First in Flight Read online

  Other experimenters in France were close behind Santos-Dumont.

  On November 5, 1907, Léon Delagrange made a flight covering over 1,600 feet.

  More significant than the efforts of Santos-Dumont and Delagrange was that of Henri Farman. In mid-October 1907, Farman flew over 900 feet, then improved that mark to 2,350 feet before the end of the month. At a field outside Paris on November 18, he fell just short of flying a complete circle, covering over 4,900 feet in the process—nearly a mile. Among the spectators in the crowd that day was Orville Wright, in France trying to tie up business with the government. He was not among those who mobbed Farman after his triumph.

  Criticism of the Wright brothers flowed naturally from these events. Asked how their accomplishments compared with the reported flights of the Wrights, the aeronauts in France, reluctant to share their glory with men who had never flown publicly, generally asserted that the brothers were fakes.

  For their part, the Wrights considered the French efforts primitive and remained confident that their rivals were several years removed from the standard they had set. Nonetheless, their reputation took a beating.

  Finally, two days before Christmas 1907, the United States government, after consultation with the Wrights, put out a public bid for a heavier-than-air flying machine. The brothers were ready with a proposal before the end of January 1908.

  And in late March, an agent working for the Wrights closed a deal with a private French syndicate.

  The performance standards set forth in both contracts far exceeded any flying the Wrights had ever done. But they were well prepared, with five new airplanes in various stages of construction.

  After their two-and-a-half-year layoff, some flying practice was in order before the official trials in the Washington area and France. Experiencing the full force of public pressure for the first time, the Wrights found that privacy concerns again outweighed convenience. Seven and a half years earlier, they had turned to the Outer Banks mostly for the wind and sand. No longer needing those commodities, they would now return strictly for the isolation.

  The world was closing in. A major push for powered flight was under way in western New York, led by the talented Glenn Curtiss. By the time the Wrights were finished with the Outer Banks in 1908, at least four other Americans had flown.

  The Fourth Estate

  Having staked out a position in the vanguard of aeronautical reporting with its story of the powered flights of December 1903, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot ran the following item on its front page on May 2, 1908. Headlined “WRIGHT BROTHERS SAIL OVER LAND AND SEA WITH AEROPLANE,” it was accompanied by a couple of photographs of the brothers’ gliders in flight.

  With their machine under perfect control, John and Wilbur Wright, of Ohio, has [sic] mastered the air, and yesterday morning down at Nags Head, N.C., not only sailed their airship over the land, but ventured ten miles out on the ocean, and steering their aerial navigator back to terra firma as easily as a harbor captain steers the ordinary little tugboat.

  The Wright brothers have been at Nags Head for the past ten days, daily experimenting with their airship, or aeroplane. Newspapers up North have been waiting almost with breathless anxiety for some tidings of the results of their experiments, but up to last night not a word had gone out from the camp of the experimenters, which is as closely guarded as the cell of a condemned murderer….

  The two brothers yesterday not only sailed their ship overland, but steered her out to sea. From the shore the lifesavers at Nags Head watched the peculiar shaped thing sail away in the distance until it resembled only a black speck on the horizon, like some bird that inhabits the seashore in search of food for itself and young.

  Fearing something might befall the two men who defied the wind and angry waters below them, the brave men who guard the coast prepared to launch their life boats and pull in the direction of the thing in the air, ready to save its two passengers should they be thrown into the sea. Hardly had they got in readiness for the trip, when the little black speck, magnified through the glass of the captain of the lifesaving station, was seen to turn and make for the shore.

  Coming like a bird and as straight as an arrow, the thing gradually took on size, until it resumed its natural proportions and sailed peacefully back to the place from which it had started.

  Unlike the 1903 account, which at least had a basis in fact, no one ever came forward to claim credit for this story. On the date in question, the Wrights were ground-bound in a rebuilt hangar at Kill Devil Hills, the pieces of their airplane spread around them. The wings were assembled and the engine—less the radiator—mounted, but work on the elevator and the tail assembly was only partially completed. They were still a week from flying. Wilbur had been on the North Carolina coast a little over three weeks, and “John,” his younger brother, barely a week.

  The Wrights would also have been surprised to learn that they made a visit to the Outer Banks in 1904 or 1905—at least according to ninety-year-old Charlie Rose in a Raleigh News and Observer article in 1983. The eleven-or twelve-year-old Rose and his two cousins were mending fishing nets on Core Banks, near the southern end of the Outer Banks, when an airplane came roaring over their heads and landed on the flats nearby. The pilot was Wilbur Wright, who generously offered to take the boys for rides, making them the first North Carolinians to fly and giving them a spectacular view of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse in the process.

  Assuming it started at Kill Devil Hills, such a fantasy flight would have been remarkable not only for its distance—roughly 110 miles, most of it probably over the vast Pamlico Sound—but also because Wilbur must have found a way to transport a complete set of starting rails with him, else he never would have gotten back off the Core Banks sand.

  Actually, many people suppose that the Wright brothers’ association with the Outer Banks ended in 1903. Their return trip in 1908 was in some regards their most interesting visit, featuring the first two-person flights in history and a new cast of secondary characters. It also stands as their only visit entirely devoted to powered flight.

  Their French contract demanded that they “make two flights, each of 50 kilometers within an hour,” according to Wilbur. Their American contract required that their airplane fly 125 miles at an average speed of 40 miles per hour and be able to carry two men. The craft also had to be constructed in such a manner that it could be transported on a standard army wagon, which meant that its wings had to be easily removable. At that time, the primary military use of airplanes was understood to be in scouting enemy positions.

  The Wrights had no intention of meeting these strict requirements during their Outer Banks trip. In fact, they were bringing what amounted to a secondary airplane: their 1905 craft, fitted with a larger motor and equipped for upright seating and a passenger. Practice time was their primary goal. They also needed to familiarize themselves with the new controls demanded by the upright seating. The levers were now to the right of the pilot, and the passenger’s position to the right of that.

  With his name known—if not universally respected—around much of his own country and in Europe, Wilbur found himself in the same kind of predicament he had experienced seven and a half years earlier. Shipping men and supplies to the Outer Banks and setting up camp there were attended by all the usual frustrations’, along with a few new ones.

  Wilbur left Dayton alone on Monday, April 6, and arrived in Elizabeth City the following evening. A couple of minor disasters were close on his heels: his trunk was lost in transit, and he was informed at the depot that the camp buildings at Kill Devil Hills were in ruins. There were even three fires in Elizabeth City that night, though none affected Wilbur directly. That was the good news.

  After buying lumber and gasoline, Wilbur shipped across the sound aboard the B. M. Van Dusen, arriving in Kitty Hawk on April 9. When he reached camp the following day, he found the 1903 hangar laid practically flat, the 1901 building without a roof and with only three walls standing, the water pump go
ne—appropriated by the Kill Devil Hills lifesavers—and the camp’s contents, including the various gliders in storage, either damaged by weather or picked over by local residents.

  The lumber to repair one of the camp buildings was sent from Elizabeth City aboard the Lou Willis on April 10, but owing to conditions in the sound, it couldn’t be brought to a point on shore opposite the camp, and it proved to be only a partial shipment at that. Some of the remainder of the wood, Wilbur learned, was still aboard one of the boats plying the sound, and the rest was back in Elizabeth City. Further delays were caused by a storm that blew the sails off the Lou Willis, another blow that left it aground, and a headache suffered by a member of the Midgett family, who left work the day he was expected to deliver the missing lumber. It took ten days to get the goods from Elizabeth City to Kill Devil Hills.

  Meanwhile, the barrel of gasoline Wilbur had purchased was now less than half a barrel, owing to a leak caused by rough handling. Without shelter of his own, he stayed at the Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station, where the food gave him diarrhea.

  Whether referring to his besieged intestines or the general state of affairs, Wilbur pronounced conditions “almost intolerable.” Set to take the international stage later that year with the engineering miracle of the new century, he was finding himself thoroughly beaten by mundane matters.

  The only bright spot was the arrival of Charlie Furnas, a Dayton mechanic and friend of the Wrights.

  Wilbur was at the Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station on April 15 when someone spotted a man milling around the camp a mile away. Expecting it to be one of the local men he’d hired to do carpentry work, Wilbur trekked across the sand and was completely surprised to discover Furnas.

  It is unclear whether Furnas made the trip out of curiosity or whether Orville had dispatched him to help his brother. Regardless, Charlie Furnas stayed for the duration. He proved his usefulness almost immediately by making the long walk to Kitty Hawk to try to expedite the shipping of the lumber, as Wilbur was too ill to do so himself. He also helped hammer together some of the furnishings once the camp building was completed.

  For his efforts, Furnas was rewarded more handsomely than he could have imagined. The Wrights’ American contract demanded that their airplane carry two men, but their father had made them promise that they would not fly together. They needed to test two-man flight before their official trials, and Wilbur now found the answer right in front of him.

  On the other hand, Furnas may have unwittingly deprived some local resident—perhaps one of the Wrights’ friends among the lifesavers—of the honor of being the world’s first airplane passenger.

  Things began looking up around April 25. That was the date the building was complete enough for Wilbur and Furnas to bring their belongings over from the lifesaving station and set up housekeeping, and also the day Orville arrived with the airplane parts.

  Wilbur was anxious to get into the air by then. For two and a half weeks, while his nearest flying machine was being packed into crates in Ohio, he had faithfully begun his daily diary entries by recording the wind speed and direction, a fruitless exercise. Now, at last, he had an outlet for his energy.

  April 26 was a Sunday. Work on the airplane began immediately after that.

  The Wrights may have received a visit from Bill Tate and his family around this time. In interviews with Outer Banks Magazine in 1984 and the National Park Service in 1990, Pauline Tate Woodard, one of Bill’s daughters, recalled that it was in 1908 that her father loaded the children aboard the Dixie—a powerful boat belonging to the owners of the Martins Point property where the Tates were living—and took them down the sounds to Kill Devil Hills to meet the Wright brothers.

  “I remember that Sunday well,” Elijah Tate said in the 1984 interview in Outer Banks Magazine.

  It was a fine autumn afternoon and Father took all four of us children: Irene, eleven, Pauline, ten, myself, six and the youngest, my brother Lewis, then four…. Well, the brothers had a kind of experimental surface, a fabric and wood panel about six feet wide with a hand hold on each end. They used it to test the angle of incidence, the inclination with the horizon, to see how much lift they could get at various strengths of wind. The brothers set the wing section on edge and said to me, “Lije, take hold of it,” but just as I was about to reach up to the top edge they said, “Here, let Lewis do it; he’s lighter.” So Lewis held on to the leading edge and lay on the wing and they ran with it against the wind, one on each side.

  The Wrights kept running until the wing rose to arm’s length above their heads.

  At least one source places this visit in 1911, not 1908, which fits with Elijah Tate’s memory of an autumn afternoon; the 1908 trip was in the springtime. Then again, the “Wright brothers” in question in 1911 would have been Lorin and Orville, not Wilbur and Orville, and all the Tate children would have been three years older than Elijah remembered.

  Whichever the case, Lewis Tate still set the mark as the youngest member of the clan to fly, surpassing ten-year-old cousin Tom Tate and his glides of 1900.

  False as it was, the account of the Wrights’ daring ocean flight that ran in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot on May 2 awakened attention in high places. That same day, the New York Herald telegraphed the Weather Bureau operator in Manteo—presumably Alf Drinkwater, who now held that position—asking for news of the brothers’ activities.

  The Herald also ran a muted version of the Virginian-Pilot story. The editors there supposedly disbelieved the tale, but living as they did in mortal fear of James Gordon Bennett—the Herald’s famous owner, also an aeronautical enthusiast—they didn’t dare let the matter pass without sending a reporter. Rather than dispatching a regular staffer, they compromised, engaging the services of D. Bruce Salley, a reporter for the Norfolk Landmark who had previously worked as a stringer for the Herald.

  The thirty-five-year-old Salley, described as “long” and “loose-jointed” by one of the reporters who soon joined him to cover the Wrights, was a good man for the job. A lifelong resident of Tidewater, Virginia, and a veteran of at least three Norfolk newspapers, he already had contacts on the Outer Banks.

  He promptly shipped to Manteo and checked into the Tranquil House. On May 5, he began a routine that grew all too familiar over the next week and a half, rising early, taking a skiff across Roanoke Sound, and then tramping overland toward the Wrights’ camp.

  That first time, unlike the days that followed, he entered camp directly, escorted by one of the Midgett family, his captain on the trip across the sound. Salley introduced himself and stated his purpose. What passed between the Wrights and Salley was not recorded by either party, but Salley came away with the impression that reporters were unwelcome around camp. He resolved to take a more secretive approach from that point onward—though he violated his cardinal rule just three days later.

  The Wrights were not quite ready for flying the Tuesday that Salley visited, but they were the following day, Wilbur making a flight of a little over 1,000 feet in twenty-two seconds—their first effort since 1905. Thanks to a more powerful motor and the strong winds of Kill Devil Hills, they didn’t require the catapult they’d used at Huffman Prairie, employing instead a 120-foot rail.

  Bruce Salley, sent to the Outer Banks for one specific purpose, was resting on his laurels in Manteo at the time. Luckily for him, he received a telephone call—most likely from one of the Kill Devil Hills lifesavers—informing him of the flight. He then wrote his copy and delivered it to Alf Drinkwater at his home, which doubled as the Manteo telegraph office. Salley’s description of the Wrights’ machine was reasonably accurate, as were the details of the flight he’d received over the phone, but the embellishments he added were conjecture.

  “Wright brothers, the aeronauts, now at Kill Devil Hill, near here, made their first flight in their new aeroplane this afternoon,” his account began. “Although but a test flight it was successful in every respect, the machine under the perfect control of its two m
akers traveling a distance of 1000 feet. Apparently it could have flown a thousand times as far as easily as not…. After several preliminary tests made during the next two or three days a durance [sic] test of the machine will be made, and on this test an effort will probably be made to fly the machine to cape Henry, a distance of about seventy five miles and return.”

  A flight to Cape Henry, Virginia, was out of the question. Salley further claimed that the craft bore both Wilbur and Orville that day, which was also mistaken.

  The Wrights were back at it on Friday, May 8, making nine short flights that morning, assisted by lifesavers Willie Dough, Uncle Benny O’Neal, and Avery Tillett. Wilbur reported trouble getting used to the new “cockpit” controls.

  Bruce Salley nearly managed to miss his assignment again, arriving around noon, after the first nine flights. This time, acting on the assumption that the Wrights wouldn’t fly if they knew he was present, he staked out a position in the brush some distance from camp. That afternoon, he secretly watched as Orville made a flight of 945 feet in thirty-one seconds. Actually, he didn’t manage to keep his secret for long. Finding the spectacle of flight even more marvelous than he had imagined it in his dispatch two days earlier, he burst from cover and hustled into camp, where he “interrupted experiments,” as Wilbur put it.

  During his visit, Salley apparently asked for and received specific information about the craft, as his second telegraph from Manteo corrected a few errors he’d made in the first. For example, he stated that the motor produced thirty horsepower, rather than the twenty previously reported, a fact only the Wrights could have provided him. In his enthusiasm, he also inquired about the prospect of a transatlantic hop, a flight roughly twenty thousand times the length of the one he’d just witnessed. “Wilbur Wright gave it as his opinion today that a machine could not be made to fly across the ocean until something better than a gasoline engine has been found to drive it,” he noted in his dispatch.