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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  They would need that sort of publicity. The situation in France, Wilbur remarked to Orv, was similar to how an old-time circuit rider had found religion in his district, “in other words, flat on its back.” Weiller, the taxicab entrepreneur who was to head up the Wright syndicate in France, was “about scared out,” and the other potential members of the group, including Deutsch de la Meurthe, were less than enthusiastic “on account of the excitement over recent flights of Farman & Delagrange.”6

  Delagrange made forty takeoffs from Paris, Rome, Milan, and Turin between January 20 and July 10. By the end of June he had remained in the air for as long as 18 minutes, 30 seconds on a single flight. Farman had won the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize; flown in France, Belgium, and America; carried passengers; and captured the European record for time aloft—20 minutes, 20 seconds.

  In America, the members of the Aerial Experiment Association, determined not to be left behind, were now at work on their third powered machine, dubbed the June Bug by Alexander Graham Bell to commemorate a plague of small insects infesting Hammondsport that spring.

  Curtiss made the first three successful flights with the new craft on June 21. By June 25 he was covering distances of up to 725 yards; two days later he raised his own record to 1,040 yards. The members of the AEA told Aero Club of America officials that they would try for the Scientific American Trophy on July 4.

  The trophy was the American answer to the series of rich prizes available to French airmen. Donated to the Aero Club of America in September 1907, it was a silver sculpture, valued at $2,500, to be awarded annually in recognition of a significant achievement in mechanical flight. The first person to win the trophy three times would gain permanent possession; until then, it would stay with the Aero Club of America, which would establish the criteria for the prize and supervise each year’s competition.

  When the trophy was unveiled in the fall of 1907, Aero Club officials announced that the initial award would be made to the first individual to complete a straight-line flight of one kilometer in the presence of designated witnesses. The requirements for subsequent years would be devised to keep pace with the advance of aeronautics.

  The AEA request for official witnesses to be present at Hammondsport on July 4 caught Augustus Post, secretary of the Aero Club, by surprise. Like everyone else, he had assumed that the Wrights would be the first to apply.

  Post discussed the situation with Charles Munn, publisher of Scientific American and donor of the trophy. Munn immediately contacted Orville, offering to postpone the AEA attempt if the brothers would agree to take part in the competition. Orv refused, citing a competition rule requiring all entries to make an unassisted takeoff. There would not be time to add wheels to their machine.

  Obviously, the Wrights could easily have won the trophy, just as they could have won all the prizes being offered in Europe. It would have been a simple matter to put wheels on their machine and choose a flying field large enough so that they could dispense with the weight and derrick launch system. The truth was that the Wrights were simply not interested in competing with latecomers who were infringing on their patents.

  The Fourth of July, 1908, was a triumph for the AEA. Twenty-two members of the Aero Club, including president Allan Hawley, who had given Will his balloon ride in Paris the year before, were present. Charles Manly and Herring were there, along with a small army of newsmen and photographers. Whatever the outcome of the trial, it would be officially witnessed and well recorded.

  High winds and rain prevented a takeoff until seven o’clock in the evening. Manly, who would function as the Aero Club starter, measured off the course, while Curtiss and his crew rolled the June Bug out of its tent-hangar, attached the tail assembly, and ran up the engine. Curtiss took off, rose to an altitude of forty feet, and immediately set the machine back down again. The tail was at a slightly negative angle, making it impossible for the pilot to hold the nose up.

  With the problem corrected, Curtiss took off once again. Trailing a thick plume of exhaust smoke, he flew 5,360 feet in 1 minute, 40 seconds, winning the prize with ease. Glenn Hammond Curtiss had joined Santos-Dumont, Gabriel Voisin, and Henri Farman in the headlines.

  Wilbur and Orville did not share the general enthusiasm. Orv wrote to Curtiss on July 20, citing the assistance he and his brother had given the AEA and noting that all of the key elements of the June Bug were covered in the Wright patent. So long as AEA members confined their activities to research and experimentation, the Wrights were pleased to allow them free use of any features of their patent. “We did not intend,” Orv warned, “to give permission to use the patented features of our machines for exhibitions or in a commercial way.”7

  Wilbur meanwhile had arrived in Paris on May 29. He first checked on the progress at Bariquand et Marre; far from completing any new engines, the workmen had not even assembled the sample engine that Orv had shipped out. Company officials promised to have two complete engines ready for inspection within two weeks. Ten days later Will found that the workmen had damaged the original motor in their efforts to get it started. “They are such Idiots! and fool with things that should be left alone,” he complained in his diary on June 9. “I get very angry every time I go down there.”8

  The disheartening visits to Bariquand et Marre were punctuated by a series of drives into the French countryside in search of a suitable flying field. Anxious to escape the newsmen dogging his every step, Wilbur decided against using Issy or any of the other local areas favored by the French airmen.

  He settled on the Hunaudières race course, near Le Mans, a hundred miles from Paris, where he would find a measure of isolation. In addition, Léon Bollée, a Le Mans automobile manufacturer, offered him factory workspace and a team of mechanics. There were, in fact, few things Bollée would not have done for Wilbur. A sport balloonist and president of the Aéro-Club de la Sarthe, he would become the Wrights’ closest friend in France.

  Wilbur was in need of friends. Alone and operating under a great deal of pressure, his temper and patience grew short. Forgetting how he had felt in 1907 when his brother bombarded him with criticism from a distance, Wilbur made the same mistake.

  “I am a little surprised that I have no letter from you yet,” he wrote on June 3. “The fact that the newspapers say nothing of a visit to Washington leads me to fear you did not stop there in returning home. It is a great mistake to leave a personal inspection of the grounds go till the last minute.”9 Orv understood, and sent off a detailed description of the field at Fort Myer, along with a map, in his next letter.

  Wilbur then launched into a new complaint. The crates containing the airplane arrived at the Bollée factory on June 16—“I opened the boxes yesterday, and have been puzzled ever since to know how you could have wasted two whole days packing them.”10

  The crates were filled with an indiscriminate mass of wood, wire, and fabric. “The cloth is torn in numerous places, and the aluminum [paint] has rubbed off of the skid sticks and dirtied the cloth very badly.” That was only the beginning. The list of damage included smashed oil caps, torn magneto coils, crushed propeller supports, “badly mashed” radiators, broken seats, bent axles, and broken ribs. “I am sure that with a scoop shovel I could have put things in within two or three minutes and made fully as good a job of it. I never saw such evidence of idiocy in my life.”11

  Orville realized what must have happened—overzealous customs inspectors had opened the crates and done a catastrophically poor job of repacking. Aware that Will was wound as tight as a watch spring, he did not press the issue.

  Six weeks of effort were required to assemble the airframe from the broken bits and pieces Wilbur pulled from the crates—twice the length of time he had allowed for the task. Bollée’s mechanics did their best but the language barrier was a constant problem. As Will’s French was rudimentary, he had to perform the most difficult tasks, like wing assembly, himself. “I was the only one strong enough in the fingers to pull the wires together tight, so I
had all the sewing to do myself … my hands were about raw when I was not half done.”12

  The engine remained a problem. With the new French-built power plant still incomplete, Bariquand et Marre shipped the original American engine to the Bollée factory late in June. Will, his fingers still raw, spent two additional days fiddling with it on the test block, working out the problems introduced by the French crew. He was hard at work on July 4 when a radiator hose tore loose, spraying his left side with boiling water.

  Bollée, who was standing behind watching, eased him to the floor and ran to fetch a vial of picric acid for the burns. Wilbur suffered an injured arm, a fist-sized blister on his side, and an even larger blister on his left forearm. The pain did nothing to improve his disposition. “I would really save time by getting into bed and staying there till entirely well,” he wrote to Orville on July 9, “as nothing is done down at the shop except irritate my arm and nerves. If you had permitted me to have any anticipation of the state in which you had shipped things over here, it would have saved three weeks’ time probably. I would have made preparations to build a machine instead of trying to get along with no assistance and no tools. If you have any conscience it ought to be pretty sore.”13

  At last, on the evening of August 4, they carted the airplane from the Bollée factory to Les Hunaudières. As at Kitty Hawk, Wilbur intended to set up housekeeping in the simple wooden shed that housed the machine. The hangar was provided with “a little outfit of cooking,” and a larder stocked with “the finest sardines, anchovies, asparagus &c, &c,” compliments of M. Pellier, “the richest man in Le Mans … and … one of the largest manufacturers of canned goods in France.” There was a small restaurant near the race course, and a farmhouse within a hundred yards of the shed where he could obtain fresh milk and water.14

  Having waited almost three years for this moment, Wilbur was anxious to fly as soon as possible, but a hard rain set in on the morning of August 5 and kept him inside for two more days. Saturday, August 8, dawned clear and windless. It was, he told his brother, “the finest for a first trial we have had for several weeks. I thought it would be a good thing to do a little something.”15

  He took off at about six o’clock that evening and flew two rounds of the field. The whole thing was over in less than two minutes. There was a sparse crowd in the grandstand. The general feeling that the Wrights were a pair of bluffeurs had been growing for the past year as more and more Frenchmen left the ground. A number of French airmen had come each day, however, rain or shine. Blériot was there that evening, and Archdeacon. They knew precisely what they had seen—and they were stunned. Wilbur swept through four great curves, each time banking deeply into the turn. Here was a man who could control his machine to a degree that they had only dreamed of. Truly, as the publicist François Peyrey wrote, Wilbur and Orville were “Les Premiers Hommes-oiseaux.”

  Wilbur captured the imagination of the world with his first public flights in France in late summer 1908.

  Wilbur flew eight more times at Les Hunaudières between Monday and Thursday of the following week. He turned in his best performance—seven circles of the track in 8 minutes, 132/5 seconds—on Thursday, August 13.

  Men and women who had held their collective breath as Farman struggled through his wide, flat turns saw Wilbur fly a tight figure-8 with a slight motion of the hand and a flick of the wrist. It was quite beyond their experience, and proof at last that the Wrights had accomplished all they claimed.

  Word of Hunaudières swept through France that week. The crowds grew larger each day as more people were drawn to see this miracle for themselves. The London Daily Mirror hailed “THE MOST WONDERFUL FLYING-MACHINE THAT HAS EVER BEEN MADE.”16 The Times agreed that the demonstrations at Les Hunaudières “proved over and over again that Wilbur and Orville Wright have long mastered the art of artificial flight. They are a public justification of the performances which the American aviators announced in 1904 and 1905, and they give them, conclusively, the first place in the history of flying machines….”17

  French newspapers like Le Figaro were even more enthusiastic. “I’ve seen him; I’ve seen them! Yes! I have today seen Wilbur Wright and his great white bird, the beautiful mechanical bird … there is no doubt! Wilbur and Orville Wright have well and truly flown.”18

  Georges Besançon spoke for the French aviators in L’Aérophile—“the facility with which the machine flies, and the dexterity with which the aviator gave proof from the first, in his maneuvering, have completely dissipated all doubts. Not one of the former detractors of the Wrights dare question, today, the previous experiments of the men who were truly the first to fly….”19

  Apologies flowed in from experimenters and enthusiasts across France. Archdeacon, who had tried harder than most not to believe, was one of the first: “For a long time, for too long a time, the Wright brothers have been accused in Europe of bluff—even perhaps in the land of their birth. They are today hallowed in France, and I feel an intense pleasure in counting myself among the first to make amends for that flagrant injustice.”20

  “Who can doubt that the Wrights have done all that they claim,” asked the newcomer René Gasnier. “My enthusiasm is unbounded.” Paul Zens commented that “Mr. Wright has us all in his hands. What he does not know is not worth knowing.” Surcouf referred to Wilbur as a “titanic genius,” while Léon Delagrange noted simply: “Nous sommes battu.”21

  Once the intial shock had washed over them, the French aviators retracted a little. Farman, in a Le Matin interview published on August 26, objected that “our machines are as good as his.” Blériot, initially enthusiastic, later reassured his colleagues that the Wrights had only a “momentary superiority.” Charles and Gabriel Voisin refused to credit the Wrights with even that much. “Where was aviation born?” they asked in a joint letter to Le Matin, “IN FRANCE.” “Without wishing to diminish at all the merit of the aviators of Dayton, we permit ourselves to make the observation that French aviation was not born uniquely by their experiments; and that if we have derived some information—moreover very little—from their tests, they have also profited from French genius in large measure.”22

  Voisin had entered the field, built machines, and taught himself to fly, all the while convinced that the Wrights were perpetrating a hoax. A proud man with an enormous ego, he could not admit that his work, the very appearance of his machine, had been shaped by what he knew of the Wright technology. To the end of his life—he died at the age of ninety-three in 1973—he would refuse to accept that Wilbur and Orville had laid the foundation of French aeronautics.

  But such criticism was scarcely noticed outside limited aeronautical circles. After years of relative obscurity, the Wrights were swept along on a wave of popular acclaim that drowned out any dissent.

  Life would never be the same for the brothers after the week at Les Hunaudières. Orville had not flown publicly yet, but already they had achieved a level of international celebrity so incredible that there has not been anything quite like it since. Wilbur and Orville seemed to have accomplished nothing less than a miracle.

  Even in an age that has come to regard journeys to the moon and robot exploration of the planets as commonplace, flight continues to inspire the same sense of awe and power that it did when the airplane was new. Aviation, that most hard-edged of technologies, has somehow retained a component of the magic that was so apparent to the first witnesses who saw Will fly at Les Hunaudières.

  The psychological impact was stunning. If man could fly, was any goal beyond his reach? That was the one great lesson of Hunaudières—and of the flights that would follow in the summer and fall of 1908.

  Having captured the attention of the world during a single week in August, Wilbur paused and shifted his operations to a larger, more suitable field known as Camp d’Auvours, eleven kilometers east of Le Mans. An artillery testing ground, it had been his first choice. Les Hunaudières, surrounded by trees, a grandstand, and other obstacles, was resorted to onl
y when French military authorities rejected his request. Now, in the glare of publicity, the Army relented.

  He made his first flight there on August 21. The atmosphere was incredible, and the crowds so large that Hart Berg and the local military commander were forced to introduce a ticket system. Wilbur was in the air day after day, breaking the few records that had been set by the French and proving his mastery to one and all.

  The members of the new French syndicate were now anxious that he continue to fly in France, generating publicity to spur the sale of the Wright Flyer to governments and wealthy private individuals. Orville would have to undertake the Army trials on his own. Wilbur warned his brother to prepare for some difficulty in mastering the upright controls—“I have not yet learned to operate the handles without blunders,” he admitted on August 15, “but I can easily make turns of three hundred feet in diameter.” He advised Orv to “be awfully careful in beginning practice and go slowly.”23

  chapter 27

  FORT MYER

  August~September 1908

  Orville arrived at Fort Myer on August 20, 1908. The two Charlies, Furnas and Taylor, were already there, supervising the transfer of the crated flying machine from the railroad station in Arlington to the large balloon hangar on the post where it would be assembled. Orville initially registered at the St. James Hotel in Washington, but was quickly moved by Albert Zahm into more prestigious quarters at the Cosmos Club.

  Zahm, an old friend of Chanute’s, had played a key role in organizing the great aeronautical conference at the World’s Columbian Exposition fifteen years before. Now he taught physics at Catholic University, where he was conducting studies of airship-hull resistance with a large wind tunnel. A man who regarded himself as a mover and shaker in official scientific circles, Zahm assumed that Orville would enjoy the limelight.