Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  Swearing, according to one study, accounts for no less than 13 per cent of all adult conversation, yet it remains a neglected area of scholarship. One of the few studies of recent years is Cursing in America, but its author, Timothy Jay of North Adams State College in Massachusetts, had to postpone his research for five years when his dean forbade it. ‘I was told I couldn’t work on this and I couldn’t teach courses on it, and it wouldn’t be a good area for tenure,’ Jay said in a newspaper interview.53 ‘The minute I got tenure I went back to dirty words.’ And quite right, too.

  Wing dining, somewhere over France, 1929

  19

  The Road from Kitty Hawk

  The story is a familiar one. On a cold day in December 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright, assisted by five locals, lugged a flimsy-looking aircraft on to the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. As Wilbur steadied the wing, Orville prostrated himself at the controls and set the plane rolling along a wooden track. A few moments later, the plane rose hesitantly, climbed to about 15 feet and puttered along the beach for 120 feet before setting down on a dune. The flight lasted just twelve seconds and covered less ground than the wing-span of a modern jumbo jet, but the airplane age had begun.

  Everyone knows that this was one of the great events of modern technology, but there is still a feeling, I think, that the Wrights were essentially a pair of inspired tinkerers who knocked together a simple contraption in their bike shop and were lucky enough to get it airborne. We have all seen film of early aircraft tumbling off the end of piers or being catapulted into haystacks. Clearly the airplane was an invention waiting to happen. The Wrights were just lucky enough to get there first.

  In fact, their achievement was much, much greater than that. To master powered flight, it was necessary to engineer a series of fundamental breakthroughs in the design of wings, engines, propellers and control mechanisms. Every piece of the Wrights’ plane was revolutionary, and every piece of it they designed and built themselves.

  In just three years of feverish work, these two retiring bachelors from Dayton, Ohio, sons of a bishop of the United Brethren Church, had made themselves the world’s leading authorities on aerodynamics. Their home-built wind tunnel was years ahead of anything existing elsewhere. When they discovered that there was no formal theory of propeller dynamics, no formulae with which to make comparative studies of different propeller types, they devised their own. Because it is all so obvious to us now, we forget just how revolutionary their concept was. No one else was even within years of touching them in their mastery of the aerodynamic properties of wings. Their warping mechanism for controlling the wings was such a breakthrough that it is still ‘used on every fixed-wing aircraft that flies today’.1 As Orville noted years later in an uncharacteristically bold assertion, ‘I believe we possessed more data on cambered surfaces, a hundred times over, than all of our predecessors put together.’2

  Nothing in their background suggested that they would create a revolution. They ran a bicycle shop in Dayton. They had no scientific training. Indeed, neither had finished high school. Yet, working alone, they discovered or taught themselves more about both the mechanics and science of flight than anyone else had ever come close to knowing. As one of their biographers put it: ‘These two untrained, self-educated engineers demonstrated a gift for pure scientific research that made the more eminent scientists who had studied the problems of flight look almost like bumbling amateurs.’3

  They were distinctly odd. Pious and restrained (they celebrated their first successful flight with a brief handshake), they always dressed in business suits with ties and starched collars, even for their test flights. They never married, and always lived together. Often they argued ferociously. Once, according to a colleague, they went to bed heatedly at odds over some approach to a problem. In the morning, they each admitted that there was merit in the other’s idea and began arguing again, but from the other side. However odd their relationship, clearly it was fruitful.

  They suffered many early setbacks, not least returning to Kitty Hawk one spring to find that a promising model they had left behind had been rendered useless when the local postmistress had stripped the French sateen wing coverings to make dresses for her daughters.4 Kitty Hawk, off the North Carolina coast near the site of the first American colony on Roanoke Island, had many drawbacks – monster mosquitoes in summer, raw winds in winter, and an isolation that made the timely acquisition of materials and replacement parts all but impossible – but there were compensations. The winds were steady and generally favourable, the beaches were spacious and free of obstructions, and above all the sand-dunes were mercifully forgiving.

  Samuel Pierpont Langley, the man everyone expected to make the first successful flight – he had the benefits of a solid scientific reputation, teams of assistants, and the backing of the Smithsonian Institution, Congress and the US Army – always launched his experimental planes from a platform on the Potomac River near Washington, which turned each test launch into a public spectacle, and which then became a public embarrassment as his ungainly test craft unfailingly lumbered off the platform and fell nose first into the water. It appears never to have occurred to Langley that any plane launched over water would, if it failed to take wing, inevitably sink. Langley’s devoted assistant and test pilot, Charles Manly, was repeatedly lucky to escape with his life.

  The Wright brothers by contrast were spared the pestering attention of journalists and gawkers and the pressure of financial backers. They could get on with their research at their own pace without having to answer to anyone. And when their experimental launches failed, the plane would come to an undamaged rest on a soft dune. They called their craft the Wright Flyer – named, curiously enough, not for its aeronautical qualities but for one of their bicycles.

  By the autumn of 1903, the Wright brothers knew two things: that Samuel Langley’s plane would never fly and that theirs would. They spent most of the autumn at Kitty Hawk – or more precisely at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk – readying their craft, but ran into a series of teething problems, particularly with the propeller. The weather, too, proved persistently unfavourable. (On the one day when conditions were ideal they refused to fly, or do any work, because it was a Sunday.) By 17 December, the day of their breakthrough, they had been at Kitty Hawk for eighty-four days, living mostly on beans. They made four successful flights that day, of 120, 175, 180 and 852 feet, lasting from twelve seconds to just under a minute. As they were standing around after the fourth flight, discussing whether to have another attempt, a gust of wind picked up the plane and sent it bouncing across the sand-dunes, destroying the engine mountings and rear ribs. It never flew again.

  Because it occurred so far from the public gaze, news of their historic achievement didn’t so much burst on to the world as seep out. Several newspapers reported the event, but often with only the haziest idea of what had taken place. The New York Herald reported that the Wrights had flown three miles, and most other papers were similarly adrift in their details.

  Many of those who had devoted their lives to achieving powered flight found it so unlikely that a pair of uneducated bicycle makers from Dayton, working from their own resources, had succeeded where they had repeatedly failed that they refused to entertain the idea. The Smithsonian remained loyal to Langley – he was a former assistant secretary of the institution – and refused to acknowledge the Wrights’ accomplishment for almost forty years.

  * * *

  The Wrights’ home town, Dayton, was so unmoved by the news that it didn’t get around to giving them a parade until six years later. Unperturbed, the brothers put further distance between themselves and their competitors. By 1905, in an improved plane, they were ‘flying up to twenty-four miles, and executing complicated manoeuvres, while staying aloft for almost forty minutes. Only the tiny capacity of the plane’s fuel tank limited the duration of their flights.5 The next year they received their patent, but even it was not the ringing endorsement they deserved. It credit
ed them only with ‘certain new and useful improvements in Flying-machines’.

  The Wright brothers seemed unbothered by their lack of recognition. Although they made no secret of their flying, they also offered no public demonstrations, and hence didn’t attract the popular acclaim they might have. Indeed in 1908, when the more publicity-conscious Glenn Curtiss flew over half a mile at Hammondsport, New York, many assumed that that was the first flight.

  In 1914, long after Langley himself was dead, the Smithsonian allowed Curtiss to exhume Langley’s airplane, modify it significantly and try to fly it in order to prove retroactively that the Wrights had not been the first to design a plane capable of flight. With modifications that Langley had never dreamed of, Curtiss managed to get the plane airborne for all of five seconds, and for the next twenty-eight years the Smithsonian, to its eternal shame, displayed the craft as ‘the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free-flight’.6

  The original Wright Flyer spent twenty-five years under dustsheets in a Dayton shed. When no institution in the United States wanted it, it was lent to the Science Museum in London and displayed there from 1928 to 1948. Not until 1942 did the Smithsonian at last accept that the Wrights were indeed the inventors of powered flight, and not until forty-five years after their historic flight was the craft at last permanently displayed in America.

  The Wright brothers never called their craft an airplane. The word was available to them – it had existed in America for almost thirty years and, as aeroplane, in Britain for even longer. (Aeroplane was first used in 1869 in a British engineering magazine to describe a kind of aerofoil used in experiments.) In the early days there was no agreed term for aircraft. Langley had called his contraption an aerodrome. Others had used aerial ship or aerial machine. The Wright brothers favoured flying machine. But by 1910 airplane had become the standard word in America and aeroplane in Britain.

  Flying and its attendant vocabulary took off with remarkable speed. By the second decade of the century most people, whether they had been near an airplane or not, were familiar with terms like pilot, hangar, airfield, night flying, cockpit, air pocket, ceiling, takeoff, nosedive, barnstorming, tailspin, crack-up (the early term for a crash), bail out and parachute. Pilots were sometimes referred to as aeronauts, but generally called aviators, with the first syllable pronounced with the short ă of navigator until the 1930s.

  In 1914 airlines entered the language. The first airlines were formed not to carry passengers but mail. Pan American Airways began by ferrying mail between Key West and Havana. Braniff, named for its founder, Tom Braniff, covered the south-west. Other early participants were United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, which would eventually become United Airlines, Pitcairn Aviation, which would evolve into Eastern Air Lines, and Delta Air Lines, which had begun as a crop-dusting service in the South. Airmail was coined in 1917, and airmail stamp followed a year later.

  Early planes were dangerous. In 1921 the average pilot had a life expectancy of 900 flying hours.7 For airmail pilots, flying mostly at night without any proper navigational aids, it was even worse. While an airmail pilot on the St Louis-Chicago run, Charles Lindbergh staked his life on a farm boy in Illinois remembering to put on a 100-watt bulb in his backyard each night before he went to bed. It is little wonder that of the first forty pilots hired to carry air mail for the government thirty-one died in crashes. Lindbergh himself crashed three planes in a year.

  Largely because of the danger, flying took on a romance and excitement that are difficult to imagine now. By May 1927, when Lindbergh touched down at Curtiss Field on Long Island for his historic flight across the Atlantic, the world had become seized with a kind of mania about flying and was ready for a hero. Lindbergh was just the person.

  In recent months, six aviators had died attempting to cross the Atlantic, and several other groups of pilots at or around Curtiss Field were preparing to risk their lives in pursuit of fame and a $25,000 payoff called the Oteig Prize. All the other enterprises involved teams of at least two men, and muscular, well-provisioned, three-engined planes. And now here was someone who had flown in from out of nowhere (and had incidentally set a coast-to-coast speed record in the process) who was aiming to fly the ocean alone in a frail, single-engined mosquito of a plane. That he had lanky boyish good looks and an air of innocence made him ideal, and within days America and the world were gripped by a Lindy hysteria. On the Sunday after his arrival, 30,000 people showed up at Curtiss Field hoping to get a glimpse of this untried twenty-five-year-old hero.

  That Lindbergh was a one-man operation worked in his favour. Where others were fussing over logistics and stocking up with survival rations, he bought a bag of sandwiches at a nearby lunch counter, filled up his fuel tank and quietly took off in the little plane named the Spirit of St Louis (so called because his backers were from there). He departed at 7.52 a.m. on 20 May 1927, and was so loaded down with fuel that he flew most of the distance to Nova Scotia just fifty feet above the ocean.8 Because a spare fuel tank had been bolted on to the nose, Lindbergh had no forward visibility. To see where he was going, he had to put his head out the side window. Thirty-four hours later, at 10.22 at night, he landed at Le Bourget airfield outside Paris. One hundred thousand people were there to greet him.

  To the French he was Le Boy. To the rest of the world he was Lucky Lindy – and he was lucky indeed. Though he did not know it, the night before he had taken possession of the plane, one of the workmen fuelling it had lost a piece of hose in the tank. Since a piece of hose could easily foul the fuel lines, there was no option but to take it out. The workman had cut a six-inch hole in the tank, retrieved the hose and surreptitiously patched the hole with solder. It was a miracle that it held throughout the turbulent Atlantic crossing.

  Lindbergh was by no means the first person to cross the Atlantic by air. In May 1919, eight years earlier, a US Navy plane had crossed from Newfoundland to Lisbon, though it had stopped in the Azores en route. A little less than a month after that, John Alcock and Arthur Brown of Great Britain flew from Newfoundland to Ireland, the first non-stop flight. Lindbergh flew 1,500 miles further, and he did it alone, and that was enough for most people. Indeed, most didn’t want to be reminded that Lindbergh was not the first. When ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’, a popular newspaper feature, noted that some twenty other people (including those in dirigibles) had crossed the Atlantic by air before Lindbergh, its offices were inundated with 250,000 angry letters.

  Never before in modern history had anyone generated such instant and total adulation as Lindbergh. When he returned to America, the parade in his honour produced more confetti than had been thrown to greet the returning troops after World War I. New York City gave him the largest dinner that had ever been put on for a private citizen. The New York Stock Exchange even closed for the day. Such was the hysteria that attached itself to Lindbergh that when his mother went to have her hair done in Washington, it took twenty-five policemen to control the mobs.9

  The immense excitement and sense of possibility that Lindbergh’s solo flight generated helped to usher in the age of passenger travel. Within two years most of the airmail lines were carrying passengers, and others, like American Airways (later Airlines), National Airlines Taxi Service, and Northwest Airways Company, were rushing to join the market. Lindbergh himself helped to found what is generally credited as the first true passenger airline. Formed in 1929, it was called Transcontinental Air Transport, or TAT, but was commonly known as the Lindbergh Line. In July of that year, using Ford Tri-Motor planes, TAT began the first longdistance passenger services across America, and in so doing introduced concepts that are still with us: flight attendants (only men were employed at first), lavatories, meals on board, and individual reading lights. Three months later the first in-flight movies were introduced. It also took the very bold – at the time almost unthinkable – decision not to carry parachutes.

  Because of a paucity of suitable airports and ce
rtain vexing limitations of the Ford Tri-Motors, not least an inability to clear any but the smallest mountains, passengers flew only about two-thirds of the total distance. Westward-bound travellers began with an overnight train ride from New York’s Pennsylvania Station to Columbus, Ohio. There, safely past the Alleghenies, they boarded the first plane. It flew at about 2,500 feet and at a top speed of 100 m.p.h., stopping in Indianapolis, St Louis, Kansas City, Wichita and Waynoka, Oklahoma. At Waynoka, passengers boarded yet another train to carry them past the Rockies to Clovis, New Mexico, where a plane was waiting to take them on to Los Angeles via Albuquerque, and Winslow and Kingman, Arizona. The whole undertaking was, by modern standards, drafty, uncomfortable and slow. Altogether the trip took forty-eight hours – though that was twenty-four hours faster than the fastest train. As a reward for their bravery, and for paying an extravagant $351.94 for a one-way ticket, every passenger was given a solid-gold fountain-pen from Tiffany’s.10

  Planes were unpressurized and unventilated. For many passengers, breathing at the higher altitudes was difficult. Often the rides were so rough that ‘as many as three-quarters of the passengers became airsick (another new word of the age). Even the celebrated aviator Amelia Earhart was seen diving for the airbag (yet another). For pilots there were additional difficulties. The Ford Tri-Motor, called with wary affection the Tin Goose by airline crews, was a challenging plane to fly. One of its more notable design quirks was that the instruments were mounted outside the cockpit, on one of the wing struts, and frequently became fogged once airborne.11