “The Chicago Conference undoubtedly marks a new era in aeronautics. It brought together many scientists and engineers who have been engaged seriously on the problem of flight. The subject, it was shown, is one for the study of men of broad knowledge, and accurate training, and is no longer to be considered the hobby of mere cranks.”6

  Coming in the wake of the Chicago conference, the publication of Progress in Flying Machines in 1894 marked Octave Chanute as the international authority on the history, theory, and current status of aeronautical studies. The book was an updated version of a series of articles he had published in the American Engineer and Railroad Journal since 1891. Covering virtually everything that had been accomplished in the field since the time of Leonardo da Vinci, it quickly became the basic text for all would-be aviators.7

  At this point Chanute was anxious to move beyond the lectern and the printed page and conduct flying-machine tests of his own. As an engineer, he was accustomed to investigating a project on paper, then transforming theory into practice. It would have been out of character for him to have devoted twenty years of spare-time research to aeronautics without applying the results to an actual flying machine.

  An admirer of Lilienthal, Chanute agreed that the manned glider offered the most direct approach to solving the problems of successful powered flight. The actual business of constructing a glider was quite beyond him, however; he was not at all handy and had no skill in carpentry or metalworking. As a railroad chief engineer and a bridge builder, he was accustomed to developing a general plan, then supervising the work of the assistants who would carry it through.

  Chanute had always recognized the importance of encouraging younger men. In the 1880s and early 90s he had offered help to several men, including Edward Huffaker, who later served as Langley’s aeronautical assistant at the Smithsonian, and John Montgomery, a Californian who had made the first glider flight in the United States in 1885. Chanute had provided a forum for these experimenters to present their work at AAAS meetings, and at the conference in Chicago.

  Even this limited experience had taught him a lesson. Young fellows like Huffake
r and Montgomery who insisted on becoming involved with flying machines were apt to be difficult, opinionated, and far more eager to pursue their own ideas than to take instructions or advice from Chanute. Still, he recognized that by hiring talented young newcomers to build and test gliders for him, he was not only adding to the store of aeronautical knowledge but supporting engineers who might someday play a major role in solving the problem of flight.

  Chanute began his own glider design program in 1895, with the construction of some small flying models. He chose Augustus Moore Herring as his assistant. Herring was no newcomer to flight studies. Born into a wealthy Georgia family in 1865, he had studied engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, but did not graduate. He worked at a variety of jobs following the collapse of his consulting firm in the panic of 1893, but his real love was aeronautics.8

  During the early 1890s Herring had constructed several unsuccessful gliders, as well as one very interesting biplane flying model powered by rubber strands. In the spring of 1894 he began work on the first of three successful gliders based on original Lilienthal plans obtained from Germany. Short flights made with these machines came to Chanute’s attention as a result of an article on the subject in the New York press. The initial involvement of the two men was short-lived. Herring left Chanute’s employ in May 1895 for Langley’s more lucrative Aerodrome program at the Smithsonian.

  A talented egotist, Herring found it impossible to remain with Langley. The secretary insisted on being informed of every detail, and refused to allow the young engineer the free hand he believed was essential if they were to make progress with the Aerodromes. Langley, for his part, came to regard Herring as an ingrate who made few substantial contributions to the program. In fact, a comparison of the Langley models before and after Herring’s short tenure in Washington suggests that he was most responsible for the major changes that led to the successful flights of May 1896.