First in Flight Read online

  Herring’s trials proved powered hang gliders to be a technological dead end. The pilot’s only means of steering and correcting for gusts of wind was swinging his legs to one side or the other, a technique that could only work with craft of small size—imagine a pilot trying to change the course of a modern airliner by shifting his weight. By contrast, the Wrights’ system—in which the pilot operated the craft from an internal position and controlled its movement by means of levers that varied the angle of the wing and elevator surfaces—could be used in craft of much larger size.

  Augustus Herring’s subsequent attempt at developing an engine powerful enough for sustained flight was anticlimactic, ending in 1899 when a fire destroyed the boatyard where all his equipment was stored. By some estimates, he had gone through twenty-five thousand dollars in his quest for powered flight.

  Having taken his best shot at flight, Herring turned his attention full-time to a project he had been developing simultaneously with his powered hang glider. The Wright brothers knew something about two-wheel ground transportation, but Herring went them one better, constructing what were perhaps the first motorcycles offered commercially in the United States, using the trade name “Mobikes.” He also built and sold lightweight bolt-on gasoline engines for bicycles.

  For their day, Herring’s Mobikes were excellent machines. Sold in both conventional and motorcycle-built-for-two versions, they weighed between seventy-five and ninety-five pounds, carried 1-horsepower motors, and sold for $250 to $275. They rode on puncture-proof tires, ran fifty or sixty miles between fuelings, handled moderately difficult grades with ease, and operated dependably on the poor roads of the era. Herring sold about two hundred of them. Though his Mobike operation was destroyed in the same fire that claimed his aeronautical project, he rebuilt and resumed production, with a long-range view to manufacturing a line of automobiles. That plan was never realized.

  Herring’s interest in flight was rekindled when he read “Some Aeronautical Experiments,” the published version of Wilbur Wright’s paper delivered before the Western Society of Engineers.

  When he received Herring’s letter about getting back into aeronautics, Octave Chanute was past his anger with the younger man. He was also not the type to turn away someone in financial difficulty.

  In granting Chanute’s request that they allow Herring to experiment with them in 1902, the Wright brothers were welcoming a man who had more extensive associations in the field than they did, who had more glides to his credit, and who had attempted powered flight. Herring had even exceeded them in two-wheel transportation, having received a fair amount of praise for his Mobikes in national publications like The Horseless Age.

  On the other hand, they were opening their camp to a man who had a reputation for jealous self-interest even in his best days, who had exhausted his best ideas on flight, and who had little left to bring to the subject but contentiousness.

  Third Season

  After a year’s respite from bad voyages, the Wrights had a trying time making their way across Albemarle Sound again in 1902.

  They left Dayton at 9:00 A.M. on Monday, August 25, and arrived in Elizabeth City at 5:45 P.M. on August 26. Finding a two-masted schooner, the Lou Willis, tied at the dock and scheduled to depart for Kitty Hawk before dawn, they hurried back to the rail depot to retrieve their crates just before the storage facility closed at 6:00, bought a barrel of gasoline as the Standard Oil warehouse was closing for the evening, and entreated a shopkeeper to reopen his store to sell them a small oven.

  Things slowed down considerably after that. They waited nine hours for the Lou Willis to cast off, at 3:45 A.M. Wednesday, and then endured a cruelly slow voyage that didn’t see them to Kitty Hawk until thirty-six hours later, at an average speed of about a mile per hour.

  It wasn’t the captain’s fault. The Wrights couldn’t have been in better hands than those of Franklin Midgett of Kitty Hawk. Part of the most famous family of lifesavers on the Outer Banks, Midgett had only recently left the lifesaving service to start a boat line. However, there was nothing he could do about the dead calm, and the wind that later blew from the east, and the water so unusually shallow that they ran aground briefly.

  In a collection of letter excerpts called “Our Life in Camp at Kitty Hawk” that he compiled for U.S. Air Services magazine in 1943, Orville captured the difficulties of this trip and the worse time awaiting the Wrights setting up camp at Kill Devil Hills.

  Having made only ten miles by four o’clock Wednesday afternoon, Captain Midgett gave up for the day and anchored. With a lady passenger on board and the Lou Willis’s cabin only about six feet square, the woman-shy Wrights decided to spend the night on the open deck, Orville trying to sleep lying atop a lumber pile.

  Upon awakening, they found the Lou Willis’s galley little more appetizing than Israel Perry’s aboard the Curlicue. “After the mate had drawn us each a bucket of water with which to wash off the wrinkles from our faces the next morning,” Orville noted, “he proceeded to wash the dishes from the night before in cold water, without soap, in the same bucket; and then carrying it below, he made up the dough for bread in it, I suspected. However, as I had had hardly anything to eat for a couple of days, I didn’t follow it below deck to see just what it was used for there, for I found the more I saw the less I ate.”

  The Lou Willis sailed again at four-thirty Thursday morning and arrived at Kitty Hawk at four that afternoon. Before disembarking, the Wrights helped get a barrel of sugar out of the hold through an opening “several inches smaller than the barrel itself,” in Wilbur’s estimation. From Kitty Hawk, Dan Tate ferried them in his spritsail boat to a site opposite the camp at Kill Devil Hills, after which they went by horse cart over the dunes, having to get out and push part of the way.

  If they were looking toward their camp as an oasis after a trying journey, they must have been disappointed. Anxious to put their wind-tunnel findings to a practical test, they spent eleven days just getting their facilities in order—driving a deeper well, raising the ends of the building where the sand had blown away, laying foundation posts for better support, constructing a combination kitchen and dining-room addition, “upholstering” their table and dining-room chairs with burlap, adding bunks in the rafters, weatherproofing the exterior of the building, tarpapering the roof.

  They also had to contend with the wildlife, large and small, that was overrunning the camp.

  According to Orville, the brothers were driven to distraction by the local mouse population, a problem they tried to solve by means considerably less ingenious than what they applied to the flight problem. They baited homemade traps with bits of cornbread, chased mice with sticks, and blazed away at them indoors with guns. “The mark of the bullet is in the corner right back of where [the mouse] stood,” Orville wrote. In chasing a mouse that kept escaping through cracks between the floorboards, the Wrights even tried stationing “one [man] above and one below the floor,” one with a stick and the other with a gun—which sounds patently dangerous for the man bearing the stick.

  Orville wrote of one particular mouse that liked to knock pieces of cornbread onto the tin oven to wake him up, then “come onto my bed and promenade on my head, to tell me to get up and put another piece on the shelf.”

  Outside, there were hogs that had to be driven from camp. The weapons of choice here were tent pegs, which the Wrights apparently threw at the interlopers. In the case of one hog that overturned the brothers’ chicken coop and then “laid himself down on its former site to sun himself,” Orville, a noted marksman with gun or tent peg, placed the first peg “with terrific force squarely in the pit of his stomach, the second the full length of his side, and the third on the back of his head.” In his estimation, it was “a victory equal to Dewey’s at Manila.”

  They were another eleven days in assembling their new glider—laying the frame for the upper wing, adding the ribs to the frame, covering the wing with cloth, kiting it to test the angle at which it flew, bu
ilding the lower wing, cannibalizing the uprights from their 1901 glider for use in the new machine, wiring and hinging the wings in tandem, building and covering the elevator, adding a vertical tail. It was September 19 before they finally tested the completed craft, making about twenty-five glides, none of them entirely free.

  Bill Tate had moved north from Kitty Hawk to Martins Point to oversee a large tract of land and a lumber operation for an absentee owner, so he was no longer a fixture in camp as he had been the previous two seasons. Instead, the Wrights retained his half-brother, Dan Tate—the father of Tom Tate, the boy who rode aboard the 1900 glider—as a paid employee. Dan was their principal helper—bringing them supplies, working on the camp building, running with one wing of the glider during launches, even warning them of approaching weather—until their professional guests began arriving. On days when Dan didn’t come to camp, they could do no more than kite their glider.

  On September 20, they made about fifty glides, only two of them free.

  After spending three years reading about flight, theorizing with his elder brother, making calculations, writing letters, taking photographs, conducting wind-tunnel tests, building gliders, and keeping flight and instrument records, Orville finally got his chance at gliding on September 23. That morning, he rode the craft with Wilbur and Dan Tate running at the wingtips. After dinner, he made his first free glides, one of them covering a respectable 160 feet. However, he still had a ways to go to catch his brother. Wilbur could now keep the wings level in flight and bring the glider to a virtual standstill in the air.

  Just how much Orville had to learn came to light during a flight later that afternoon, when he grew so preoccupied with the wing-warping mechanism that he forgot about the elevator control. Wilbur’s and Dan Tate’s yells from the ground came too late. The craft nosed up at a forty-five-degree angle, stalled, and fell to the sand from a height of twenty-five or thirty feet. Orville was unhurt, but the glider required several days of repairs, the wing coverings having to be removed and the broken ribs spliced. They didn’t fly again until September 29.

  Having left home thirty-six days earlier, the Wrights got in only three days of free gliding before their company began to arrive. First in camp was their elder brother Lorin. Katharine, their sister, had informed them that Lorin might be making the trip to the Outer Banks, but there was some confusion as to his date of departure.

  Wilbur and Orville were in the dunes preparing for their first glide of the day on September 30 when they saw two men, both heavily burdened, struggling across the sand on foot. Taking them to be George Spratt and someone helping to carry his bags, they left their glider and hurried back to camp to greet them. Instead of Spratt, they found Lorin, who had traveled halfway across the continent for no better reason than to watch his brothers’ experiments and to help however he could. Wilbur and Orville built him a bed before the day ended.

  The two oldest children in the Wright family were restless souls who headed west in their early adulthood. Reuchlin, the eldest, settled in Missouri and Kansas and remained distant from the family. Lorin, four and a half years older than Wilbur, moved to Kansas before eventually returning to Dayton, where he lived less than a block from the family home. A familiar part of his younger brothers’ lives, he worked with them briefly in their printing business and was no doubt familiar with their bicycle business and their aeronautical ambitions. A married man with four children by 1902, he worked as a bookkeeper and took odd jobs on the side to pay the bills. He later kept books for Wilbur and Orville after they became famous.

  On the Outer Banks, Lorin went fishing, ran errands with Dan Tate, and took photographs of the glider in flight. Though he assisted at launches and witnessed numerous discussions of aeronautics, he didn’t contribute toward the building of the Wrights’ gliders or the theory behind them. Neither did he fly.

  George Spratt arrived the following day. Up until at least September 16, there had been considerable doubt that he was coming at all.

  Spratt had been having a bad time since he last saw the Wrights. Back home in Pennsylvania in late 1901, he had built a device designed to measure some of the forces acting on a wing surface. By late January, he was apparently having difficulty with his experiments. Wilbur wrote him a letter on the art of fashioning model wings from sheet metal, even sending Spratt four of the miniature wings he and Orville had tested in their wind tunnel. However, sheet-metal surfaces didn’t suit Spratt’s new measuring device, and he had to resort to the far more tedious process of carving wooden wings. Octave Chanute also tried to help, writing Samuel Langley to ask that some grant money be sent the Pennsylvanian’s way, a request Langley turned down. Recognizing his middling laboratory skills and his limited financial means, Spratt grew depressed with being a marginal member of the aeronautical community.

  He was more than that to the Wrights. Just how badly Wilbur wanted him in camp is revealed in his letters.

  On January 23, he wrote Spratt a brief motivational lecture: “I see from your remark about the ‘blues’ that you still retain the habit of letting the opinions and doings of others influence you too much. We thought we had partly cured you of this at Kitty Hawk. It is well for a man to be able to see the merits of others and the weaknesses of himself, but if carried too far it is as bad, or even worse, than seeing only his own merits and others’ weaknesses. In the present case there was no occasion for your ‘blueness’ except in your own imagination.”

  When Langley vetoed a grant for Spratt, Wilbur tried to cheer his friend by attributing it to Langley’s jealousy of Chanute, or to Langley’s bad experience with a previous Smithsonian employee Chanute had recommended—Edward Huffaker.

  Finally, in September, Wilbur tried to entice Spratt with a rosy description of conditions at the 1902 camp—the absence of mosquitoes, the new kitchen, the indoor beds, the improved well.

  It worked. Spratt proved himself a popular and valuable member of the camp again that season.

  Lorin Wright and George Spratt witnessed what were perhaps the greatest glides in history a couple of days after their arrival. On October 2, Wilbur made three glides over five hundred feet.

  There were some highly encouraging aspects of the new glider’s performance. Thanks to the lessons the Wrights had learned during their wind-tunnel tests, their wings were generating far greater lift than in previous years. Any object in flight, whether bird or man-made craft, must have its wings angled above the horizontal to maintain a glide. Gliding efficiency is measured by the degree of angle above the horizontal: the smaller the angle necessary to maintain a glide, the more efficient the craft. By that standard, the Wrights were now gliding better than the birds.

  But there were problems with the craft, too. After the 1901 season, the Wrights had surmised that differential drag was responsible for their glider’s tendency to slip sideways in turns. When an airplane is banked during a turn, it is paramount that the upper and lower wings move at the same speed. But the Wrights found that when they warped their wings, the upper wing had more of its surface exposed to the wind than did the lower wing; the lower wing continued to move at the same speed as before warping, but the upper wing began to slow, throwing the craft into a spin.

  In 1902 for the first time, the Wrights were flying a glider equipped with a tail. Since the tail’s two fixed vertical vanes would be presented at an angle to the wind during turns, they would serve to increase the drag on the lower, or faster, wing until it was equal to that of the upper wing, so the two would continue to move at the same speed.

  That was the theory, at least. In actual practice, the twin six-foot vanes only exacerbated the problem, sometimes throwing the glider into such severe spins that it seemed to bore into the sand upon impact; the Wrights called this phenomenon “well-digging.”

  Following supper on October 2, the three Wrights and Spratt discussed the problem before retiring to their bunks in the rafters. After the others were asleep, Orville, awake from drinking too much coffee, r
easoned that making the vertical rudder movable and placing it under the pilot’s control would allow him to correct for differential drag in any wind. Used in combination, wing warping and a movable vertical rudder would at last make balanced turns possible.

  Before he broached the subject with Wilbur the following morning, Orville supposedly gave a quick wink at Lorin, expecting Wilbur to dismiss his theory out of hand, as he seemed to do on principle. This time, however, Wilbur immediately saw the merit in his younger brother’s idea. He even proposed taking it a step farther. With the pilot having to work the elevator with a hand lever and the wing-warping mechanism with a hip cradle, controlling the glider was already complicated enough. He suggested tying the vertical rudder in with the wing-warping mechanism so they worked in tandem.

  From the start of the Wrights’ experiments, Orville had contributed excellent glider-building skills and an intelligent counterpoint to Wilbur’s ideas on flight. Now, he was also taking his turn as a pilot. His breakthrough on the vertical rudder may have marked his coming of age as Wilbur’s equal in aeronautical design as well.

  Once the movable rudder was added, the 1902 machine became the first glider in history that could be controlled in three axes of motion. From there, all that was left was adding a motor and propellers to achieve powered flight.

  Octave Chanute and Augustus Herring were there to witness the fruits of these developments. They arrived around noon on Sunday, October 5, unlike the Wrights taking the easier boat route via Manteo, rather than direct from Elizabeth City. One of Chanute’s gliders had already been in camp nearly two weeks, having been shipped aboard the Lou Willis and carried through the sand by Wilbur and Dan Tate.

  Chanute’s return to the Outer Banks said something about his commitment to aeronautics and his high regard for the Wrights, of course, but it was also a testament to his fortitude.