The Wright Brothers

by David McCullough

As the newspapers reported, the failure was worse by far than that of October 7, as was the humiliation for Langley and nearly everyone connected with the costly, long-drawn-out project. Halfhearted and unconvincing explanations were offered by Langley and others, fixing the blame on flaws in the launching apparatus. Few were convinced. Langley was compared to Darius Green, the comic fool of the famous poem whose ludicrous machine flew in one direction only, downward.

The whole thing had been a colossal failure, to be sure, but as the Chicago Tribune said, it was impossible not to feel some sympathy for Langley. He has constructed his aerodrome on scientific principles so far as he understands them. He has spent much money, he has shown great patience and perseverance, and he has labored hard. . . . Evidently something is wrong with the scientific principles or the professor’s application of them.

Neither brother was ever to make critical or belittling comments about Langley. Rather, they expressed respect and gratitude for the part he had played in their efforts. Just knowing that the head of the Smithsonian, the most prominent scientific institution in America, believed in the possibility of human flight was one of the influences that led them to proceed with their work, Wilbur told Octave Chanute in a letter written some years later.

The treatment Langley had been subjected to by the press and some of his professional friends had been “shameful,” Wilbur said. “His work deserved neither abuse nor apology.”

Everything was set. There was no debate or extended discussion over which of them should go first. They simply flipped a coin. Wilbur won and worked his way between the propellers and in among the truss wires to stretch flat on his stomach beside the engine, his hips in the padded wing-warping cradle, whereby he could control the wing-warping wires by shifting his body, and head up, looking forward out through the horizontal rudder or elevator that controlled the up or down pitch of the craft.

The repairs took two days. Not until late the afternoon of the 16th was the machine ready. While they were setting it up on the track in front of the building, seeing to final adjustments, a stranger wandered by and after looking the machine over, asked what it was. When we told him it was a flying machine, he asked whether we intended to fly it [Orville would write later]. We said we did, as soon as we had a suitable wind. He looked at it several minutes longer and then, wishing to be courteous, remarked that it looked as if it would fly, if it had a “suitable wind.” The brothers were much amused, certain that by “suitable wind,” the man had in mind something on the order of the recent 75-mile-an-hour gale.

Only five men showed up the morning of Thursday the 17th, after the brothers hung a white bedsheet on the side of the shed, the signal to the men at the Life-Saving Station that their help was needed. Many, as Orville later explained, were apparently unwilling to face the “rigors of a cold December wind in order to see, as they no doubt thought, another flying machine not fly.” Those who did turn out felt differently. “We had seen the glider fly without an engine,” remembered John T. Daniels, “and when these boys put an engine in it, we knew that they knew exactly what they were doing.”

The day was freezing cold. Skims of ice covered several nearby ponds. A gusty wind was blowing hard out of the north. “The wind usually blows,” Wilbur had reminded his Chicago audience in June. It was blowing at nearly a gale force of 20 to 27 miles per hour, far from ideal. The difficulty in a high wind was not in making headway in it but maintaining balance. Reflecting on the moment long afterward, Orville would express utter amazement over “our audacity in attempting flights in a new and untried machine under such circumstances.”

With everything in place and ready to go, Wilbur and Orville walked off a short way from the others and stood close talking low for some time under an immense overcast sky. Dressed in their dark caps and dark winter jackets beneath which they wore their customary white shirts, starched white collars, and dark ties, they could as well have been back in Dayton on a winter morning chatting on a street corner.

Because Wilbur had won the toss three days before, it was now Orville’s turn. The two shook hands as if saying goodbye. Then Wilbur went over to the others and told them not to look so glum, but to cheer Orville on his way. “We tried,” Daniels said, “but it was mighty weak shouting with no heart in it.”

In the time since 1900, when Wilbur had gone off on his first trip to Kitty Hawk bringing a camera as part of his equipment, the brothers had become increasingly interested in photography as essential to their flying experiments. They had even begun selling photographic equipment at the bicycle shop. In 1902 they had made what for them was a major investment of $55.55 in as fine an American-made camera to be had, a large Gundlach Korona V, which used 5 × 7-inch glass plates and had a pneumatic shutter. Early that morning of December 17, Orville had positioned the Korona on its wooden tripod about 30 feet from the end of the starting rail and assigned Daniels to squeeze the rubber bulb to trip the shutter as the Flyer passed that point.

At exactly 10:35, Orville slipped the rope restraining the Flyer and it headed forward, but not very fast, because of the fierce headwind, and Wilbur, his left hand on the wing, had no trouble keeping up. At the end of the track the Flyer lifted into the air and Daniels, who had never operated a camera until now, snapped the shutter to take what would be one of the most historic photographs of the century.

“Were you scared?” Orville would be asked. “Scared?” he said with a smile. “There wasn’t time.” “It was only a flight of twelve seconds,” he would also stress later, “and it was an uncertain, wavy, creeping sort of a flight at best, but it was a real flight at last.” The machine was picked up and carried back to the starting point, after which they all took a short break to warm up inside the camp.

At about eleven o’clock, the wind having eased off somewhat, Wilbur took a turn and “went off like a bird” for 175 feet. Orville went again, flying 200 feet. Then, near noon, on the fourth test, Wilbur flew less than a quarter mile through the air and a distance of 852 feet over the ground in 59 seconds.

It had taken four years. They had endured violent storms, accidents, one disappointment after another, public indifference or ridicule, and clouds of demon mosquitoes. To get to and from their remote sand dune testing ground they had made five round-trips from Dayton (counting Orville’s return home to see about stronger propeller shafts), a total of seven thousand miles by train, all to fly little more than half a mile. No matter. They had done it.

The day in Dayton had been cloudy and freezing cold with snow on the ground. It was past dark when Carrie Kayler, preparing supper in the kitchen at 7 Hawthorn Street, stopped to answer the doorbell. The Western Union man handed her a telegram, which she signed for and carried upstairs to the Bishop. A few minutes later he came down looking pleased, but with no excitement in his voice, told her, “Well, they’ve made a flight.” The telegram read: SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL AGAINST TWENTY ONE MILE WIND STARTED FROM LEVEL WITH ENGINE POWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTY ONE MILES LONGEST 57 SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. OREVELLE WRIGHT

Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started.

Of those who had been eyewitnesses at Kill Devil Hills the morning of the 17th, John T. Daniels was much the most effusive about what he had felt. “I like to think about it now,” he would say in an interview years later. “I like to think about that first airplane the way it sailed off in the air . . . as pretty as any bird you ever laid your eyes on. I don’t think I ever saw a prettier sight in my life.”

It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and all their energy into an idea and they had the faith.

Tunison read the telegram and showed no interest. “Fifty-seven seconds, hey?” he said. “If it had been fifty-seven minutes, then it might have been a news item.” No mention was made of the story in the Journal the following day, though it did get brief attention in the Dayton Daily News on an inside page. Elsewhere in the country, a ludicrously inaccurate account of what the brothers had done got much play as a result of a story that appeared on the front page of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot under a banner headline: “FLYING MACHINE SOARS 3 MILES IN TEETH OF HIGH WIND OVER HILLS AND WAVES AT KITTY HAWK ON CAROLINA COAST.”

Of course, they were pleased with the flight. But their first word with me, as I remember, was about the motor being damaged when the wind picked up the machine and turned it topsy-turvy. . . . They wanted a new one built right away. . . . They were always thinking of the next thing to do; they didn’t waste much time worrying about the past.

The work to be done here, the brothers knew, could well be the final, critical stage in the maturation of their whole idea. Here they would have to learn to do far more than what they had at Kitty Hawk. They must master the art of launching themselves safely into the air, of banking and turning a motor-propelled machine, and landing safely. Therefore, Wilbur stressed, they would have to learn to accommodate themselves to circumstances.

The pasture belonged to Torrence Huffman, president of Dayton’s Fourth National Bank, whom the Wrights knew. When they inquired if they might rent it for their use, he said there would be no charge, so long as they moved the cows and horses outside the fence before flying their machine. While he liked the brothers well enough, Huffman was among the many who had little faith in their project. “They’re fools,” he told the farmer who worked the adjoining land.

They were also putting their lives at risk, as well they knew. On a flight on August 24, hit by a sudden gust of wind, Orville smashed into the ground at 30 miles an hour and though he suffered no broken bones was so badly shaken and bruised he was unable to fly for another month.

While I like horses in a certain way [he wrote], I do not enjoy caring for them. I do not like the smell of the stables. I do not like to be obliged to clean a horse every morning, and I do not like to hitch one up in winter. . . . It takes time to hitch up a horse; but the auto is ready to start off in an instant. It is never tired; it gets there quicker than any horse can possibly do.

In the second week of September came word from the Wrights that he should return without delay. He reached Dayton on Tuesday, September 20, 1904, the day Wilbur would attempt something never done before in the history of the world. He would fly a power machine in a complete circle. Still recovering from his crash in August, Orville would be on the sidelines watching with Root and Charlie Taylor. Apparently no one else was on hand at Huffman Prairie. “God in his great mercy has permitted me to be, at least somewhat instrumental in ushering in and introducing to the great wide world an invention that may outrank electric cars, the automobiles . . . and . . . may fairly take a place beside the telephone and wireless telegraphy,” Root would begin his eyewitness account.

But before describing what he saw happen, he made a point of stressing that the Wrights were not just the sort who love machinery, but were “interested in the modern developments of science and art.” He had been “astonished” by the extent of their library and to find in conversation that “they were thoroughly versed not only in regard to our present knowledge, but everything that had been done in the past.” In saying this in what he wrote, he would be the first to recognize how much more there was to Wilbur and Orville than most imagined, even among the relative few who took time to give it some thought. They were not simply “another Darius Green,” Root stressed, but “scientific explorers” serving the world much as Columbus had.

When it first turned that circle, and came near the starting point, I was right in front of it, and I said then, and I believe still, it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life.

When the engine is shut off, the apparatus glides to the ground very quietly and alights on something much like a pair of light sled-runners [skids], sliding over the grassy surface perhaps a rod or more. Whenever it is necessary to slow up the speed before alighting, you turn the nose uphill. It will then climb right up on the air until the momentum is exhausted, when, by skillful management, it can be dropped as lightly as a feather.

An officer of the British Army’s Balloon Section, Lieutenant Colonel John Edward Capper, appeared in Dayton and did not hesitate to inform the brothers that he had come at the request of his government.

Reluctant to have him come with them to Huffman Prairie just yet, they instead showed him photographs of recent flights. But it was they themselves who impressed the visitor more than anything, and he invited them to submit a proposal for the sale of their Flyer II to the British government. They were unwilling to comply, partly because they were “not ready to begin considering what we will do with our baby now that we have it,” as Wilbur had confided to Octave Chanute. Furthermore, as patriotic Americans, they would be ashamed to offer it to a foreign government without their own country having a first chance.

It has for years been our business practice to sell to those who wished to buy, instead of trying to force goods upon people who did not want them. If the American Government has decided to spend no more money on flying machines till their practical use has been demonstrated in actual service abroad, we are sorry, but we cannot reasonably object. They are the judges.

As always, they had no time to waste. Work went on. A new 1905 Flyer III was under way, a machine “of practical utility,” as the Wrights would say. In fact, the Flyer III would prove to be the first practical airplane in history.

“The best dividends on the labor invested,” they said, “have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.”

Wilbur by then had flown 11 miles on a single run, Orville, 12 miles, then 15. To both of them, this, their Flyer III, with its “improvements,” was as big an advance as Flyer I had proven to be at Kitty Hawk.

Saturday, December 30 In the afternoon [wrote the Bishop in his diary], Wilbur and Orville sign up the contract with Mr. Arnold Fordyce, of Paris. . . .

821,393,

Berg also noticed Wilbur’s luggage consisted of a single leather grip the size of a doctor’s bag and his wardrobe left much to be desired. But on the way to the hotel, it was Wilbur who suggested it might be “advisable” for him to buy a new suit. At a tailor shop in the Strand, Berg “fixed him up” with both a dress suit and a tuxedo. When Wilbur’s account of these purchases reached home, Katharine wrote at once to tell him how “Orv had marched off to Perry Meredith’s [haberdashery] this morning and ordered the same for himself.”

The following day they met with Hart Berg and Frank Cordley for what Wilbur described as “a rather warm heart-to-heart talk,” meaning it was extremely heated. They took up the matter of patents, Wilbur making it clear from the start that Flint & Company was in no way entering into a partnership with them. “We are, and intend to be, the sole owners of the patents,” he said, according to his own notes on the conversation.

To the reporters the brothers were like no one they had ever tried to cover. A correspondent for the London Daily Mail told Orville he was “the toughest proposition” newspapermen had yet run up against. He himself, said the correspondent, had already spent more money on cab fares trying to learn what the brothers were up to than he could ever hope to recover, but that he could not give up for fear some other reporter would get the “scoop.” In mid-August, when it looked as though French interest in an agreement had revived, Wilbur and Berg returned from Berlin. Still there was no real progress with the French. Nor had there been with the Germans.

So stay they did and for a while Orville joined Wilbur in Berlin. Not until the start of November, back in Paris, did they decide it was time to go. But not before going with Hart Berg to see a demonstration put on by the French aviator Henri Farman, “Monsieur Henri,” a former artist, champion bicycle rider, and automobile racer, who was considered Europe’s outstanding pilot. Large crowds gathered at Issy-les-Moulineaux southwest of Paris. Farman had been getting a great deal of publicity, and even in the United States. (“Aren’t you getting worried over ‘Farman’s flights’?” Katharine had asked.) Farman flew a biplane made by a French aircraft manufacturer, Voisin Frères. Many of his trials were unsuccessful. On the longer flights, he had trouble getting off the ground, and the same was true when trying to make a circle. But in one flight he covered more than half a mile and flew an almost complete circle.

French aviation enthusiasts had no doubt, however, that France was now clearly in the lead. France could boast of the Voisin brothers, Gabriel and Charles, who had formed their aircraft company only that year, and other French aviators beside Henri Farman, including Léon Delagrange, who also flew a Voisin biplane, and Louis Blériot, who had taught himself to fly in a monoplane of his own design. Like Henri Farman, these French pilots flew in public and greatly to the public’s delight.

The big change this time was that the Flyer had been modified to carry two operators. They were to ride sitting up side by side, primarily to provide better control over the wing warping. It also meant no more stretching flat on their stomachs straining their necks to see ahead. The wind resistance would be greater but the advantages counted more.

A writer named Byron Newton, sent by the Paris Herald, did full justice to the wild and unimaginably remote setting he and the others found themselves confronted by after landing at Manteo on Roanoke Island: The Wrights we found were some twelve or fourteen miles distant from that point, among the great sand dunes on the coast near Kitty Hawk life saving station. Their place was on the narrow stretch of marsh and jungle that lies between the Atlantic and the mainland. . . . I have never viewed or traversed a more forbidding section of country. To reach this stretch of land we had to cross Roanoke Sound in an open boat and then walk about six miles, at times climbing over great mountains of gleaming white sand . . . and other times we were forced to pick our way through swamps and jungle infested with poison snakes, mosquitoes, wild hogs, and turkeys, with the air heavy with fever breeding vapors. Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk seemed “the end of the world,” wrote the correspondent for Collier’s Weekly, Arthur Ruhl, who then stressed that this end of the world had in fact become “the center of the world because it was the touchable embodiment of an Idea, which, presently, is to make the world something different than it has ever been before.”

A photographer for Collier’s Weekly, James Hare, snapped what would be the first photograph ever published of a Wright Flyer in the air.

To the newsmen from their distant vantage point, it appeared Wilbur and Orville had taken flight together and so some of their dispatches reported. But the brothers, ever conscious of the risks involved, had already decided they must never fly together. That way, if one were to be killed, the other could still carry on with the work.

“I was watching with the field glass,” Orville would recount. “The machine turned on end—the front end—with the tail in the air. There was a big splash of sand—such a cloud that I couldn’t see from where I was exactly what had happened. . . . It was probably thirty seconds before Will appeared.”

As things turned out Bollée would do more to help Wilbur than anyone, and never asked for anything in return.

Now he was looking at the Flyer in shambles and could barely control his fury. A dozen or more ribs were broken, one wing ruined, the cloth torn in countless places. Everything was a tangled mess. Radiators were smashed, propeller axles broken, coils badly turned up, essential wires, seats, nuts, and bolts, all missing.

“In putting things together,” he added, “I notice many evidences that your mind was on something else while you worked last summer.”