First in Flight Page 14

  And as for Wood’s assertion that Oldfield stood behind the Wrights’ success, a long line of claimants had already formed. Edward Huffaker believed the brothers had learned some of their most important lessons from him. George Spratt ultimately broke with the Wrights over their unwillingness to admit that one of his ideas led them to powered flight. In weak moments, Octave Chanute let Wilbur and Orville be characterized as pupils whose success was dependent on his instruction.

  When all such claims are totaled up, there is little left for the Wrights beyond taking the blame for their crashes.

  At least one man besides Bill Tate received a personal invitation from the Wrights to witness their powered flights. Unlike Tate, this man didn’t hesitate on account of the weather. He had something better to do. In fact, he was the central local figure in what appeared to be the greatest news story ever to hit the Outer Banks, an event that at the time rendered the activity at Kill Devil Hills insignificant. The 1903 season saw the introduction of one of the most memorable and controversial of the peripheral figures in the Wright brothers’ story: Alpheus “Alf” Drinkwater, a telegrapher by trade.

  On December 2, 1903, the navy tug Peoria was en route, depending on the account, from New York, Newport, or New London to either Annapolis or Norfolk. Regardless, it got caught in a bad storm and overshot its destination by a wide margin. In the rough seas, the Peoria lost control of the two vessels it was charged with towing, the submarines Moccasin and Adder.

  The original United States Submarine Service, a fleet of seven vessels, had been organized earlier that year, and the news that two of its ships were adrift and unmanned in the rough Atlantic was of major national concern.

  Boatswain Patrick Deery of the Adder, a forty-three-year-old Brooklynite, was riding with his crew mates aboard the Peoria. Answering the call for a volunteer to try to save his ship, he tied a rope around his waist, jumped into the frigid Atlantic, and swam a hundred yards to the Adder. He attached a line and then swam back to the Peoria. After a couple of stiff drinks to warm him up, he volunteered to go after the Moccasin, but the Peoria was already heavily burdened in the high seas and unable to maneuver into position to save the second drifting vessel.

  So it was that the Moccasin fell into Alf Drinkwater’s lap at Currituck Beach, thirty miles north of Kill Devil Hills.

  Submarines were little recognized among the general public at the time. The telegraph operator at False Cape, Virginia, first identified a “submerged barge” drifting toward shore, then amended his description to a half-sunk pontoon with a kerosene barrel on top. It was Drinkwater who correctly identified the Moccasin and informed the navy when it washed up opposite the Currituck Beach Lighthouse at eleven-thirty on the evening of December 3.

  The Moccasin was twenty-eight-year-old Alf Drinkwater’s big break. Drinkwater claimed to be the grandson of an Englishman shipwrecked on the Outer Banks in 1830. His father was the keeper of the Oregon Inlet Lifesaving Station, and an uncle of his was the keeper of the station at Cape Hatteras. With such a heritage, it was natural that he should aspire to a lifesaving career himself. But at a frail-looking 120 pounds, he was judged by his father to be unfit for the life of a surfman.

  That judgment may have been premature.

  When his father transferred to the lifesaving station at Virginia Beach, Virginia, Alf Drinkwater supposedly picked up the art of telegraphy by hanging around the railroad station there. In 1900, he was hired as a telegrapher at the lifesaving station at Currituck Beach, beginning a lengthy career that saw duty with the Signal Service, the Weather Bureau, the Lifesaving Service, the Coast Guard, Western Union, and the Associated Press.

  In his later years, Drinkwater was fond of saying that he had witnessed more shipwrecks than any man alive, the basis for his claim being that whenever lifesavers were mustered to fire a line or launch a surfboat, a telegrapher was required to go with them, climb the nearest telegraph pole, and cut in his key so additional help could be summoned if needed. He said there wasn’t a pole in 125 miles of coast that he hadn’t climbed for the purpose of making repairs, stringing wire, or preparing emergency communications.

  The grounding of the Moccasin was tailor-made to forge a young man’s reputation. Sixty-seven feet long and powered by a 160-horse-power engine, the Moccasin was part of the first generation of practical submarines. Capable of a little over seven knots submerged, and sporting a single torpedo tube in its bow, it also marked a new era of war machinery. Fanfare surrounding the Moccasin was such that, earlier that year, President Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, had gone aboard for a submerged test in Narragansett Bay, to great public controversy. Now, with the vessel aground on the Outer Banks, President Roosevelt supposedly wanted a report on the progress of salvage operations every three hours.

  The reading public was anxious for news, too, and Alf Drinkwater was just the man to supply it. He set up his telegraph on an orange crate and cut into the line to Norfolk. As salvage operations dragged on, he found an old beach-cart cover, made it into a tent, and slept nights on the sand beside the Moccasin.

  The navy tried dragging the submarine back to the water, as many as six tugs maneuvering close to shore and pulling with cables. But after three weeks, the Moccasins hull was still seven feet deep in sand. The navy finally engaged the services of a private engineering firm and even brought down the vessel’s New Jersey-based builder, who assured the salvage engineers that the Moccasin would hold together even if it were dragged overland all the way to Norfolk. Employing a set of hawsers and two winches, the salvage men dragged the vessel inch by inch over the sand. It took a week, but by early January, the Moccasin was back in the water.

  In the meantime, residents from up and down the Outer Banks came to witness the spectacle.

  Alf Drinkwater was thoroughly frozen and pretty well exhausted after more than a month of roughing it on the beach. He was supposedly the only professional news source on the scene, and his accounts of the salvage operation appeared on the front pages of papers from the Washington Post and the New York Times on down, though they didn’t carry a byline in those days. His work was judged so good that he was given a 20-percent pay raise, from $600 to $720 annually. He also received a couple of commendations from an admiral.

  Forgotten in all this excitement was a short trip south Drinkwater had made several weeks earlier. In the Kitty Hawk area to effect some line repair in late November, he had run across Wilbur and Orville Wright and inquired about the progress of their experiments. The Wrights told him of their powered machine and invited him to come watch the trials. But by mid-December, Drinkwater wouldn’t have thought of budging from Currituck Beach even if he’d known the exact date of the flights.

  Still, thirty miles to the north, baby-sitting a beached submarine, Alf Drinkwater carved himself a piece of the Wright brothers’ story. For years, Drinkwater was credited by many North Carolina sources with transmitting the first news of the powered flights, but that was clearly false. That honor belonged to Joe Dosher at the Weather Bureau office in Kitty Hawk. As it developed, Drinkwater’s story was that, near the time of the flights, there was a break in the telegraph line south of Currituck Beach. News of the flights was telephoned from down the coast, and he then telegraphed it on to Norfolk.

  The scene painted by Drinkwater is possible, if unlikely in the extreme. Most experts—including Orville Wright—have discounted it entirely, though Drinkwater still has his supporters.

  Whatever the truth behind his first-flight story, Drinkwater bet on the wrong horse when he stayed at Currituck Beach rather than traveling to Kill Devil Hills.

  The Moccasin, redesignated the A-4, was later lashed to the deck of a transport vessel—along with its old friend Adder, now the A-2— and carried halfway around the world to serve on patrol and escort duty in the Philippines during World War I. That service completed, the Moccasin was made a target ship and was blasted into oblivion sometime around 1922.

  The Wright Flyer now hangs in a
prominent place in the National Air and Space Museum, part of the Smithsonian, our national museum.

  Fourth Season

  When visitors to Wright Brothers National Memorial stroll from the visitor center past the replica camp buildings to the boulders commemorating the events of December 17, 1903, many are surprised at the shortness of the first powered flights. Most high-school quarterbacks can throw a football as far as the first flight. And as for the Flyer’s speed relative to the ground, top runners can cover the distances of the four flights twice as fast on foot. Through its entire career, the world’s most famous airplane flew barely more than a quarter-mile.

  Except for its resolution, the 1903 season was as plagued by trouble as the 1901 season. Having been saddled with the formidable tasks of building an engine from scratch, arriving at a theoretical basis for propeller design, and designing and building the components of what was by far the largest craft of their career, the Wrights weren’t prepared to start for North Carolina until early fall. They spent a fair portion of their time on the Outer Banks either housebound during storms or huddled around a stove during wintry weather. Though they had dedicated the season to achieving powered flight, most of their days out on the sand saw them flying their 1902 glider. A long way from anywhere, and with minimal tools, they found themselves in need of the kind of workshop they had back in Dayton to get the Flyer in working order. When they finally succeeded, they were probably within a few days of packing up and heading home for Christmas without having achieved their goal. Whether they would have returned to the Outer Banks the following year is a matter for speculation.

  The Wrights shipped their camp supplies, tools, and airplane parts from Dayton between September 9 and September 18 and departed themselves September 23, three days behind Wilbur’s tentative schedule. They would get only farther in arrears as the weeks passed.

  Arriving in Elizabeth City on September 24, they learned that the freight depot of the Norfolk and Southern Railroad had burned eight days earlier—about the time their first shipment from Dayton would have passed through the same building. In fact, when they saw tomato, soup, sardine, salmon, and lard cans resembling their own lying on the wharf, they had reason to fear the worst.

  From Elizabeth City, the Wrights took the boat Ocracoke to Roanoke Island, arriving in Manteo about one-thirty in the morning on Friday, September 25. In seven passages to and from the Outer Banks, this was their first time through Roanoke Island. In Manteo, they boarded a gasoline launch for the trip to Kill Devil Hills. They reached camp early Friday afternoon. Their concerns about the Elizabeth City fire were quickly soothed, as they found their provisions and tools waiting for them, along with lumber for a second camp building. Their airplane parts, having been shipped later, were never at risk from the fire.

  Wilbur had predicted to Octave Chanute that the brothers would spend about a week constructing a hangar big enough for the new machine, then several weeks in assembling the Flyer itself, with powered trials to take place sometime around October 25. The plan was to take the 1902 machine out for gliding practice when the winds were favorable and to work on the powered machine on rainy and calm days.

  Orville judged the conditions that late September to be extremely favorable for gliding, an assessment borne out on Monday, September 28. That day, the Wrights made between sixty and a hundred flights. Gliding success is measured by distance relative to the ground. But men had also long dreamed of the kind of flight practiced by eagles—of soaring, in which success is measured by time aloft. Now, for the first time, the Wrights were on the verge of doing just that. Under the right wind conditions, they were able to remain virtually stationary relative to the ground. Wilbur had one flight that lasted over thirty seconds. Another flight lasted over twenty-six seconds but covered only fifty-two feet—a forward speed of only two feet per second. The flights that day averaged twenty seconds. That was longer than all but one of the Wrights’ four powered flights two months later.

  During the week they were building their new hangar—with the help of Dan Tate, before his fall from grace—the Wrights flew two more days, October 3 and October 5. The wind was not high enough for soaring on either occasion. On October 3, Wilbur made a flight lasting forty-three seconds and covering 450 feet. Several other glides broke thirty seconds. They also tried quartering—flying not into the wind, but with the wind at roughly a forty-five-degree angle behind them. This lent their glides great speed.

  The parts of their new machine arrived in camp October 8. Co-incidentally, Samuel Langley’s first attempt at powered flight had taken place just the previous day.

  The fact that the two most concentrated pushes for powered flight in United States history were culminating at virtually the same time, and only 150 miles apart, begs the question of whether there was a race between the Wright brothers and Samuel Langley.

  The two projects could hardly have been more different. Langley was a famous man brave enough to risk an outstanding career in science for the dream of flight. He was a public official, and his project was dependent on government funds—plenty of them. The burden of expectations was entirely on him.

  By comparison, the Wrights’ operation was so humble, and was centered in such an out-of-the-way place, that it almost entirely escaped notice. Since the Wrights built their flying machines with their own funds, the only pressure on them was self-imposed. They were free to quit whenever they chose, with no loss to anyone but themselves.

  As to the issue of competition between the two camps, Langley had shown considerable interest in visiting the Wrights on the Outer Banks in 1902, but as far as he knew, they hadn’t cast their sights beyond gliders. The Wrights had asked Octave Chanute not to spread the word about their plans for powered flight, and he had obliged. If there was any feeling of rivalry, it was on the Wrights’ side.

  The brothers learned of Langley’s first attempt through a newspaper clipping sent them by a neighbor in Dayton. They received their first detailed information when Chanute visited them on the Outer Banks in early November. He brought several pictures of Langley’s Great Aerodrome. More important, he told the Wrights a couple of sobering details: the craft weighed about 750 pounds and had a fifty-horsepower motor. That was about the same weight as the brothers’ machine, but with four times the power. Roughly three and a half years in the making, Langley’s lightweight engine was the best of its kind in the world. Of course, that is not to say the Great Aerodrome itself was airworthy. Years later, with the luxury of closer examination, Orville said the Wrights would never have worried about Langley’s craft if they’d known how flimsy it was.

  No one felt the burden of poor construction more acutely than Charles Manly, Langley’s pilot and chief engine builder. The Wrights’ machines had proven sturdy beyond all demands placed on them. With safety the foremost concern, the brothers had aimed toward developing complete control over their craft. They traveled halfway across the country to conduct their tests at extremely low altitudes over a forgiving surface of sand. By contrast, Charles Manly would have little control over the Great Aerodrome’s orientation in flight. His cockpit, located between and below the front wings, would be the first thing to hit the water when the craft completed its flight and settled onto the Potomac, and he would likely have to extricate himself from a submerged position. If the craft happened to reach land, the prospects were worse yet.

  Launched on October 7, the Great Aerodrome dropped like a stone, its front wings collapsing before it even cleared the houseboat from which it was launched. Its rear wings and rudder were also broken. Manly’s easy swim to safety was the most successful happening that day. Two months later, when he was dunked again, he nearly drowned.

  Meanwhile, the Wrights were unpacking the pieces of their new machine when a severe storm arrived. Dark clouds gathered Thursday, October 8. The Wrights spent a sleepless night in the rafters of their thin shelter amid winds Wilbur estimated at fifty miles per hour. Though they could hear water sloshing on the floor b
elow, their biggest worry was the new hangar, the walls of which were not yet completely braced.

  Dan Tate was apparently devoted enough to the cause of aeronautics to make the trip to camp in thirty-mile-per-hour winds the following morning. He returned home when the storm grew more severe in late morning or early afternoon. The winds topped out at seventy-five miles per hour, the official figure recorded by the Weather Bureau.

  Dan was not the only man out and about. Wilbur’s letter to his sister describing the blow—complete with drawings in the margin—is one of the most entertaining things he ever wrote.

  Having braced their new hangar on Friday, the Wrights were back in their 1901 building when they heard its tarpaper tear loose. It seemed the entire roof would soon follow. As Wilbur described it,

  Orville put on my heavy overcoat, and grabbing the ladder sallied forth from the south end of the building. At first it appeared that he was going down to repair some of the rents in the Big Hill which was being badly torn to pieces, for he began by walking backwards about 50 feet. After a while I saw him come back past the side opening in our partially raised awning door…. Thereupon I sallied out to help him and after a tussle with the wind found him at the north end ready to set up the ladder. He quickly mounted to the edge of the roof when the wind caught under his coat and folded it back over his head. As the hammer and nails were in his pocket and up over his head he was unable to get his hands on them or to pull his coattails down, so he was compelled to descend again. The next time he put the nails in his mouth and took the hammer in his hand and I followed him up the ladder hanging on to his coattails. He swatted around a good little while trying to get a few nails in, and I became almost impatient for I had only my common coat on and was getting well soaked. He explained afterward that the wind kept blowing the hammer around so that three licks out of four hit the roof or his fingers instead of the nail. Finally the job was done and we rushed for cover. He took off the overcoat and felt his other coat and found it nice and dry, but after half an hour or so, finding that he was feeling wetter and wetter, he began a second investigation and found the inside of his coat sopping wet, while the outside was nice and dry. He had forgotten when he first felt of his coat, that it, as well as the overcoat, were practically inside out while he was working on the roof.