Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Lilienthal’s work went on. His greatest disciple was a Scottish marine engineer by the name of Percy Pilcher, who as well as being a devotee of building gliders believed that powered flight was possible. In 1897, after building a glider called the Hawk, which sailed a breathtaking 820 feet, he began to build a triplane—with three levels of wings—which he intended to get into the air by virtue of a 4-horsepower engine. And yet, like his mentor Lilienthal, Pilcher was to discover the perils of leaving mother earth’s close embrace.

  On the afternoon of 30 September 1899, after it had turned out that his engine did not have enough power to get his triplane into the air and Pilcher used real horses to drag himself and the Hawk into the air, the flimsy, single bamboo link to the crankshaft broke. Pilcher fell 30 feet and landed in a crumpled heap, his broken legs being the least of it, and passed away two days later. Small sacrifices had to be made…

  As always, however, there were others ready to come forward and take over where Pilcher had left off.

  The morning of 17 December 1903 dawned cold and windy on the sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills, near a town called Kitty Hawk on a small island off the coast of North Carolina in the United States. This was the place where Wilbur and Orville Wright—two bachelor brothers in their early to mid-thirties, who owned a bicycle store in Dayton, Ohio—had been staying over the previous couple of months. It was too windy, Wilbur thought, for them to try out the machine they had been working on for so long. Maybe they should wait until the wind dropped?

  Maybe…But in the end neither brother could bear to wait any longer, whatever the wind, and just after ten o’clock they brought their strange contraption out from its hangar and into the open.

  They were hoping to do nothing less than fly in it. They had picked Kitty Hawk at the suggestion of Octave Chanute, whose book Progress in Flying Machines they had devoured before entering into correspondence with him. It was he who had suggested that what they most needed was a place with open space, a frequent steady breeze and, perhaps most importantly, a soft landing ground should they actually succeed in getting off the ground.

  Which last, of course, was no certain thing.

  Over the previous few years the brothers had built various unpowered versions of their current machine, and through trial, error and scientific experiments, together with close study of the work of the likes of Lilienthal and Pilcher, and with a great deal of material from Chanute, determined what worked and what didn’t. There had been moments of despair, as on one occasion in August 1901, when a hoped-for breakthrough had proven to be a dud and Wilbur had exclaimed to Orville, ‘Not within a thousand years would man ever fly.’ And there had been times of elation, as when they had realised that the secrets of lateral control of their craft, of maintaining balance, could be discovered by studying the way birds shaped their wings when soaring, turning and descending. Through it all, they had simply kept going, solving the problems that presented themselves one by one and incorporating all their successes into this machine.

  Built out of spruce, ash and muslin, they called their plane the Flyer, in a show of faith that would make their father, Bishop Wright, very proud. (And he was a bishop, for the record, who believed that if his sons could invent something capable of flying long distances, it might be useful in helping to spread the word of Christianity to far-flung corners of the world.)20

  Their bizarre-looking machine had a two-tiered wing of some 40 feet across, with a curved shape that Lawrence Hargrave would have recognised as bearing a great similarity to the curve of his box kites. So, too, would Hargrave have felt at home in the windy environment of Kitty Hawk, which was not at all unlike that of Stanwell Park, where he had first proved that air flowing fast over curved wings could lift a man off the ground. Though the Flyer had many points of difference with other attempts to build a plane that would fly in a controlled fashion, one in particular was revolutionary—and the Wrights had established that it worked by long testing.

  The Flyer had evolved from a series of gliders with movable surfaces, so that as the pilot flew he could control the plane’s movement around the lateral, longitudinal and vertical axes in ‘pitch’, ‘roll’ and ‘yaw’ respectively. That is, the pilot could use a front-mounted ‘elevator’ to point the plane’s nose up or down to gain or lose altitude; he could control a specially designed and patented wing-twisting system to roll the plane on its axis from stem to stern to bank, so that either the right wing or the left wing lifted to encourage the plane to turn right or left.

  The 1902 glider’s wings had proven to be somewhat too enthusiastic to obey the pilot’s control inputs and, as the plane banked, it fell into a ‘side slip’, winding itself into a death spiral to the sand. The glider’s fixed tail fins contributed to this effect.

  It was Orville who, wrestling with the dynamics of flight late one night in bed, managed to bring that particular demon to the ground. What if, he wondered, while staring at the cracks in the ceiling, the rudders were to be altered so that they could swing from side to side and the pilot could then perhaps balance the turns. Carefully, he suggested this proposal to Wilbur at breakfast the following day. Wilbur drew on his pipe, just long enough to recognise his brother’s proposal for the enormous breakthrough that it was, and then all but instantly matched it with a breakthrough of his own.21 Yes, he replied, and why not build it so that when the pilot, already lying prone on the lower wing with his hips in a cradle attached to the wing-warping wires, could simultaneously turn the movable rudders?22 Orville liked it and deleted the second rudder for good measure and simplicity. Two breakthroughs, and they were not even on to their second cup of coffee for the day!

  Now, the Flyer’s propulsion was provided by two enormous counterrotating propellers on shafts just behind the wings and turned by chains, one of which was contained in a metal tube. These were powered by a 12-horsepower engine the brothers designed and had built in their bicycle shop by their mechanic, Charlie Taylor, in six weeks, after it had emerged that existing manufacturers were too busy to produce a small gasoline engine with the power-to-weight ratio Orville and Wilbur required to generate sufficient thrust for man-carrying flight. The whole machine weighed 605 pounds without the pilot.

  But would it all work? Would it even be able to get off the ground?

  To reach sufficient speed to take off, the Flyer was placed on a single rail of two-by-four laid in the sand, nicknamed ‘Junction Railroad’ by the pair. Once the craft was launched along that rail, the speed of the air flowing over those curved wings, aided by the thrust of the propellers, would lift man and machine off the ground and they would proceed in a forward direction—in the air! And the pilot would be able to control the machine once it was flying, reacting to changing air conditions by changing the shape of the plane as required, and so stay aloft! That, at least, was the theory.

  Upon an earlier coin toss, it was Orville who had the honour of being the first to attempt to fly that day, lying prone on the lower wing as the prevailing headwind continued to come straight at them in freezing gusts of about 25 miles per hour.

  The engine was started and the propellers whirled. Orville released the catch of a restraining rope and the Flyer tore down the 60-foot track, with Wilbur running alongside holding onto the right wing for as long as he could to keep the whole thing steady. Faster and faster it went until…until…until…then came the moment. As Wilbur dropped back, he was stunned to see the Flyer, with his brother Orville on board, lift off the ground some 10 feet into the air, sail forth in a slightly awkward bound, and return to earth at a point level with the commencement of the flight in a controlled fashion, some twelve seconds and 120 feet later.

  Success!

  Then it was Wilbur’s turn and, taking a couple of tips from his brother about what he had learnt, he managed to go a little further still, up to 175 feet. Just as they once had to learn to ride a bicycle, they were now trying to learn how to fly this plane they had built together.

  Next, Orville Wrig
ht, now the world’s second most experienced pilot, nudged the distance up to 200 feet and was once again the world’s most experienced. Oddly enough, neither brother at this point was overwhelmed with exultation—they just weren’t the type. And nor was either overwhelmed with trepidation at watching a beloved brother put himself in harm’s way in this fashion. Fact was, they had been working long enough on this flying machine, and hard enough—and most crucially, glimpsed enough signs indicating they were on the right track—that they expected nothing less than success. So when it came, it was good, but not absolutely stunning. Such, it seems, are many iconic historical moments, at the time. The brothers kept going.

  Just before noon Wilbur took off, as before, but this time…this time, instead of coming almost immediately back to earth, the plane majestically kept going…and going. Two hundred feet! Three hundred! Five hundred! SEVEN hundred! At about 850 feet, the machine suddenly darted down—in fact so suddenly that on impact a part of the plane’s elevator supports were broken, and then a sudden gust of untimely wind flipped the whole thing over several times, breaking it so badly that it would never fly again.

  In one morning, aviation had recorded its first powered flight, broken four records and had its first crash…

  In Australia, the news of the extraordinary feat didn’t so much hit like thunder as like the sound of a walnut dropping onto parched earth some distance away. That is, while the American newspapers did, after a fashion, fête the brothers—still with one eyebrow raised because no journalist or photographer had witnessed their triumph, and the brothers didn’t release their own photos—the news did not immediately reach Australian shores. The first flicker of what happened at Kitty Hawk came via a letter from Octave Chanute to Lawrence Hargrave, who by this time had moved back to Sydney from Stanwell Park, and was living in the salubrious eastern suburb of Woollahra.

  ‘It is possible,’ Chanute wrote to his trusted and admired Australian colleague, ‘that your newspapers have reproduced the sensational report that the Wright brothers have flown three miles in a dynamic machine. This is erroneous—the real facts are set forth in the enclosed statement issued three days ago.’

  Despite the fact that he was suffering from typhoid fever, Lawrence Hargrave devoured the report in nothing flat and, excited beyond measure, soon took up a pen himself. First he wrote a letter of sincere congratulations to the Wright brothers: ‘I have just read of your flight on the 17th December 1903. My heartiest congratulations. May the caution you have hitherto exercised not be relaxed for an instant. I hope Mr Chanute was with you and took plenty of snapshots…‘23

  And then Lawrence Hargrave penned a letter to the editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph:

  Sir,

  In the Chicago Daily News Jan 6th, you will find an account of the successful experiments of Mssrs Orville and Wilbur Wright with a power-driven man-carrying aeroplane. These are the first practical results that have ever been attained by the numerous workers in this branch of aeronautics. Lest you think it only a yarn the facts are vouched by Mr O. Chanute the Past President of the Western Society of Engineers who writes to warn me of the sensational reports that had previously been published. Should you not have the Chicago Daily News on your files your reporter is at liberty to copy that in my possession.24

  The Daily Telegraph editor dispatched a reporter immediately and published a story the following day. In Australia, as elsewhere, the news was getting out. A new age really was upon the world, and it seemed that with these extraordinary machines, all things were possible.

  They were crossing the mighty Pacific Ocean! From horizon to horizon, there was nothing but sparkling water as far as the eye could see, in every direction a vast panorama…

  While, in that first part of the twentieth century, for most Australians the Pacific was an almost unbreachable blue barrier separating them from everywhere else in the world, that was not the case for six-year-old Chilla and his siblings and parents. For at much the same time as those hardy inventors from Ohio, the Wright brothers, were demonstrating that the Wright stuff was just what the aviation world was looking for, the sprawling Australian family had upped sticks once again, marched up the gangplank of a ship called RMMS Aorangi, and sailed off to settle in Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada.

  Sadly, this was less a case of the family seeking adventure than one of simple need, as Vancouver was the place where father William had at last found work. It was a long and horrifying story, but in essence the family patriarch had gone guarantor on a loan to a trusted friend who, after being unable to pay, had shot himself as a result. William had lost his job, his self-respect and a lot of money in one fell swoop. The family had just been able to stay afloat, with the financial help of Catherine’s businessman father. To raise the fare for Canada and give them start-up money, they had been obliged to sell all the family furniture, including the piano.

  Not that young Chilla was aware of any of that, of course. In fact, for a young lad of his adventurous disposition—already excited beyond measure at the thought that he would soon be throwing real snowballs in Canada25—shipboard life was heaven on water, though hell for the family trying to keep track of him. Under the captain’s table, in the engine room, hiding in the lifeboat, running around the funnel, climbing onto the backs of laughing sailors, hanging out the porthole…

  Hanging out the porthole? This time he had gone too far and after a few whispered words between Catherine and the ship’s captain it was all organised. In no time Chilla and the young friend he had been doing it with were hauled before Captain Phillips, who gravely informed them that if there was one more instance—just one more, do you hear me?—then the two terrors would have to be placed in chains for the duration of the voyage, if not keelhauled first. Was that absolutely clear?!?!

  Yes, Cap’n. Sorry, Cap’n. Terribly sorry, Cap’n. It will not happen again, Cap’n.

  Not to worry, there was soon plenty of excess excitement aboard the Aorangi anyway, as the ship crossed the equator. There had long been a tradition among English-speaking seafarers that all who crossed the equator for the first time should be initiated into the Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep and such. Those who were yet to ‘cross the line’ were derisively referred to as ‘pollywogs’, whereas, once they had crossed and thereby entered into the domain of His Royal Majesty Neptunus Rex, otherwise known as King Neptune, they could henceforth be known as ‘trusty shellbacks’…

  At the age of just six, thus, Chilla had crossed the line, and—after going through a fun ceremony consisting of having mud and whitewash smeared over his face, and being dumped backwards into a tank of water26—was now a trusty shellback.

  Although William’s new job as a humble clerk with the Canadian Pacific Railway company wasn’t a particularly well paying one, it was certainly better than being unemployed in Australia, and the family settled down to make the best of it. For at least they had each other and at least Vancouver provided a whole range of fresh outdoor pursuits for them to engage in. On the weekends they would go camping in the great Canadian outdoors, skiing in winter, sailing in summer, salmon fishing any time. The best part of the fishing, apart from the marvellous moment when you first felt the tug on the line, was that it did a lot to put free food on the table, which was a great bonus given William’s humble wage. And somehow, too, Catherine always managed to make that wage go a long way. Generally, William was in his wife’s considerable thrall, acutely aware that he had not turned into the great provider she had thought he would be when they married, and yet also deeply appreciative that she did not rub his nose in it for that fact. A sensitive, retiring type, he was a good father, and that was something…

  By this time the ‘Smith’ family had become known as the ‘Kingsford Smith’ family, by virtue of the fact that they were living on a street in Vancouver where two other families named Smith lived, and it was just easier that way. For many families, living in a foreign land would have been daunting, removed as they wer
e from all things familiar including wider family and friends, but not for the Kingsford Smiths. They were entirely self-contained, enjoying their own company enormously and always looking out for each other. Of the children, Harold was perhaps the most serious, feeling the responsibility of being the oldest brother, while Winifred was a deputy mother to Catherine in her relations with the younger ones. Wilfrid, Elsie, Leofric and Eric all had the charming combination of being hard-working but fun-loving types, while the most carefree of the lot was young Chilla—sure as he always was that he only had to stumble and there would be a dozen hands instantly reaching down to lift him up again.

  The Wright brothers kept working, as indeed did other aviation inventors around the world. On 20 September 1904, just a little less than a year since their first flight, Flyer II hit the launch rails at the nearby prairie cow paddock owned by Dayton banker Torrence Huffman and lent to them gratis.

  Made of fragile white pine, instead of spruce, their new flying machine was equipped with a stunningly powerful 16-horsepower engine and a more efficient wing shape. In the absence of reliable winds of the required strength, the Wrights had developed a catapult launch system consisting of a tower from which a cable was attached to 1600-pound iron weights. With the motor running and poised to launch, the pilot released the weights, which had been winched to the top of the frame and attached to the plane by a cable.27