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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  With the design complete, Wilbur and Orville felt it impossible to postpone getting back into the air. On June 19 they informed Chanute that “changes in our business arrangements” would enable them to leave for Kitty Hawk much earlier than originally planned.7 That change had come in the person of Charles Taylor.

  Charlie was an old friend. Born on May 24, 1868, near Cerro Gordo, Illinois, he had quit school after the seventh grade and worked at a variety of mechanical trades before meeting Henrietta Webbert at the Jolly Young Men and Girls Club in Kearney, Nebraska, in 1892. Four years later, married and finding it difficult to establish themselves in Nebraska, the couple moved to Dayton, where Henrietta’s brother said there were jobs to be had. Charlie worked at Stoddard Manufacturing for a time, then established his own machine shop.

  The Wrights met Charlie through his brother-in-law, who owned the building where the Wright Cycle Company was located. They liked him at once, and directed business his way. Charlie helped to plan the production of the oil-retaining wheel hub of which the Wrights were so proud, and machined the original coaster brakes for the Van Cleve bicycles.

  Eventually Taylor tired of struggling as an independent and took a job with the Dayton Electric Company. Strolling home after work on a hot Saturday night in June 1901, he stopped off to say hello to the Wrights, who were open late that evening. “One of the brothers, I forget which, asked me how I would like to go to work for them,” he remembered many years later.

  There were just two of them in the shop and they said they needed another hand. They offered me $18 a week. That was pretty good money; it figured to 30 cents an hour. I was making 25 cents at the Dayton Electric Company, which was about the same as all skilled machinists were getting. The Wright shop was only six blocks from where I lived—at Calm and Grant streets—and I could bicycle to lunch. Besides, I liked the Wrights. So I said all right and I reported in on June 15. That was in 1901.8

  Katharine always had trouble with Charlie. She found him altogether too sure of himself for a “hired man.” Then there were the cigars—Charlie smoked them one after another, consuming up to twenty a day. But Wilbur and Orville knew that Charlie could be counted on to get the job done. They must have been convinced that he was honest as well, for they were about to trust him with their livelihood.

  Just a year before, Wilbur had explained to Chanute that they could not afford to allow a hobby to interfere with their business. Now they were hiring Taylor to watch the shop at the height of the season because they could not wait an extra month to resume their experiments. It was out of character—and a clear indication of shifting priorities.

  Four days after Charlie started work, Wilbur told Chanute they would leave for Kitty Hawk by July 10. Chanute immediately wired Dayton to ask if he could pay a personal visit on the afternoon of June 26. There was a dinner that evening, but it seems likely that the three men, lost in conversation, scarcely noticed what they were eating. The discussions continued into the next day, right up until Chanute caught the afternoon train for Tennessee, where he planned to visit Edward Chalmers Huffaker, an assistant who was at work on a new glider designed by Chanute.

  One of the most experienced and best educated aeronautical experimenters in the United States, Huffaker was a graduate of Emory and Henry College, and held an M.S. in physics from the University of Virginia. His interest in flight was inspired by Langley’s work, and that of the American expatriate Hiram Maxim. He had written to Chanute in 1892, describing his own experiments with a series of glider models. Chanute invited the young engineer to offer a paper at the great aeronautical meeting in Chicago.9

  The Wrights listened politely as Chanute described his contract with Huffaker, unaware that a plan linking them to the Tennessee engineer was already forming in the mind of their guest. While Chanute did not broach the subject, he was a firm believer in the team approach to aeronautics, and regarded his own experience at the Indiana Dunes as a model. By gathering a small group of talented young enthusiasts at an isolated site for a period of intense testing, he had been able both to compare the performance of various glider types and to encourage a cross-fertilization of ideas.

  Wilbur and Orville’s new round of glider tests offered a golden opportunity to do it all again. Huffaker should be sent to join the brothers at Kitty Hawk with the glider that he was completing. Chanute also had George Spratt, a young physician from Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in mind as a possible team member.10 Spratt had never constructed a machine or seen a glider fly, but his thoughts on the subject intrigued Chanute.

  George Alexander Spratt had first written to Chanute in April 1899. He had been fascinated by flying creatures since boyhood—“Flying has been the dream of my life,” he confided. “I never scared a bird up or saw it cross a valley, but what I longed to go with it and envied it.” The young man devised an apparatus to measure the lift of curved surfaces, and conducted test flights with a large model glider that proved rather disappointing.

  He refused Chanute’s offer to pay for the materials to be used in building a full-scale version of his glider, remarking that he would “bungle” the job and waste the money. What better experience than two weeks with the confident Wright brothers?

  Chanute recognized that the situation was not precisely what it had been in 1896. The Wright brothers were not his employees, and had no desire to be members of any team. Still, Chanute intended to take full advantage of the fact that they were polite and would be unwilling to offend him.

  Two days after leaving Dayton, he wrote to Wilbur, expressing his disappointment in the Huffaker glider. “The mechanical details and connections of the gliding machine … are so weak, that I fear they will not stand long enough to test the efficiency of the ideas in its design….”11

  Indeed, as Chanute described it, the machine sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. Huffaker had constructed the wing struts of cardboard tubing, designed the wings to fold for easy storage, and attached the fabric so as to automatically vary the curvature of the wing with changes in pressure. The Wrights found it difficult not to laugh when they first saw the thing.

  Having disarmed the Wrights, Chanute offered a proposal. “If you were not about to experiment, I should abandon the machine without testing, but perhaps it will stand long enough to try it as a kite, and to make a few glides from a height of 15 or 20 feet.” If the Wrights thought they could “extract instruction from its failure,” he would ask Huffaker to join them at Kitty Hawk at his expense. They could call on Huffaker for assistance with their tests in exchange for their help with his own trials. “The latter,” Chanute hastened to add, “I expect to be brief.” In addition, Chanute offered to send George Spratt along, “if you think you want more assistance.”12

  Was the letter an offer of help or a call for assistance? The Wrights had no need of help, and would find the presence of two strangers in their camp a trial and an inconvenience. Still, if Chanute was honestly asking for their assistance in testing his craft and training his people, they could not easily refuse.

  “As to Mr. Huffaker’s trip to Kitty Hawk,” Wilbur replied on July 1, “I do not feel competent to advise you, as you alone can judge whether the probable advantage would justify the expense involved.” They could not accept Chanute’s offer to send Spratt as their helper. “If, however, you wish to get a line on his capacity and aptitude and give him a little experience with a view to utilizing him in your own work later, we will be very glad to have him with us.”13

  Sensing their reluctance, Chanute wrote back on July 3, assuring Wilbur that Spratt was “discreet concerning other people’s ideas,” and that Huffaker was “quite reliable.” “I mention this,” he concluded, “as you told me that you have no patents.”14

  Wilbur responded briskly:

  We have felt no uneasiness on this point, as we do not think the class of people who are interested in aeronautics would naturally be of a character to act unfairly. The labors of others have been of great benefit to us in ob
taining an understanding of the subject and have been suggestive and stimulating. We would be pleased if our labors should be of similar benefit to others. We of course would not wish our ideas and methods appropriated bodily, but if our work suggests ideas to others which they can work out on a different line and reach better results than we do, we will try hard not to feel jealous or that we have been robbed in any way.15

  The Wrights left for Kitty Hawk on Sunday, July 7. A storm much worse than any they had experienced the previous fall held them in Elizabeth City for several extra days. “Anemometer cups gave way at 93 miles per hour,” Wilbur reported to Chanute, “… the highest speed [ever] recorded.”16 Just before crossing the Sound they wired traveling instructions to Huffaker and Spratt, and to Chanute, who was also planning to join them.

  They reached Kitty Hawk dock on Thursday evening and spent the night at the Tates. The following morning they loaded all their camping equipment and lumber onto a beach cart and drove to the campsite at the Kill Devil Hills, where Will had flown the fall before. They were off to a bad start:

  After fooling around all day inside the tent, excepting on a few occasions when we rushed out to drive a few more tent pegs, our thirst became unbearable, and we decided upon driving the Webbert pump, no well where we could get water being within a mile’s distance. Well (pun), we got no well; the point came loose down in the sand and, we lost it! Oh misery! Most dead for water and none within a mile! excepting what was coming from the skies. However, we decided to catch a little of this, and placed the dish pan where the water dripped down from the tent roof; and though it tasted somewhat of the soap we had rubbed on the canvas to keep it from mildewing, it pretty well filled a long-felt want.17

  Work on the hangar for the new glider began on Monday, July 15, and continued for three days. Orv thought it “a grand institution, with awnings at both ends; that is, with big doors hinged at the top, which we swing open and prop up, making an awning the full length of the building at each end….”18

  Huffaker arrived in camp the following Thursday, “and with him a swarm of mosquitoes which came in a mighty cloud, almost darkening the sun.” That, Orville added,

  was the beginning of the most miserable existence I have ever passed through. The agonies of typhoid fever with its attending starvation are as nothing in comparison. But there was no escape. The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything were crawling with them. They chewed us clean through our underwear and socks. Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hen’s eggs. We attempted to escape by going to bed, which we did at a little after five o’clock. We put our cots out under the awnings and wrapped up in our blankets with only our noses protruding from the folds…. The wind, which until now had been blowing over twenty miles an hour, dropped off entirely. Our blankets then became unbearable. The perspiration would roll off us in torrents. We would partly uncover and the mosquitoes would swoop down upon us in vast multitudes.19

  The following night, the three campers set up their beds in the open air beneath wooden frames supporting mosquito netting. At first all went well. “But what was our astonishment when in a few minutes we heard a terrific slap and a cry from Mr. Huffaker announcing that the enemy had gained the outer works and he was engaged in a hand-to-hand conflict with them. All our forces were put to complete rout.”20

  The campers finally stumbled upon the expedient of burning old tree stumps, collected from a sand hollow a quarter of a mile from camp, to drive off the mosquitoes. Spratt, who arrived in camp on the evening of July 25, dragged his bedding out into the open, but returned a few minutes later, agreeing that the smoke was preferable to the mosquitoes. Wilbur wrote to Chanute on July 26, hoping to catch him before he left for Kitty Hawk—“You should by all means bring with you from the North eight yards of the finest meshed mosquito bar you can find. Except for the mosquitoes, our camp life has been pleasant but exciting at times.”21

  They finished the glider on July 26. Between the mosquitoes and the midday heat, it had not been an easy task.

  They made seventeen glides on Saturday, July 27. As in 1900, Wilbur was the sole pilot. Problems were apparent from the outset. The first flight ended with a quick nose down into the sand. With each trial, Wilbur moved a few inches more to the rear, attempting to shift the center of gravity farther back and bring the nose up.

  They returned to Kitty Hawk with a new machine in 1901. As in 1900, Wilbur did all the flying. Bill (left) and Dan Tate (right) helped to launch him into the air.

  The craft remained in the air, but Wilbur, forced to stretch his arm far forward to the control, found that full up or down elevator was still required to maintain command of the machine. “In the 1900 machine,” he would later explain, “one fourth as much rudder [elevator] action had been sufficient to give much better control.”22

  Time after time the glider flew an undulating pattern, as Wilbur struggled to maintain an even keel. Twice it climbed rapidly out of control, then stalled, or stopped dead in the air. Screams from the ground sent the pilot scooting rapidly forward toward the leading edge. To everyone’s relief, the glider pancaked straight down from an altitude of twenty feet, landing without injury to pilot or machine.

  The forward elevator, they realized, had saved the day. That expanse of surface out in front of the main wing had prevented the glider from nosing over or falling off on one wing. It happened again a few minutes later. This time the machine had even begun to fall backward before Will brought the nose down sufficiently to flutter safely back to earth.

  This early indication that the forward elevator would help to keep the nose up in a stall was encouraging, but the basic problem remained. As Orv explained to Katharine, “this is precisely the fix Lilienthal got into when he was killed.” For the first time since they had begun their experiments, the brothers were genuinely frightened.

  Huffaker, whose aeronautical experience had been limited to some work on the Langley models in 1896, failed to recognize the danger, and regarded their work as an overwhelming success. He was particularly impressed by a long glide of 315 feet in 19 seconds, which he thought was probably the best anyone had ever made. “We think,” Orv noted, “that at least three or four better have been made before.”23

  Pitch control was the problem. Wilbur found it impossible not to overcontrol. They reduced the size of the elevator to 10 square feet, reducing the lift at the forward end of the machine and making the elevator a bit less sensitive. It did not help. As in 1900, they decided to pause and gather a full range of data while flying the glider as an unmanned kite before risking any further damage to craft or pilot.

  The results were not encouraging. Total lift remained only one third of that predicted by the Lilienthal tables, and the angle of attack was still much higher than expected. Empty, the machine would not kite at an angle as low as 3 or 4 degrees in a wind of less than 23 to 25 miles per hour. Wilbur recorded their disappointment: “As we had expected to devote a major portion of our time to experimenting in an 18-mile wind without much motion of the machine, we find that our hopes of obtaining actual practice in the air reduced to about one-fifth of what we hoped, as now it is necessary to glide in order to get sustaining speed. Five minutes practice in free flight is a good day’s record. We have not yet reached so good an average as this even.”24

  Although they had not fully tested the controls, it was apparent that the 1901 machine was less responsive than its predecessor. The brothers attributed this to the deeper camber of the 1901 wing, over which the center of pressure might move more slowly. They were also afraid that the center of pressure was reversing directions at small angles of attack.

  That was the heart of the control problem: How to govern the movement of the center of pressure around the center of gravity. The two points coincided when the airplane was flying straight forward in a balanced condition. The elevator and wing-warping controls enabled the pilot to alter the position of the center of pressure to restore balance or to maneuver.

&nbs
p; The Wrights had concluded that the airstream striking the upper surface of the deeply curved wings of 1901 not only increased resistance but caused an unexpected reversal of travel of the center of pressure. To confirm their suspicions, they removed the upper wing and kited it separately. At relatively low wind velocities the surface soared high overhead at a steep angle of attack. As the wind velocity increased, the angle of attack decreased and the pull of the kite line approached the horizontal. Finally, in very high winds of over 25 miles per hour, the wing nosed down at a negative angle, forcing the brothers to pull it up off the sand with the tether ropes.

  Their fears were confirmed. The deep camber of 1 in 12 was leading to a reversal of the center of pressure at low angles of attack, a condition that created the unexpected pitch problems. In addition, a comparison with the drift measurements made in 1900 showed that the new craft had much greater head resistance. Late in July the Wrights ceased testing and remodeled the machine to correct the defects. They reshaped the leading edge spar and added a new spar near the midpoint of each wing supporting a series of short uprights that were used to truss the ribs into a much shallower camber.

  Huffaker had scarcely given a thought to his own machine. His attempts to fly were so pathetic that he had given up early on, abandoning the tattered remnants of the Chanute-Huffaker glider to deteriorate slowly in the sand.

  By the time Chanute finally arrived in camp on August 5, Huffaker was brimming over with enthusiasm for the Wrights and their glider. “He is astonished at our mechanical facility,” Wilbur noted, “and, as he attributes his own failures to the lack of this, he thinks the problem solved when these difficulties are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretical nature which must be met by new mechanical designs.”25

  Very soon after putting the rebuilt machine back into service on August 8, the Wrights tried a new means of launching the glider, kiting it up to an altitude of twenty or thirty feet in a wind of 17 to 20 miles per hour, then cutting loose to glide back to earth. In this way they hoped to make repeated flights from the sand flats, and avoid the time-consuming drudgery of carrying the craft back uphill after every flight. In practice, however, the machine kited at far too steep an angle for launching a glide.