First in Flight Read online

  What he caught was one of the classic shots in the history of photography—and also one of the most-analyzed shots. Every aspect of this photograph has been carefully scrutinized: the angle of the elevator, the footprints in the sand, the carriage on which the Flyer rode down the rail, the small bench on which its right wing rested before launch, the coil box and cables that sparked the motor, a C-clamp, a shovel, a can containing a hammer and nails. The blur pattern created by the propellers—which rotated at a known speed—has even been used to calculate the shutter speed of the Wright brothers’ camera: of a second.

  It was supposedly the only photograph John Daniels ever took.

  The Flyer lifted about forty-five feet down the track. Orville had difficulty with the elevator almost immediately; improperly balanced, it turned too far in either direction, so that it alternately sent the craft upward quickly, then made it dart toward the sand when Orville tried to make an adjustment. Twelve seconds and 120 feet out, one of these downward movements brought the craft to the sand, cracking a skid.

  The witnesses may not have known the textbook definition of powered flight, but they recognized success when they saw it. They hurried forward with Wilbur to congratulate Orville. It was the first time in history that a heavier-than-air craft had taken off from level ground, moved forward under its own power, and landed at a point as high as that from which it began.

  The men then retired inside the 1901 building to get warm. Johnny Moore was the butt of some humor when he marveled at the Wrights’ stock of eggs and was naive enough to believe that the one scrawny hen that resided in camp laid six to eight a day.

  After the cracked skid was repaired and the Flyer was carried back to the starting rail, it was Wilbur’s turn at the controls. At 11:20, with the wind slightly calmed, he covered 175 feet in about fifteen seconds.

  Twenty minutes later, Orville flew 200 feet in fifteen seconds.

  At noon came the flight that settled the issue once and for all. With Wilbur aboard, the Flyer started off on an undulating course, as before, but straightened out after 300 or 400 feet. Around 800 feet, it began pitching again and finally darted to the ground after 852 feet and fifty-nine seconds. The elevator frame was broken in landing.

  As with Augustus Herring’s hang-glider leaps on the shore of Lake Michigan, this feat is more impressive when the headwind is taken into account: Wilbur’s 852 feet over the ground translate to more than half a mile through the air. He said in later years that with more experience, he could have taken off from a standstill under the conditions present that December 17.

  Wilbur and Orville removed the damaged elevator. The men then carried the Flyer back to camp and set it in the sand just west of the buildings. That the Wrights were ecstatic about their accomplishment that day is shown in the fact that they discussed flying the four miles to the Weather Bureau office in Kitty Hawk—an utter pipe dream given the high wind, the low altitude at which they operated, and the unreliability of the elevator.

  They never got a chance to try. A gust of wind hit the Flyer and started to flip it. Orville grabbed hold of a strut. John Daniels did, too, but he made the mistake of holding onto the craft from the inside, so he was knocked down and tangled up with the motor and the propeller chains.

  “I can’t tell to save my life how it happened,” Daniels remembered, “but I found myself caught in them wires and the machine blowing across the beach heading for the ocean, landing first on one end and then on the other, rolling over and over, and me getting more tangled up in it all the time. I tell you, I was plumb scared. When the thing did stop for half a second I nearly broke up every wire and upright getting out of it.”

  Daniels, miraculously uninjured, summed up his experience: “I ate sand for a whole week after that.”

  The Flyer was ruined for good.

  C H A P T E R 5

  1 9 0 8

  Often as the machine buzzed along above the sand plains, herds of wild hogs and cattle were frightened from their grazing grounds and scurried away for the jungle, where they would remain for hours looking timidly out from their hiding places. Flocks of gulls and crows, screaming and chattering, darted and circled about the machine as if resentful of this unwelcome trespasser in their own and exclusive realm. There was something about the scene that appealed to one’s poetic instincts—the desolation, the solitude, the dreary expanse of sand and ocean and in the centre of this melancholy picture two solitary men performing one of the world’s greatest wonders.

  Byron Newton

  in the June 1908 issue of

  Aeronautics magazine

  Aftermath

  Following the fourth powered flight of December 17, 1903, and the wreck of the Flyer, the witnesses dispersed and the Wrights retired inside to enjoy their dinner. Early that afternoon, they set out on foot the four miles to the Weather Bureau office in Kitty Hawk and Joe Dosher’s telegraph machine.

  This is the message they sent home to their father: “Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest fifty-seven seconds inform press home Christmas.”

  The telegram bore Orville’s name as the sender, somehow mistranscribed en route to Dayton as Orevelle. The stated figure of fifty-seven seconds for the longest flight was also in error; the correct time was two seconds longer. The twenty-one-mile-per-hour wind speed was intended to express the minimum wind over the course of the entire four flights.

  That simple telegram and the news of the flights grew into a confused mess over the years. Alf Drinkwater, camped beside the Moccasin at Currituck Beach, was only the first of many to stake a claim to the story as it flashed north to Norfolk and then west to Ohio.

  Drinkwater maintained that, with the telegraph line out of commission, Joe Dosher telephoned the Currituck Beach Lifesaving Station with a batch of messages to be sent northward. The Wrights’ big news supposedly arrived among transmissions from vacationing duck hunters telling the folks back inland when they’d be heading home. The messages were then presumably delivered to Drinkwater at his telegraph on the beach. According to Drinkwater, word from Dosher came through about eight o’clock that night, and the Wrights’ message read, simply, “Flights successful. Will be home for Christmas.”

  His claim appears doubtful. The Wrights arrived at the Weather Bureau office around three o’clock, not eight, and Joe Dosher was in the process of telegraphing—not telephoning—their message as they left the premises. He made contact with Norfolk almost immediately. In fact, he supposedly received a reply quickly enough to call the Wrights back into the office. The operator on the other end, sensing something important, wanted permission to share the story with the local press. The Wrights wanted the news to come out of Dayton, so they declined.

  On the Norfolk end, the chain of events is even more muddled, with four principal figures involved.

  Charles C. Grant was on duty at the Weather Bureau office in Norfolk on December 17, sitting in for the regular man, Jim J. Gray. Grant later claimed that the first message about the flights came in at eleven in the morning, not three in the afternoon, and that it was from lifesavers Willie Dough and John Daniels, not the Wright brothers themselves. It supposedly read, “Wrights made a short flight this morning and will try again this afternoon.”

  This also appears doubtful. The first flight took place just after ten-thirty, and it is unlikely that Dough and Daniels could have conveyed the message to Kitty Hawk by eleven o’clock. Besides, their help was needed in carrying the Flyer back from where it landed. It is well documented that Daniels was caught in the wreck of the Flyer after the fourth flight, and aside from Grant’s claim, it has never been suggested that Daniels or Dough left the Wrights’ camp and returned between the first and fourth flights.

  The more likely scenario is that Charles Grant received the news from the Wrights via Joe Dosher at three o’clock, then wired back asking permission to pass it along to the pr
ess. Though instructed to keep mum, he apparently took a broad interpretation of the Wrights’ directive—intended only for their family in Ohio—to “inform press.” When Edward O. Dean of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot called on the Weather Bureau office during the regular course of his beat late that afternoon, Charles Grant told him of the flights.

  Edward Dean was a young reporter from South Carolina who was hoping that a temporary stint in Norfolk would prove a means to a journalistic career in New York. He knew a hot tip when he heard one, but he also understood that his knowledge of the coast was inadequate to guide him in handling an important story. He therefore took his information to the Virginian-Pilot’s precocious city editor, Keville Glennan.

  Keville Glennan was the son of an early owner of the Norfolk Virginian, one of the papers that merged to become the Virginian-Pilot. Though only twenty-three, he was already a veteran. He received his introduction to newspaper work at age eleven, his first beat being the Norfolk docks, where he chased down produce prices and news of shipping through the Dismal Swamp Canal.

  While the report of the powered flights was unexpected, it was Glennan’s contention that he already knew of the Wright brothers’ activities. In early 1902, he had supposedly gone by horseback to cover a shipwreck off Cape Henry. Huddled behind a dune with a group of lifesavers in frigid conditions, Glennan had voiced a complaint about his plight, only to have one of the surfmen jokingly tell him that it wouldn’t be long before he could travel through the air to the site of wrecks, that there were two Ohio men farther down the coast experimenting with flying machines. Glennan claimed that between then and December 1903, he had established a small network of contacts to keep him apprised of the Wrights’ activities and had also boned up on the literature pertaining to flight, including the stories of Samuel Langley.

  If it is true that Glennan went to such lengths to compile information on the Wrights and flight in general, then it is a legitimate question why his paper generally disparaged the cause of aeronautics and contained virtually no coverage of the brothers until after the powered flights.

  Edward Dean had a hot tip but no knowledge of aeonautics or the Wright brothers. His editor, Keville Glennan, supposedly had some background on the subject but no specifics on the Flyer or the flights themselves. The two men were in the process of discussing how they could play the limited facts at their disposal into a story when a third newsman, a man who claimed to have the complete details, walked into the room.

  Like Glennan, Harry P. Moore claimed knowledge of the Wrights. He contended that he had known of their activities since their first trip to the Outer Banks in 1900, and that he had even visited their camp and witnessed some of their glides without revealing his newspaper connection.

  Younger than both Glennan and Dean, Moore, too, had big-time aspirations. Some accounts describe him as the mail-room supervisor at the Virginian-Pilot, though Glennan said Moore alternated between taking want ads and working in the circulation department. He also wrote as a stringer for newspapers outside the Norfolk area. It was Moore’s aspiration to become a full-time reporter, and the story of the flights was ideally suited to advance his career.

  It was to Harry Moore that the phantom eleven o’clock telegram from Willie Dough and John Daniels was supposedly addressed. Moore claimed that after he received it, he spent part of the afternoon trying to verify the story with Daniels and another of his contacts among the lifesavers.

  Whatever his sources, Moore did in fact have independent knowledge of the flights when he met with Keville Glennan and Edward Dean at the Virginian-Pilot around five or six o’clock.

  Glennan’s main concern was that his newspaper not be scooped by its Norfolk rival, the Landmark. He quickly took measures to prevent that from happening. First, young Dean was sent back to the Weather Bureau office “to guard that source until it closed at 8:30,” as Glennan put it. What Dean could have or would have done to prevent further dissemination of the news is anyone’s guess.

  It has often been written that the Associated Press declined to pick up the story of the flights, or that the AP distributed the story far and wide, only to have it run in just a handful of papers.

  But according to Glennan, the Virginian-Pilot’s charter required that it offer any news story centered within thirty miles of Norfolk to the AP. Conveniently enough, Kill Devil Hills was outside that range. Afraid that the story would be distributed by the AP and picked up by the Landmark in roundabout fashion, Glennan decided to keep it off the wire. However, Harry Moore was not technically a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot, so he was free to sell the story to whomever he chose. As a compromise, Glennan drew up a select list of out-of-town papers, and Moore agreed to confine his efforts to those.

  From all these machinations came the first story of powered flight. One of the great scoops of the century, it is believed to have been a collaborative effort between Harry Moore, who supplied what passed for facts, and Keville Glennan, who did most of the writing. Edward Dean later characterized Glennan as “a master of descriptive writing”—no irony intended.

  The headline ran all the way across the front page on December 18, with descending subheadlines beneath it, in the manner of the day: “FLYING MACHINE SOARS THREE MILES IN TEETH OF HIGH WIND OVER SAND HILLS AND WAVES AT KITTY HAWK ON CAROLINA COAST. No Balloon Attached to Aid It. Three Years of Hard, Secret Work by Two Ohio Brothers Crowned With Success. Accomplished What Langley Failed At. With Man as Passenger, Huge Machine Flew Like Bird Under Perfect Control. Box Kite Principle With Two Propellers.”

  The article read, in part,

  The problem of aerial navigation without the use of a balloon has been solved at last.

  Over the sand hills of the North Carolina coast yesterday, near Kitty Hawk, two Ohio men proved that they could soar through the air in a flying machine of their own construction, with power to steer it and speed it on its way….

  [There] are two six-bladed propellers, one arranged just below the center of the frame, so gauged as to exert an upward force when in motion, and the other extends horizontally to the rear from the center of the car, furnishing the forward impetus….

  Wilber [sic] Wright, the chief inventor of the machine, sat in the operator’s car and when all was ready his brother unfastened the catch which held the invention at the top of the slope.

  The big box began to move slowly at first, acquiring velocity as it went, and when half way down the hundred feet the engine was started.

  The propeller in the rear immediately began to revolve at a high rate of speed, and when the end of the incline was reached the machine shot out into space without a perceptible fall.

  By this time the elevating propeller was also in motion, and, keeping its altitude, the machine slowly began to go higher and higher until it finally soared sixty feet above the ground.

  Maintaining this height by the action of the under wheel, the navigator increased the revolutions of the rear propeller, and the forward speed of the huge affair increased until a velocity of eight miles an hour was attained.

  “It is a success,” declared Orville Wright to the crowd on the beach after the first mile had been covered.

  But the inventor waited. Not until he had accomplished three miles, putting the machine through all sorts of maneuvers en route, was he satisfied.

  Then he selected a suitable place to land, and, gracefully circling drew his invention slowly to the earth, where it settled, like some big bird, in the chosen spot.

  “Eureka,” he cried, as did the alchemist of old.

  Wilbur might have been pleased to see himself given a head of hair—“raven hued and straight,” according to the Virginian-Pilot. He might not have been so thrilled with his “swarthy complexion” and his “nose of extreme length and sharpness.” Orville was “not quite so large as Wilber [sic] but is of magnificent physique.”

  The punch line to the entire episode is that no one cared about the story. It came only a week and a half after Samuel Langley’s
second failure, and the credibility of flying-machine builders stood at an all-time low.

  The Wrights may have had Bob Westcott and S. J. Payne watching their flights through spyglasses, but Langley had a whole gaggle of owl-stuffers and scientists watching his disaster from the Smithsonian tower. People in the wider world also awaited news of the great professor’s activities. The story of his failure played on front pages across the country, to Langley’s everlasting humiliation.

  “Langley’s Dream Develops the Qualities of a Duck,” the Raleigh News and Observer headlined its version of the Associated Press story. “It Breaks Completely in Two, but Without Even An Expiring Quack, Drops a Wreck into the Icy Potomac.”

  The Charlotte Observer, generally sympathetic to the cause of aeronautics, went with the withering headline, “As Bad As Darius Green. Langley Airship Total Wreck.”

  “It would serve no useful purpose to say anything which would increase the disappointment and mortification of Prof. Langley at the instant and complete collapse of his airship,” the New York Times noted in an editorial, then went on to air its opinion anyway: “The fact has established itself that Prof. Langley is not a mechanician, and that his mathematics are better adapted to calculations of astronomical interest than to determining the strength of materials in mechanical constructions.”

  The Wilmington (N.C.) Messenger went so far as to question the manhood of a sixty-eight-year-old: “We notice that the professor does not have sufficient faith in his work to risk his life in the machine when the attempts to fly it are made. He either goes to Washington City or places himself at some safe distance when the attempts are made.”