The Wright Brothers Read online

  As it happened, one of the two men Octave Chanute wished to have join the brothers in their experiments had arrived just as the mosquitoes struck and so shared in the miseries. He was Edward Huffaker of Chuckey City, Tennessee, a former employee of the Smithsonian Institution and author of a Smithsonian pamphlet, On Soaring Flight. Now a protégé of Chanute, he had brought with him a disassembled glider of his own design built at Chanute’s expense. To Wilbur and Orville he seemed at first a welcome addition.

  The second to join the group, young George Alexander Spratt from Coatesville, Pennsylvania, had little in the way of appropriate background for the work at hand. Chanute had described him as having medical training that could prove valuable in case of an accident, but Spratt had abandoned his medical ambitions after finishing medical school several years before. About all he could offer as reason for his participation was that flying had been the dream of his life, which was altogether true. He arrived in the last days of the mosquito siege.

  The hangar-workshop at Kill Devil Hills was now to provide lodging for four. As the chief cook, Orville arranged a corner kitchen with a gas stove fashioned out of a metal barrel and shelves lined with canned goods—Arm & Hammer baking soda, Chase & Sanborn coffee, Royal Purple Hand-Packed tomatoes, Gold Dust Green Gage plums. Fresh butter, eggs, bacon, and watermelon had to be carried on foot from Kitty Hawk.

  Huffaker expressed amazement at the brothers’ “mechanical facility” but was to prove increasingly irksome to them, lazy and indifferent about such daily necessities as washing dishes. He was also inclined to make use of the personal possessions of the others without bothering to ask permission. As tiresome as anything for the sons of Bishop Wright was to hear Huffaker go on about “character building,” rather than hard work, being the great aim in life. The more they learned about the glider he had designed and planned to test but never did, the more they considered it a joke.

  Spratt, by contrast, helped every way he could and was excellent company.

  On July 27, with the glider at last ready, the experiments began. The day was clear, the wind at Kill Devil Hills, about 13 miles an hour. Besides Huffaker and Spratt, Bill Tate and his half-brother Dan were on hand to assist.

  Wilbur was to do all the gliding. As they made ready for the first launch into the wind, Orville and Spratt positioned themselves at the corners. Expectations were high.

  But no sooner was the machine up than it nosed straight into the ground only a few yards from where it started. Wilbur, it seemed, had positioned himself too far forward. In a second try, having shifted back a bit, he did no better. Finally, after several more failed attempts, he moved back nearly a foot from where he started and sailed off more than 100 yards.

  To all present but Wilbur and Orville this flight seemed a huge success. To the brothers it was disappointing. The machine had not performed as expected, not, in fact, as well as the one of the year before. Wilbur had had to use the full power of the rudder to keep from plowing into the ground or rising so high as to lose headway. Something was “radically wrong.”

  In a glide later the same day, the machine kept rising higher and higher till it lost all headway, exactly “the fix” that had plunged Otto Lilienthal to his death. Responding to a shout from Orville, Wilbur turned the rudder to its full extent and only then did the glider settle slowly to the ground, maintaining a horizontal position almost perfectly, and landing with no damage or injury.

  Wilbur went again. And again. Several times the same experience was repeated and with the same result. On one glide the machine even began to drift backward.

  “The adjustments of the machine are away off,” Orville explained to Katharine. The curvature, or “camber,” of the wings, from the leading edges to the rear, was too great and had to be changed. It was this that concerned them the most, the ideal camber, or curve, of the wing from its leading to its trailing edge, being that which gave the wing the most lift against the pull of gravity. What was so troubling was that the ratio they had gone by was exactly what Lilienthal had recommended, about 1 to 12, whereas for their glider of the year before, Machine No. 1, the brothers had used a ratio of 1 to 22.

  They stopped gliding for several days to rebuild—flatten—the wings back to a camber close to what it had been in 1900, and with fine results. Photographs were taken of Wilbur soaring through the air exactly as wished. He himself would write, “The machine with its new curvature never failed to respond promptly to even small movements of the rudder.

  The operator could cause it to almost skim the ground, following the undulations of its surface, or he could cause it to sail out almost on a level with the starting point, and passing high above the foot of the hill, gradually settle down to the ground.

  Further, he had no trouble landing quite smoothly at speeds of 20 miles an hour or more.

  Work on the wings had filled the first week of August, during which Octave Chanute arrived on the scene. His protégé Huffaker had only praise for the Wrights. As Wilbur had said earlier in a letter to Bishop Wright, “Mr. Huffaker remarked that he would not be surprised to see history made here in the next six weeks.

  Our opinion is not so flattering. He is astonished at our mechanical facility, and as he has attributed his own failures to the lack of this, he thinks the problem solved when these difficulties . . . are overcome, while we expect to find further difficulties of a theoretic nature which must be met by new mechanical designs.

  Chanute, too, was greatly impressed by what he saw. He recorded little at the time, however, and apparently had few questions, as different as his own methods had been over the years. For all the time and study he had devoted to the science of gliding, he himself had never physically ventured into the air.

  The successful tests flown with the reconstructed wings took place on August 8. The following day Wilbur was back at the controls and in the air once more. But again there were problems, this time of a different and even more troubling kind.

  Their wing-warping system of which the brothers were so proud was not responding as expected, and they could not understand why. When the left wing dipped low, while skimming close to the ground for landing, Wilbur had pulled hard on the elevator to no effect. It was like trying to open a barn door in a strong wind. Then suddenly the glider plunged into the sand, throwing him forward through the elevator and leaving him a bruised eye and nose and painful ribs.

  Octave Chanute left Kitty Hawk two days later, convinced the Wrights had made more progress and with a larger glider than anyone thus far, and urged them to keep on with their work.

  In the days following, it rained without letup, and to add to his miseries Wilbur contracted a cold. George Spratt departed, then Edward Huffaker, but not before helping himself to one of Wilbur’s blankets.

  On August 20, Wilbur and Orville, too, said their goodbyes to the Tates and others and were on their way home.

  What they talked about on the train heading back to Ohio was neither recorded at the time nor discussed in any detail afterward. Yet it is clear from a few of their later comments that they were as down in spirit about their work as they had ever been, and especially Wilbur.

  It was not just that their machine had performed so poorly, or that so much still remained to be solved, but that so many of the long-established, supposedly reliable calculations and tables prepared by the likes of Lilienthal, Langley, and Chanute—data the brothers had taken as gospel—had proven to be wrong and could no longer be trusted. Clearly those esteemed authorities had been guessing, “groping in the dark.” The accepted tables were, in a word, “worthless.”

  According to what Orville was to write years later, Wilbur was at such a low point he declared that “not in a thousand years would man ever fly.” Once home, however, according to Katharine, they talked mainly of how disagreeable Edward Huffaker had been.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Unyielding Resolve

  We had to go ahead and discover everything ourselves.

  ORVILLE WRIG
HT

  I.

  The pall of discouragement disappeared in a matter of days, replaced with a surge of characteristic resolve. They would make a fresh start. Wilbur’s gloom on the train was only momentary. As Orville said, “He was at work the following day and it seemed to me was more hopeful and determined than ever.”

  “We knew that it would take considerable time and funds to obtain data of our own,” Orville later recounted, “but there was some spirit that carried us through . . .”

  The “boys” were working every night on their “scientific” investigations, Katharine reported to their father. “We don’t hear anything but flying machine . . . from morning till night.”

  Not incidental to the sustaining of spirit were the glass-plate negatives of the photographs taken at Kitty Hawk, which the brothers developed in a darkroom set up in the carriage shed out back. There, Wilbur would write, he and Orville had moments of “as thrilling interest as any in the field, when the image begins to appear on the plate and it is yet an open question whether we have a picture of a flying machine, or merely a patch of open sky.”

  At the end of August came an invitation from Octave Chanute for Wilbur to address the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago on the subject of gliding experiments. It was his first request to speak in public, and he was extremely reluctant to accept, feeling the date set, September 18, left too little time to prepare anything of substance. But Katharine “nagged” him into going. That Wilbur might prove a poor speaker seems never to have entered her thoughts.

  Only days later, in the first week of September, came the shocking news that President William McKinley had been shot by an insane anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, while attending the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York. For days he was at death’s door. “McKINLEY IS DYING,” read the large headline across the front page of the Dayton Free Press on September 13. The following morning, he was dead, and that same day at Buffalo, young Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as the twenty-sixth president of the United States.

  William McKinley had been “Ohio’s own.” Born in Ohio, he had served through the Civil War in the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment, married an Ohio girl, served long as an Ohio congressman and for two terms as the governor of Ohio. In Dayton, the day of his death, thousands of people filled the streets downtown. The scene was like nothing in the city’s history. Fire bells tolled. The courthouse and other public buildings were quickly and heavily draped in black.

  The Wright brothers, it appears, kept working as hard as ever at the shop, possibly as a way of coping with the tragedy. For Wilbur there was the added pressure of preparing his lecture. The morning he boarded the train for Chicago, September 18, Dayton was still shrouded in black, as McKinley was not to be buried for another two days.

  Orville and Katharine having decided that Wilbur’s wardrobe was insufficient for so important a public debut, he went off, as Katharine recorded, “arrayed in Orv’s shirt, collars, cuffs, cuff-links, and overcoat.” Never had he looked “so ‘swell.’ ”

  How he felt was another matter. Octave Chanute had written to inquire whether he would mind if the meeting of the society was designated “Ladies’ Night.” Wilbur had replied it was not for him to decide. “I will already be as badly scared as it is possible for a man to be.” Asked by Katharine and Orville whether his talk would be scientific or witty, he said, “Pathetic.”

  Arriving in Chicago, he went directly to Chanute’s three-story brownstone on Huron Street to dine with Chanute prior to the speech and was relieved to find his host as cordial as ever and the kind of man whose top-floor, private study was so chock-full of models of flying machines and stuffed birds he could hardly get into it himself.

  The gathering of some fifty society members and their wives convened at the Monadnock Building at eight o’clock. In his brief introduction Chanute spoke of the advances made in aerial navigation by “two gentlemen from Dayton, Ohio” bold enough to attempt things neither he nor Otto Lilienthal had dared try.

  The speech Wilbur delivered—modestly titled “Some Aeronautical Experiments”—would be quoted again and again for years to come. Published first in the society’s journal, it appeared in full or part in The Engineering Magazine, Scientific American, the magazine Flying, and the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. In the words of a latter-day aeronautics specialist at the Library of Congress, the speech was “the Book of Genesis of the twentieth-century Bible of Aeronautics.”

  It was authentic Wilbur Wright, straightforward and clear. What was needed above all for success with a flying machine, he said, was the ability to ride with the wind, to balance and steer in the air. To explain how a bird could soar through the air would take much of the evening, he said. Instead he took a sheet of paper, and, holding it parallel to the floor, let it drop. It would not “settle steadily down as a staid, sensible piece of paper ought to do, but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse.” This was the kind of horse, he said, that men had to learn to manage in order to fly, and there were two ways:

  One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders.

  If one were looking for perfect safety, he said, one would do well to sit on the fence and watch the birds. “But if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”

  He praised the work of both Lilienthal and Chanute. “Lilienthal not only thought, but acted. . . . He demonstrated the feasibility of actual practice in the air, without which success is impossible.” Noting that Lilienthal, over a period of five years, had spent no more than five hours in actual gliding, he said the wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. What if a bicycle rider tried to ride through a crowded city after only five hours’ practice, spread out in bits of ten seconds over a period of five years?

  He praised the biplane developed by Chanute as a “very great structural advance” and told how, with a few changes, he and Orville had built and tested their own double-deck glider in Outer Banks winds of up to 27 miles per hour.

  Much that followed in the published version of the speech was highly technical and included mathematical equations and diagrams of wing curvatures. (“Do not be afraid of making it too technical,” Chanute had urged.) How critical Wilbur had been about the unreliable data compiled by Lilienthal and Chanute when addressing the Chicago gathering is unknown, since no stenographic record was made of the actual speech. But in the published version he pulled back considerably out of respect for Chanute. Of Lilienthal’s tables, he went only so far to say Lilienthal might have been “somewhat in error.”

  If Chanute took issue with anything Wilbur said, or was in any way offended, he never let on. In a letter written after he finished proofreading the speech before publication, Chanute called it “a devilish good paper which will be extensively quoted.”

  That Wilbur returned to Dayton from Chicago even more grateful for Chanute’s friendship and counsel can be seen in the increased volume of their correspondence. Over the next three months, until the end of the year, Wilbur would write to Chanute more than twelve times, or once a week on average. Some of the letters ran as long as seven to nine pages, and Chanute invariably replied without delay.

  Meanwhile, an article in the September issue of the popular McClure’s Magazine written by Simon Newcomb, a distinguished astronomer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, dismissed the dream of flight as no more than a myth. And were such a machine devised, he asked, what useful purpose could it possibly serve? “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watc
hmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.”

  With their former trust in the calculations of Lilienthal and Chanute shattered, the brothers set out that autumn of 1901 to crack the code of aeronautics themselves. It was a brave decision and a crucial turning point.

  Of primary importance was to find a way to achieve accurate measurements of the “lift” and “drag” of a wing’s surface, and the ingenuity, as well as patience, they brought to their experiments were like nothing done by anyone until then. For three months, working in one of the upstairs rooms at the bicycle shop, they concentrated nearly all of their time on these “investigations” and with stunning results.

  They devised and built a small-scale wind tunnel—a wooden box 6 feet long and 16 inches square, with one end open and a fan mounted at the other end, and this powered, since the shop had no electricity, by an extremely noisy gasoline engine. The box stood on four legs about waist high.

  Although a wind tunnel had been used by an English experimenter, Francis Herbert Wenham, as early as the 1870s, and by several others since, including Hiram Maxim, their tests were nothing like those of the brothers, who proceeded entirely on their own and in their own way.

  For testing apparatus inside the box, they used old hacksaw blades cut to different sizes with tin shears and hammered into a variety of shapes and thicknesses—some flat, some concave and convex, or square or oblong, and each about six inches square and one-thirty-second of an inch thick—these strung on bicycle spoke wires.

  Though such apparatus did not look like much, it was to prove of immense value. For nearly two months the brothers tested some thirty-eight wing surfaces, setting the “balances” or “airfoils”—the different-shaped hacksaw blades—at angles from 0 to 45 degrees in winds up to 27 miles per hour. It was a slow, tedious process, but as Orville wrote, “those metal models told us how to build.”