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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Herring and Langley reached a parting of the ways in December 1895. Chanute cabled his old assistant as soon as he heard the news, inviting him to join a crew of workmen in Chicago who were constructing a series of gliders that would be tested in the Indiana Dunes that summer. Herring accepted, and agreed to bring the remains of his last Lilienthal glider with him.

  Chanute had developed a multiwing design. The workmen dubbed the craft the “Katydid.” Even Chanute had to admit that the profusion of wings, struts, and wires gave it a distinctly insectlike appearance. The machine featured twelve wings—each six feet long by three feet wide—set on either side of the fuselage. The original plan called for positioning eight wings in front, and four wings at the rear.

  William Avery, a carpenter in Chanute’s neighborhood, had constructed the Katydid and decided to stay on to fly the craft. William Paul Butusov, an emigrant Russian seaman who had come to Chanute in the summer of 1895 claiming to have made fabulously successful secret glider flights in the wooded hills near Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, was the third member of the team.

  They were comfortably ensconced in a camp pitched deep in the dunes by late afternoon on June 22, 1896. Herring assembled, rigged, and made a first short tentative flight with his Lilienthal before dusk. Chanute’s hopes of keeping their activity a secret were dashed when an observant stationmaster at Miller wired news of their arrival to the Chicago Tribune. A reporter showed up in camp the next morning. Before the week was out, Chanute had joined Langley on the front pages of American newspapers.

  Chanute, at sixty-four, did not glide at all. Herring made most of the early flights, with Avery and Butusov taking over the piloting on occasion. The performance of the two gliders was disappointing. The Lilienthal proved to be awkward, dangerous, and difficult to control. The Katydid was no better: the best flights obtained during the first period on the dunes were under one hundred feet in length.

  The party returned to Chicago on the Fourth of July, disappointed by bad weather, the poor performance of the gliders, and the plague of reporters that had descended on the camp. They remained in the city for a month and a half. Avery repaired the multiplane, while Butusov constructed a glider of his own—the Albatross. Herring spent his time building what would prove to be the most important and influential hang glider of all time.

  During his spare time on the dunes, Herring had flown a small monoplane kite with a flexible cruciform tail that had much impressed Chanute. As the older man later recalled, he had discussed with Herring the possibility of building another glider loosely based on the kite. They had agreed that the craft would also feature another idea that Herring had been toying with—a cruciform tail, free to move in any direction so as to maintain stability. Chanute provided some simple sketches and asked Herring to work out the details.

  That was not the way Herring remembered it. He pointed to the striking resemblance between the 1896 “two-surface” glider and some models that he had flown in New York in 1892, and three years later at the Smithsonian. Albert Zahm, who was teaching physics at Catholic University in 1895, had seen those models, and agreed with Herring. In 1908 he went so far as to comment: “It is sometimes said that the best French airplanes are copied from the Americans … Farman’s airplane resembles the Wright brothers; theirs resembles Chanute’s glider of 1896, and this in turn resembles Herring’s rubber driven model….”9

  Chanute and his young assistants tested a variety of machines on the Dunes. Augustus Moore Herring is shown here with the famous “two-surface” design. The dogs were Chanute family pets, Rags and Tatters.

  It is clear that Herring played a more important role than was generally recognized at the time. He was responsible for the cruciform tail unit, and may well have suggested the general configuration. Chanute financed construction; contributed to the general design; and provided the all-important Pratt truss system, a combination of solid struts and flexible wires that transformed the structure into a single beam that would resist bending or torsion.

  It was a simple, elegant design, quite unlike the studied complexity of the Katydid, or Butusov’s enormous Albatross, which resembled a cross between a gigantic bird and a sailing schooner. All three craft were shipped back to the lakeshore by boat in mid-August. This time the camp was established five miles farther down the beach in the hope of avoiding reporters.

  Flight testing, which began on August 29, convinced the group that the triplane wings of the new glider provided too much lift at the front of the structure. In the wake of Lilienthal’s death in Germany only three weeks before, this was cause for serious concern. Avery suggested removing the bottom wing to produce the final “two-surface” configuration.

  With that accomplished, longer flights of over 150 feet became commonplace within a day or two. Eventually, the distance through the air grew to 359 feet, with the machine remaining aloft for up to 14 seconds. While the Katydid and the Albatross, which was to be launched into the air from a huge ski-jump ramp, proved less than successful, the little group was overjoyed with the performance of the small biplane. Their craft was much superior to the famed gliders constructed by Lilienthal. They had taken a major step forward.9

  Flights continued until the rough weather set in that September. The Chicago newsmen located the second camp as easily as they had the first, and were soon spreading word of the new glider. Octave Chanute, long famous among the small circle of international aeronautical enthusiasts, now became a public celebrity. The invention of the airplane, no longer a subject of jest, seemed to be just around the corner.10

  chapter 12

  WINDMILLS OF THE MIND

  August 1896~July 1899

  The typhoid struck suddenly late in August 1896. Katharine, preparing to leave for her junior year at Oberlin, was convinced that Orville had contracted the illness from a tainted well just inside the rear door of the bicycle shop. His condition deteriorated rapidly. By the end of the month Orville hovered near death. His temperature reached a peak of 105.5 degrees, then fell, finally stabilizing at 103. Dr. Spitler offered little encouragement. The infection would have to run its course.

  Bishop Wright was, as usual, absent from home on a church trip. He had actually packed his bags and left for the station when he received Katharine’s wire, then thought better of it. There was very little he could do. He instructed Katharine and Wilbur to seal the suspect pump, and to first boil, then chill any water consumed at home. They were to move Orville to the best room in the house and sponge him “gently and quickly with least exposure, followed by rapid friction.”1

  Orville spent September deep in delirium. Katharine and Wilbur took turns sitting by his bed, feeding him a steady diet of milk and beef broth. Milton, who returned home on September 4, divided his time between assisting with Orville’s care and catching up on church and family business.

  Whenever possible, he spent his evenings “with Lorin’s.” Young Milton, Lorin’s eldest and his grandfather’s favorite, excited by the festivities being staged to mark Dayton’s centennial anniversary, marched back and forth for the bishop, demonstrating “how the drum major keeps time and how the soldiers drill.”

  Daytonians were feeling very proud of themselves. Folks in the East could no longer look down their noses at the citizens of a state that had dominated the national political scene for the past quarter of a century, contributing five of the seven Presidents elected between 1868 and 1900.

  Still, honest Daytonians had to admit that their own Gem City was the very definition of an average American place. The precise center of U.S. population in 1870, Dayton remained at the statistical center of the top one hundred American municipalities surveyed in the Census of 1900: the fifth largest city in the state, the forty-fifth largest in the nation.

  After one hundred years, this most typical of American cities seemed poised on the brink of unprecedented expansion and prosperity. The population had doubled between 1870 and 1880, then increased by another 60 percent to reach 80,000 in 1896. Most
Daytonians were employed in the one thousand factories, machine shops, and foundries that dotted the city. Dayton was a national center for the production of farm implements, bicycles, metal castings, and railroad cars.

  By the 1890s, however, the National Cash Register Company—“the Cash”—dwarfed all other Dayton employers. The cash register was born in the Empire Restaurant at 10 South Main in 1878. Discouraged by slow sales, inventor James Ritty sold his patents to local businessman John H. Patterson in 1883. A marketing genius, Patterson created a sales team, armed them with a spiel that no merchant could resist, and turned them loose on an unsuspecting world. The firm was selling 13,500 registers a year by 1890. Patterson was well on his way to becoming a legend, and Dayton had acquired a new economic backbone.

  Change was sweeping over the city. Dayton boasted twelve miles of paved streets; municipal water, gas, and sewer lines extending into every corner of the city; and a skyscraper, the eleven-story Riebold Building. A complex web of telephone and electric power lines had been spun above the streets. You could board a streetcar on the West Side, transfer to an interurban train, and travel to every corner of the state—and beyond—in record time.

  Dayton’s pride in all these achievements was wrapped up in the great Centennial Celebration, which opened at Van Cleve Park on September 14, 1896. As one observer noted, the three days of speeches, pageantry, and parades “outdid anything that Dayton, or even some larger and older cities, had ever witnessed.”

  Orville missed the entire event. Milton kept his room supplied with fresh flowers, while Wilbur and Katharine read to him. He was unconscious most of the time, and the reading was, as much as anything, a means of helping them to pass the time while they nursed their brother.

  Wilbur welcomed the opportunity for some quiet thinking. Late in August he had run across a short item in the paper that startled and intrigued him: Otto Lilienthal was dead.

  Wilbur had thought a great deal about Lilienthal over the past several years. It had begun with the helicopter toy. Neither he nor his brother had ever forgotten the sense of awe and wonder inspired by the sight of the little thing bobbing up and down against the ceiling. Thereafter, they paid particular attention to bits of aeronautical news in the papers.

  They had first run across Lilienthal’s name when they were producing The Evening Item. In July 1890, the news service to which they subscribed had included an item on him. Will recast it in humorous terms and carried the article in the issue of July 26:

  “Needs More Wings”

  A German named Lilienthal, after experimenting for 23 years with artificial wings, has succeeded in raising himself, weighing 160 pounds, with the aid of a counter weight, lifting 80 pounds. How to raise the other 80 pounds is still beyond him.

  They did not forget Lilienthal. One account of his exploits, an article entitled “The Flying Man” that appeared in the September 1894 issue of McClure’s Magazine, was especially intriguing. Now he was gone.

  For Wilbur, it was a turning point. “My own active interest in aeronautical problems dates back to the death of Lilienthal in 1896,” he reported a few years later. “The brief notice of his death which appeared in the telegraphic news at that time aroused a passive interest which had existed from my childhood, and led me to take down from the shelves of our home library a book on Animal Mechanism by Prof. Marey, which I had already read several times.”2

  Wilbur must have leafed through that book as he sat by Orville’s bed. It was a disappointment. Etienne Jules Marey, a French physician and photographer, had included a few photographs of birds in the air, but provided no clues as to the basic mechanism of flight.

  Orville’s fever broke early the next month. On October 8 he sat up in bed for the first time in six weeks. Tapioca and other soft foods replaced the milk and beef broth. Everyone in the house could begin to relax. Katharine, already late for the fall term, left for Oberlin the next morning. Milton caught a train for Marion, Ohio, where he met with the local Brethren and attended an enthusiastic Bryan meeting at the fairground. The bishop noted laconically that “a man jumped onto my head off the Fairground fence, but did not kill me.”3

  Orville was still too weak to return to the bicycle shop. As he lay in bed, Wilbur brought him up to date on what had happened during his illness. They spent some time discussing Lilienthal’s death. Wilbur may also have mentioned the other bits of aeronautical news. Langley, back at work at the Smithsonian after a summer vacation, had flown another of his Aerodromes. Augustus Herring had returned alone to the Indiana Dunes in the early fall and flown his own copy of the Chanute-Herring two-surface glider that had proven so successful earlier in the summer.

  The questions were obvious. What sort of catastrophe could have taken the life of Lilienthal, a man with two thousand glides to his credit? Who would replace him? What of Langley and Chanute? Would their successes lead to continued efforts to develop a full-scale powered machine? What did the future hold for those who sought to fly?

  The spark of curiosity flickered over the next two years, but it did not die. “In the early spring of 1899,” Orville recalled two decades later, “our interest in the subject was again aroused through the reading of a book on ornithology.” The book was probably James Bell Pettigrew’s Animal Locomotion, or Walking, Swimming and Flying, With a Dissertation on Aeronautics. Wilbur once told Octave Chanute that he had read Pettigrew’s work. It is the only other book either of them mentioned as having been among their earliest research.

  In any event, the study of flight in nature was important to them at the outset. “We could not understand that there was anything about a bird that could not be built on a larger scale and used by man,” Orville explained. “If the bird’s wings would sustain it in the air without the use of any muscular effort, we did not see why man could not be sustained by the same means.”4

  Much later, Wilbur would corroborate Orville’s belief:

  My brother and I became seriously interested in the problem of human flight in 1899…. We knew that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, “It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly,” he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility. Our own growing belief that man might nevertheless learn to fly was based on the idea that while thousands of the most dissimilar body structures, such as insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, were flying every day at pleasure, it was reasonable to suppose that man might also fly…. We accordingly decided to write to the Smithsonian Institution and inquire for the best books relating to the subject.5

  Richard Rathbun, assistant to Samuel Pierpont Langley, received that letter on the morning of June 2, 1899. The letterhead indicated that the correspondent, Wilbur Wright, was, with his brother Orville, the proprietor of the Wright Cycle Company at 1127 West Third Street in Dayton, Ohio. The fellow came straight to the point: “I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes after the style of Cayley’s and Pénaud’s machines. My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable.” It was “only a question of knowledge and skill.” The final success, when it came, would not be the work of any single individual. Rather, he believed, “the experiments and investigations of a large number of independent workers will result in the accumulation of information and knowledge and skill which will finally lead to accomplished flight.”

  Wilbur assured the officials of the Smithsonian that he was serious. “I am an enthusiast,” he admitted, “but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.” He wished only to avail himself “of all that is already known and then if possible to add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success.” To achieve that goal, he requested copies of “such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the
English language.”6

  Rathbun scarcely gave Wilbur’s letter a second thought. Since Langley’s success with the small Aerodromes in 1896, the Institution had been flooded with a steady stream of letters from would-be aviators. The announcement in 1898 that the secretary had received a grant of $50,000 from the U.S. Army Board of Ordnance and Fortification for the construction of a full-scale, man-carrying version of the Aerodrome flown at Quantico did little to improve the situation. Every aeronautical crank in the nation was now aware that the Smithsonian Institution had money to spend on flying-machine experiments. At least this latest enthusiast had not included the usual plea for government funding.

  Rathbun prepared a quick answer to the letter, and passed it on to a clerk who gathered together the handful of pamphlets to be enclosed. They were reprints of articles originally published in the Smithsonian Annual Report: Louis-Pierre Mouillard’s “Empire of the Air”; Otto Lilienthal’s “The Problem of Flying and Practical Experiments in Soaring”; Samuel P. Langley’s “The Story of Experiments in Mechanical Flight”; and E.C. Huffaker’s “On Soaring Flight.”

  In addition, Rathbun included a few suggestions for further reading: Octave Chanute, Progress in Flying Machines; Samuel Pierpont Langley, Experiments in Aerodynamics; and James Howard Means, The Aeronautical Annual. The Langley, he noted, could be purchased from the Smithsonian for one dollar, postage included. The entire package was in the mail to Dayton the next morning. Wilbur wrote back the following week, offering his thanks for the prompt service and placing an order for Experiments in Aerodynamics.

  It was the most important exchange of correspondence in the history of the Smithsonian. The receipt of those pamphlets set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in the invention of the airplane.