by P Fitzsimons
After retiring from a successful and prosperous career as a railway engineer, the robust 62-year-old with the white and well-groomed spade beard had recently returned to a passion that had first engaged him some forty years earlier. As a young man, he had become so absorbed in documenting the history of man’s quest to fly that it threatened to derail his paying job and he had been obliged to put it aside. Now freed from that daily burden of work, he had been able to re-enter the field with gusto and had been quick in publishing many learned treatises on the remaining riddles of successful flight.
As he put it in a letter to a friend: ‘My general idea is to pass in review what has hitherto been experimented with a view to accounting for the failures, clearing away the rubbish, and pointing out some of the elements of success, if I can…’4
Chanute’s book covered everything from the Greek mythology of Icarus and his wings of wax to the genuine vision of Leonardo da Vinci that man would be able to fly. He took particular interest in the eccentric English baronet George Cayley, who in 1809, at the age of thirty-six—after examination and experimentation with the theories of flight dating back to 1792—had published a treatise, ‘On Aerial Navigation’. In this work, Cayley had stated as firm principles that ‘lift’, ‘propulsion’ and ‘control’ were the three key elements that had to be resolved before successful flight could take place. For the next forty years Cayley had continued refining his gliders to the point that, by 1853, the then 80-year-old had been able to press-gang his coachman into sitting in a fixed-wing machine as it glided serenely for several hundred yards across Yorkshire’s Brompton Dale. Cayley was immensely impressed, but the coachman was not.
‘Please, Sir George,’ he had shouted to him. ‘I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, not to fly!’5
There was also in Chanute’s towering work detailed examination of the various experiments in the possibilities of flight that were being conducted around the world. Much of his writing was heavily scientific in nature, with complex diagrams and long mathematical calculations tougher than Chinese calculus. And yet, a warm man, he was also keen to acknowledge many of those scientists, engineers and inventors around the world with whom he had engaged in such extensive correspondence, helping him to become the world’s foremost authority on the subject.
And so now, on this cold and snowy day, he came to the warmest, most heartfelt passage of all, and penned it in his elegant longhand…
If there be one man, more than another, who deserves to succeed in flying through the air, that man is Lawrence Hargrave of Sydney, New South Wales. He has now constructed with his own hands no less than 18 flying machines of increasing size, all of which fly, and as a result of his many experiments (of which an account is about to be given) he now says, in a private letter to the writer, that ‘I know that success is dead sure to come’.
M. Hargrave takes out no patents for any of his aerial inventions, and he publishes from time to time full accounts of them, in order that a mutual interchange of ideas may take place with other inventors working in the same field, so as to expedite joint progress…6
Stanwell Park is a tiny strip of beach, clinging like a crab to a coastal cleft just south of Sydney. On this morning of 12 November 1894, the local eccentric, Lawrence Hargrave, who was known in those parts for his obsessive belief that it was possible to build a machine that would fly—no, really—was going about his business with the help of the property caretaker, James Swaine. People down that way had noticed the newly arrived bearded one with the wild eyes, long-suffering wife and gaggle of kids. They knew he was forever pottering in the workshop he had set up on the northern veranda of his house on the hill, and was always muttering about ‘air flows’, ‘thrust’, and ‘curved surfaces’ but few knew what he was on about.
Lawrie Hargrave had always been regarded as a bit odd since, as a young man, he outraged local Rushcutters Bay churchgoers up in Sydney Town by ‘walking on water’, courtesy of some ‘elongated flotation shoes’ that he had designed and built. But look, what on earth was he up to now? Flying kites? But what curious-looking kites they were! Three-dimensional kites!
‘Cellular kites’, he called them—like two open-ended boxes, with upwardly curved top surfaces, joined and strengthened by thin struts. And instead of flying around all over the place, diving and bobbing and soaring like normal two-dimensional kites, these strange things were amazingly stable. Somehow, they were built in such a way that as the air flowed over the curves, they were perpetually tugging upwards ever upwards and so seemingly defying the law of gravity, which had ruled the physical world since Eve ate one apple and another fell on Isaac Newton’s head.
First, as a couple of his kids sat at a safe distance watching, Hargrave got one kite in the air and then attached the rope beneath it to the next kite, which went up. And then he and the caretaker Swaine did the same thing twice, then three times more, until four of the contraptions were in the air, all connected to one rope tethered to…to…to what? What was he doing now? Sitting in a kind of sling? Yes, a sling!
And now came the celebrated moment, just before eleven o’clock—a stray puff of wind rising off the majestic Pacific Ocean from the south-west gave a silky surge and then, as it flowed over the curved shape of the box kites, the upward pressure on the rope attached to the inventor increased to the point that…suddenly the 44-year-old broke free of the ‘surly bonds of earth’7 and was propelled upwards. It was possible! Before the awed Swaine, Lawrence Hargrave was momentarily lifted 16 feet above the ground and would have gone higher still if not for another rope that kept him tethered to heavy bags of sand on mother earth—and even then it was only just, as Swaine had to desperately wrestle with the block and tackle to hold him down. A ‘Eureka!’ moment, if ever there was one! The key fact he had demonstrated was that when air moves at pace over curved wings, there is enough upwards pull to lift a human off the ground.
As to the problem of propulsion, Hargrave had already put in an enormous amount of work on that vexing question. His view was that the only way forward was to develop a very light-weight yet powerful engine to which could be attached an especially designed propeller, or ‘screw’ as he called it, which could bite upon the air and pull the machine forward in the same way that a ship’s propeller did in water. If it worked, then this would always pull the plane forwards and the speed of the wind over the wings would be able to lift a man.
It was with this specific aim that seven years earlier Hargrave had created, and since refined, the world’s first rotary engine. This was a revolutionary departure from most existing engine designs whereby, instead of the cylinders (and their pistons) being in a fixed position providing force on the whirling crankshaft, it was the cylinders and pistons which rotated around a stationary crankshaft. Hargrave’s idea was that, by attaching the propeller to those whirling cylinders, they would be kept cool with their own flow of air instead of the cumbersome and leaky water-cooled systems. This would only leave control as the key issue…and then a man could even, genuinely, fly like a bird.
Of course, Lawrence Hargrave was not a man working in isolation, for all over the world in the last gasp of the nineteenth century, people were busily trying to solve the riddle of how to fly—just as they had been for centuries. But, crucially, Hargrave was also a man keen to share his knowledge—with no interest whatsoever in patents—and he had no sooner been borne aloft by the power of wind moving swiftly over curved cells in a kite than he wrote a full report of it, complete with diagrams, which he sent off to Octave Chanute, just as he had previously put into the public domain notes on the design of his rotary engine.
No, this was not powered flight, which was the grand quest, but it was a significant breakthrough, one of the key riddles solved, and as Chanute spread word among other researchers around America and the world, the reaction was immediate.
Only a couple of years later, in 1897, in one of the many letters Octave Chanute wrote to his Australian correspondent, he noted: ‘Mr M
illet has put a Hargrave kite on the market and I am told the skies in our eastern States are red with them.’8 Another of his admirers was the famed American inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, who was then getting very interested in the problems of flight. Bell considered Hargrave’s ‘box kite’, as it had become known, as ‘a very sound design’.9 The two corresponded and became such close friends that Bell would later visit Australia, just to meet with Hargrave, and noted, amazed, that ‘Mr. Lawrence Hargrave is better known in America than in his own country’.10
And it had always been thus. In the mid-1890s, Hargrave had written to Chanute that, ‘The people of Sydney who can speak of my work without a smile are very scarce; it is doubtless the same with American workers. I know that success is dead sure to come, and therefore do not waste time and words in trying to convince unbelievers.’11
It was at this time of great excitement in the nascent world of modern aviation that, some thousand and a bitty miles to the north of Lawrence Hargrave, wee Charles made seventh, and last, in the Smith family when he was born on the 9th day of February 1897, in a rather unprepossessing house on Riverview Terrace in the leafy Brisbane suburb of Hamilton.
It was not that Charlie was necessarily a ‘mistake’, but the fact that his next oldest sibling, Eric, was a full ten years older than him, and that the first five of those seven children had come in the space of just six years, was a fair indication that he was at least a surprise. (Another indication was the fact that his father was forty-five years old when he was born, and his mother forty.) Still, the key thing was that ‘Chilla’, as he soon became known to his own flesh and blood, was loved, as much by his four brothers and two sisters—Harold, Winifred, Wilfrid, Elsie, Leofric and Eric—as by his parents. As it was, though, in the first few days of his life they felt they pretty much had to love him, as no-one else except the family possibly could, so unsightly did he seem to their eyes.
Bald at birth, terribly wrinkled and with a mashed nose, he looked as though he had been bashed in the face with a shovel, and there was some discussion in the family that he resembled nothing or no other person so much as ‘Yorkey’, an extremely old and battered-looking Aboriginal man who used to do chores around the house for the family when they had lived in Cairns.12
And yet, what a transformation! In just a short while this baby, born with a face like a dropped pie, began to develop before their very eyes and look like an advertisement for mother’s milk, with—to use his sister Winifred’s words—‘golden hair, blue eyes, rose-leaf skin, and the reddest lips imaginable curling over pearly teeth…’13
Both sisters thought such good looks were wasted on a boy, but they didn’t stop pampering him for all that, and the sunny-tempered toddler happily soaked up all the attention from them and the rest of the family.
And a very tight family it was, as in part registered by the fact that each of the children had their mother Catherine’s maiden name of ‘Kingsford’ for their middle name, to go with the ‘Smith’ surname inherited from their father, William. Generally, the maternal weight on the family scales was greater than the paternal. Catherine was warm-hearted, strong-willed and deeply involved in all her children’s lives, the sun around which they revolved. She combined great femininity with a strong constitution, and was up at five o’clock every morning, sweeping the kitchen, preparing breakfast, sorting the washing, getting the kids off to school, doing the shopping and myriad maternal things until late into the night. A born hostess, she ran an open house where there were frequent visitors and they were always welcome—at the dinner table if they needed a feed, or on the couch if they needed a place to stay. For his part, William was a loving father, and a hard worker who left the house early and didn’t return until late, but he was also a little detached and definitely deferential to his wife.
Brisbane was Catherine’s home town, with her father no less than a former lord mayor of that metropolis, while William, a relatively humble bank manager, had started his life in Sydney and, as an adult, was posted through his working life here, there and everywhere—and it just so happened that ‘here’, when Charles was born, was on Riverview Terrace. By the time Charlie was two, however, the whole family had moved to ‘there’, Sydney, to live first near Manly Beach and then to the inner harbour-side suburb of Longueville.
Each day, William would head off to work in the city with his older sons, while the other siblings would walk to school and Charlie would stay at home to play, with his mother never more than a quick scold away. Generally, he was a boisterous child, confident from the first, and despite his angelic looks, never minding a bit of rough ‘n’ tumble or taking a scrape. Ah, the stories the family delighted in telling each other of what Chilla, their ‘engaging little sinner’,14 had got up to this time.
What about when he put the house-help Ruby’s hat through the laundry wringer, only to have it emerge as flat as two pancakes? Knowing that he was in real trouble this time, Chilla trotted out to the rose garden, broke off the thorniest branch he could find, and brought it to his mother, gravely announcing: ‘Here’s a pwickly stick to whip him wif, he’s been a naughty boy to put poor Wooby’s hat froo her mangle…’15
Catherine did not whip him with the prickly branch or anything else on this occasion, not that she was above administering the odd bit of corporal punishment. (Still, as one who stood just over 5 feet tall, and weighed only 6 stone, she was never one to pack much of a wallop even on a bad day—it was her emotional power that guided her children to adulthood, not her physical force.)
While she was close to all her children, the bond between her and her youngest child was a particularly strong one from the beginning. With the rest of the family gone for the day, it was frequently just the two of them spending time together. One way Catherine kept him occupied was to set him up with a pencil and huge sheets of butcher’s paper, encouraging him to draw, which he delighted in doing, frequently focusing on drawing those mechanical things he could see from their garden, like ships, ferries, paddlesteamers, bridges and trains. Not for nothing would Chilla’s first note to Santa Claus read when he was four:
Dear Santa,
Will you bring a train with piston rods to make
the wheels go round? Will you make Christmas
come quick?
Sincerely,
Chilla.16
Of course, it was Catherine who would arrange with Santa to bring exactly that, and then delight in playing with him and the train while Father was at work. And it was also Catherine who tended his many wounds when Chilla, convinced that he could fly, jumped from the roof of their shed holding nothing but an open umbrella.17 Turned out he couldn’t fly after all…
Generally, however, Chilla’s favourite times were when the whole family was together, particularly on Sundays, when he was more often than not the centre of attention. One of his show-stoppers—at this time when the Boer War was in full swing—was to sing out with great passion the words of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, as best he could. With all the family around him, egging him on, Chilla would stand on the enormous polished dining-room table and belt out…
Duke’s son—cook’s son—son of a hundred kings—
(Fifty fousand horse and foot goin’ to Table Bay!)
Each of ‘em doin’ his country’s work
And who’s to look after the things?
Pass the hat for your credit’s sake,
And pay—PAY—PAY!18
Again, Chilla, again! they would urge him. And he would give another rousing rendition. Whenever there were guests over, young Chilla would take centre stage with some kind of performance or other and the entire family thought the little showman something of a prodigy for his capacity to memorise words and sing them well, and as he got a little older to quickly teach himself the musical instruments they were playing on, including the piano and the ukulele.
Even when Sunday began to ebb away there was still a little more fun to be had, albeit of
a slightly more pious nature, as the family would gather round the piano and lustily sing hymns together, before Father would read a chapter from the Bible. This last was less because they were particularly religious than because it was just a nice, communal family thing to do.
All up, there might have been happier kids than Chilla as the twentieth century dawned, but probably not many…
‘Is that man your dad?’ asked the small boy down at Stanwell Park of the young girl who sat gazing at the man on the beach with all the kites.
‘Yes, he’s my father,’ replied Nellie Hargrave, barely repressing a sigh and throwing a ‘here-we-go-again’ glance at her sister Hilda and younger brother Geoffrey. She more or less knew what the young tousle-headed lad was going to say before he said it.
‘Is he…is he really a wizard?’
‘No,’ replied Nellie firmly, ‘he’s a scientist discovering how men can fly.’
‘Fly! That means he must use magic,’ said the boy with wide eyes.
‘No magic,’ said Nellie with some conviction. ‘One day men will fly in machines with wings like those.’19
In fact, many men around the world had been trying to do exactly that, and her father’s initial breakthrough with box kites was just part of a great burst of experimentation in aviation, as the conviction had grown that it really might be possible for man to fly. No-one had been more active than Germany’s Otto Lilienthal, who for many years had been pioneering gliders, including an 1894 model designed to have the two wings flap in the manner of a bird. Lilienthal established that a key component to successful flight was for the pilot to be able to react while in flight to changing wind conditions, and he was able to fashion a primitive rudder on his gliders, attached to a piece of string, which he could control by backwards and forwards movement of his head. Alas, on 9 August 1896, while he was soaring from the hill he had constructed just outside Berlin, he was caught by a gust of rising air, causing the glider to stall and he fell to the ground from a height of more than 50 feet. Just before he died the next day in a Berlin hospital, celebrated legend has it that he uttered his last words on the subject of flying experimentation: ‘Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden…’ (Small sacrifices must be made…)