The Wright Brothers Read online

  In answer to an inquiry Wilbur sent to the United States Weather Bureau in Washington about prevailing winds around the country, they were provided extensive records of monthly wind velocities at more than a hundred Weather Bureau stations, enough for them to take particular interest in a remote spot on the Outer Banks of North Carolina called Kitty Hawk, some seven hundred miles from Dayton. Until then, the farthest the brothers had been from home was a trip to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition of 1893. And though they had “roughed it” some on a few camping trips, it had been nothing like what could be expected on the North Carolina coast.

  To be certain Kitty Hawk was the right choice, Wilbur wrote to the head of the Weather Bureau station there, who answered reassuringly about steady winds and sand beaches. As could be plainly seen by looking at a map, Kitty Hawk also offered all the isolation one might wish for to carry on experimental work in privacy.

  Still further encouragement came when, on August 18, 1900, the former postmaster at Kitty Hawk, William J. Tate, sent a letter saying:

  Mr. J. J. Dosher of the Weather Bureau here has asked me to answer your letter to him, relative to the fitness of Kitty Hawk as a place to practice or experiment with a flying machine, etc.

  In answering I would say that you would find here nearly any type of ground you could wish; you could, for instance, get a stretch of sandy land one mile by five with a bare hill in center 80 feet high, not a tree or bush anywhere to break the evenness of the wind current. This in my opinion would be a fine place; our winds are always steady, generally from 10 to 20 miles velocity per hour.

  You can reach here from Elizabeth City, N.C. (35 miles from here) by boat . . . from Manteo 12 miles from here by mail boat every Mon., Wed., & Friday. We have telegraph communication & daily mails. Climate healthy, you could find good place to pitch tent & get board in private family provided there were not too many in your party; would advise you to come anytime from September 15 to October 15. Don’t wait until November. The autumn generally gets a little rough by November.

  If you decide to try your machine here and come, I will take pleasure in doing all I can for your convenience and success and pleasure, and I assure you you will find a hospitable people when you come among us.

  That decided the matter. Kitty Hawk it would be.

  In the final weeks of August the brothers built a full-sized glider with two wings that they intended to reassemble and fly at Kitty Hawk, first as a kite, then, if all went well, fly themselves. Its wingspan was 18 feet. The total cost of all the necessary pieces and parts—ribs of ash, wires, cloth to cover the wings—was not more than $15. The only thing missing were long spruce spars for the glider, which had proven impossible to find in Dayton. But Wilbur felt confident they could be picked up on the East Coast.

  All was packed up in crates for shipment east, along with the necessary tools and a tent. Wilbur was to go first and get things in order. For more gear and his clothing, he borrowed Katharine’s trunk and suitcase. Not forgetting the example set by Otto Lilienthal, he also brought a box camera and tripod.

  Katharine could hardly believe he was going where he said. “I never did hear of such an out-of-the-way place.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Where the Winds Blow

  One ship drives east and another drives west

  With the self-same winds that blow.

  ’Tis the set of the sails

  And not the gales

  Which tells us the way to go.

  ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, “WINDS OF FATE”

  I.

  The legendary Outer Banks, a narrow chain of sandbars and islands shielding the North Carolina coastline from the full force of the Atlantic Ocean, reach more than 175 miles from Norfolk, Virginia, south to Cape Lookout. In 1900 few lived there other than fishermen and their families, and those with the Life-Saving Service. No bridges as yet crossed from the mainland. One got to the Outer Banks by boat and about the only signs of civilization at Kitty Hawk were four Life-Saving Stations, one every six miles, and the Weather Bureau Station. There were no real roads. The one conspicuous structure on the skyline was a rambling summer hotel at Nags Head.

  Wilbur reached Norfolk by train on September 7, 1900, roughly twenty-four hours after leaving Dayton, and checked in overnight at a hotel. The temperature in Norfolk the next day hit 100 degrees, and dressed in his customary dark suit, high collar, and necktie, he nearly collapsed.

  He needed still to find the long spruce strips necessary for his “machine” and so set off to several lumberyards only to be told they had none. Settling for white pine, he gathered up everything and boarded a 4:30 train to Elizabeth City, sixty miles to the south, where the Pasquotank River flows to meet Albemarle Sound.

  When, at Elizabeth City, he inquired about the best way to get over to Kitty Hawk, he received nothing but blank stares. No one he talked to seemed to know anything about the place or have the least idea how to get there.

  It was another four days before he found a boatman on the waterfront, one Israel Perry, who said he had been born and raised at Kitty Hawk and agreed to take Wilbur across. Perry also had a friend to help him. Wilbur’s heavy trunk and the pine strips would go over on the weekly freight boat.

  To get to Perry’s schooner required going by a small skiff much the worse for wear and leaking badly. When Wilbur asked if it was safe, Perry, to assure him, said, “Oh, it’s safer than the big boat.”

  With constant bailing the whole three miles, they managed to reach the schooner, which was indeed in sadder shape. “The sails were rotten,” wrote Wilbur, “the ropes badly worn and the rudder-post half rotted off, and the cabin so dirty and vermin-infested that I kept out of it from first to last.”

  The weather had been fine all day, but by the time they started out of the wide Pasquotank River and down the sound, it was nearly dark and the water much rougher than the light wind had led them to expect, as Israel Perry pointed out several times, clearly “a little uneasy.” The voyage ahead was forty miles.

  The wind shifted and grew increasingly stronger. The waves, now running quite high, “struck the boat from below with a heavy shock and threw it back about as fast as it went forward,” Wilbur would write. He had had no experience with sailing, let alone rough water, but plainly the flat-bottom craft was woefully unsuited for such conditions.

  In the strain of rolling and pitching, the boat sprang a leak, and with water crashing over the bow required still more bailing.

  At 11 o’clock the wind had increased to a gale and the boat was gradually being driven nearer and nearer the north shore, but as an attempt to turn round would probably have resulted in an upset, there seemed nothing else to do but attempt to round the North River Light and take refuge behind the point.

  The situation suddenly became more dramatic still.

  In a severe gust the foresail was blown loose from the boom and fluttered to leeward with a terrible roar. . . . By the time we had reached a position even with the end of the point, it became doubtful whether we would be able to round the light. . . . The suspense was ended by another roaring of the canvas as the mainsail also tore loose from the boom, and shook fiercely in the gale.

  By now their only chance was to take in the mainsail, let the boat swing stern to the wind, and, under the jib only, make a straight run over the sandbar. This, as Wilbur wrote, was a highly dangerous maneuver in such a sea, but somehow Perry managed without capsizing.

  He would not land on sandbars for a thousand dollars, Perry told Wilbur. So they lay at anchor in the North River the remainder of the night. Having no stomach for any food Perry might have below, Wilbur dipped into a jar of jelly Katharine had packed in his bag and stretched out on deck.

  Setting the boat in order as best they could took half the next day. It was afternoon before they got under way again and not until nine that night were they anchored at Kitty Hawk, where again Wilbur slept on deck.

  He finally went ashore the next morning, September 13, two
days after leaving Elizabeth City.

  He headed first to the home of William Tate, the former Kitty Hawk postmaster with whom he had corresponded.

  In all, Kitty Hawk comprised perhaps fifty houses, nearly all the homes of fishermen, and Tate, too, made most of his living that way three months of the year, beginning in October when the fish were running. As he would later write, “The community of Kitty Hawk at that time was a hardy race, chiefly descendants of shipwrecked sailors whom storm and misfortune had cast upon the shores of the North Carolina coast.” He himself was the son of a shipwrecked Scotsman. The life there, Tate stressed, was one of “double-barreled ISOLATION.”

  Houses had little in the way of furniture. Their bare floors were kept clean by scrubbing with white sand. Families raised most of what they ate in small vegetable gardens while the “men-folk” hunted all they could. Clothes were hand-sewn and most everyone got by with just two or three changes of clothes—“one for special occasions,” it was said, “and then one on one day and one on the next.” Mail came about three times a week. Children went to school about three months a year, and no one, it seemed, knew what a vacation was.

  Tate and his wife, Addie, gave the visitor the warm greeting he had promised, and Wilbur, as Tate remembered, “proceeded to unfold a tale of hardship” about his trip from Elizabeth City. “He was a tenderfoot and of course had a tale of woe to tell.

  His graphic description of the rolling of the boat and his story that the muscles of his arms ached from holding on, were interesting, but when he said he had fasted for 48 hours that was a condition that called for a remedy at once. Therefore we soon had him seated to a good breakfast of fresh eggs, ham and coffee, and I assure you he did his duty by them.

  When Wilbur asked if he might board there temporarily until his brother arrived, the Tates excused themselves to confer in the next room, but without closing the door. Hearing Addie say she was not sure their home would do for such a nicely dressed visitor, Wilbur stepped to the door to tell them he would be quite happy with whatever accommodations they could provide.

  In a long letter to his father, Wilbur described the Tate home as an unpainted, two-story frame house with no plaster on the walls, “no carpets at all, very little furniture, no books or pictures.” For Kitty Hawk, this was above the average.

  A few men have saved a thousand dollars, but this is the saving of a long life. . . . I suppose a few of them see two hundred dollars a year. They are friendly and neighborly and I think there is rarely any real suffering among them.

  Beside fishing, they tried to grow their own beans and corn. As there appeared to be nothing but sand, Wilbur thought it a wonder they could grow anything.

  Until Orville’s arrival, Wilbur worked at setting up camp on a good-sized hill half a mile from the Tate house, overlooking the water. That done, he began preparing their glider, most of his efforts taken up with a change in the wingspan from 18 to 17 feet, because of his failure to find the spruce spars needed and having to be satisfied with the pine substitutes that were two feet shorter. As a result the fabric for the wings—a beautiful white French sateen—had also to be cut back in size and resewn. To accomplish this he borrowed Addie Tate’s sewing machine of the kind one pumped by foot.

  In another letter to the Bishop, he tried to describe what the glider amounted to, stressing that it was to have no motor but depend on the wind only, that the central objective was to solve the problem of balance, and that he knew exactly what he was about, both in building the glider and what he expected to achieve with the tests to come. All this was remarkably clear and concise, and, as time would show, a stunning example of extraordinary prescience.

  I have my machine nearly finished. It is not to have a motor and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a view to solving the problem of equilibrium. I have plans which I hope to find much in advance of the methods tried by previous experimenters. When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will be quickly solved. A failure of a motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.

  Equilibrium—balance—was exactly what riding a bicycle required and of that he and Orville knew a great deal. Well aware of how his father worried about his safety, Wilbur stressed that he did not intend to rise many feet from the ground, and on the chance that he were “upset,” there was nothing but soft sand on which to land. He was there to learn, not to take chances for thrills. “The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn anything positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.”

  As time would show, caution and close attention to all advance preparations were to be the rule for the brothers. They would take risks when necessary, but they were no daredevils out to perform stunts and they never would be.

  Wilbur also assured his father he was taking “every precaution” about his drinking water.

  As Bill Tate would later recall, the local people grew increasingly curious about the visitor and the “darn fool contraption” he was sewing, gluing, and tying together.

  In the meantime, it had been drawn out of him by adroit questioning that his brother would be down in a couple of weeks. They were going to live in a tent and were going to make some experiments with their contraption in the art of flying.

  Outer Banks people were still pretty “set in their ways,” Tate added. “We believed in a good God, a bad Devil, and a hot Hell, and more than anything else we believed that same God did not intend man should ever fly.”

  II.

  Orville reached Elizabeth City on September 26, having traveled from Dayton without incident or inconvenience. The little delay he had reaching Kitty Hawk was only from lack of wind, and on arrival, again without any inconvenience, he found Wilbur had the “soaring machine” nearly ready.

  With everything in place, it consisted of two fixed wings, one above the other, each measuring 5 by 17 feet. In addition it had warping controls and a movable, forward rudder—the “horizontal” rudder or elevator—of 12 square feet. There were no wheels for takeoffs or landings. Instead the machine had wooden skids, far better suited for sand.

  The whole apparatus weighed slightly less than 50 pounds. With Wilbur aboard as “operator,” it would total approximately 190 pounds. He would lie flat on his stomach, head first, in the middle of the lower wing and maintain fore-and-aft balance by means of the forward rudder.

  Wind would be all-important and contrary to the old Irish wish—“May the wind be ever at your back”—a good wind had to be head-on. As would be said, for the Wrights the winds were never the enemy.

  New to such experimental work as they were, the brothers had yet to realize the need for keeping records of all they did. But from their letters home, it appears the experiments began on October 3. “We’ve been having a fine time,” Orville wrote to Katharine on October 14, “altogether we have had the machine out three different days, from 2 to 4 hours each time.”

  When, at the start of their experiments, a “terrific wind” was blowing at more than 30 miles an hour, “too strong and unsteady for us to attempt an ascent in it,” they flew their machine like a kite, with lines hanging down to the ground by which they could work the steering apparatus. The greatest difficulty was keeping the glider at a height of no more than 20 feet or so. Even with an ideal wind of 15 to 20 miles an hour, the pull of the kite could be fierce. “It naturally wants to go higher and higher,” Orville explained. “When it begins to get too high, we give it a pretty strong pull . . . to which it responds by making a terrific dart to the ground.” If nothing had been broken, they sent it flying again and photographed it in the air.

  Once, after they set the glider on the ground to make “adjustments,” a sudden gust caught one corner and, “quicker than thought,” threw it 20 feet, smashing it to pieces. Orville, who had been standing a
t a rear corner holding one of the upright spars, was yanked off his feet and landed in a heap 20 feet away, shaken but unharmed.

  They photographed the wreckage, then dragged it all back to camp and talked of heading home. But after a night’s sleep, they decided there was hope. Repairing the damage took three days.

  As word of what they were up to continued to spread among the local populace, increasing numbers of them could be seen watching from a respectful distance. Bill Tate and several Tate family men and boys were also glad to lend a hand when needed.

  The whole time Wilbur and Orville worked together side by side, no less than at home, with the exception of those days when the conditions seemed right to try a manned flight, and then it was Wilbur only who took to the air, if ever so briefly.

  He would stand inside an opening in the lower wing, as Orville and Bill Tate stood ready at the wing tips. On signal, all three would take hold and start trotting forward, down the sand slope straight into the wind. Wilbur would hoist himself into position, stretch flat, and grasp the controls. Orville and Tate grabbed hold of the lines attached to the wing to keep the glider from sailing higher than wished.

  Making themselves reasonably comfortable when not working took considerable time and effort. They had moved from the Tate home to Wilbur’s good-sized tent with room enough for tools, supplies, and themselves. All was very different from back home, as Orville described for Katharine:

  The site of our tent was formerly a fertile valley, cultivated by some ancient Kitty Hawker. Now only a few rotten limbs, the topmost branches of trees that then grew in this valley, protrude from the sand. The sea has washed and the wind blown millions and millions of loads of sand up in heaps along the coast, completely covering houses and forest.