First in Flight Read online

  Today, Chanute is remembered as a kind of aeronautical man about town, someone whose wealth and professional standing allowed him to influence nearly everyone trying to fly, though his own understanding of the flight problem was limited. Actually, Chanute saw his share of troubles during his lifetime. He was a worrier and a workaholic. In 1875, while working for the Erie Railroad and trying to design an elevated railway system for New York City, he “had what would be called a ‘nervous breakdown’,” according to the editor of his travel diaries. His doctor insisted Chanute leave the country for an extended walking tour of Europe, away from all personal and professional responsibilities. In his diary, the troubled Chanute wrote of his “state of depression,” his “shattered health,” his need of recovering “the mental tone and balance necessary for future success and the earning of a living” to support his wife and five children.

  Toward the end of the century, Chanute’s principal business was a Chicago-based company whose purpose was to preserve railroad ties by injecting them with a creosote mixture. Long used to keep railroad ties, telephone and telegraph poles, and a variety of underground timber from rotting, the process was designed by Chanute himself. In the 1890s, he tried to get out of the business, leaving it in the hands of his son Charles and another man, only to be drawn back into the daily operation of the company at a time when he was ready to retire and devote himself to the flight problem.

  At the time of his 1902 visit to the Wrights’ camp, he was still recovering from the death in April of Annie Riddell James Chanute, his wife of forty-five years.

  Camping and working with gliders on the Outer Banks were young men’s pastimes. Orville Wright was thirty-one in 1902. George Spratt was thirty-three. Wilbur Wright and Augustus Herring were thirty-five. Lorin Wright was thirty-nine. Dan Tate, usually the senior man in camp, was forty-one.

  Octave Chanute, however, was seventy. Conditions on the Outer Banks were doubly hard on him. A wealthy, famous, elderly gentleman, he left the comforts of home for the privilege of risking difficult travel across the coastal waters, enduring climatic extremes, living in cramped quarters, eating bad food, and going to the bathroom in the woods.

  With the arrival of Chanute and Herring, the Wrights had their liveliest camp to date. Discussions of aeronautics lasted well into the evening. Sometimes, Orville broke out his mandolin and played for the men. It must have been a strange sound to hear from a makeshift wooden building on a lonely expanse of sand, but then again, its unlikely that anyone happened near enough to witness it.

  Perhaps the music aided digestion. Camp fare was neither better nor more bountiful than in the past. In one of his letters, Wilbur described how Orville, having a hankering for wild fowl, went to the beach and shot three “sea chickens” one day. “That will make one mouthful for me, and a half mouthful for him,” Wilbur noted. “After a bullet has gone through one of them there is just a little meat left around the edges. Our meat, you see, is costing us about 60 cents per pound in cartridges, so you understand what epicures we are in our eating.” The muffins they baked were said to “resemble the shell of a terrapin in hardness.”

  Even with the poor food and the six bunks crowded into the rafters, conditions in camp were much improved over the previous year. The Wrights now had a dependable water source and reasonably good facilities for cooking and dining. The improvements even extended to transportation. The Wrights had brought along a balloon-tire bicycle that traveled easily across the sand, making social visits and errands a far more pleasant prospect than in the past.

  Augustus Herring may have seen matters differently. Out with Wilbur on an errand to fetch some blankets his first day in camp, he was caught in a downpour and soaked to the skin. That was perhaps the high point of his stay. Whether motivated by hunger or a love for all God’s creatures, he took to worrying about the chicken the Wrights kept outside the camp building, predicting that it would be stolen while they slept. One night, he woke everyone at two in the morning with an announcement that the chicken had indeed been stolen by a fox, though how he came to that knowledge from his position in the rafters is anyone’s guess. Morning found the chicken to be present and in good working order.

  Herring had bigger things to worry about than poultry. He assembled his “multiwing” glider on October 6, the day after his arrival, and was ready to test it that evening. On his second glide, which covered only twenty feet, he landed on the right wing and broke the main cross-span between the upper and lower surfaces. He tried again two days later but could not get airborne at all. The same fate befell him on Friday, October 10. On October 11, the Wrights tried to help him fly the multiwing as a manned kite, but it wouldn’t take to the air even when they ran along with it.

  Between these tests, Herring made a variety of field measurements of his and the Wrights’ glider, all of which told him little about why the multiwing was failing. In his diary, Orville attributed it to structural weakness, noting that winds too light even to sustain the craft in flight distorted the shape of its wings. The Wrights’ wind-tunnel tests had led them to believe that the performance of Chanute’s 1896 biplane glider had been exaggerated, and what they saw of Herring’s multiwing, a similar craft, confirmed their opinion.

  A frustrated Chanute laid the blame on Herring’s construction, writing Samuel Langley on October 21 that Herring was a “bungler.” Chanute’s criticism was less than fair, since he had personally inspected the craft while it was being built and had written Wilbur back in July that Herring was “putting excellent workmanship on the machine.”

  On Monday, October 13, Orville, Herring, and Spratt assembled and tested Chanute’s other glider, the craft designed by Charles Lamson, the California jeweler. It had arrived the previous Wednesday aboard the Lou Willis. Flown only that one day, the Lamson glider performed little better than the multiwing, Herring attaining a best glide of forty-five or fifty feet.

  In case the point needed to be driven home, the performance of the Wrights’ modified glider let Herring know just how far behind he was.

  The brothers completed work on their movable tail rudder—a single vane five feet high and fourteen inches from front to back—on Monday, October 6, and tested it that Wednesday and Friday. It appears Herring and Chanute witnessed no glides of monumental length either day However, what they saw was of far greater importance. Orville was still having a beginner’s trouble with the controls, but Wilbur quickly mastered the rudder and wing-warping combination. For the first time in history, a glider was capable of executing turns. The control system of the Wrights’ 1902 craft also allowed them to make corrections for gusts of wind from any quarter. That Friday, Lorin Wright took history’s first photograph of a glider turning.

  Herring and Chanute left camp on October 14, a day after Lorin’s departure. Chanute’s understanding of what he had seen on the Outer Banks that season defies analysis. He had witnessed the utter failure of the two gliders built under his sponsorship, but he somehow held out hope that the Wrights would spend valuable time continuing to test them in his absence. He still believed that building inherently stable craft was the means to achieving flight, which suggests he had a poor grasp of the Wrights’ accomplishments. Yet upon leaving North Carolina, he headed to Washington to sing the Wrights’ praises to Samuel Langley.

  Herring also set course for the nation’s capital to seek an audience with Langley, traveling separately from Chanute. According to Wright biographer Fred Howard, his intent was to exchange what he knew of the brothers’ “secrets” for a job at the Smithsonian. Wanting no part of Herring, Langley declined to meet with him.

  That is not to say Langley was uninterested in the Wrights. His interest piqued by Chanute’s visit, he wrote Chanute on October 17 that he was considering sending someone to the Outer Banks to witness the Wrights’ experiments, or even going himself. Two days later, he cabled Wilbur at the Weather Bureau office in Kitty Hawk asking permission to visit the brothers’ camp. He followed that with a letter to Wil
bur. Langley was still interested in December, writing Chanute with a request for information on the Wrights’ control system and even inviting the brothers to Washington, telling Chanute he would pay their travel expenses if they would discuss their experiments with him.

  Wilbur turned down Langley’s request to visit the Outer Banks on the grounds that it would fall too close to the end of the season. He was perhaps being less than completely honest. From the time Langley’s telegram arrived on October 19, it was eight days before Dan Tate quit the Wrights’ employment to take charge of a fishing crew, which left the brothers without the manpower to launch their glider and brought their trials to a close. Even then, as Wilbur wrote Chanute, the brothers “should have liked to have prolonged our stay a few weeks longer.” A visit from Langley and whatever contingent he might have brought from Washington presumably would have allowed them that opportunity.

  Having been on the Outer Banks about two months, the Wrights were perhaps weary of camp conditions. Or they may have had enough of entertaining visitors. More likely, they were disinclined to share their hard-gotten aeronautical advances with the man who was deeper into the pursuit of powered flight than anyone alive.

  George Spratt remained in camp for six days after the departure of Chanute and Herring. He saw little gliding during that time, the days being spent mostly in leisure activities like bird-watching, botanizing, and gathering seashells and crabs. On October 16, Orville reported going to the beach and killing starfish with gasoline. Like the shells and crabs, the starfish were presumably intended as souvenirs for the family back in Dayton.

  The main reason the Wrights experimented little those days was the weather, fickle as always. For example, the night of October 14, with fifty-mile-per-hour winds, was followed by a day so calm that they couldn’t even get their glider into the air.

  First-time visitors to the Kitty Hawk area are often surprised at the strength of the wind. The northward-flowing Gulf Stream tends to stall pressure systems over the Outer Banks. Isolated from the mainland, with no mountains and few forests, the Outer Banks suffer the full effect of ocean winds. Along the entire coast of the continental United States, only Florida is hit harder by hurricanes. The winds on the Outer Banks can blow at a variety of intensities from a variety of quarters—often within the span of a single day. Or the air can be completely calm.

  Or conditions can be perfect for gliding. George Spratt should have delayed his departure for the mainland. The same day he left, October 20, the Wrights enjoyed the finest day of gliding they’d ever had, at the beginning of their best-ever week. That day, they recorded five glides over five hundred feet, including Orville’s first glide of that length. They remained in the air over twenty seconds on all of those efforts. Their average glides were extending well over three hundred feet now.

  As always, the Wrights did their best work in private. On October 24, a steamer plying Albemarle Sound noticed their activities and veered closer to shore for a better look, but beyond that isolated incident, only Dan Tate was on hand to witness the flights.

  In a two-day span, the Wrights made over 250 glides. For anyone who has ever tried to handle a standard umbrella—with perhaps 15 square feet of surface area—in a stiff breeze, carrying a glider with 305 square feet of wing area uphill through sand might seem like a labor out of Greek mythology. While gliding on the Outer Banks was at times a strenuous undertaking, it wasn’t as difficult as it first appears. As Orville once explained to Amos Root, a man who in 1904 witnessed the first circular flight of a powered airplane, the Wrights always glided against the wind. Then, on their return up the dunes, they had only to angle the wings slightly so that the wind pushed them up the slope.

  On the ninth glide of the day on October 23, Wilbur sailed 622½ feet in twenty-six seconds, setting American records for both distance and time aloft. After three more glides, all over 500 feet, Orville nearly equaled his brother’s best distance, traveling 615½ feet.

  Orville proudly wrote his sister that day, “We have gained considerable proficiency in the handling of the machine now, so that we are able to take it out in any kind of weather…. We now hold all the records! The largest machine … the longest distance glide (American), the longest time in the air, the smallest angle of descent, and the highest wind!!!”

  The Wrights were at the brink of powered flight. They had mastered two of the three conditions necessary, having designed wings capable of sustaining a craft in flight and a control system that allowed them to maintain balance and execute turns.

  After making some short glides on October 24, they broke camp on October 28 and walked to Kitty Hawk through “a cold drizzling storm blowing over 30 miles per hour,” in Wilbur’s description. Their trip across Albemarle Sound was as frustrating as the one two months earlier—another thirty-six-hour affair. After starting out aboard the Lou Willis, they had to transfer to a boat called the Ray when Captain Franklin Midgett refused to complete the journey because of high winds.

  The Wrights had already done calculations on a powered machine: the size of the wings, the weight of the airframe, the weight of the engine, the horsepower necessary to get the craft off the ground and keep it there. All they needed now was to acquire a motor and do some reading on the subject of propellers.

  C H A P T E R 4

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  Our section [Kitty Hawk] got its full share of the heavy hurricane of a few days ago, the wind reaching a velocity of 80 miles per hour at which time it blew the anemometer off the weather station and from that time the record was lost ….

  The surfmen who were obliged to do double duty on account of thick weather claim it is the most severe storm they hope experienced for many years. These brave fellows are poorly paid for the hardships they endure and the risks involved in the performance of their duty is great …. These men during the past hurricane night and day faced the storm in the discharge of their duties while the salt spray brought tears to their eyes and the flying sand and pebbles bit like bird shot, still they did not complain. We believe that to the faithful there will sooner or later come a reward.

  Elizabeth City Economist,

  October 16, 1903

  Off-Season

  Wilbur Wright did an odd thing that winter. Back in Dayton, he contacted an organization called the Redpath Lyceum Bureau about the possibility of becoming a touring lecturer on the subject of flight. The bureau responded that if Wilbur could pay his own expenses, hire a lantern operator, and inject a little humor into his presentation, some bookings might be arranged.

  As with Wilbur’s short-lived interest in moving his glider experiments to the Chicago area following the 1901 season, it is unclear how serious his intentions were. The Wrights were in the process of preparing their first patent application, and showing slides of their work to crowds of strangers could hardly have been in their interest. With powered flight within his reach, close to the solution of one of history’s great engineering problems, it was unlike Wilbur to want to leave the shop and go off lecturing.

  Maybe he figured he had some time on his hands. The Wrights had always taken the addition of an engine to be the easiest part of solving the flight problem. There were plenty of companies in the business of making gasoline engines. They had only to have a motor built to their specifications. And as for a means of converting their engine’s power into forward thrust, they could take their cue from the literature on marine propellers. Once they knew the theory behind marine-propeller design, they could adapt it to the special case of moving through air.

  They were badly mistaken on both counts. Wilbur wrote ten or more reputable manufacturers in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio saying he needed an engine that would deliver eight or nine horsepower, weigh no more than twenty pounds per horsepower, and run free of vibration. None of the manufacturers could deliver such an engine. As for the theory behind marine-propeller design, there was none. Propeller designs had always been arrived at through empirical means. There was no part
icular strategy for determining in advance what made for the greatest efficiency.

  The Wrights would have to build an engine and propellers from scratch. What had looked like a winter of taking advantage of the labor of others was turning into a series of engineering hurdles as challenging as any they’d ever faced.

  Luckily, they had help in the person of shopkeeper, machinist, friend, and fledgling engine builder Charlie Taylor. The Wrights had hired Taylor as an assistant in their bicycle shop in 1901 for the sum of eighteen dollars a week, or thirty cents an hour. He was a bargain of the first magnitude.

  It’s unlikely that customers of the shop ever mistook Taylor for a member of the Wright clan. Katharine Wright could barely stand him at times, finding him insolent. A man who apparently took pride in his vices, Taylor smoked as many as twenty-five cigars a day and enlivened the shop with blue language. That is not to say he was bad for business. It was Taylor who, beginning in 1901, allowed the Wrights the freedom to escape to the Outer Banks without having to worry about affairs back home.

  The Wrights and Taylor had minimal experience with engines. Wilbur and Orville had built a one-cylinder motor to power the machinery in their bicycle shop. Taylor had worked on engines but never constructed one.

  For a piece of machinery that, over the entire course of its working life, performed its intended function for a total of 101 seconds, the engine of the Wright Flyer has received a good deal of scrutiny. At least one complete book and dozens of papers and articles have been written about it.

  The Wrights didn’t make comprehensive drawings of their engine. Rather, they just scratched out a representation of the next component to be built on whatever scrap of paper was at hand. Orville or Taylor then tacked the paper to the wall over the workbench and set about making the part. The machinery on hand to aid in the work was as basic as might be expected for such a bare-bones operation: a drill press and a lathe.