First in Flight Page 15

  The Wrights went so far as to try a few glides the following afternoon, but the folly of this was quickly apparent. On Orville’s second flight, a gust of wind lifted him so rapidly that, in struggling to descend, he hit Wilbur on the head with the corner of the left wing. The glider was slightly damaged by the wind. The door of the 1901 building was broken.

  The next day, with winds still at forty or fifty miles per hour, they wisely stayed indoors.

  Wilbur gave the blow’s obituary this way: “The storm continued through Saturday and Sunday, but by Monday it had reared up so much that it finally fell over on its back and lay quiet.”

  With their buildings and flying machines largely intact, the Wrights were not the hardest hit on that portion of the coast. According to Dan Tate, five vessels washed ashore between the camp and Cape Henry, Virginia. One of them was visible from the highest dune at Kill Devil Hills.

  For a time, progress on the powered machine went smoothly. The Wrights unpacked the last of its parts on the worst day of the storm, then began assembling the three sections of the upper wing and installing wires and hinges on October 12. By the time they stretched the cloth two days later, they realized their new wings were to be “far ahead of anything we have built before,” as Wilbur wrote Chanute. In previous years, the spars running from tip to tip had created a noticeable hump on the underside of the wings about two-thirds of the way back. Now, the Wrights had thinner spars that allowed the wings to taper smoothly from front to back, resulting in improved aerodynamic efficiency.

  They started on the lower wing October 15. Unlike their gliders, the 1903 craft was asymmetrical, owing to the fact that its lower wing had to accommodate both a pilot and a motor. The right wings were four inches longer than the left, so providing additional lift for the motor, which was to be mounted slightly right of center. The pilot was to lie to its left.

  Wilbur was now predicting a powered trial around November 1.

  Next came the twin surfaces of the elevator, the tail surfaces, the skids to be mounted beneath the craft, the braces, the wires and pulleys between the upper and lower wings, the frame for the elevator and the uprights between its upper and lower sections, and the frame for the tail. As in the original design for the 1902 glider, the Flyer had a tail composed of twin vertical vanes, though these were now fully integrated with the wing-warping system. By November 2, the Wrights were ready to assemble, mount, and test the engine.

  During this period, they continued practicing with the 1902 glider. On October 19, they made several glides in the 500-foot range, the longest glide, by Orville, stretching 603 feet. With favorable winds on October 21, Orville soared for just over a minute; the Wrights stayed aloft for over forty-five seconds numerous times that day. They were also flying at heights of 40 to 60 feet, their greatest ever. Their best day came on October 26. In twenty attempts, they soared for more than a minute six times, covering distances of 450 to 500 feet.

  Given that the Wrights were late in arriving on the Outer Banks that year, and that they had already endured one fierce storm, and that their intention was to achieve powered flight, their continued interest in gliding is difficult to understand. The weather was not likely to get any better as they approached November, yet at times, they seem to have been in no particular hurry to assemble and test the Flyer.

  For example, on October 21—the date of Orville’s first flight over a minute—the Wrights were out gliding at eight o’clock in the morning. They moved to a different hill in midmorning, then returned to camp when the wind died. They worked on the Flyer until twelve-thirty, but by one o’clock, they were back on the dunes gliding, where they remained until dinner.

  Likewise, parts of a couple of other days were organized around capturing flights of the 1902 machine on film, though they already had pictures from the previous year. And when George Spratt and Octave Chanute arrived in camp, the Wrights felt no compulsion to rush the Flyer to readiness, but made sure they took their guests out to witness glides.

  Perhaps this only reflects their priorities ever since they’d begun building flying machines. Samuel Langley’s motor was much better conceived than the Great Aerodrome’s general construction and its control system. For the Wrights, a motor and propellers were still secondary to control and balance. Their three and a half seasons of sporadic practice notwithstanding, they were still new to gliding, and there was much left to be learned.

  The Wrights’prospects began a downturn around the time George Spratt arrived.

  On the night of October 24, the wind picked up to forty-five miles per hour and the temperature fell. The next day, the Wrights and Spratt fashioned a carbide can into a stove, apparently covered parts of the 1901 building’s walls with carpets to keep out the wind, and spent a good deal of time sitting on the floor to avoid the smoke. The stove had its drawbacks, as Orville wrote his sister: “Everything about the building was sooted up so thoroughly that for several days we couldn’t sit down to eat without a whole lot of black soot dropping down in our plates.”

  The homemade stove soon took on a fair bit of sophistication, as the Wrights added iron legs, dampers, and a stovepipe. However, it also caused some unexpected damage: it dried out the wing fabric and wood of the 1902 glider, which, unlike the Flyer, did not rate storage in a separate building. The Wrights flew the glider only four more days, the last time on November 12, when they practiced launching it off the track built for the powered machine. Finding the cloth and trussing loose that day, they pronounced the glider dangerous and promptly retired it.

  The problems with the powered machine were becoming frustrating in the extreme. During the first test of the motor and propellers, on November 5, the engine ran so rough that it damaged the propeller shafts. With no equipment on hand to repair the damage, and with no machinist they knew and trusted closer than Charlie Taylor back at the bicycle shop, they had no choice but to ship the shafts to Dayton and wait for their return. George Spratt carried them to Norfolk on the first part of his journey home to Pennsylvania.

  Dan Tate had quit camp for good. Octave Chanute came, got a taste of the weather, and left in a week. The Wrights’ new machine was inoperable without its propeller shafts, and their old glider was dilapidated. Alone for the first time in a month, they performed a variety of tests and minor duties—running the motor, planing the junction railroad, assessing the strength of their elevator, making calculations on their propellers, assessing the strength of the wings—but by their own assessment, they were essentially loafing. On November 15, Orville recorded that he was holed up in camp studying German and French, the immediate purpose being to translate an article from a German newspaper concerning one of the brothers’ flying machines. Even that turned out to be a test of patience, with no German dictionary on hand.

  They were also getting hungry. The provisions the Wrights had brought from Dayton were long used up. Expecting a shipment to arrive via Captain Midgett and the Lou Willis on November 19, they finished off nearly all of what they had on hand early that day. When the boat didn’t show, they were down to crackers and condensed milk for supper that night and rice cakes and coffee for breakfast the following morning.

  The propeller shafts arrived November 20, after a fifteen-day wait.

  A couple of days in late November, it was too cold to work. One morning, the Wrights awoke to find the ponds around camp and the water they kept in their wash basin frozen. They also encountered snow flurries. The previous year, they had devised a system to classify cold conditions: there were 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-blanket nights. “We now have 5 blanket nights, & 5 blankets & 2 quilts,” Wilbur wrote his father and sister on November 23. “Next come 5 blankets, 2 quilts & fire; then 5, 2, fire, & hot-water jug. This is as far as we have got so far. Next comes the addition of sleeping without undressing, then shoes & hats, and finally overcoats. We intend to be comfortable while we are here.”

  Meanwhile, the engine tests proceeded quickly. The same day the propeller shafts arrived, the Wrights
installed them and tried the motor. The engine vibrated so badly that the sprockets on the propeller shafts kept loosening up, a problem the Wrights solved in typically simple fashion: by applying a liberal dose of tire cement. Tested again, the engine ran reasonably well, and the propellers produced a thrust the Wrights judged adequate to get them into the air. After fixing one more minor problem—a couple of broken hubs on the carriage designed to bear the Flyer down the junction railroad—they were ready to fly.

  November 25 was to be the day, but rain set in just as they were ready to take the machine out for a trial. The next two days were cold enough to keep the brothers indoors.

  Disaster struck again on November 28, when they discovered that one of the propeller shafts was cracked. Orville caught the first boat off the Outer Banks and returned home to help Charlie Taylor make shafts of heavier steel.

  Unlike his brother, Wilbur had no avowed interest in German and French. He didn’t even play the mandolin. It must have been a lonely two weeks in camp, with few or no visitors and little to do but chop wood and write letters.

  Orville returned December 11. En route from Dayton, he read a newspaper account of Samuel Langley’s second trial, which had taken place December 8.

  Predictions of Langley’s demise had been premature—if only by a couple of months. Back in mid-October, after the professor’s first failure, Wilbur had written Octave Chanute, a touch cavalierly, “I see that Langley has had his fling, and failed. It seems to be our turn to throw now.” On December 2, less than a week before the professor’s second trial, Wilbur wrote George Spratt, “It is now too late for Langley to begin over again.”

  Perhaps Langley should have taken the hint. His second effort was an even more abject failure than the first. This time, the Great Aerodrome flipped upside down on launching and fell straight into the Potomac. Charles Manly discovered himself underwater with his coat caught on a piece of metal. He came up beneath some ice on the river, and one of Langley’s workers jumped in to try to help him. Once Manly was out of the water, the clothes had to be cut from his body.

  Charles Manly was done with flying. So was Samuel Langley. That left the Wrights with the only major push toward heavier-than-air flight in the country.

  The Wrights found it ironic that Langley blamed his houseboat-mounted catapult system for the failure. It cost twenty thousand dollars, or about twenty times what the brothers had spent on all their aeronautical efforts to date. And that didn’t begin to count the cost of the Great Aerodrome itself, and that of its small-scale predecessors, and that of Langley’s engine-development program.

  The Wrights’ junction railroad cost four dollars in materials, and it worked perfectly.

  With Orville back in camp, the Wrights moved quickly. The day after his return, they installed the new propeller shafts and made preparations for a trial, only to find there was inadequate wind for starting from level ground and not enough daylight to wrestle the Flyer into the dunes. Instead, they practiced starting the craft on the junction railroad, breaking part of the tail frame in the process.

  The wind was favorable on December 13, but that was a Sunday, a day of rest.

  After repairing the tail frame on the morning of December 14, they were ready. Around one-thirty, they hung out their prearranged signal, which was promptly spotted at the Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station. Before long, Bob Westcott, John Daniels, Tom Beacham, Willie Dough, and Uncle Benny O’Neal were on hand to help move the Flyer part way up a dune. A couple of boys—one of them John Beacham, son of Tom Beacham—and a dog accompanied them. The boys and the dog stayed long enough to have their image recorded for posterity—as part of the Wrights’ photograph of the preparations for flight that day—but they didn’t witness much of anything, fleeing over the sand at the awful noise when the brothers started the motor.

  The honor of piloting the powered machine was decided by coin flip: Wilbur would go first.

  It is doubtful that the Wrights would have viewed the trial that day as a success even if Wilbur had flown better than he did. Starting with a downhill run meant that they were violating one of their own criteria for powered flight: that the machines landing point had to be at least as high as its takeoff point. Orville also found it necessary to enlist a couple of the lifesavers to help with the launch. This was another contingency the Wrights had sought to avoid, lest there be any claim that their machine was assisted into the air.

  The Flyer started down the track before Orville was ready. He grabbed hold of an upright and began running with the machine, but it outpaced him within 35 or 40 feet and lifted shortly afterwards. Wilbur made the mistake of directing the craft upward just past the end of the track, when it barely had enough speed to be airborne. It reached a height of 15 feet about 60 feet out, then began to lose speed and dip toward the ground. The left wing struck first. The skids dug into the sand, and some braces and struts for the elevator broke on impact. The craft had covered 105 feet in three and a half seconds.

  The Wrights never considered calling the attempt that day a powered flight, since in addition to being started down an incline, it was short and poorly controlled. Nonetheless, they now had complete confidence in their ability to fly, as reflected in the telegram Wilbur sent his father the following day: “Misjudgment at start reduced flight … power and control ample rudder only injured success assured keep quiet.”

  Though sworn to silence for the moment, the Wrights back in Ohio were ready to issue the news as soon as they received word of the first successful flight. Lorin would notify the local papers and the Associated Press. Bishop Milton Wright had copies of a description of the Flyer and a sketch of Wilbur and Orville. To Katharine fell the responsibility of notifying Octave Chanute.

  Wilbur and Orville spent the next day and a half repairing the elevator. They were ready again by noon on December 16, but around the time they were setting up the junction railroad—on level ground this time—the wind died. They waited for several hours, the Flyer poised on the track. Finally, they had to wrestle it back to the hangar for the night.

  On the morning of December 17, the weather was cold enough to freeze puddles around camp, and the wind was blowing between twenty and twenty-five miles per hour—dangerous conditions for flying a prototype aircraft even these days. The Wrights aimed to be home by Christmas, however, and they had to take advantage of what opportunities they had left. They tacked up their flag to summon the lifesavers.

  To the north, a couple of invited guests were about to miss the action, Alf Drinkwater camping beside the Moccasin and Bill Tate getting a late start south on his horse.

  To the west, in Dayton and Chicago, the Wright family and Octave Chanute were awaiting news from the Outer Banks.

  Beyond these small circles, it was to be an event unknown and unexpected anywhere in the world.

  The contingent of helpers arrived on foot: Willie Dough, Adam Etheridge, six-foot-one, 240-pound strongman John Daniels, W. C. Brinkley, and Johnny Moore. Lumber merchant Brinkley had been conducting some business on the beach the previous day when he heard of the proposed flights, upon which he had decided to stay over with the lifesavers and watch. Young Johnny Moore lived in a shack in Nags Head Woods. His mother, a widow, was the local fortuneteller, most of her business coming from the summer vacationers at Nags Head. Moore is generally thought to have accompanied the surfmen and Brinkley, though some North Carolina newspaper accounts contend he happened by on his way home from a fishing trip, or that he made the three-mile trip from his home, strolled into camp, and introduced himself, at which point the brothers invited him to stay and help.

  At the Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station, Bob Westcott was watching through a spyglass. Four miles away, at the Kitty Hawk station, S. J. Payne was doing the same.

  The Flyer was mounted on the track about a hundred feet west of camp, heading south to north. The Wrights each cranked a propeller and let the motor run. “Wilbur and Orville walked off from us and stood close together on the
beach, talking low to each other for some time,” remembered John Daniels. “After a while they shook hands, and we couldn’t help notice how they held on to each other’s hand, sort o’ like they hated to let go; like two folks parting who weren’t sure they’d ever see each other again.”

  It was an uncharacteristic bit of drama from the Wrights.

  Witnessing such a gesture, the spectators might have supposed Orville was about to depart on a long journey. Their mood equaled the Wrights’ in sobriety. According to Daniels, “Wilbur came over to us and told us not to look sad, but to laugh and hollo and clap our hands and try to cheer Orville up when he started.

  “We tried to shout and hollo, but it was mighty weak shouting, with no heart in it.”

  The coin flip from the failed attempt on December 14 carried over: it was now Orville’s turn. He got aboard the lower wing and tested the controls.

  The Wrights’ aspirations didn’t end with coaxing the Flyer into the air; they wanted as much flight data as they could gather. The machine was ingeniously rigged with an anemometer, a stopwatch, and an engine counter, so as to calculate “the distance through the air, the speed, the power consumed, and the number of turns of the screws,” as Wilbur put it.

  A visual record was just as important. Orville had set up the camera behind and to the right of the Flyer and centered the frame on a point just beyond the end of the track, so as to capture the flight at an angle from the rear. Wilbur then selected John Daniels—who had never before taken a photograph—and coached him on how and when to snap the shutter. At 10:35, when Orville slipped the line holding the Flyer and headed down the track, Daniels was in position under the black cloth at the back of the camera.