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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Orville found life at the Cosmos Club “more pleasant … than I expected.” He met “stacks of prominent people,” eager to shake his hand and offer assistance. The newspapers, ever alert to a whiff of romance, called attention to the society belles who flocked around him. He handled the situation with a light touch, admitting to Katharine that he was “meeting some very handsome young ladies,” yet he would “have an awful time to think of their names if I meet them again.”1

  But Orville was never comfortable as the center of attention. Wilbur knew how difficult life could be for a celebrity, and worried that all the attention might distract his brother. “I fear he will have trouble with over-attention from reporters, visitors … &c,” he told Milton. “It is an awful nuisance to be disturbed when there is experimenting and practicing to be done. I am treated with wonderful kindness … but too much time is wasted and nervous energy expended.”2

  Indeed, Orville complained to Katharine on August 27: “The trouble here is that you can’t find a minute to be alone. I haven’t done a lick of work since I have been here. I have to give my time to answering the ten thousand fool questions people ask about the machine. There are a number of people standing about the whole day long.” The strain was beginning to tell, as it had on Wilbur the month before. The closing line of that letter was of particular concern to a worried sister and father. “I have trouble in getting enough sleep.”3

  The process of unpacking and assembling the machine proceeded much more smoothly than it had for Wilbur. “The goods came through in perfect shape,” Orv told him with obvious satisfaction. “They were packed exactly as were the goods sent to Europe. Our trouble there is with the customhouse tearing everything loose and not fastening them again.”4

  While the mechanics uncrated the airplane and laid out the parts, Orville plotted the course for the required cross-country demonstration flights. Taking off from the parade ground, he would fly five miles to Alexandria, make a turn, and retrace his course to Fort Myer. There would be “quite a number of good landing places, though there is one large forest … over a mile wide in which there are no breaks whatever.” He would also have to cross three deep ravines, but most of the route was over open land where he could set down in an emergency.5

  The next task was to meet with the five officers who composed “the committee which will pass upon the trials.” He already knew two of the men, Lieutenant Lahm and Major George Squier, the executive officer to the Chief of the Signal Corps. Squier had prepared the advertisement for bids and would now serve as president of the board. Captain Charles S. Wallace was an unknown quantity.

  The same could not be said for Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge, whose presence as a member of the AEA made both of the Wrights very nervous. Predictably, the lowest-ranking member of the board, Lieutenant Benjamin Delahauf Foulois, became a particular favorite of Orville’s. His avid interest in aeronautics, as evidenced by a Signal School thesis entitled “The Tactical and Strategical Value of Dirigible Balloons and Aerodynamical Flying Machines,” and his light weight (130 pounds, soaking wet) marked him as a prime candidate for pilot training.6

  The Wright trials would cap a full summer for the members of the board, who had already served as the official acceptance panel for the Baldwin airship SC-1. Baldwin and Curtiss arrived on the post with their machine on July 20 and were flying by August 4.

  Baldwin’s contract required his airship to average 20 miles per hour over a measured course, with a system of bonuses and penalties for exceeding or failing to achieve that speed. Baldwin stood at the rear of the machine manipulating the rudder; Curtiss rode up front, manning the elevator control and monitoring the engine. The speed trial came on August 14, when the two men set out for Cherrydale, a little over four miles away. They covered the course at an average speed of 19.61 miles per hour. That .039 difference resulted in a 15 percent penalty deducted from the bid price of $6,750.7

  Baldwin and Curtiss were also required to train three Army officers—Lahm, Selfridge, and Foulois—to fly the airship. Foulois was the first. The young lieutenant thought the flight “thrilling beyond words.” It lasted only about ten minutes, and Foulois was kept too busy reacting to Baldwin’s commands to worry about being aloft

  with only a bag of air holding me up and four Oregon spruce bars held together by wire holding me in. But being airborne, with the controls in my hands and the hot engine blasting me in the face sent a surge of joy through my whole body that defied description. As we chugged around the Fort Myer parade ground, I looked eastward to the Capitol, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial glistening in the bright morning sun. It was one of those sights a person never forgets.8

  Between flights, Foulois had ample opportunity to observe Orville Wright. It seemed to Foulois that he and his mechanics lived in a world of their own. “They paid no attention to anyone else,” he recalled, “and shrugged off all questions from onlookers. They talked only to each other, as though they were on a desert island miles from civilization.”9

  Concentration was needed—the engine refused to run up to speed. The Wright contract with the Army had established a basic purchase price of $25,000 providing the machine was able to maintain an average speed of 40 miles per hour during the tests. There would be a bonus of $2,500 for each additional mile per hour, and a similar penalty for each mile per hour less. The engine had to perform without a miss. Some higher octane gasoline, a set of new oil cups, and a bit of tinkering with the magneto solved the problems.

  The airplane passed the portability test on September 1, when it was loaded onto an Army wagon and moved from the balloon shed to a large tent pitched at the edge of the parade ground, where the derrick and track were already in place. There was a minor accident the next day. Orv made a test run up the track and was returning the machine to the starting point when the crossbar slipped off the rail, dropping the airplane onto the ground. The rope snapped while Marine Lieutenant Richard Creecy was straightening out the resulting tangle. The 400-pound weight grazed his jaw in passing. The damage, both to the airplane and to Creecy, was minor.10

  Orv left the ground for the first time on September 3. As Will suggested, he took it slow and easy, flying a circle and a half of the field in 1 minute, 11 seconds. The President’s twenty-one-year-old son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was there for the event.

  Strangely, the flight attracted little of the attention that greeted Wilbur in France. It was third-page news in the Washington Evening Star. The whole thing would take a bit of time to sink in. The Europeans were flying-machine connoisseurs—they knew what to expect, and Wilbur gave them more. He showed a knowledgeable crowd what it meant to really fly. That was the source of the excitement.

  Washingtonians had seen Baldwin, Curtiss, and their officer-pupils chugging up and down the Potomac all day, every day. After that, Orv’s circle and a half of the parade ground did not seem like much. It took a few days to realize that this was something different indeed.

  Orville flew three miles the next day, and was in the air at every opportunity over the next week and a half.11 As the flights grew more spectacular, the crowds swelled. September 9 was a red-letter day. With three cabinet secretaries looking on, Orville set three world records. On the first flight he remained in the air for 57 minutes and 13 seconds—a new world endurance record. A few minutes later he went up again, breaking his own record by remaining airborne for 62 minutes, 15 seconds. Next he made his first passenger flight in public, taking Lieutenant Lahm for a 6-minute, 24-second spin. It was a new endurance record for flight with a passenger.

  On September 10, Orville remained in the air for 65 minutes, 52 seconds, shattering his record for the third time. He did it again on September 11, with a flight of 70 minutes, 24 seconds. On September 12, with Chanute in the audience, Orville took Major Squier up and set a new record of 9 minutes, 61/3 seconds for flight with a passenger. He went back up by himself that afternoon and shattered the basic endurance record yet again.

 
; High winds and an engine overhaul kept him on the ground until September 17, when he was scheduled to fly with Selfridge. Orville was not looking forward to it. “I will be glad to have Selfridge out of the way,” he told Wilbur. “I don’t trust him an inch. He is intensely interested in the subject, and plans to meet me often at dinners, etc. where he can try to pump me. He has a good education, and a clear mind. I understand that he does a good deal of knocking behind my back.”12

  Still, Selfridge, as a member of the official board, was entitled to a ride. They took off at five o’clock in the afternoon. It was the first time Orville had flown in five days. He was dressed in his usual flying costume, a neat suit with a billed cap. Selfridge wore his uniform pants and blouse. Reporters noted that he handed his jacket and hat to a friend as he climbed aboard the machine.13

  They made three circles of the parade ground, keeping relatively low and well inside the circle of surrounding buildings. As they began the third circle, Orville eased the nose up, climbing above 100 feet. This time he intended to make a broader turn. They were moving directly toward the wall of Arlington Cemetery when Orville heard, or felt, a slight tapping at the rear of the machine.

  He looked over his shoulder and could see nothing wrong, but decided to cut the power and land as soon as he had completed a turn back toward the crowd. Two or three seconds after the first taps had alerted him, there were two audible thumps, followed by a violent shaking. The airplane slewed to the right. Orville reached to cut the power, assuming that the problem was in the transmission system. He struggled with the controls as the left wing continued to drop, pulling the nose down until the craft was headed straight for the ground. Selfridge, who had been silent up to this point, looked at Orville and murmured, “Oh! Oh!” The machine hit the ground moving at top speed and nosed over, burying Orville and Selfridge in a tangle of debris.14

  The crowd surged across the parade ground toward the cemetery gate, three mounted troopers leading the way. Orville was pulled from the wreckage first, bleeding and unconscious. A physician in the crowd tended him while Charlie Taylor and several officers worked their way through the wreckage toward Selfridge. Like Orville, he was unconscious and bleeding from the head. A field ambulance arrived within a few minutes, but Army physicians on the scene decided it would be safer to transport both men to the post hospital by stretcher.

  Orville demonstrated the performance of their machine for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia. Tragedy, and the first fatality suffered in a powered airplane crash, came on September 17, 1908.

  As the troopers dispersed the crowd, newsmen and friends gathered in front of the post hospital to wait for the medical reports. Orville suffered a broken left thigh, several broken ribs, scalp wounds, and an injured back. He was in shock, but would survive. Selfridge was in more serious condition, with a severely fractured skull. He had been taken into surgery.

  The reporters interviewed the more knowledgeable spectators while waiting for further news. Flint was there, and remarked that he hoped the crash would not blind the public to the great things Orville had accomplished earlier in the week. Chanute was the first to suggest that the accident was the result of a broken propeller blade. The final bulletin was issued at about eight-thirty that evening: Thomas Selfridge had died without regaining consciousness a few minutes after being wheeled out of the operating room.15

  Milton was conducting family business near Richmond, Indiana, when the news arrived. If his laconic diary entry is any indication, he took it better than might be expected—“Orville injured. Orville’s disaster at 5; Selfridge’s death.”16

  Katharine had just come home from school when she received her telegram. She immediately contacted her superiors at Central High, requesting indefinite leave. There was packing to be done, and arrangements to be made for a trip to Washington that evening. She would nurse Orv herself, or supervise those charged with his care. Katharine had spent her last day as a full-time teacher.17

  Wilbur was in the hangar with his airplane preparing to try for the Michelin prize when word of the disaster reached him at eight o’clock the following morning. He closeted himself in the shed for a time. Then, as François Peyrey reported, he emerged, canceled all flights for a week, and set off on his bicycle for Le Mans, where he would wait for further news.18

  Wilbur’s reaction fit a pattern that had been emerging at least since the time of the first trip to France in the spring of 1907. He was convinced that things went wrong when he was not there to prevent it. Orville was simply not as careful as he was. He wrote to Katharine on September 20:

  I cannot help thinking over and over again “If I had been there, it would not have happened.” The worry over leaving Orville alone to undertake those trials was one of the chief things in almost breaking me down a few weeks ago and as soon as I heard reassuring news from America I was well again…. It was not right to leave Orville to undertake such a task alone. I do not mean that Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who with the most friendly intentions in the world would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from getting the proper rest. A man cannot take sufficient care when he is subject to continual interruptions and his time is consumed in talking to visitors.19

  Wilbur clearly believed the accident was the result of his brother’s carelessness. “I suspect that Orville told Charlie to put the … screws [propellers] on instead of doing it himself, and that if he had done it himself he would have noticed the thing that made the trouble, whatever it may have been”—a mistake Wilbur did not think he would ever make. “People think I am foolish because I do not like the men to do the least important thing on the machine.”20 Perhaps now everyone would understand the necessity for such care.

  There was never much question about the cause of the accident. On September 9, a split had been noted in one of the original propellers shipped from Dayton. Orville and Charlie Taylor had repaired the blade, then wired Lorin in Dayton requesting that he ship two new replacements. The “big screws” bolted in place on September 16 had the same chord as the original blades, but were six inches longer.

  Following the accident, the left blade was found to be in perfect condition. The right blade was splintered and broken—a split similar to that discovered the week before in one of the old blades had opened up while the machine was in the air on September 17, flattening the blade slightly. The unequal thrust between the two blades had created the light tapping sound that Orville had heard; the differential pressure caused the right propeller support to give a little. The blade swung just far enough out of line to clip one of the guy lines holding the rudder in place. The rudder had then twisted out of position, forcing the machine into the ground.

  The Army accepted the explanation without question and made it clear that the accident would not be held against the Wrights. “Of course we deplore the accident,” George Squier commented,

  but no one who saw the flights of the last four days at Fort Myer could doubt for an instant that the problem of aerial navigation was solved. If Mr. Wright should never again enter an airplane, his work last week at Fort Myer will have secured him a lasting place in history as the man who showed the world that mechanical flight was an assured success. No one seems to realize at this close range what a revolution the flights portend. The problem is solved, and it only remains to work out the details.21

  Before his release from the hospital, the Army assured Orville that the Wrights would be given a contract extension permitting them to return to Fort Myer to complete the demonstration flights in the summer of 1909. No penalties would be imposed. “I’ll be back next year with a new machine,” Orville told Squier firmly. “We will make good on our contract.”22

  chapter 28

  POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE

  November 1908~June 1909

  Orville was in the hospital at Fort Myer for seven weeks, with Katharine beside him the entire time. “The nurses are nice,”
she told Agnes Osborn, “but Orville likes to see me.” He was incoherent for a considerable time after her arrival. “I kept him quiet all afternoon by reading to him,” she noted on September 22. “He does not hear what I read, but the monotonous sound of my voice puts him to sleep often.”1

  Katharine herself was well cared for. “You never saw such kindness and consideration in all your life,” she assured Agnes. “Everybody from the Secretary of War on down has offered me the town. Maj. Squier, the head of the Signal Corps [sic], the department for which the flying machine was being [built] is just about the handsomest man I’ve ever seen.” No, she had forgotten about Captain Bailey, the surgeon in charge of Orv’s case. “I never saw a more winning face than he has and I am told that he is a good surgeon.”2 Katharine’s judgments of the opposite sex had mellowed.

  With Chanute’s help and advice, she did her best to protect her brother’s interests. She was particularly concerned about the members of the AEA, all of whom were in Washington to serve as pall bearers at the Selfridge funeral. Three of them—Bell, McCurdy, and Casey Baldwin—called on Orville at the hospital on September 23, but were refused admission by the doctors. They left their cards, then walked to Arlington Cemetery to pay their respects. Passing the balloon shed where the crated Flyer was awaiting shipment back to Dayton, they prevailed upon the Army guard to let them in. The crate was not sealed, and the sergeant on duty later recalled that Bell took at least one measurement from the wings.

  Outraged, Katharine asked Chanute to investigate. After interviewing the sergeant, Chanute assured her there was nothing to worry about—Bell was only checking the wing chord.3 Katharine was not so sure. Where her brother’s interests were concerned, she could not be too careful.