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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  That film remains as breathtaking today as it did in the spring of 1909. It offers a real sense of what it was like to sit there beside Wilbur, exposed on the lower wing of the machine. A string—a simple instrument to enable the pilot to judge the attitude of the airplane—blows back toward your face. The horizon rises and falls at the command of the elevator. You catch a glimpse of the aqueduct looming in the distance, then flash over it and brace yourself as the pilot banks into a turn. It is an extraordinary piece of film.

  By the end of April, the U.S. Army commitment was looming once again. The Wrights had been granted only a year’s extension. It was time to go home. They traveled to London by way of Paris and Le Mans, fêted at every stop. Arriving in London on May 2, they were anxious to conduct a few bits of business and be on their way. The itinerary included a visit to the War Office where they met their correspondents of so many months before. A side trip to inspect the Short Brothers balloon facility at Battersea was far more important.

  Wilbur moved on to Centocelle, near Rome, where he flew in April 1909. This photograph was taken by Hart 0. Berg from the basket of a tethered balloon.

  Two of the Short brothers, Oswald and Eustace, operated one of the most successful balloon factories in England. When the English automobile magnate Charles Stewart Rolls, who had seen Wilbur fly in France, became determined to own a Wright machine of his own, he approached the Shorts with a construction contract. The notion appealed to the brothers, who enlisted a third member of the family, Horace, and left for France to discuss the possibility with Wilbur.

  Will concluded an arrangement with the Shorts, who prepared the first full set of drawings of a Wright Flyer based on measurements of the craft in France. Over the next few months, the Wrights received other inquiries from potential English buyers. Rather than create a new syndicate or turn the business over to the CGNA, they contracted with the Shorts to produce a total of six Wright machines for delivery to English customers. Wilbur and Orville were reassured by their quick visit to the factory—the Shorts could do the job.

  They were in England for only two days, and attended gala banquets both nights. “If the Wright brothers and their sister had the faintest desire for social fame,” one society editor noted, “they could have been fêted from Buckingham Palace downwards.” They were old hands at this sort of thing, though only Katharine seems to have enjoyed it. Wilbur had summed it up back in September. Invited to offer a few after-dinner remarks to his old friends of the Aéro-Club de la Sarthe, he commented: “I know of only one bird, the parrot, that talks, and he can’t fly very high.”21

  Loaded down with gold medals, honorary diplomas, and the good wishes of an entire continent, they boarded the North German Lloyd liner Kronprinzessin Cecile on May 4. An armada of small boats awaited them as they passed through the Narrows and into New York Harbor on the morning of May 11. This was no ordinary arrival. Other ships in the area, their decks covered with cheering, waving passengers, dipped their flags in salute. The band playing on the afterdeck was all but drowned out by the whistles and bells of the small craft moving toward the liner.

  An enormous crowd was watching as they walked down the gangplank in Hoboken. Off-duty officials, anxious to shake hands with the returning heroes, packed the customs shed. There was a cursory search of their luggage. “The inspector obliged Wilbur to exhibit his medals,” one reporter noted, “but it was more to satisfy his curiosity than to fulfill a duty.” Then they climbed into a waiting cab provided by the reception committee and were whisked away to the Waldorf for lunch.22

  New York officials had originally planned to stage a major homecoming celebration for the Wrights. The Congress of the United States, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Aero Club of America had each voted to award them gold medals. Congressman Herbert Parsons invited President Taft to present all three awards in a ceremony in New York soon after the Wrights’ return to America. But Governor James M. Cox of Ohio lodged a stern protest, arguing that the Wright Brothers’ Home Day Celebration being planned in Dayton for June 17–18 would be a more appropriate occasion for such a presentation. President Taft humorously invited Parsons and Cox to debate the issue at the White House.

  The Wrights settled the dispute. They cabled New York while at sea, explaining that they wished to return to Dayton as soon as possible. There was work to be done—preparations for the Army trials at Fort Myer.23

  The Wrights were no more pleased by Dayton’s homecoming plans. “The Dayton presentation has been made the excuse for an elaborate carnival and advertisement of the city under the guise of being an honor to us,” Wilbur complained to Chanute on June 6. “As it was done against our known wishes, we are not as appreciative as we might be.”24

  Approaching Dayton on the morning of May 13, they hoped for nothing more than a quiet reunion with family and friends, but were prepared for the inevitable crowd of newsmen on the platform. At Xenia, ten miles from home, Ed Ellis and several other friends boarded the train with a bouquet of American Beauty roses for Katharine, and news that ten thousand people were waiting to greet them in Dayton.

  The boisterous welcome, which included an all-day party, was only the beginning. Mayor Burkhardt and a delegation from City Hall called at 7 Hawthorn Street the next day, outlining plans for the “real celebration” being planned for mid-June. Wilbur and Orville spent every spare minute over the next few weeks back at the old bike shop and in a new work area set up in the barn behind Lorin’s home. They were putting together the parts for the airplane that would be flown at Fort Myer, testing propellers, and generally working to ensure a successful demonstration.

  They also did some traveling, visiting Russell Alger at the Packard plant in Detroit in late May. Alger was one of a group of industrialists considering the establishment of a company to produce Wright aircraft. Two weeks later they returned to Washington for a full day of business and ceremony. Unable to attend the celebration in Dayton later that month, President Taft had invited the Wrights to the White House to accept the Aero Club of America medal.

  Their train arrived at Union Station, the splendid new gateway to the nation’s capital, at 8:40 that morning. The waiting reporters, many of whom had covered the Army trials at Fort Myer, recognized Orville and Katharine at once. Katharine, who had a good memory for faces, startled several of the newsmen by remembering their names.

  The reception committee arrived on the heels of the reporters. A. Holland Forbes, president of the Aero Club of America, led the conquering heroes to a taxi that whisked them off to the Willard Hotel, where another crowd waited. Katharine was escorted up to the suite of rooms reserved on the fifth floor, while her brothers remained in the lobby, shaking hands and accepting the congratulations of well-wishers. As at the station, everyone seemed to recognize Orville immediately. Wilbur’s face was less familiar to Washingtonians. To his great delight, Holland Forbes was mistaken for the elder Wright brother several times that morning.

  Rested and refreshed, Katharine left for a small reception at the home of Mrs. C. J. Bell, wife of the treasurer of the Aero Club of Washington. Squier and Lahm walked the brothers one block west along Fourteenth Street for an appointment with their superior, Brigadier General James Allen, Chief Signal Officer of the U.S. Army.

  They left the War Department at noon, accompanied by Squier, Lahm, and Allen, and walked a long block past the White House, turning up Madison Place to the Cosmos Club, where a gala luncheon was scheduled in their honor. A bastion of masculine conservatism, the club suspended a cardinal rule on June 10, 1909. In Katharine’s honor, ladies were admitted to the luncheon. Wilbur and Orville found their sister, herself a career woman with moderately feminist views, already on the scene and very pleased. The 159 guests included some of the best known and most powerful figures in the city, from the aging Alexander Graham Bell to the leaders of the House and Senate.

  Promptly at 2:15 P.M., the entire party walked across Lafayette Square to the White House, where they joined other dig
nitaries assembled in the East Room. The great double doors to the central hallway were thrown open at 2:40. Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine Wright were escorted in, accompanied by Holland Forbes and Representative Herbert Parsons of New York.

  After a round of applause, Forbes offered some remarks on behalf of the Aero Club of America. President Taft’s speech was brief and laced with humor. He assured the audience that, while his own girth would keep him on the ground, he shared the universal interest in flight. The work of the Wright brothers was something in which all Americans could take pride. “You made this discovery by a course that we of America feel is distinctly American, by keeping your nose right at the job until you had accomplished what you had determined to do.”25

  Back in Dayton, every member of the family was caught up in the final preparations for the Wright Brothers’ Home Days Celebration on June 17–18. “You must be pretty well satiated with glory,” Chanute remarked on June 16. “The harvesting of prizes, the receiving of unstinting praise, the reception of numerous medals” would now be capped by acclaim at the carnival.26

  The Wrights were universally admired as the first real heroes of the new century. The great Homecoming Celebration staged by the citizens of Dayton on June 18, 1909, included a “living flag” composed of local grade schoolchildren.

  Aware that the Wrights regarded all this as a waste of precious time, Chanute advised them to accept the inevitable. “I know that the reception of such honors becomes oppressive to modest men … but in this case you have brought the trouble upon yourselves by your completing the solution of a world-old problem, accomplished with great ingenuity and patience at much risk of personal injury to yourselves.”27

  The great carnival included receptions, spectacular parades, band concerts, and fireworks featuring pyrotechnic portraits of Wilbur and Orville, intertwined with the flag, eight feet tall. Bishop Wright delivered the invocation at the ceremony on June 18. His sons, clad in morning coats and top hats, received a gold Congressional Medal from General Allen, a state gold medal from Governor Judson Harmon, and a City of Dayton medal from Mayor Burkhardt. A gigantic “living flag,” composed of schoolchildren dressed in red, white, and blue, topped off the festivities with a serenade. That evening the entire family gathered at the grandstand on the corner of Monument and 1st as guests of honor at a spectacular automobile parade and the closing ceremony.

  Wilbur and Orville left the reviewing stand as early as possible that evening. A telegram from Washington had informed them that the crates containing the airplane had reached Fort Myer. They would be up early the next morning, off to catch the familiar ten o’clock train for the nation’s capital.

  chapter 29

  THE WRIGHT COMPANY

  June 1909~November 1909

  Despite the celebrations, Wilbur and Orville had accomplished a great deal in Dayton. Wilbur knew now that the accident last September had not been his brother’s fault. During the past month they had spent as much time as possible in Lorin’s barn, testing a replica of the failed 1908 propeller. They cracked the first test blade after less than two minutes’ running time. Obviously, the new propeller design had a weak spot on the concave side that allowed the blade to flatten and split. The problem was easily solved by strengthening the blade at that point.

  “I am glad it was no carelessness of Orville that brought about the catastrophe,” Wilbur told Chanute. “It is so easy to overlook some trifling detail when setting up a machine under the conditions which existed at Fort Myer, that I feared he might have failed to properly secure a nut somewhere.”1

  They were determined that nothing would go wrong this time. Nor would there be any distractions. Newsmen and everyone else were kept at arm’s length. By June 24 the airplane appeared to be ready for testing. The newspapers expected that the Wrights would fly immediately, but they remained indoors for two more days, tuning the engine. The entire Senate trooped across the river on June 26 to witness the first flight of the season, but the Wrights still refused to fly. It was too windy. The newspapers charged that they were “No Diplomats” and had “Snubbed Congressmen.”2

  Critics took advantage of the situation. Carl Dienstbach, an antagonist of long standing, was a music critic turned aeronautical enthusiast who had attacked the Wrights in the German press as early as 1905. Since then he had published a series of articles in American magazines extolling Augustus Herring. The delay in flying at Fort Myer provided material for a vicious attack in American Aeronaut:

  we had the tragi-comic spectacle of the “kings of the air,” their brows fresh with the laurels of Dayton’s great celebration, wearing the halo of surpassing records on two continents and strong in their renewed cooperation, doing—nothing, or, what was worse in the popular estimation, tinkering at a machine as if it had been the crudest experimental make shift, and frightened by the lightest breath of air….3

  Their friends were as impatient as their enemies. “They tinkered and fussed and muttered to themselves from dawn to dusk,” Benny Foulois remarked. “It seemed as if they would never say they were ready to go.” Foulois found Orville the more talkative of the two.

  When you spoke to the two of them, it would be Orville who would answer, and Wilbur would either nod assent or add an incomplete sentence as his way of corroborating what his younger brother had said. At no time did I ever hear either of them render a hasty or ill-considered answer to any question I asked, and sometimes they took so long to reply that I wondered if they had heard me.4

  As a matter of principle, Orville would do all of the flying at Fort Myer. He finally took to the air on June 29, beginning with four cautious flights, the longest lasting only forty seconds. It would take a while for him to feel easy at the controls again. The wing-warping handle now featured a “bent wrist” control for the rudder. The pilot simply turned his wrist to activate the rudder, while moving the entire lever to the front or rear to warp right or left. There was also a spark-retarding pedal on the footbar for throttling the engine.

  The trials got off to a rocky start: Orv smashed a skid in landing on the second day. Then, on July 2, the engine stopped cold while he was in the air, forcing him to glide in for a landing—straight into a small thorn tree.

  He was badly shaken but uninjured. The airplane, however, had suffered two broken skids, a large section of torn fabric, and several cracked ribs. Spectators broke through the cordon of troops and ran toward the crash. When Will reached the scene he found them stripping the tree of souvenir branches; worse, a photographer stood taking pictures of the damaged craft. Without thinking, Wilbur grabbed a piece of wood from the ground and threw it at the fellow, then demanded the exposed photographic plate.5

  The brothers returned to Fort Myer to complete the Army acceptance trials in 1909. Orville did all the flying, while Wilbur (in the derby) supervised preparations on the ground.

  He had done the same thing once in France. On the second day of flying at Les Hunaudières, Wilbur noticed a French officer in the grandstand taking photos of the Flyer as it was being wheeled out for takeoff. He leaped over a low fence and confronted the photographer, refusing to move until he had obtained the plate. The situation at Fort Myer proved to be a bit more embarrassing. The photographer, an official representative of the War Department, finally received an apology.6

  The damage could be repaired in a few hours; the torn fabric was more serious. Orville had to return to Dayton to prepare a new wing covering. Back in Washington on July 7, he flew again on July 12. The serious problems were behind them now. He set a new duration record of 1 hour, 20 minutes on July 20, and a new record of 1 hour, 12 minutes for flight with a passenger, Lieutenant Lahm, on July 27. That flight also satisfied the Army requirement for a one-hour minimum time aloft with an observer.

  One final demonstration remained. The all-important speed trial on which the purchase price of the Flyer would be based was scheduled for July 30. The Wrights chose Benny Foulois as the passenger for this flight. They would take off fro
m the parade ground and fly to Shooter’s Hill in Alexandria and back for a ten-mile round trip. Foulois had arranged for a balloon to be tethered as a navigational aid at the turning point.

  There were perhaps seven thousand people at Fort Myer that day, a smaller crowd than usual. It had rained earlier, and everyone knew that the Wrights refused to fly when the weather was less than ideal. By four o’clock the sky was clearing and the wind had fallen off. Orville announced that he would take off in an hour and a half. Major Charles Saltzman and Lieutenant George Sweet, the U.S. Navy observer, left for Shooter’s Hill with a field telephone.

  Foulois climbed aboard the machine fully equipped for his adventure—two stopwatches dangled from his neck, a box compass was strapped to his left thigh, an aneroid barometer to his right, and a map of northern Virginia stuck in his belt. Orville ran up the engine, then leaned over and shouted in his ear: “If I have any trouble, I’ll land in a field or the thickest clump of trees I can find.”7

  As usual, Orville kept the machine close to earth after leaving the rail, pulling into a slow climbing turn as he picked up speed. They flew two rounds of the parade ground to gain altitude, then swung toward the starting line. Foulois clicked the first stopwatch and they were on their way.

  “All twenty-five horses in the engine were functioning perfectly as we skimmed over the treetops toward the balloon,” Foulois recalled. “The air was bumpy, and I had the feeling that there were moments when Orville didn’t have full control of the machine as we dipped groundward. It was as if someone on the ground had a string attached to us and would pull it occasionally as they would a kite. But each time Orville would raise the elevators slightly, and we would gain back the lost altitude.”8