First in Flight Read online

  “In the past,” the Washington Post commented, “we have paid our respects to the humorous aspects of the Langley flying machine, its repeated and disastrous failures, the absurd atmosphere of secrecy in which it was enveloped, and the imposing and expensive pageantry that attended its various manifestations. It now seems to us, however, that the time is ripe for a really serious appraisement of the so-called aeroplane and for a withdrawal by the government from all further participation in its financial and scientific calamities.”

  So it went from coast to coast. In the shadow of Langley’s public failure, the Wrights’ private success stood as nothing. Readers wouldn’t have believed it, didn’t even want to hear of it—or so newspaper editors seemed to believe.

  Most accounts say that Harry Moore sent queries to twenty-one newspapers to try to interest them in the Virginian-Pilot story. He found only five takers.

  The reaction in the Wrights’ hometown was particularly frustrating. Rather than giving the story a banner headline and front-page treatment, the Dayton Daily News placed it in the section reserved for local news and headlined it “Dayton Boys Emulate Great Santos-Dumont.”

  Lorin Wright had even worse luck peddling the story in person. The response the local Associated Press representative gave him is legendary: “Fifty-seven seconds, hey? If it had been fifty-seven minutes then it might have been a news item.”

  An abbreviated version of the Virginian-Pilot account bearing an Associated Press credit finally began appearing in isolated papers in North Carolina and elsewhere around the time the Wrights packed up camp and headed home just before Christmas. The coverage was still sparse.

  David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in the late 1940s, liked to tell the story of how one of the Wright family approached a local paper with the earth-shattering news that two local residents had accomplished the world’s first heavier-than-air flights. “Popular local bicycle merchants home for holidays,” an item in the personals column read the next day. Lilienthal’s tale was fiction, but it illustrates the level of mistrust the public felt on the subject of flight in December 1903.

  There was one well-qualified gentleman who was chafing to spread the news. “I am deeply grateful to you for your telegram of this date advising me of the first successful flights of your brothers. It fills me with pleasure,” Octave Chanute wired Katharine Wright in Dayton on December 17. “I am sorely tempted to make the achievement public, but will defer doing so in order that they may be the first to announce their success.”

  “Immensely pleased at your success,” he telegraphed the brothers in Kitty Hawk the next day. “When ready to make it public please advise me.”

  “Pleased at your success. When ready to make public please advise me,” he wired Wilbur the following day.

  Given Chanute’s connections in high places, perhaps Wilbur and Orville should have allowed him the role he desired. The Wrights were quickly finding that their simple story was either being ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.

  In a way, it was a fitting primer for their return to the Outer Banks in 1908.

  To date, their great invention had not changed the world in the slightest.

  Four and a Half Years

  The success of December 1903 led the Wrights to a change in attitude. Back home, they took stock of the progress they’d made and the problems yet to be solved. Wilbur was now thirty-six and well aware of the physical demands of building and flying airplanes. He was concerned with reaching the goal of practical flight while he was still vigorous. Slow progress had doomed others before him to failure.

  The Wrights decided to devote themselves full-time to flight, making little further pretense of supporting themselves through their bicycle business. That being the case, they would also expect some financial gain from their work. Flying was no longer to be a sportsmen’s vacation, but a business proposition.

  The first step was consolidating their operation close to home. After scouting the open areas around Dayton, they decided on a hundred-acre cow pasture eight miles east of town, a place familiar to Orville and others of his generation from school field trips. Called Huffman Prairie, it belonged to Torrence Huffman, a Dayton banker. Though not a believer in flight, Huffman allowed the Wrights free use of his land, the only stipulation being that they chase his cows to safety before they try to take to the air.

  By April 1904, the brothers had cut down the tall grass, built a hangar much like their second Outer Banks structure, and begun assembling a new airplane, Charlie Taylor already having made considerable progress on an improved engine.

  Flying so close to home, the Wrights could now run a year-round operation. They would also be spared the expense of camping on the Outer Banks, as well as the aggravation of having inadequate repair facilities on hand when something broke. They could depend on having decent meals. Additionally, if their invention was ever to find a market, they needed to make it work outside the special conditions present on the Outer Banks.

  But quitting North Carolina had a downside, too. There were significant differences in geography and climate between the prairie and the Outer Banks.

  Wilbur once described their new site as looking like “a prairie dog town,” pocked with small, grassy hummocks, a surface less forgiving than the Outer Banks sand. When their airplane crashed, it tended to suffer greater damage.

  And the indifferent winds of western Ohio made it tougher to get off the ground. Having used a 60-foot starting track on the Outer Banks, the Wrights first tried a 100-foot track at Huffman Prairie, eventually extending it all the way to 240 feet. They often found that by the time they completed the painstaking process of laying track, the wind had changed direction or died altogether.

  Lastly, there was some advantage to experimenting at sea level during dry, cold conditions, as on the day of the famous flights. The difference in elevation between Huffman Prairie and Kill Devil Hills is only 815 feet. However, Wright biographer Harry Combs took the trouble to calculate the difference in density altitude between the sites on two separate days—December 17, 1903, and May 23, 1904—taking humidity and air temperature into consideration. He found that on the latter date, with warm temperatures and high humidity, it was as if the Wrights were trying to take off from an altitude 4,700 feet higher than on December 17, 1903. Though the dates in question are not entirely representative of conditions at the two sites, the point is well taken: the air at Huffman Prairie was simply less buoyant than that at Kill Devil Hills.

  Problems were quickly evident. On May 23, the first day the Wrights tried their new machine, it failed to lift at all, simply running off the end of the track and into the grass. Three days later, Bishop Milton Wright came to the pasture, his first chance to see his sons fly. “Went at 9:00 [on] car to Huffman’s farm,” he noted soberly in his diary. “At 2:00 Orville flew about 25 ft. I came home on 3:30 car.”

  The frustrations continued beyond the end of July, with most flights only in the two-hundred-foot range. This was also the most dangerous work the Wrights had ever done. For example, in eight days of trials in early August, they broke their “tail stick,” “disarranged” their tail wires, “injured” a runner, broke their rudder, broke a propeller, and broke their elevator. Many such mishaps brought bumps and bruises to the pilot.

  The Wrights blamed their craft’s lack of lift on a shallower wing camber than they’d used in 1903. They blamed its fragility on the substitution of pine spars for spruce.

  Mid-August brought a definite improvement, with four flights over 1,250 feet, exceeding their best effort at Kill Devil Hills. In fact, their main limitation soon came to be the length of the pasture.

  The revelation came on September 7, when the Wrights began using a simple catapult launch system. They built a twenty-foot derrick and placed it behind the craft, at the rear end of the starting rail. In preparing to launch, they would raise nearly a ton of weight to the top of the tower. A rope led down to the base of the derrick, out to the fa
r end of the track, and then back to the front of the craft. When the weight dropped, the airplane, engine running wide open, as always, was accelerated quickly and reliably to flight speed using only a sixty-foot rail.

  Just thirteen days after they began using the catapult, Orville made the first circular flight in history, covering a little over four thousand feet in a little over a minute and a half. Though the 1904 craft was unstable, and though the Wrights found the mechanics of turning difficult to master, they made a couple of flights exceeding five minutes and encompassing several circuits of the pasture by the time they suspended operations in early December.

  They didn’t get back into the air until late June 1905, using a new airframe but the same motor as the 1904 machine.

  Their 1905 craft is widely regarded as the world’s first practical airplane, though Orville would hardly have believed it on July 14, when he suffered the brothers’ worst crash to date, losing control of the elevator and diving into the prairie at thirty miles an hour. It was the modifications to the elevator after this crash—it was enlarged and moved farther in front of the wings—that finally made for a stable craft and allowed the rapid progress that followed.

  During one trial in late September, the craft stayed up for over eighteen minutes. On October 3, that record was broken with a twenty-six-minute flight. The following day saw a flight exceeding thirty-three minutes. The Wrights were now actually running their gas tank dry. Lying prone for such spans of time was growing uncomfortable. Though it must have been a temptation to point the craft upward, gain some altitude, and venture out over the countryside, the brothers were always careful to remain low and to stay within the confines of the pasture.

  Their best flight came on October 5, when Wilbur made thirty circuits, staying up more than thirty-nine minutes and covering a little over twenty-four miles, at an average speed of about thirty-seven miles per hour. John Daniels, Johnny Moore, and the other Outer Banks witnesses probably wouldn’t have believed it.

  Nearly as amazing as these breakthrough flights is the scant attention they received.

  The Wrights’ flying field outside Dayton was alternately known as Simms Station, in reference to the trolley stop adjacent to the prairie. Though the field was located in a rural area, the trolley line running past it served two small towns to the east and hundreds of passengers daily. Since the Wrights were more concerned with catching a breeze than scheduling their flights between trolley runs, it would seem they couldn’t escape notice now.

  In a departure from the way they usually conducted business, they wrote the Dayton and Cincinnati newspapers to invite reporters—but no photographers—to their first trials in 1904. About forty spectators were on hand to witness the failed flight of May 23, with a few still present to see the twenty-five-foot hop three days later.

  It has been suggested that these were deliberate failures staged for the press. If newsmen were on hand to witness a humbling attempt at flight, the argument goes, then they wouldn’t get excited about reports of activity at Huffman Prairie over the coming months, and the brothers would be left in peace. But though the Wrights had their faults, disingenuousness is rarely taken to be one of them. Most likely, the failed public flights of May 1904 just represent miscalculation or overconfidence on their part.

  Whatever the reason, the Wrights found themselves more alone than they could have hoped. A couple of farmhouses looked onto the prairie, and trolley patrons and other local people knew of their activities, but the media remained unaware or indifferent. It is one of the strange facts of the Wright brothers’ story that the first eyewitness accounts of their flights were written by Amos Root, the publisher of a beekeeping journal called Gleanings in Bee Culture. Having heard rumors of the brothers, Root traveled by car from Medina, Ohio, and was rewarded on September 20, 1904, by seeing history’s first circular flight. Through the following year, he was the only man to regularly cover the Wrights, using their flights as a kind of moral tale to inspire his readers to better beekeeping.

  Finally, after the great flights in the fall of 1905, the brothers’ activities began to attract interest, though even then press coverage was mostly confined to Dayton and Cincinnati.

  Meanwhile, the Wrights were busy on other fronts.

  In early 1904, they renewed their effort—begun between the 1902 and 1903 seasons—to secure a patent for their invention, this time hiring a patent attorney to prepare their application. That October, they made their first try at selling an airplane, to a representative of the British government. Their sales efforts continued between the 1904 and 1905 seasons.

  With the great flights of 1905, the Wrights proved they could launch their airplane, ascend and descend, turn, fly long distances, and land, all reliably and under control. Having mastered the basics, they believed they could build airplanes to buyers’ specifications—airplanes that would fly farther, faster, and higher than anything they had constructed to date.

  The brothers now had more to lose than they had to gain by further flying. Without patent protection, the spread of accurate information about their airplane could only hurt them. Until they sold their invention and reaped their reward, they would retire from flying.

  That retirement lasted longer and was filled with more frustration than they anticipated.

  The Wrights are often said to have been marginal or even poor businessmen. In fairness, it should be noted that they undertook to introduce a radically new technology to the entire world, a task few small-time entrepreneurs would be equipped to handle. To their credit, they consistently resisted financial assistance and offers of partnership, always maintaining full control over their invention. They didn’t become fabulously wealthy off airplanes, but they made about as much money as they cared to. They were scrupulously honest, and they remained dignified ambassadors of flight throughout their lives.

  That said, they did have shortcomings as businessmen. According to their critics, their excessive secretiveness so delayed their sales negotiations that they lost their technological advantage and let their competition catch up with them. The greatest aeronautical engineers the world had ever seen, they ultimately spent more time in courtrooms defending old designs than in the workshop pioneering new ones. They were essentially past their heyday by the end of 1909. Their main American rival, Glenn Curtiss, a more astute businessman, remained at the forefront of the industry much longer than did the Wrights.

  Their business failings first came to light after 1905.

  Octave Chanute still hadn’t seen the Wrights fly, but he was well aware of their progress, and he believed it was time for them to flaunt their invention before the world. He encouraged them to announce a public flight or to compete for flight prizes being offered in St. Louis and France. Failing that, he encouraged them to reveal photographs of their machine in the air, which likely would have been revelation enough to bring the governments of the world to their doorstep. At the very least, they might release eyewitness statements from some of the people who had seen them fly at Huffman Prairie.

  The Wrights were reluctant to consider any of those options.

  From late 1905 through the end of 1907, they worked full-time trying to sell airplanes to the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, usually to the respective governments but occasionally to private syndicates, usually through their own efforts but sometimes with the help of agents. They hosted potential customers in Dayton and traveled to New York, Washington, and assorted sites in Europe.

  They made it a condition of negotiations that they would reveal no particulars of their invention or stage any demonstrations until they had a contract. They wouldn’t show drawings of their airplane, and they certainly wouldn’t show the craft itself, even to representatives who had sailed across the ocean to meet them. Honorable men not given to making exaggerated claims, they expected to be taken at their word. And in fact, to a man, those officials who met face to face with the Wrights came away believing they could do what they sai
d they could do.

  From the brothers’ perspective, there was little risk on the buyers’ part, as no money was to be paid until they proved their airplane could perform according to the terms specified in the contract.

  From the buyers’ perspective, they were being asked to stake their careers on the claims of two self-taught men from Dayton, Ohio. Embarrassment had always been the reward for those who believed in flight. The Wrights may have convinced the representatives they met face to face, but those officials were front men for networks of decision makers, not free agents. In the wake of Samuel Langley’s failure, it was unreasonable to expect that Washington might contract for an airplane sight unseen. And though foreign governments did not have a Samuel Langley in their closet, a considerable risk still attended the official who signed his name to a contract.

  The Wrights felt at liberty to dictate the terms of sale because they believed they had the field to themselves. “We are convinced that no one will be able to develop a practical flyer within five years,” Wilbur wrote Octave Chanute on October 10, 1906.

  He drove home the point a few sentences later: “It is many times five years.”

  Actually, it was thirteen days from the time of that writing. While the machine in question was by no means a “practical flyer,” it covered a distance somewhere between 150 and 200 feet on October 23, then flew 726 feet on November 12. That was legitimate heavier-than-air flight even by Wilbur Wright’s standards.

  It was Alberto Santos-Dumont who made the breakthrough, piloting a craft called the 14-bis. In airworthiness, Santos-Dumont’s machine was a major step backward from even the Wrights’ early gliders. He operated it standing upright in a wicker basket, like something out of Ben Hur. Already famous as a balloonist, Santos-Dumont reasserted his claim as the world’s foremost aeronaut with the longer of his two powered flights in France.

  Though Octave Chanute was not involved with Santos-Dumont’s effort, he helped bring about the success of it and other projects. Since 1902, experimenters in France—the world’s hotbed of aeronautics—had been building gliders patterned after those of the Wrights. Chanute published articles in Europe detailing the brothers’ success, including photographs he had taken of their 1902 glider and partial drawings of their craft. French aeronauts took those bits and pieces as their starting point. The Wrights grew more famous abroad through the old news delivered by Chanute than they were in their own hometown through their exploits at Huffman Prairie.