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  FIRST IN FLIGHT

  Copyright © 1995 by Stephen Kirk

  All Rights Reserved

  The paper in this book meets

  the guidelines for permanence

  and durability of the Committee

  on Production Guidelines for

  Book Longevity of the

  Council on Library Resources.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kirk, Stephen, 1960–

  First in flight : the Wright brothers in North Carolina / Stephen Kirk.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-89587-127-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Wright, Orville, 1871–1948. 2. Wright, Wilbur, 1867–1912. 3. Aeronautics—United States—Biography. 4. Aeronautics—United States—History. I. Title.

  TL540.W7K57 1995

  629.13’0092’273—dc20 95-6039

  Design by Debra Long Hampton

  Map by Jonathan Phillips

  Printed and Bound by R. R. Donnelley & Sons

  To Mary, Elizabeth, and Rebecca

  C O N T E N T S

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 1900

  Chapter 2 1901

  Chapter 3 1902

  Chapter 4 1903

  Chapter 5 1908

  Chapter 6 1911

  Chapter 7 1932

  Chapter 8 Beyond

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  The excerpts from Bruce Salley’s 1908 dispatches included in this book appear courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill.

  I owe thanks to many people for the help they provided during this project: the staff at Wright Brothers National Memorial, especially Darrell Collins and Warren Wrenn; Dawne Dewey at Wright State University; Steve Massengill at the North Carolina State Archives; Michael Halminski of the Chicamacomico Historical Association; Daniel W. Barefoot of Lincolnton, North Carolina, who generously shared unpublished material; Peggy A. Haile at the Norfolk Public Library; Steven Hensley of Greeneville, Tennessee; Barry Reynolds, southern Virginia’s baddest librarian; Jonathan Phillips of Wake Forest, North Carolina, mapmaker and friend; Marion Strode and Pamela C. Powell at the Chester County (Pa.) Historical Society; Monica Hoel and Thelma Hutchins at Emory and Henry College; Nellie Perry of the National Park Service; Doug Twiddy, Carole Thompson, and Jody Gibson of Twiddy and Company Realtors on the northern Outer Banks; the staff of the Maud Preston Palenske Memorial Library in St. Joseph, Michigan; Betty Husting of Locust Valley, New York; Thomas C. Parramore of Raleigh, North Carolina; Rodney Barfield at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort; and Brenda O’Neal at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

  The staff at the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo was of great help. Curator Wynne Dough gave my manuscript a careful reading. Hellen Shore and Sarah Downing answered numerous questions and located photographs for me.

  Thanks is also due Judy Breakstone, Sue Clark, Margaret Couch, Debbie Hampton, Liza Langrall, Carolyn Sakowski, Anne Schultz, Dr. Heath Simpson, Lisa Wagoner, and Andrew Waters at John F. Blair, Publisher.

  Lastly, I should credit my mother, Pat Kirk, whose interest in books inspired mine; my father, Ed Kirk, who got close enough to Chuck Yeager to actually reach out and touch him, but wisely refrained from doing so; and my wife, Mary, and daughters, Elizabeth and Rebecca, for their support through more than a few lost weekends.

  Introduction

  Admittedly, this is the kind of book Orville Wright wouldn’t have liked.

  During his later years, a number of writers went to great lengths to win his approval for their biographies of the Wrights, the primary results being hurt feelings and even an attempt by Orville to pay one writer to kill his project. It took Fred Kelly, the Wrights’ authorized biographer, more than a quarter-century to earn Orville’s confidence.

  The rub was always Orville’s insistence on separating the invention of the airplane from the personality of its inventors. He wanted the story to be heavy in technical explanation and light on personal detail. As far as he was concerned, the development of the airplane was a tale fraught strictly with engineering hurdles, but contrary to his wishes, the public found the image of two self-taught geniuses in suits and stiff collars chasing gliders in the dunes as appealing as the invention itself.

  Neither does this book attempt to do justice to the career of the Wright brothers.

  Experts agree that their experiments in Ohio, Virginia, and Europe were more important to the development of aviation than what they did on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the focus here. But just as the Wrights’ personal traits had a definite bearing on the solution of the flight problem—whether Orville liked it or not—so did the Outer Banks exert an influence on the Wrights. It is far from certain they would have succeeded elsewhere.

  I got the idea for this project upon seeing a photograph captioned “World’s First Flight Crew” in an old book I bought for twenty-five cents at a library sale. The photograph showed seven mustached, hard-looking men of the United States Lifesaving Service standing before a plain wall. These were men whose job it was to guard the welfare of sailors along one of the most dangerous sections of the Atlantic coast. As a sidelight, they gave aid to a couple of visiting bicycle builders and posed for their camera, looking about as natural as figures in a wax museum. I wanted to learn how these men found themselves parties to one of the great events of the century; how their lives were affected when the Wright brothers came to “town”; how their help, along with that of other local residents and a variety of visitors to the Outer Banks, figured in the Wrights’ success.

  People like Dan Tate, Augustus Herring, Alf Drinkwater, and Bruce Salley are remembered only as footnotes to the Wright brothers’ story—when they are remembered at all. But that is not to say they have no stories to tell. One ten-year-old Kitty Hawk boy went aloft in a Wright brothers glider nearly two years before Orville Wright—the world’s first heavier-than-air pilot—ever did. One local man was so well respected by the Wrights that he remained in contact with Orville for more than four decades after the famous flights. Others parlayed a rather scanty association with the brothers into fame and public appearances. One of the early aeronauts who witnessed the Wrights’ experiments on the Outer Banks was distinctly unimpressed, disparaging them as mere “bicycle mechanics” to his dying day. Another started out their friend and ended up claiming they appropriated some of their most important ideas from him.

  Pieces of the Wrights—a sewing machine, bits of wing fabric, the wood from their camp buildings, papers they left behind—are scattered around the Outer Banks, in fact and legend, well beyond the bounds of Wright Brothers National Memorial.

  This book seeks to describe the full range of the Wright brothers’ experiences on the Outer Banks—their experiments, their leisure-time pursuits, the lifesaving personnel and local citizens they associated with, the other outsiders who came hoping to fly with them or cover them in the press. It also seeks to present the Wrights’ trips to North Carolina in the broader context of what was happening on the Outer Banks at the turn of the century. Other events of note took place while the Wrights were in residence, including the ground-breaking work of another experimenter, now as obscure as the Wrights are famous, who changed the world nearly as much as did Wilbur and Orville.

  If the Wright brothers’ story can be boiled down to one essential fact, it is that on December 17, 1903, they made four powered airplane flights at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, the first in history. But depending on how far you care to read into dubious sources, you can find that they made three flights that day, or only one, or that they fle
w successfully three days earlier, or that they never left the ground at all until 1908. And that doesn’t begin to examine the claims of people who counted themselves responsible in some way for the brothers’ success. There is no part of the Wrights’ story that hasn’t been disputed by someone.

  The appearance of Wilbur and Orville Wright on the North Carolina coast marked an unlikely convergence of two of the most original of men and one of the most fascinating of places. With the approach of the centennial anniversary of the first powered flights, interest in the Wrights will be stronger than ever. Perhaps attention is also due their lesser-known Outer Banks associates, along with some of the local rumors, contrary claims, and fanciful tales that have followed in the wake of a great event.

  FIRST IN FLIGHT

  C H A P T E R 1

  1 9 0 0

  World’s fairs now vie with one another more in their side-show or “Midway” attractions than in their true objects, and each succeeding one has to outreach its predecessors in strange and startling sensations. One of the shocks that is to be given at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition next year is a spectacular “trip to the moon.” You go aboard the airship Luna; when all is ready the cables are thrown off and you rise into the upper regions, (for so it appears to the passengers). It is night and the stars shine brightly above…. You see the moon, too, at first far away but gradually nearer; and at length you land on it.

  Elizabeth City North Carolinian,

  October 11, 1900

  The State of Affairs

  The good people of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, need not have looked five hundred miles to the north for a fantasy flying story. The actual chain of events had already begun just across Albemarle Sound. Wilbur and Orville Wright, camping in a tent half a mile south of Kitty Hawk, spent the day the above article appeared repairing their first man-carrying glider, damaged by a gust of wind the previous day. Wilbur had made his first glides about a week earlier, probably on October 3.

  Yet no one in coastal North Carolina guessed that they were about to host one of the great achievements in an age of technological advances.

  Many of those advances had made it as far as the remote place the Wright brothers chose for their experiments. Elizabeth City was a prime beneficiary. As the southern terminus of the rail route from Norfolk, Virginia, it was enjoying a prosperity brought by technology. And thanks to a new telegraph line, even citizens of the Outer Banks—who had long set a standard for isolation—could swap messages with Norfolk, and then the rest of the world, at nearly the speed of light.

  In North Carolina and elsewhere, the older citizens of that era had seen the world shrink more in their lifetimes than it had in all previous recorded history. Advances in transportation were perhaps the foremost reason why people felt a greater ability to exert control over their world than ever before. Automobiles, only about ten years old at the turn of the century, were still few and plagued by mechanical troubles. But trolleys and “safety bicycles”—a familiar subject to the Wright brothers—simplified getting around in cities. And with trains traveling at unheard-of speeds of sixty to seventy miles per hour, and with five-hundred-foot floating palaces making swift, safe, regular passage across the ocean, it was possible to travel halfway around the world in a week and a half.

  Advances like these came into popular use before the memory of traveling by horse over washboard roads had begun to fade. People were prepared to believe anything was possible.

  Anything except human flight, that is. John Trowbridge captured the sentiment of the era in a well-traveled poem called “Darius Green and His Flying Machine.” The poem describes a country bumpkin who uses thimble and thread, a bellows, umbrellas, and “a hundred other things” to build a contraption for flying. On the Fourth of July, he hurls himself from a window and, predictably enough, falls in a heap in the barnyard, amid the straw and chaff “and much that wasn’t so sweet by half.”

  The name Darius Green was recognized by reading people all over the country. The poem probably struck such a chord because it contained an element of the familiar. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, aeronautics was the province of barnyard engineers. Though many were talented, they were hampered by a lack of scientific data to guide their work, and they generally operated without any contact with, or knowledge of, other experimenters in the field. They stood no chance of achieving flight. It was their low status in the public eye that defined flying as a fringe pursuit, with would-be aeronauts held in about as high regard as the builders of perpetual-motion machines.

  The best-known example in eastern North Carolina was James Henry Gatling, who lived near Murfreesboro, about eighty-five miles northwest of Kitty Hawk. A literal Darius Green, Gatling began as a boy in the 1820s and 1830s by observing birds and designing kites, then graduated to jumping from a barn loft holding an umbrella or wearing wings made of fodder and corn leaves. Ridicule from neighbors and even his family’s slaves soon drove him to pursue his passion in secret.

  As an adult, laboring in the considerable shadow of his younger brother Richard Gatling—inventor of the Gatling gun—he built a craft powered by twin, manually operated blowers that directed air at the underside of the wings, which he believed would sustain him aloft. He intended to call his machine the Gatling Flyer, but once he put it on public display, someone wryly christened it the Old Turkey Buzzard, and it was that name that stuck.

  There were many things James Henry Gatling didn’t know about the flight problem. He didn’t know what sort of wings he needed to support the weight of his machine: how long from tip to tip, how broad from front to back, how deep from top to bottom, and what kind of curvature they should have, if any. He didn’t know what wind velocity and what horsepower would be necessary to sustain him aloft. He didn’t even know how many horsepower his engine delivered, or the most efficient means for using that horsepower to propel him through the air. In fact, he likely didn’t know he needed to know such things.

  Nonetheless, Gatling optimistically mapped himself out a mile-long course for the day in 1873 when he was to test his machine. Launched from a twelve-foot-high cotton-gin platform, the Old Turkey Buzzard suffered an unscheduled meeting with an oak tree at the edge of the yard. Gatling never attempted to fly again.

  In fairness, it should be noted that Gatling was well ahead of most of his contemporaries. At least he built a full-scale prototype. Most independent experimenters never progressed beyond drawings and small models, yet they continued to believe they were within a hairs-breadth of a man-carrying, powered machine.

  Experimenters like James Henry Gatling inhabited many parts of the map. Local newspapers sometimes printed their claims without close examination, but by and large, people recognized them for what they were—dreamers. Whatever public exposure they got tended to emphasize their folly, rather than the honest effort—and sometimes the blood—they spent in pursuit of flight.

  The turning point came in the 1880s, when trained engineers began to take a serious interest in aeronautics. The principal figures in the United States were Octave Chanute and Samuel Langley.

  Octave Chanute was the great benefactor of early aviation. Born in Paris in 1832, he moved to New Orleans during his boyhood years, then to New York. Chanute grew interested in engineering just as the railroad boom was opening up the West. Too impatient to learn his craft sitting in a classroom, he presented himself to a track-laying crew of the Hudson River Railroad in 1849 and offered to work for nothing. It wasn’t long before he made his way onto the payroll and up the company ladder. He did his most notable work in Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas; among his major credits were the stockyards of Chicago and Kansas City and the first bridge over the Missouri River. Chanute enjoyed a stellar national reputation, his professional accomplishments and fine character receiving ample play in the newspapers.

  Chanute caught the aeronautical bug in the mid-1870s, when he traveled to Europe and learned that human flight was coming to be considered a real possib
ility by engineers there. When Chanute thought back on his own career, he remembered times when the destruction of a bridge or the lifting off of a roof in a storm could not be accounted for by the wind velocity alone. He wanted to learn about the mechanics of lift and how it might be applied to the flight problem.

  His method was not to begin experimenting immediately, but to make a thorough survey of all the serious efforts at human flight. Chanute believed that the technical problems connected with flight were so complex that they could never be solved by lone experimenters. He felt that only a cooperative effort among many scientists and engineers could achieve success. Toward that end, he began establishing contact with a variety of flight enthusiasts on both sides of the ocean. Soon, experimenters were learning of Chanute’s interest and writing him for information and advice, for which he rewarded them with news of their colleagues scattered far and wide. Not only did Chanute help liberate experimenters from the isolation that had doomed them to failure, he also contributed personal finances toward the work of individuals he found particularly promising.

  This portion of Chanute’s career reached its peak in the early 1890s with the publication of his classic work, Progress in Flying Machines. The book begins with brief accounts of early experimenters like the French locksmith Besnier, whose 1678 craft consisted of a pole slung over either shoulder with a broad paddle attached at each end—four paddles in all. Besnier strove to beat his way through the air by brute force, jumping first from a chair, then a table, then a window sill, then a second story, and finally a garret, from which he succeeded in paddling over the roof of the cottage next door. Chanute soberly characterized these efforts as “short downward flights aided by gravity.”

  Covering everything from muscle-powered craft to the sophisticated gliders of Germany’s Otto Lilienthal, Progress in Flying Machines tells a tale paved with good intentions but bad ideas. Thanks to Octave Chanute, prospective aeronauts now had a thorough survey of early experiments in flight and a much clearer notion of which paths showed promise and which would certainly end in failure.