First in Flight Read online

  The members of the Wright exhibition team had their successes, too. In June 1910, for example, Walter Brookins established a world altitude record of over six thousand feet. Four months later, Ralph Johnstone climbed to over nine thousand feet.

  Records were broken and rebroken quickly in those days. Aviation technology advanced with amazing speed in the years after the Wrights’ first public flights. Yet the Wrights were becoming spectators. With Wilbur doing most of their legal maneuvering and Orville training pilots, their engineering days were largely past. Whether, under different circumstances, they would have made further significant contributions to flight will never be known. But it is a fact that the next important advances—ailerons, of course, but also enclosed fuselages, monoplane design, and tractor propellers—were all pioneered by other men.

  The Wright brothers were receding toward the middle of the pack.

  By the fall of 1911, when Orville returned to the Outer Banks, he was again flying gliders. Wilbur, who was busy pursuing a couple of lawsuits, and who was all but finished with flying anyway, did not accompany him.

  Soaring

  Though Orville Wright was one of the most famous men in the world when he came to Kill Devil Hills in 1911, his arrival was still secondary news on the local level.

  In August or early September, J. D. Hathaway of Elizabeth City, a physician and amateur archaeologist, was walking the beach a couple of miles north of Nags Head when he stumbled upon the remains of an ancient Indian village apparently destroyed by fire. It is not unusual for the Outer Banks winds to shift the sand from atop shipwrecks and other relics buried for many years, then to cover them again beyond discovery just as quickly.

  Dr. Hathaway and other investigators initially found Indian pottery, arrowheads, a tomahawk, a pipestem, and what they tentatively identified as petrified sweet potatoes. As the story developed through September and October, however, a piece of flowered earthenware of English design was also discovered, along with what appeared to be an English dagger of the period of Edward IV. This anlace, or dagger, was partly consumed by rust, and a portion of its edge was broken away. According to the Elizabeth City Weekly Advance of September 29, it was “a very unwieldy instrument—but a very effective one, if it ever landed on the cranium of an enemy” Their memory jogged, other local residents recalled finding old brass buttons in the vicinity in years past.

  It was only a small leap from the discovery of English artifacts to the claim that Nags Head was the ultimate destination of the Lost Colony of 1587. If so, Dr. Hathaway’s archaeological find was highly significant. According to his theory, Virginia Dare and her elders had traveled across the sound from Roanoke Island to live among friendly Indians while awaiting relief ships from Great Britain. The Lost Colonists and their Indian friends later perished in a fire set by a rival tribe.

  While the discovery at Nags Head was interesting, it ultimately didn’t lay to rest North America’s oldest mystery. After leading the local news in late summer and early fall, it took its spot among the numerous theories that place the Lost Colonists at points north, south, east, and west of Fort Raleigh and Roanoke Island—wherever blue-eyed Indians, unexplained accents, and cryptic words carved into trees have dared rear their heads.

  Orville left Dayton for North Carolina on Saturday, October 7. Accompanying him this year were his older brother Lorin, on his second trip to the Outer Banks; Horace “Buster” Wright, Lorin’s ten-year-old son; and Englishman Alec Ogilvie, invited to make the trip as Wilbur’s replacement. They reached Kill Devil Hills on October 10, Orville’s glider parts arriving three days after that.

  Travel to the Outer Banks was improving by this late date, the Eastern Carolina Transportation Company providing year-round, daily boat service between Elizabeth City and Manteo, with a stop in Nags Head both ways.

  Organizing camp also proved easier than in years past. The buildings were a shambles, as always, but matters were apparently set straight within a few days, and the glider was fully assembled and ready to fly three days after its arrival.

  The most interesting addition to camp in 1911 was Alec Ogilvie.

  If a brief biographical account in the July 1910 issue of The Motor, a British journal, is to be believed, Ogilvie began flying not long after the Wrights, gliding from the hills of Sussex, a county in southeastern England. In the winter of 1901, he supposedly moved his operation to a spot near the ruins of Camber Castle, a fortress in Sussex on the Strait of Dover, built by Henry VIII around 1514. There, Ogilvie constructed a large shed, apparently with a view to setting up camp and doing some gliding over the square mile of beach available at low water.

  He met Wilbur Wright in France in 1908. The following year, the Wrights contracted with British balloon manufacturers Oswald and Eustace Short to build a total of six Wright airplanes for British customers. One of the purchasers was Charles Rolls, of Rolls-Royce fame. Another may well have been Alec Ogilvie, as the account in The Motor has him flying a British-built Wright plane on the beach and out over the water near Camber Castle in the summer of 1910.

  Ogilvie’s career is more certain after that. In September 1910, he traveled to Dayton, where he took flying lessons from Orville and arranged to purchase a Wright Roadster, a one-seater version of their standard airplane. The following month, he traveled with Orville and Katharine Wright to Belmont Park on Long Island, New York, to participate in the International Aviation Tournament, the first international flying competition to be held in America. The major award at stake was the Gordon Bennett Trophy, a speed prize awarded by James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald. The Wrights were intent on winning the trophy, building a special racer called the Baby Grand, which had a scant 140 square feet of wing area but a motor delivering between fifty and sixty horsepower. In testing, Orville flew it at seventy miles per hour. Unfortunately, the Baby Grand crashed in practice with ace pilot Walter Brookins aboard. In its absence, Alec Ogilvie, though not a member of the Wright exhibition team, carried the torch for the brothers, finishing third in the trophy race. This was a respectable achievement given that his new Roadster’s engine had barely a third the horsepower of the winning French plane.

  In June 1911, Wilbur stayed with Ogilvie during a trip to England. Ogilvie was preparing for a flying meet to be held in Eastchurch. Wilbur’s main purpose was an inspection of the Wrights’ British operation.

  With regard to his trip to the Outer Banks, Alec Ogilvie was simply someone Orville trusted enough—even in the highly competitive atmosphere of aeronautics in 1911—to help test a development he hoped would put the Wrights back in the industry lead.

  In their early experiments, the brothers had avoided systems that promoted automatic stability, feeling it was paramount to establish three-dimensional control over an airplane. But once they perfected three-dimensional control, they began to see an advantage in relinquishing some of the moment-by-moment operations of an airplane, freeing the pilot from making manual adjustments for every gust of wind.

  They began tinkering with an automatic-stability system about 1906 and applied for a patent in 1908. Their system had two components: a pendulum that sensed changes in the roll and yaw axes and a vane that sensed changes in pitch. When the airplane veered from straight and level, the pendulum and vane activated the wing-warping and elevator systems by means of compressed-air cylinders, which restored the craft on course.

  The purpose of Orville’s 1911 trip was to test this system. Returning to the Outer Banks and using a glider, rather than a powered craft, would allow him to experiment over a forgiving surface and at slow speeds.

  These plans quickly came to nothing. When Orville went to Kitty Hawk to pick up his glider parts on October 13, sailing up the sound from Kill Devil Hills in a rented motorboat, he found four newsmen waiting at the dock: John Mitchell of the Associated Press; Van Ness Harwood and another reporter named Mitchell, both representing New York papers; and Bruce Salley, on his second trip covering the Wrights. Seeing suc
h a crowd gathered in his honor, Orville apparently decided on the spot that there would be no testing of the automatic-stability system.

  Unlike the 1908 trip, Orville was not faced with deadlines that compelled him to proceed with testing regardless of whether reporters were present. Revealing the secrets of his new system without patent protection in place would have jeopardized years of work.

  On the other hand, after his 1908 experience with reporters on the Outer Banks, and after apparently having sent his brother Lorin on an advance trip to North Carolina in September 1911, it is a mystery why Orville did not expect to be bothered by newsmen.

  Their primary plans canceled, Orville and Alec Ogilvie resolved to have some fun and go gliding. The 1911 craft, once it was modified with parts cannibalized from the ruined machines lying around camp, had a different configuration from other Wright gliders. For the first time, the elevator was at the rear of the craft, with the tail having both horizontal and vertical surfaces. This gave the machine a more modern look than their old gliders. A vertical stabilizer replaced the elevator at the front of the craft.

  The first day of trials was Monday, October 16, when Orville made three glides. He immediately noticed that the tail surfaces were too small. He made modifications between the first and second and second and third flights, adding the vertical vane in front and then replacing the original elevator with a larger surface in back. The reward was a third glide lasting twenty-three seconds and covering over twelve hundred feet.

  Alec Ogilvie got his turn the following day, making three glides to Orville’s two.

  Orville was aboard on October 18 when the craft flipped over in midair and careened straight into a dune, breaking the elevator and both of the left-hand wings. Repairs and modifications—the tail frame was lengthened and both tail surfaces were further altered—consumed the next three days. Two more newsmen arrived during this period: Arnold Kruckman and a man named Berges, both representing the New York American.

  If Lewis Tate’s flying adventure took place in 1911, rather than 1908, then Sunday, October 22, was the magic day, Orville noting simply in his diary, “Tate & family called in morn.” Ten-year-old Buster Wright would have been a year older than Elijah Tate, Lewis’s brother. Whether Buster was ever given a chance at mounting a wing was not recorded. However, his stay in camp was memorialized on film, as he posed wearing a floppy hat and standing in the open door of the 1903 camp building, looking very much like Tom Tate in his famous picture from 1900, in which he was captured showing off his whopper fish.

  Orville was back in the air on October 23. There was a further mishap on the second flight that day, as the craft flipped over immediately upon being let go by Lorin Wright and Alec Ogilvie. Both the horizontal and vertical portions of the tail were broken. Orville attributed the crash to different wind velocities at the surface and six feet above ground.

  The following day saw the best gliding ever done by a Wright brothers craft, and some feats not surpassed for ten years. The success emphasized just how far the technology had come since 1900.

  Orville took a variety of anemometer readings that Tuesday, finding the wind to range from twenty-five miles per hour at ground level, to forty miles per hour six feet above the top of the dune, to fifty miles per hour six feet above that. While hardly suitable for man or beast, those conditions were ideal for soaring craft. The briefest glide that day lasted a minute. One flight lasted five and a half minutes, the craft rising fifty feet above the top of the dune. Two others lasted seven and a half minutes. And topping all of these was a glide by Orville that lasted a full nine minutes and forty-five seconds, the craft remaining virtually stationary relative to the ground.

  When the flight was over, it was determined that the glider had traveled forward only 120 feet. That was exactly the same distance as the first powered flight of December 17, 1903, but of a duration almost fifty times greater. It was the Wrights’ longest-standing record, not broken until 1921 in Germany.

  Aside from the greatest of these glides, which is universally credited to Orville, it is not entirely clear who made each of the approximately twenty flights that day. Some accounts suggest that all of them were Orville’s, while others split them indiscriminately between Orville and Alec Ogilvie.

  The good times continued with fifty-five glides over the following two days, though lower winds did not permit the kind of feats performed October 24. Nine of the flights on October 26 lasted over a minute.

  One of the strangest visits during all the Wrights’ experiments on the Outer Banks occurred around this time, as reported by Orville in a letter on November 18. The interloper this time was Victor Lougheed, the older half-brother of Malcolm and Allan Lougheed, who later founded what eventually became the Lockheed Corporation—a worldwide leader in aviation and aerospace technology. Victor Lougheed was a minor force in aeronautics himself, having published two books on the subject in 1909 and 1910.

  He was, however, an ardent supporter of California aeronaut John Montgomery and just as strong a detractor of the Wright brothers. Thanks to a brief glide way back in 1885, Montgomery held the distinction of having made the first heavier-than-air flight of any kind in the United States. In the fall of 1911, while Orville was setting up operations at Kill Devil Hills, Montgomery was undertaking some glider experiments on the West Coast.

  When Victor Lougheed learned that Orville Wright had made a glide of nearly ten minutes, he announced his opinion that the reports coming out of Kill Devil Hills were false and promptly headed to the Outer Banks to prove them so. The exact date when he reached North Carolina was not recorded, but since he could not have read of Orville’s great flight until October 25 at the earliest, he certainly did not arrive before testing wrapped up on October 26.

  Upon making his way to camp, Lougheed “learned at first-hand from a half dozen different persons who had been eyewitnesses of the flights that the reports were really true,” according to Orville. Lougheed immediately turned around and headed back home without even bothering to have a look at the record-setting craft—and presumably without congratulating Orville.

  Had records been kept for the shortest stay at the Wrights’ camp, Victor Lougheed would have easily set the standard. He must also go down as their most frustrated visitor.

  Orville and his more agreeable guests broke camp sometime around the end of the month.

  John Montgomery, the man championed by Victor Lougheed, died in a glider crash in California on October 31.

  Orville eventually did put his automatic stabilizer to a public test, after his patent came through in the fall of 1913. The device worked just as advertised. On the last day of the year, before a crowd at Huffman Prairie, he made numerous laps of the field with his hands held high, completely off the controls.

  However, he was upstaged six months later by a twenty-one-year-old: Lawrence “Gyro” Sperry.

  Lawrence Sperry’s family was living in Cleveland, Ohio, in December 1903 when the Cleveland Press was one of the few papers to carry the news of a couple of bicycle mechanics and their flights in a powered airplane. Ten-year-old Lawrence, the story goes, was so moved that he gave up his newspaper route and began making plans to open a bicycle repair shop in the family basement.

  Aside from his early interest in aeronautics, Sperry could hardly have been more different from Orville Wright. He was the son of famous inventor Elmer Sperry, a pioneer in electric automobiles, streetcars, mining machines, and railroad equipment, and most notably in gyroscopic navigation systems for ships. A daredevil and innovator from a young age, Lawrence Sperry was recruited by Glenn Curtiss to develop a gyroscopic stabilizer in 1912. He came up with a brilliant system of two gyroscopes, one sensing movement from side to side and operating the rudder, the other sensing movement in the roll and pitch axes and operating the ailerons and elevator.

  Like Orville Wright, Sperry publicly demonstrated his stabilizing system with his hands off the controls, but he went Orville one better by standing in the
cockpit and having an assistant crawl several feet out onto one wing. It was Sperry’s system that became the basis for subsequent developments in the field.

  His star was still rising in America and Europe through the early 1920s, with his marriage to a well-known actress, his landings and takeoffs in streets and public parks, and his advances in seat-pack parachutes, detachable landing gear, and aerial torpedoes.

  Sperry was crossing the Strait of Dover in December 1923 when his engine failed. He washed up dead on the Sussex shore not far from where Alec Ogilvie learned to fly in the shadow of a ruined castle.

  Orville Wright’s automatic-stability system was his last big idea for advancing the technology.

  C H A P T E R 7

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  Reports reach this newspaper that some vandal called a souvenir hunter has already chipped a piece of granite from the base of the beautiful Wright Memorial on Kill Devil Hill

  … Every one connected with this undertaking has taken something akin to a religious pride in making this monument one of the outstanding things in America. Every piece of the beautiful Mt. Airy granite used in the construction was especially selected and especially quarried.

  And now, unless carefully guarded it is to be ruthlessly despoiled by these loathsome creatures who must have a souvenir to tote around with them as evidence that they have visited the very birthplace of aviation. Their word for it would not suffice; people of such low mentality are such infernal liars that no one would believe them.

  Elizabeth City Independent,

  August 19, 1932

  Wilbur Wright, 1867–1912

  Contrary to warnings like that in the Elizabeth City Independent— or perhaps in part because of them—Wright Brothers National Memorial has weathered the attention of millions of visitors in fine shape for more than six decades.

  Only one of the men it was built to honor lived to see its dedication.

  In August and September 1896, Wilbur Wright watched his brother Orville nearly die from typhoid. Orville’s fever reached 105 degrees and then held for an extended period at 103. He was delirious for about a month. The infection was ascribed to bad well water at the family home in Dayton.