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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  They remained at anchor in the North River making repairs until mid-afternoon of the following day. Wilbur, unwilling to touch any of the food aboard the schooner, subsisted on a single jar of jam that Katharine had tucked into his bag.

  Looking across the choppy waters in the fading afternoon light of September 12, Wilbur could just make out the dark line of trees that marked the Outer Banks. It was nine o’clock when they tied up at the dock in Kitty Hawk Bay. Venturing ashore for the first time in two days early the next morning, he met a young man who guided him up a sandy lane to the Tates’ home, a two-story frame house, sided with unplaned lumber weathered by the elements to a splotchy slate gray.

  Wilbur and Orville chose the fastness of the North Carolina Dunes for their glider trials. Their hosts, the William Tates, posed for Orville on the front porch of their home in the fall of 1900. Mrs. Tate would manufacture new dresses for her youngest daughters from the wing fabric of the discarded 1900 glider.

  Wilbur received a warm welcome. He arranged to lodge and board with the Tates, at least temporarily. There was only one request. Having inspected the shallow open well in the yard, Wilbur asked for a pitcher of boiled water each morning, the danger of typhoid never far from his mind.

  He set to work immediately, assembling the glider beneath a canvas shelter erected in the Tates’ front yard. The woodwork and rigging went quickly enough. Mrs. Tate donated her sewing machine so that Wilbur could cut down the larger panels of wing fabric presewn in Dayton. “I have my machine nearly finished,” he reported to Milton on September 23, taking care to assure his father that there was nothing to fear.

  In my experiments I do not to expect to rise many feet from the ground, and in case I am upset there is nothing but soft sand to strike on. I do not intend to take dangerous chances, both because I have no wish to get hurt and because a fall would stop my experimenting, which I would not like at all. The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn something positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.

  The letter indicates how little Milton knew of his son’s plan. Wilbur had to explain that his machine was a glider—“It is not to have a motor, and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word.”13

  Orv appeared at the Tates’ door on Friday, September 28, equipped with a tent and cots, as well as coffee, tea, sugar, and a few other items unavailable in Kitty Hawk. He had talked a young man named Dillon into watching the shop. Cord Ruse would come in periodically to take care of the repair work; Katharine reported with some pride that she and Lorin were “managers.”

  Orville shared his brother’s room at the Tates for a few days, while they were putting the finishing touches on the machine. When complete, the craft had a span of 17 feet 5 inches, with a 5-foot chord and a total surface area of roughly 177 feet, including 12 square feet of forward rudder. The total weight, without a pilot, was just under fifty pounds. The pilot would lay prone in a cutout section of the lower wing, with his feet resting on the T-bar controlling the wing warping. The elevator was fixed at the leading edge. The rear could be flexed up or down with a hand control to govern pitch.

  The Wrights moved out of the Tate house on October 4, pitching their tent half a mile away. The weeks and months of dreaming were over. The time had come to test their theories in the laboratory of the sky.

  Flight was still a hobby, scarcely more than an excuse for the brothers to take a vacation in a remote place. Perhaps that is why their records of the 1900 experiments are so scanty. Neither of them ever mentioned the day they first left the ground.

  It was probably Wednesday, October 3—the day before they set up their camp at the edge of the dunes. On October 14, Orville informed Katharine that they were “having a fine time” and had tried the glider on three different days. He described a crash on the third day, October 10, that had prevented any further flying since that time. He also mentioned that on Tuesday, October 9, the wind was blowing at 36 miles per hour, surely too high for an attempted flight. October 7 was a Sunday, a day of rest when the brothers always refused to fly in deference to their father.

  With work on the 1900 glider complete, the Wrights pitched a tent on the dunes.

  Joe Dosher’s daily weather log indicates that the winds were “light” from Thursday (October 4) through Monday (October 8). Wilbur went aloft on the kite during the first day of testing, and experience would show that a wind of at least 25 miles per hour was required to get the machine into the air with so much weight aboard. Dosher would not regard a 25-mile per hour wind as “light.” On Wednesday, October 3, he reported that a “fresh” wind was blowing from the northeast. It was the only possible day in the first two weeks of October when Wilbur could have flown aboard the kite.14

  They began the morning with a series of unmanned flights. Within a few minutes, Wilbur found it impossible to resist trying his hand. Orville and Bill Tate stood at the right and left sides of the machine, each grasping a wingtip and holding fifteen or twenty feet of coiled line attached to either side of the craft.

  Wilbur stood inside the cutout in the lower wing, grasping the two inside lower ribs. At his signal, all three men trotted forward into the wind until the craft began to lift, at which point Wilbur pulled himself aboard, stretching his feet out to the T-bar at the rear and placing his hands on the elevator control.

  Orville and Bill Tate began to play out the line as slowly and carefully as possible given the excitement of the moment. Many years later Orville told John McMahon that Wilbur reached an altitude of perhaps fifteen feet on that first foray into the air when the glider began to bob rapidly up and down. Wilbur, experiencing trouble, began to yell: “Let me down!” A sustained tug on both tether ropes settled the craft gently back onto the sand. Orville had difficulty containing himself. Why come down again just when things were getting interesting? Wilbur could only comment: “I promised Pop I’d take care of myself.”15

  Those first few seconds aloft convinced Wilbur of the need to continue testing the glider as an unmanned kite. Typically, he had devised a simple but effective system of instrumentation that enabled him to record all the forces acting on the machine in flight. Joe Dosher had loaned the brothers a hand-held anemometer with which to gauge the wind speed. The pull of the glider on a standard spring fish scale provided a measure of the drag, or total air resistance.

  Readings were taken with the craft flying empty in a variety of wind speeds, and loaded with various weights of chain. At times it was flown as a pure kite, with all the controls tied off; more often, additional lines enabled them to control it from the ground.

  The test sessions lasted for three to four hours on each of the first two days, after which bad weather and high winds brought a temporary end to the experiments. By the morning of Wednesday, October 10, the wind had fallen to 30 miles per hour. Orville reported that “the Kitty Hawkers were out early peering around the edge of the woods and out of their upstairs windows to see whether our camp was still in existence.”16

  They resumed the kite experiments later that morning, carefully recording the parameters of each flight: the weight of the chain loaded on board; the wind velocity; and the amount of drag encountered. That afternoon they moved the tower to the top of Look-Out Hill, a small rise just south of the village at the edge of the dune field. Orville described their testing procedure to Katharine:

  Well, after erecting a derrick from which to swing our rope with which we fly the machine, we sent it up about 20 feet, at which height we attempt to keep it by the manipulation of the strings to the rudder [elevator]. The greatest difficulty is in keeping it down. It naturally wants to go higher & higher. When it begins to get too high we give it a pretty strong pull on the ducking string, to which it responds by making a terrific dart for the ground. If nothing is broken we start it up again. This is all practice in the control of the machine.17

  They had the machine on the g
round and were adjusting the control lines when, as Orville recalled, “without a sixteenth of a second’s notice, the wind caught under one corner, and quicker than thought, it landed twenty feet away.”18

  It was over in a flash—the right side of the machine was completely smashed. The front and rear struts were broken in several places; the ribs were crushed and the wires snapped. The brothers dragged the pieces back to camp and spoke of going home.

  Things looked brighter the next morning. The damage was extensive, but not irreparable. Wilbur and Orville had the woodworking skills, and it would be a shame to abandon the tests so soon. They had been out only three days, and had made only one abortive attempt at a manned ascent.

  As Orville reported: “The next three days [October 11, 12, and 13] were spent in repairing, holding the tent down, and hunting; mostly the last….”19 It was a respite from the excitement of experimentation, and their first opportunity to look around. They were fascinated by what they found.

  Wilbur admitted to his father that he looked upon his stay in Kitty Hawk as “a pleasure trip, pure and simple.” Both brothers relished the elemental nature of the place. Kitty Hawk was a series of houses and a store or two scattered through the marshy woods along Albermarle Sound; there were no harbors or wharfs in the wild Atlantic surf. The fishing boats put out from villages facing the Albermarle—Kitty Hawk, or Manteo and Wanchese on nearby Roanoke Island—and entered the ocean through Oregon inlet, a few miles to the south.

  A few minutes walk along the path leading south out of Kitty Hawk and they were in another world, far from the trees and marsh grass. The three great Kill Devil Hills, enormous mountains of sand, were the first in a series of dunes stretching forty miles down the Banks to Cape Hatteras. There was little vegetation beyond a few stunted trees and shrubs that took root in the wind-blown hollows behind a dune. Many years later, when asked by an artist to describe the place where the world’s first airplane had flown, Orville remarked that it was “like the Sahara, or what I imagine the Sahara to be.”

  They were captivated by the undeniable romance of the region. Even the place names—Currituck, Albermarle, Pamlico, Nags Head, Wanchese, Manteo, Ocracoke—had an exotic ring to two city boys from Ohio.

  The earliest chapters of American history had been written on the shifting sands and shallow waters of Dare and Currituck counties. Giovanni da Verrazano and the crew of La Dauphine had cruised this coast in 1524. Verrazano came ashore at the Nags Head Woods, very near the spot where Wilbur and Orville would camp during the years 1901–03. He remarked upon the “sweet savours” of the trees, and kidnapped an Indian lad for presentation at the French court.

  The English followed in Verrazano’s wake. Gazing across Kitty Hawk Bay, Wilbur could see the lonely pines of Roanoke Island, the site of the first English colony in the New World—the Lost Colony, which vanished without a trace.

  Later, this had been Blackbeard’s country. The pirate died in a sea battle fought off Ocracoke in 1718. His decapitated body had swum three times around the Adventure Galley before sinking beneath the waves, or so the Bankers told the Wrights.

  Not all the local pirates had operated at sea. Many of the place names reflected a sinister past. Nags Head and Jockey’s Ridge, for example, recalled the exploits of the legendary eighteenth-century wreckers who ventured onto the crests of the dunes leading a horse with a lantern tied around its neck. The bobbing light, resembling the stern post lantern of an inshore vessel, lured mariners onto the treacherous shoals where their cargo could be salvaged.

  The origin of other place names remained a puzzle. By Blackbeard’s time the spot Verrazano had dubbed Arcadia was already appearing on coastal maps as Chickahauk. Whether this was a corruption of “chicken hawk” or a version of some long-forgotten Indian word is uncertain. Another century would transform it into Kitty Hawk.

  It had always been a harsh and unforgiving country. “But the sand! The sand is the greatest thing in Kitty Hawk, and soon will be the only thing,” Orville exclaimed. He noted that the dune on which they were camping rested on what had once been a small house—fierce winter storms sweeping across the Banks had buried the homestead beneath a mound of sand. The rotting upper branches of a shade tree protruding above the dune were all that remained to mark the spot. Bill Tate was in the process of tearing down a house near the Wright camp site “to save it from the sand.”20

  The Wrights had never encountered anything like a storm on the Banks. “The wind shaking the roof and sides of the tent sounds exactly like thunder,” Orville wrote to Katharine a few days after arriving in Kitty Hawk. About two or three nights a week we have to crawl up at ten or eleven o’clock to hold the tent down. When one of these 45-mile nor’easters strikes us, you can depend on it, there is little sleep in our camp for the night…. When we crawl out of the tent to fix things outside the sand fairly blinds us. It blows across the ground in clouds. We certainly can’t complain of the place. We came down here for wind and sand, and we have got them.21

  The winter cold of the Outer Banks cut straight to the bone, as Wilbur told his father later, in November 1903: “In addition to … 1, 2, 3 and 4 blanket nights, we now have 5 blanket nights, & 5 blankets & 2 quilts.” They ended up at last in “shoes & hats, and finally overcoats.”22

  A plague of black flies and mosquitoes descended on the isolated dune country in the late summer and early fall. “They chewed us through our underwear and socks,” Orville would report to Katharine in 1901. “Lumps began swelling up all over our bodies…. Misery! Misery!”23

  But there was another side to the Outer Banks:

  The sunsets here are the prettiest I have ever seen. The clouds light up in all colors in the background, with deep blue clouds of various shapes fringed with gold before. The moon rises in much the same style, and lights up this pile of sand almost like day. I read my watch … on moonless nights without the aid of any light other than that of the stars shining on the canvas of the tent.24

  Ultimately, it was the Bankers themselves who most appealed to the Wrights. They were a wild, undisciplined, and self-reliant lot, eking out a marginal existence by moving from one job to another with the changing seasons—fishing in the spring and summer, hunting in the fall, and a winter’s work at one of the U.S. Lifesaving Service Stations located every ten miles or so down the Banks.

  There was “little wealth and no luxurious living” in Kitty Hawk. The houses were small and austere. The Tate home, for example, was unpainted inside and out; the floors and ceilings were of unvarnished pine. While clean and comfortable, the furnishings were in stark contrast to the overstuffed Victorian splendor of the Wright parlor. “He has no carpets, very little furniture, no books or pictures,” Wilbur reported.

  There may be one or two better houses here but his is much above average…. A few men have saved up a thousand dollars but this is the savings of a long life. Their yearly income is small. I suppose few of them see two hundred dollars a year. They are friendly and neighborly and I think there is rarely any real suffering among them. The ground here is a very fine sand with no admixture of loam that the eye can detect, yet they attempt to raise beans, corn, turnips, &c. on it. Their success is not great but it is a wonder they can raise anything at all.25

  Subsistence farming was impossible in the thin, sandy soil, although virtually everyone kept a little vegetable patch. “Our pantry in its most depleted state would be a mammoth affair compared with our Kitty Hawk stores,” noted Orville.

  Our camp alone exhausts the output of all the henneries within a mile. What little canned goods, such as corn, etc., [there is] is of such a nature that only a Kitty Hawker could down it. Mr. Calhoun, the groceryman, is striving to raise the tastes of the community to better goods, but all in vain. They never had anything good in their lives, and consequently are satisfied with what they have. In all other things they are the same way, satisfied in keeping soul and body together.26

  “Trying to camp down here reminds me constantly of
those poor Arctic explorers,” he told Katharine. They appointed Mr. Calhoun their agent, and authorized him “to buy anything he can get hold of, in any quantities he can get, in the line of fish, eggs, wild geese, or ducks.”27

  The brothers, unaccustomed to being thought of as rich men, were startled to discover that their arrangement threatened to destroy the local economy.

  The economics of this place were so nicely balanced before our arrival that everybody here could live and yet nothing be wasted. Our presence brought disaster to the whole arrangement. We, having more money than the natives, have been able to buy up the whole egg product of the town and about all the canned goods in the store. I fear some of them will suffer as a result.28

  Hunting and fishing were the major commercial enterprises. Each season tons of fish were shipped north to Baltimore and other East Coast cities. The late nineteenth century taste for exotic millinery led to the decimation of the local egret and heron colonies.

  The Banks were a hunter’s paradise. “The people about Kitty Hawk are all Game Hogs,” wrote Wilbur. Game laws were universally ignored. Each fall thousands of migratory wild fowl were destroyed by professional hunters armed with small artillery pieces known as punt guns.

  In the fall of 1894, six years before Wilbur Wright stepped onto the Kitty Hawk dock for the first time, a young Massachusetts man accompanied one of these boisterous hunting parties to the Outer Banks. The experience made an indelible impression on nineteen-year-old Robert Frost.

  Disappointed in love, Frost had left home to see something of the world outside New England. He arrived in Norfolk aboard a coastal steamer, and walked south out of town into the Dismal Swamp. He stumbled across a boat carrying a party of hunters down the Dismal Swamp Canal, which connected Norfolk with Elizabeth City via the Pasquotank River. They invited the young man to join them on the voyage across Albermarle Sound for some duck hunting on the Outer Banks.