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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Tom Baldwin drew Curtiss into aeronautics. Attracted by the reliability of the lightweight Curtiss motorcycle engines, Baldwin wrote to the young man outlining his requirements for an airship power plant. He found Curtiss a no-nonsense fellow, not eager to become involved with the flying-machine crowd.

  Baldwin persevered, and became a steady customer. Following the destruction of his airship shed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, he shifted his entire operation to Hammondsport, convincing Curtiss that the small market for aeronautical engines might be worth cultivating after all. Wilbur and Orville were high on his list of potential customers.

  Four days after receiving his first letter, the Wrights were startled to get a telephone call from Curtiss. He was in Columbus, Ohio, on business, and wanted to set up an appointment. Hard at work on a new engine design of their own, the brothers were not interested.

  They met five months later, when Baldwin summoned Curtiss to Dayton to repair the engine of an airship he was operating at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. The Wrights went out to take a look at the gasbag on September 5. Introduced to Baldwin and Curtiss, they invited them back to the bike shop for a chat.

  The meeting was pleasant. Baldwin later recalled that the Wrights were friendly, exhibiting “the frankness of schoolboys in it all, and had a rare confidence in us.” They even pulled out the photographs of the 1903, 1904, and 1905 machines in the air. Fascinated, Curtiss plied the brothers with questions. After they left, Baldwin chided him for being so inquisitive.23

  The year 1906 had brought mixed blessings. The Wrights had received patent protection, succeeded in reducing skepticism in the United States, and won the recognition of the Aero Club of America. Yet they were at an impasse. A year had passed since their last flight. Negotiations with the British, French, and American governments had collapsed, and there were no new avenues left to explore.

  As long as the Wrights were flying, even in secret, stories had leaked to the press—there were results to announce when it was useful. Determined neither to fly nor to release additional photographs, they had run out of ammunition with which to counter the skeptics.

  The problem was especially acute in Europe. When Frank Lahm published the full text of the letter from Henry Weaver in the Paris edition of the New York Herald on February 10, 1906, the paper responded with an editorial of its own. Headlined “Fliers or Liars,” it summed up the doubts that were growing among the members of the Aéro-Club de France. “The Wrights have flown or they 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.’”24

  The Wrights were frustrated but not particularly concerned. They were patient men, convinced that they would find a buyer willing to accept their terms. It was only a matter of time.

  chapter 23

  RIVAL WINGS

  October 1906-October 1907

  By the fall of 1906, Octave Chanute was convinced that the Wrights should unveil their machine at once. “The important fact,” he cautioned Wilbur, “is that light motors have been developed. The danger is that others may achieve success.” Would it not be wise to reduce their asking price and fly in public before a potential rival joined them in the air?1

  “Our friends,” Wilbur responded, “do not seem to exactly understand our position in the matter of supposed delay. If it were true that others would be flying within a year or two, there would be reason in selling at any price, but we are convinced that no one will be able to develop a practical flyer within five years.”2

  Wilbur’s estimate of a five-year lead over all other experimenters was based on “cold calculation.” “It takes into consideration practical and scientific difficulties whose existence is unknown to all but ourselves. Even you, Mr. Chanute, have little idea how difficult the flying problem really is. When we see men laboring year after year on points we overcame in a few weeks, without ever going far enough along to meet the worse points beyond, we know that their rivalry and competition are not to be feared for many years.”3

  Chanute agreed that he did not really understand the problem, but wondered whether the Wrights were not too “cocksure” that theirs was “the only secret worth knowing.” Others might hit upon the solution in less than “many times five years.” “As there are many shapes of birds, each flying after a system of its own, so there may be several forms of apparatus by which man may compass flight.”4

  On November 1, Chanute received the latest issue of the Aeronautical Journal, which announced that Santos-Dumont had made a short hop in Paris on September 13 in an aircraft known as 14-bis. On October 23, he flew the same craft a distance of one kilometer, winning both the Archdeacon Cup and an Aéro-Club de France prize. “I fancy,” Chanute noted with some satisfaction, “that he is now very nearly where you were in 1904.”5

  Wilbur and Orville were not concerned. “From our knowledge of the degree of progress that Santos has attained we predict that his flight covered less than 1/10 of [a] kilometer,” Wilbur replied. “If he has gone more than 300 feet, he has really done something; less than this is nothing.”6

  In fact, Santos had covered a distance of 726 feet in 213/5 seconds. The French were ecstatic, hailing this as the world’s first public flight of an airplane. Strictly defined, that was precisely what it was.

  Between the time of Santos’s short hop in the fall of 1906 and the first public flights of a Wright airplane in the high summer of 1908, a handful of European and American pioneers struggled into the air. Their aircraft were far more primitive than the Wright machine and the distances covered much shorter than those the Wrights could fly. Their activity was inspired by stories of the Wright success, and their machines were based on a sketchy understanding of Wright technology. None of that mattered. They had flown, and the whole world knew it.

  The brothers took a strangely detached view—the European machines were much inferior to their aircraft; few of them incorporated any means of lateral control. None, by their definition, was a practical flying machine.

  They were correct. Yet they lost something intangible by not making the first public flights. However superior their machine, Europeans saw their own colleagues fly at a time when the Wrights were still regarded as bluffeurs.

  The Wrights had not envisaged that someone sufficiently daring might fly a considerable distance in a machine that could scarcely be controlled. That, in fact, was what occurred.

  The ideas planted by Ferber, Archdeacon, and Deutsch de la Meurthe had begun to sprout in the spring of 1904. In March, the editor of L’Aérophile commented on the number of aeronautical projects under way in France. Stefan Drzewiecki was at work on a glider “of the Wright type,” only “a little different from that of M. Archdeacon.” M. Solirène was towed aloft clinging to a frail, birdlike machine; while M. Lavezarri, a talented young painter, conducted tests with a delta-wing hang-glider kite. Léon Levavaseur, an engineer who would emerge as one of the most talented of these first-generation designer-builders, had constructed his first unsuccessful monoplane in 1903. With so many diverse projects emerging, the skies of France would soon be dotted with flying machines.7

  This aeronautical renaissance was rooted in Octave Chanute’s account of the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Since his address to the Aéro-Club in 1903, Chanute had either written or provided the material for a dozen major articles published in France, England, and Germany, illustrated with the photographs taken during his visits to Kitty Hawk. He even helped the staff of L’Aérophile to prepare a set of detailed general-arrangement drawings of the 1902 Wright glider.

  Paradoxically, the articles that inspired the first generation of European flying-machine builders also misled them. Chanute made it clear that the Wrights had achieved very impressive results, and showed the world what their machines looked like. But he could not explain the underlying principles: he did not fully understand the basics of the Wright technology himself, and what he did unde
rstand he had promised not to reveal.

  The general-arrangement drawings of the 1902 glider were a case in point. Chanute gave the wing camber as 1/20, for example, rather than the correct 1/25. Problems were even more apparent in the area of control. Wilbur provided a general description of wing warping in his 1901 paper, which was readily available in France. Chanute had slipped once or twice, revealing that the operation of the rudder was linked to the wing-warping mechanism. He had been scrupulously careful not to reveal anything in the L’Aérophile drawings, however. All of the trussing wires were shown, but none of the all-important control cables.

  As a result, the Wright control system remained a puzzle to the French. Those who read the articles carefully noticed the references to wing warping, but the precise meaning of the phrase and the way in which it was accomplished were a mystery. The experience of one newcomer, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, was typical.

  A nineteen-year-old graduate of the Sorbonne, Esnault-Pelterie made his first flights in “an exact copy” of the 1902 Wright glider near Paris in May 1904. “A great stride seemed to have been taken [by the Wright brothers] in this difficult and delicate question of the conquest of the air,” he explained in L’Aérophile. “We confess that the magnificent results reported on the other side of the Atlantic have left us a little skeptical. But skepticism has no place in science. When an experiment seems surprising, there is a very simple means of resolving the doubts, and that is to repeat the experiment.”8

  The young engineer “scrupulously follow[ed] the instructions, directions and diagrams of the Wrights which were published in L’Aérophile.” The glider was “exactly like that of the American experimenters, in general dimensions, wing curvature, and the arrangement of the controls.” In fact, Esnault-Pelterie used the wrong camber and could only guess at the control system. He installed wing warping, then abandoned it, fearing that the technique “magnified tensions on the wires.”9

  The machine’s performance was disappointing. Certain that the Wright claims were exaggerated, Esnault-Pelterie rebuilt his craft, substituting weight shifting as the primary means of control. In so doing, he was forced to substantially reduce the total surface area. In addition, he reduced the camber to 1/50 and did away with the classic Wright canard.

  In addition to weight shifting, he added twin experimental élevons (ailerons) mounted at the midpoint of the forward struts. These surfaces, operated by hand wheels, were intended to control the glider in both pitch (when used in unison) and roll (when used in opposition).

  During a long series of tests that October, Esnault-Pelterie mounted the glider on a small dolly and was towed into the air by an automobile. While the flights were generally more successful than those conducted in May, the experience convinced him that the automatic stability provided by wing dihedral, in which the wingtips were angled up from the fuselage, was superior to any attempt at active roll control.

  His colleagues agreed. Automatic or inherent stability was the goal of virtually all the early European experimenters before 1908. Their most successful machine, the classic Voisin of 1907–08, retained all the external features of the Wright airplane (biplane, pusher, canard). In terms of control, however, it was a much more primitive and dangerous craft.

  Gabriel Voisin, the young man who built and flew that machine, made his first flight in March 1904 aboard a glider belonging to Ernest Archdeacon. Archdeacon, with his wealth and influence, had replaced Ferdinand Ferber as the dominant figure on the French aeronautical scene. Inspired by Ferber’s type de Wright gliders of 1902 and 1903, and by the news of the Wrights’ success with their powered machine in 1903, he commissioned a glider of his own in January 1904. L’Aérophile described it as “an aéroplane de type Wright 1902,” and noted that “apart from subsequent modifications,” it was “exactly copied from that of the Wright brothers.”10

  Those modifications were considerable. The original wingspan was reduced from 32 feet to 24 feet 7¼ inches, and the wing area, roughly 301–305 square feet in the original, to only 237 square feet. The empty weight of 112–117 pounds fell to 75 pounds. While the precise camber employed by Archdeacon is not known, it was clearly much deeper than that of the Wright machine. Most important, the 1904 Archdeacon glider did not incorporate wing warping, and featured a modified elevator.

  The craft was certainly far sturdier and closer to the Wright original than anything Ferber had built to date. That was to be expected, for the 1904 Archdeacon glider was constructed at the government balloon and airship facility at Chalais Meudon with the advice and assistance of the commandant, Colonel Charles Renard, one of the great French airship pioneers.

  Renard’s personal involvement in the Archdeacon project might have marked the beginning of a serious, government-sponsored heavier-than-air flight research program. Unfortunately, at the moment when interest in military aeronautics was blossoming in other European nations, antimilitarist sentiment and budget cuts eroded the French program. Discouraged by reduced allocations, humiliated by his own failure to win election to the Academy of Sciences, Renard took his own life on April 13, 1905.

  Archdeacon shipped his glider to a test site at Merlimont, near Berck-sur-Mer, in the spring of 1904. His test pilot was a twenty-five-year-old student of architecture—Gabriel Voisin. A native of Belleville, near Beaujeau, he was a dashing fellow, and something of a ladies’ man.

  In later years Voisin took delight in describing the conquests of his youth, which included Marie, a “glorious blonde” seventeen-year-old schoolgirl whose “every gesture” he found “infinitely graceful,” as well as an interchangeable series of housekeepers, seamstresses, dental assistants, postmistresses, landladies, prostitutes, and errant wives. Somehow, Voisin found time to experiment with boats, kites, automobiles, and engines. “My life,” he recalled, “was full, and I never knew boredom.”11

  Early in 1900, while employed as a draftsman by the firm constructing the buildings to house the Universal Exposition due to open in Paris that spring, he came across a group of workmen assembling Clément Ader’s Avion in one of the exhibition galleries. Fascinated, he clambered into the cockpit. From that moment, his life would never be the same.

  In my hands were the mysterious controls which could give life to this incomparable creation. To my right and to my left I saw the mechanism which would drive the airscrew blades. The steam generator need only to be lit to animate this marvel…. Suspended on a tackle, the huge bird was gently lifted and swung from side to side. Why was it in this place? Why was it not up in the sky flying over us and our petty activities?12

  Three years later, in the fall of 1903, Voisin was introduced to Colonel Renard. Impressed by the young man’s enthusiasm, Renard passed his name on to Archdeacon as a potential test pilot.

  Voisin first flew the Archdeacon glider from the dunes at Berck-sur-Mer on Easter Sunday, 1904. He made flights of up to twenty-five seconds in length, but ended the day so battered that Archdeacon cabled Ferber in Nice inviting him to give the nouveau aviateur some flight instruction.

  Ferber arrived several days later. Voisin was pleased to report that his instructor “did not succeed in his trials and bent everything badly.” The two continued to fly through the first two weeks of April, improving with practice. Archdeacon brought a professional photographer out to the dunes, and sent photo postcards showing his machine in the air to the members of the Aéro-Club.

  At the end of the two-week gliding session, Archdeacon was “full of enthusiasm.” He announced that Voisin had mastered the craft, completing flights of over sixty-five feet. The information obtained would be used to design an improved glider that would allow him “to do as well as the Wright brothers.”13

  Most of the members of the Aéro-Club shared his confidence. Now that Frenchmen had taken to the air, the world would see some real progress. And what better way to encourage development than to offer financial rewards to the most successful experimenters? By the fall of 1904, a series of rich prizes stood as bench
marks on the road toward the final victory.

  The Coupe d’Aviation Ernest Archdeacon, a silver trophy valued at 2,000 francs, would go to the first man to pilot a powered airplane 25 meters (80 feet) through the air. Each of the first ten men to fly at least 60 meters would receive 100 francs and a silver medal from the Aéro-Club de France. Archdeacon would present 1,500 francs to the first pilot to complete a flight of 100 meters (330 feet). That lucky fellow would earn an additional 1,500 francs for capturing the Aéro-Club’s Prix pour Record de Distance. Together, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe and Archdeacon established an aptly named Grand Prix d’Aviation of 50,000 francs for the first flight of one kilometer over a circular course. The man who won that prize would have flown—by anyone’s standards.

  Gabriel Voisin was determined to be that man. In the spring of 1905, he was at work on a second glider for Archdeacon. Encouraged by the trials at Berck, Archdeacon had formed a new company, Syndicat d’Aviation, and hired Voisin as the chief engineer and sole employee.

  They set out to build yet another “exact replica” of the 1902 Wright glider, the most successful machine known to them. Unaware that they were basing their craft on incorrect information, they assumed that its failure to match the reputed performance of the original was proof that the Wright claims were overblown.

  In designing a second craft, they retained some external features of the Wright glider (biplane wings and forward elevator), but rejected three-axis control in favor of inherent stability achieved through the use of a three-cell box kite as the main lifting surface and a two-cell kite as a tail. The glider would be towed down a wooden rail and into the air by an automobile.