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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Money was Atwood’s big problem. Given the primitive nature of aeronautical technology, this would be as much an expedition as a flight. The aviator would have to equip himself with at least two airplanes, one to fly and the other for spare parts. He would also need several spare engines, a crew of mechanics, and a means of moving the ground crew and equipment across the nation in his wake.

  Unable to raise that kind of money, Atwood decided on a shorter but still very impressive flight from St. Louis to New York via Chicago, where he would compete in a scheduled air meet. The publicity, he hoped, would attract funding for the longer flight. He left St. Louis in a Model B on August 16 and landed at Governors Island nine days later. The flight was front-page news, but no sponsors came forward.42

  Cal Rodgers, a complete unknown, emerged as the big money winner at Chicago, earning $11,285 for the longest flight of the meet. At thirty-two, he was older than most of the pilots. He was bigger as well, six feet four inches tall and weighing almost two hundred pounds. Rodgers’s family had deep roots in America. One ancestor, Oliver Hazard Perry, defeated the British in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813; another, Matthew Calbraith Perry, opened Japan in 1854. His grandfather was a rear admiral in the Union Navy, and his father a career cavalry officer, who died just before Cal was born.43

  Cal Rodgers came to Huffman Prairie in June 1911 to visit his cousin, Navy Lieutenant John Rodgers, a Wright student. Intrigued, Cal enrolled in the school himself. Confident after his victory at the Chicago meet, he convinced officials of the Armour Meat-Packing Company to sponsor his try for the Hearst transcontinental prize. Recognizing an opportunity to publicize a new grape beverage, “Vin Fizz,” the company agreed to pay for Rodgers’s airplane, to lease a train that would shadow him across the nation, and to pay 5 cents for every mile that he flew. Rodgers would pay for gas, oil, crew, and spare parts.

  Rodgers traveled to Dayton to confer with Orville and purchase a new Model EX, a small, high-powered version of the Model B. He also offered Charlie Taylor $10 a day plus expenses to serve as his chief mechanic, twice what Charlie was getting at the Wright Factory. Charlie was not getting along with manager Frank Russell and jumped at the chance. Informed of the arrangement, Orville advised his old friend to think of the project as a leave of absence.44

  Rodgers took off from a racetrack near Sheepshead Bay, Long Island, on September 17, headed west. His entourage—wife Mabel, Charlie Taylor, and the other members of the support team—followed in a special three-car train steaming out of New York on the Erie Railroad tracks.

  Rodgers suffered his first crash while taking off from Middletown, New York, the next morning. Brushing across the top of a willow tree, he lost control and fell into a chicken coop. He was fine but the EX required major repairs.

  By September 23, he had progressed to Elmira, New York. That afternoon, he destroyed the left side of his machine in a crash.

  Cal Rodgers finally rolled his wheels into the surf at Long Beach, California, on December 10, eighty-four days after leaving Sheepshead Bay. He had suffered five disastrous crashes, each requiring major repairs to the Vin Fizz—not to mention innumerable hard landings, aborted takeoffs, broken fuel lines, blown valves, and engine failures.

  He ended the flight with a pair of crutches strapped to the wing of the airplane. He had broken his ankle landing at Pasadena on November 12 and spent a month in bed before attempting the short final leg of his journey to the Pacific shore. Only the honor of the thing sustained him—he was not even close to the one-month time limit for the Hearst Prize.

  Bob Fowler, another recent graduate of Huffman Prairie, had taken off from San Francisco on September 11, heading his Model B east toward the Rockies. An ex-automobile racer, he planned to dash across the continent in twenty days. The first attempt ended the next day with a crash near Alta, California. Fowler was not injured, but his machine had to be completely rebuilt. He set off again on September 23, but turned back at the Donner Pass, still unable to make his way over the Rockies. Finally, he selected a Southern route that avoided the mountains. He landed at Jacksonville, Florida, on February 8, 1912, 112 days after his takeoff from Los Angeles.45

  Two months later, on April 3, Calbraith Perry Rodgers crashed into the surf near Long Beach. Spectators reported that he lost control after swerving to avoid a flock of seagulls. He died instantly of a broken neck.

  chapter 32

  “A SHORT LIFE…”

  March 1911~March 1912

  Wilbur Wright was forty-five in the spring of 1912—and very tired. “During the past three months most of my time has been taken up with lawsuits,” he told a friend. “I have been away from home most of the time.”1 It had been his turn to journey to Europe in 1911, responding to a summons from Henry Peartree, who handled legal matters for Flint & Company in France. Wilbur left for Paris on March 12, and did not return home until August. Orville’s trip to Germany in 1910 had been short and relatively relaxing. Typically, Will stayed longer and was on the go the entire time.

  He began with a visit to the licensees, where things had not improved since Orv’s visit in 1910. Lazare Weiller’s syndicate was virtually defunct. The Société Astra, which built the airplanes that CGNA sold, had taken over the entire operation. The changeover did not improve sales. “I have spent the best part of four or five days on the accounts,” Wilbur wrote his brother, “and can very readily see where the trouble with our business came from. It was partly incompetence, partly a poor system of bookkeeping which prevented them from ever knowing where they were at, and principally bum motors. There have been three or four different times that we have gained the lead so far as the army [purchasing office] is concerned, and each time have lost it again because the motors were no good.”2 In fact, Wilbur believed that Astra could never make a success of the business. Its machines were not up to Wright standards and its business practices were hopeless.

  The Wrights would not grow rich on the profits from the sale of license-built machines in France, but they might expect some healthy royalty payments if the French patent court ruled in their favor. Wilbur worked hard, offering lengthy testimony and doing his best to assist Peartree. The court ruled in favor of the Wrights, but there were any number of legal loopholes.

  Robert Esnault-Pelterie and the others attempted to use one of those loopholes, arguing that the wing-warping technique had been anticipated by French pioneers. The appeal to French pride led to the formation of the Ligue Aérienne, a nationalist organization whose members “made it their purpose to convince themselves and the world that France was the birthplace of human flight.”3

  Initially, the defense argued that Alberto Santos-Dumont had been the first to fly. The court rejected that argument out of hand. Santos-Dumont was not only heavily influenced by what he knew of the Wrights, but he had not flown until 1906. The chauvinists then reached further back into history to propose Clément Ader.

  The court paid an official visit to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, where the batlike Ader machine was on exhibit, complete with a label claiming that the craft had flown 300 meters in 1897. Wilbur knew that it was not true. Commandant Henri Bonel, who had been there, assured the Wrights that the machine had not left the ground.

  Borrowing a ladder, Wilbur climbed up to take a closer look—the control system was impossible and the wings had so few ribs that they would never hold their shape in flight. “The whole machine is ridiculous,” he told Orv. Disgusted and only half joking, Will suggested that they offer a prize to call the French bluff. “I am intending to offer in our names a prize of 450,000 frs., to be known as the ‘Prix de Satory’ [the 1897 trials were conducted at Satory, France], to commemorate the experiment of 9 October, 1897, the prize to be given to the person who makes the longest flight exceeding one hundred meters with a machine having its wings, screws, and actuating arrangements exact duplicates of those of the Avion….”4

  The aging Clément Ader testified that his plan to turn the machine by running the pr
opeller on one side more rapidly than that on the other corresponded to the Wright system of wing warping. Not even the defense attorneys could swallow that. Undaunted, the leaders of the Ligue Aérienne finally cited Louis Mouillard. Here, they claimed, was the true father of wing warping. Chanute had transmitted Mouillard’s notion of lateral control to the Wrights, who had taken it as their own.

  Wilbur explained to the court, as he had to Chanute, that Mouillard’s plan called for slowing the speed of one wing relative to the other, inducing a flat turn. The notion of a banking turn involving the simultaneous action of both wings with the rudder was entirely absent. Moreover, Mouillard had never flown the glider.

  The court listened, and seemed to agree with Wilbur, but it was clear that the judicial process would not be speedy. There was no sense in his remaining in Paris.5

  Things were no better in Germany or England. He found the German

  company just as shaky as Orville had reported. During his stay in Berlin Wilbur made at least one flight, probably with Captain Paul Engelhard.6

  There were fewer problems in England, but Wilbur was displeased with the way in which individual pilots modified their “Wright machines.” He told Katharine about one fellow who had “added porches, attics and sheds” to his craft, “till it looks like an old farm house which has been in the family for three or four generations.” The man was able to lunge several hundred feet through the air with the thing, but his technique left much to be desired. “When he jams a wing into the ground and whirls around suddenly, he says he has found by experience that he can turn quicker that way than any other.”7

  It was all very discouraging. As he wrote to Orville from Berlin in June:

  If I could get free from business with the money we already have in hand I would rather do it than continue in business at a considerable profit. Only two things lead me to put up with responsibilities and annoyances for a moment. First, the obligations to people who put money into our business, and second, the reluctance a man normally feels to allow a lot of scoundrels and thieves to steal his patents, subject him to all kinds of troubles or even try to cheat him out of his patents entirely. So far as Europe is concerned I do not feel that we are in debt to either the French or German companies. We have not had a square deal from either of them. All the money we ever got from either of these companies will be fully paid for by future work and worries. But I hate to see the French infringers wreck our business and abuse us and then go unscathed…. For the good of the public and the protection of others we ought to do our share to discourage such people a little.8

  Orville met him at the dock in New York on August 9, and they returned to Dayton together. After a few days rest, Wilbur was ready to resume the fight. He brought suit against the sponsors of an unauthorized Chicago air meet, then traveled back to New York to offer still more testimony in the Curtiss case.

  Orville was just as anxious to see Glenn Curtiss brought to justice, but there were other priorities. He was off to Kitty Hawk for the first time in four years on October 7, accompanied by Lorin, Lorin’s ten-year-old Horace (known as Buster, or Bus), and Alexander Ogilvie, their English pilot friend. The trip was proof that the press of business and the patent suits had not completely halted aeronautical research at the Wright Company, at least so far as Orville was concerned.

  Having achieved controlled flight, the brothers had turned to consider automatic stability as early as 1905–06. They recognized that absolute control carried with it the penalty of instability, but were willing to pay that price to obtain complete command of their machine. Next, they were anxious to take a step back and see if it might not be possible to keep an airplane flying straight and level without the intervention of the pilot.9

  They applied for a patent on such a device on February 8, 1908. Well into development by 1911, the automatic stabilizing system was based on a feedback mechanism—a pendulum (roll-yaw) and a vane (pitch) which sensed changes in attitude and activated the wing-warping and elevator controls through compressed-air cylinders to restore equilibrium.

  Orville designed a new aircraft to test the prototype system. The 1911 glider bore a general resemblance to the standard Model B, but was smaller and weighed only a third as much.

  Orville and his party arrived at the old camp on October 10. It was a shambles. Parts of the 1905–08 machine were poking out of the sand. Orville had considered bringing them home with him, but rejected the notion. The parts were “too badly damaged by the weather and the field mice that made an abode in them.”10

  The work went quickly. Most of the first week was devoted to flying kites on the beach with Bus and exploring the Sound side of the Banks in a rented motorboat. The crates containing the glider arrived at the Kitty Hawk dock on October 13. Four newsmen were waiting for Orville when he nosed his boat into the old dock to pick up the machine: D. Bruce Salley, the Norfolk reporter who had ferreted out their story in 1903; John Mitchell of the Associated Press; Van Ness Harwood of the New York Herald; and a representative of the New York World. Two more, Arnold Krockman and a Mr. Berges, both representing the New York America, strolled into camp on October 20.11

  Orville made them welcome, but decided that there would be no tests of the automatic stability system so long as reporters were present. It was just as well. The business of test-flying the new glider proved to be challenge enough. In the air for the first time on October 16, he discovered that both the rudder and elevator were too small; he added an additional vertical stabilizer in front and a larger elevator at the rear, both scavenged from the parts scattered around the camp site. By the end of the afternoon he had completed a glide of 1,223 feet.

  Orville and Alec Ogilvie both did some gliding the next day. Orv, still tinkering with the craft, added a sliding arrangement enabling him to move the front vertical surface two feet fore and aft. The last flight of the day was a near disaster: Orville flew the machine straight into the side of the sandhill. He was not injured, but the entire left side of the machine was smashed.

  There was another accident on October 23. Ogilvie and Lorin had just released the machine into the air when it reared up and flipped over on its back. Once again, Orville walked away from a crash that severely damaged his machine.

  Tuesday, October 24, dawned cool and sunny. The wind was blowing across the top of the big hill at 40 miles per hour. Orville made twenty glides that day, several of them quite spectacular. On one flight he rose to an altitude of 50 feet and remained in the air for 5 minutes, 29 seconds. On two other occasions he stayed up for 7 minutes, 15 seconds. The best flight of the day—9 minutes, 45 seconds—was almost unbelievable. Orville seemed to hang suspended in the air, moving back and forth over one spot for almost ten full minutes. The crew measured his path across the ground when it was all over and discovered that he had moved a total distance of only 40 yards.

  Once again, Kitty Hawk had rewarded the Wrights with perfect conditions. The weather, combined with the aerodynamic improvements built into the machines since the last time they had gone gliding in 1903, resulted in the first example of true soaring. The long flight of October 24 would stand as a world’s record for unpowered, heavier-than-air flight for ten years. It was Orville’s longest standing record.

  The good flying weather held for a few more days. Orville made thirty-one flights on October 25 and twenty-four on October 26, his last day on the dunes. None of them approached the record performances of October 24, but they proved that Orville’s initial demonstration of soaring was a genuine breakthrough, not the result of a meteorological fluke.

  Three thousand miles to the west of Kitty Hawk, John Joseph Montgomery was also back in the air. Any doubts he might have felt as a result of the death of Dan Maloney aboard the flimsy Santa Clara glider in 1905 had apparently vanished. With the assistance of a new financial backer, James Plew, and a publicist, Victor Lougheed, he was testing a high-wing monoplane glider on the rolling hills near Evergreen, California.12

  The Wrights had finall
y met Montgomery at the Belmont Meet the year before. The picture of enthusiasm, he claimed that his new machine was so successful his pilots were looping the loop with it. Things had gotten so dangerous he was forced to limit the extent to which the controls could be operated, just to keep the “boys” flying safe. “Of course there was no doubt in our minds as to whether his statement should be believed,” Orv remarked to Tom Baldwin, “but it was hard to tell whether his statement was a result of an illusion, or whether it was simply a plain falsehood.”13

  When news of Orville’s soaring flights appeared in the newspapers, Victor Lougheed told the press that it would be “utterly impossible to remain aloft five minutes without the use of artificial power.” Lougheed traveled to Kitty Hawk determined to expose the “hoax” once and for all. “When he learned at first hand from half a dozen persons who had been eyewitnesses that the reports were really true, he skipped out without even seeing the machine!” Orv reported to Tom Baldwin.14

  John Montgomery made his last flight on October 31 while Orville was packing up camp at Kitty Hawk. Witnesses reported that he lost control when his machine was struck by a gust. Montgomery’s wife and his mechanic ran to the glider and found the pilot unconscious, his skull penetrated by a long stove bolt. Montgomery, whose one short glide from Otay Mesa in 1885 had earned him the distinction of being the first American glider pilot, died before the doctor arrived.15

  Increasingly, the Wrights found themselves focusing on the past. On October 26, the day on which Orville made his last glides from the big Kill Devil Hill, the machine that he had flown for the Army at Fort Myer in 1909 was enshrined in the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.