First in Flight Read online

  After that experience, Wilbur took great care about what he ate and drank while traveling. In 1900, during his first trip to the Outer Banks, he wouldn’t eat food prepared in Israel Perry’s galley, and he wouldn’t drink the water at Bill Tate’s home without having it boiled. Beginning in 1907, when he made his first visit to Europe, he was equally meticulous about his diet abroad.

  In April 1912, Wilbur became ill while on a trip to Boston, perhaps the result of eating contaminated shellfish.

  His father, Milton Wright, documented the uneven course of the illness in his diary beginning on May 2: “Wilbur began to have typhoid fever”

  Six days later, he noted, “Wilbur is some better…. There seems to be a sort of typhoidal fever prevailing. It usually lasts about a week.”

  Two days after that, Wilbur dictated his will.

  On May 18, the news was grim: “Wilbur is no better. He has an attack mentally, for the worse. It was a bad spell.

  “He is put under opiates. He is unconscious mostly.”

  On May 24: “Wilbur seems, in nearly every respect, better.”

  On May 27: “His fever was higher and he has difficulty with the bladder, and his digestion is inadequate…. We thought him near death. He lived through till morning.”

  On May 28: “Wilbur is sinking. The doctors have no hope of his recovery.”

  On May 29: “Wilbur seemed no worse, though he had a chill. The fever was down, but rose high. He remained the same till 3:15 in the morning [on Thursday, May 30], when, eating his allowance 15 minutes before his death, he expired, without a struggle.

  “His life was one of toil.

  “His brain ceased not its activity till two weeks of his last sickness had expired. Then it ceased.”

  Orville was there, as was the rest of the family.

  Condolences came from the president of the United States and the kings of Europe. Wilbur was eulogized on front pages around the world. But for succinctness and eloquence, no one summed up the life of the real visionary behind the airplane better than did Milton Wright in his diary on the day of his sons death: “This morning at 3:15, Wilbur passed away, aged 45 years, 1 month and 14 days. A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died.”

  Ceremony

  After Wilbur’s death, Orville took over the presidency of the Wright Company. He was so reluctant a businessman that he maintained an office above the old bicycle shop, rather than in the company headquarters. It was during his tenure that the long-running patent suit against Glenn Curtiss was finally adjudicated in the Wright Company’s favor. There was a brief opportunity when some experts believe Orville might have established an industry-wide monopoly and charted the course of aeronautics for many years to come, but he instead opted for the short term, collecting a royalty from all competitors who wanted to continue in the airplane business.

  The Wright Company began a downward spiral characterized by a loyalty to old designs that had fallen behind the leaders in the industry. Orville finally borrowed a large sum of money to purchase a controlling interest, then turned around and sold the company. In the rapidly growing aviation industry, all this transpired rather quickly. Orville was essentially out of the company by October 1915.

  The following year, the Wright Company merged with the Glenn L. Martin Company to become the Wright-Martin Company. In 1917, the company headquarters was moved from Dayton to New Jersey. Ultimately, in the late 1920s, the company started by the Wright brothers merged with that of their longtime rival, Glenn Curtiss, to become the Curtiss-Wright Company, a major force in aeronautics for years. But Wilbur was dead and Orville was out of the picture by then.

  Meanwhile, Orville spent the World War I years helping organize the Dayton-Wright Company. As it developed, this company’s main purpose was not pioneering new technology but manufacturing craft of foreign design for the war effort. It had limited success even at that, the number and quality of its airplanes coming into question. Orville remained a peripheral figure in the company into the early 1920s.

  During World War I, he worked toward developing an unmanned, self-propelled bomb, an effort that was discontinued when the war ended. His most successful invention after Wilbur’s death was the split flap, designed to slow the speed of an airplane during a steep dive. The device was widely and successfully used on dive bombers during World War II.

  Orville spent most of his later years at Hawthorn Hill, a large home in a Dayton suburb, begun around the time of Wilbur’s illness. An engineering genius when it came to airplanes, Orville was in matters of home improvement the kind of tinkerer the Wrights’ detractors had always accused them of being. The heating, plumbing, and electrical systems he designed for the estate were the picture of complexity. Upon his death, most of his work was replaced by more sensible substitutes.

  As his days of active experimentation wound down, Orville served on a variety of aeronautical boards, his travels taking him frequently to Washington. But it is rather difficult to track his visits back to the Outer Banks. He made at least three trips after his glider experiments in 1911, and perhaps more.

  In his 1990 interview with the National Park Service, Elmer Woodard, Jr.—grandson of Bill Tate—recalled that Orville made four or five trips to Kill Devil Hills in connection with the national memorial honoring the Wright brothers, as well as one trip strictly for nostalgia. Those are more than are usually reckoned.

  According to Woodard, at least a couple of visits were intended mostly as a private matter between Orville and Bill Tate, who worked from 1915 onward as keeper of the Long Point Lighthouse at Coinjock, North Carolina, located on the mainland in Currituck County. Orville would supposedly telephone Tate at the lighthouse to arrange a meeting time, always referring to himself cryptically as “the main party” or some other such name, so his identity would not be picked up by people listening in on the party line. At the appointed hour, Orville would whisk Tate off toward Kill Devil Hills in his custom automobile. The exact nature and dates of any such private visits will probably never be known.

  On the other hand, Orville’s visit in December 1928 for the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of powered flight is fully documented. The occasion was the laying of the cornerstone of the national memorial at Kill Devil Hills and the unveiling of the granite boulder marking the 1903 takeoff point.

  The national memorial is without a doubt the best-known tribute to the Wrights. Conceived in 1926 by Congressman Lindsay Warren of North Carolina, the project was intended to serve the dual purpose of honoring the Wrights and opening the Outer Banks to development. In 1927, a bill sponsored by Warren and Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut, the president of the National Aeronautic Association, received an initial appropriation of fifty thousand dollars toward the establishment of a national memorial.

  On the home front, Elizabeth City newsman W. O. Saunders and a group of local citizens formed the Kill Devil Hills Memorial Association and set about raising funds for what eventually became the Wright Memorial Bridge, which stretches three miles across Currituck Sound from Point Harbor to the Outer Banks north of Kitty Hawk. The bridge was conceived mainly to provide access to the site of the first powered flights. Artist Frank Stick of Dare County, the Carolina Development Company, and a pair of New Jersey sportsmen—Charles M. Baker and Allen R. Heuth—donated the land for the national memorial at Kill Devil Hills.

  The trip for the laying of the cornerstone was as fraught with complications as any Wilbur and Orville had ever taken. It showed just how little the Outer Banks had changed in a quarter-century.

  Orville left Dayton by train in mid-December 1928 to attend the International Civil Aeronautics Conference in Washington. At the conclusion of the conference, he and two hundred of the delegates, representing forty nations, set out for the North Carolina coast. It was a carefully orchestrated affair. Just after midnight on Sunday
, December 16, the party departed the nation’s capital aboard the steamship District of Columbia. Assistant Secretary of Commerce William P. MacCracken, Jr., led church services on board the ship that morning, Senator Hiram Bingham banging out hymns on the piano.

  Early that afternoon, they disembarked at Old Point Comfort, Virginia, and traveled by car to Langley Field, where they were given a tour of the world’s foremost wind-tunnel facility. They then returned to the District of Columbia and steamed the rest of the way to Norfolk, where they spent the night.

  The following morning, they continued south, apparently by bus. At the border, they were met by Governor Angus McLean of North Carolina and escorted to the village of Currituck, where they transferred to sixty-five private automobiles for the rough drive to Point Harbor on Currituck Sound.

  The boat trip to the Outer Banks was as difficult as always. At one point, Woody Hockaday of Wichita, Kansas, fell overboard and was dragged under the frigid water by his heavy coat, only to be saved by a quick-thinking sailor wielding a boat hook. The ferry also grounded in the shallow sound. It was during this grounding that Governor McLean and Congressman Warren supposedly conceived the idea of establishing America’s first national seashore park, a dream later realized in Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

  Finally landing on the Outer Banks, the members of the party made their sixth transfer since leaving Washington, boarding a hundred cars donated for the occasion by local citizens. They then proceeded through woods and swamps and down the sand to Kill Devil Hills. En route, they were joined in their pilgrimage by a crowd estimated by the New York Times at three to four thousand people, traveling mostly on foot. It was a spectacle unlike any ever seen in the area. As the Times put it, “There were hundreds of boys and girls who some day will learn to fly, mothers trudging through the blowing, stinging sand with babies in their arms, and old men who have never yet seen an airplane fly.”

  Amelia Earhart was at the ceremony. So was faithful friend Bill Tate. So were first-flight witnesses John Daniels, Adam Etheridge, and Willie Dough. Johnny Moore was supposedly on the premises but “got away before he could be introduced,” according to the Times. As for the ceremony itself, neither Orville Wright nor anyone else present had much of an idea what they were laying the cornerstone to, as the design of the national memorial had not been decided upon yet.

  Across the ocean, the Paris chapter of the United States National Aeronautic Association gathered to observe a moment of silence and drink a toast to the Wrights.

  In England, where the 1903 Flyer was being stored in exile, a hundred prominent men of aviation gathered at tables set up under the wings of the old airplane to eat a celebratory dinner.

  Orville was unmoved by such a show of devotion. As was always his custom at official functions, he gave no speech or public thanks, his only surviving comment caught in a private conversation: “I wonder if this whole thing isn’t a mistake. Fifty years from now might be soon enough to determine if this memorial should be built. To do it now seems like an imposition on the taxpayers.”

  Matters took a somber turn on the ferry ride back across Currituck Sound after the celebration. Allen R. Heuth, one of the donors of the land for the national memorial, dropped dead on the deck while talking with Secretary of War Dwight F. Davis.

  As for the proposed monument, the most perplexing problem centered around what to do with Kill Devil Hills—or, more precisely, Kill Devil Hill. Of the four dunes present at the turn of the century, only the largest remained, and it had migrated an estimated four hundred to six hundred feet southwest since 1903. Left to its own devices, the hill could be expected to walk away from the site of the famous flights and eventually go swimming in Roanoke Sound, burying the new cornerstone lying atop it somewhere along the way.

  Assigned the task of halting a ninety-foot-tall, twenty-six-acre pile of sand, the United States Army Quartermaster Corps dispatched Captain John A. Gilman, whose previous credits included the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, and Captain William H. Kindervater, his assistant, to Kill Devil Hills. They began work in early 1929. Kindervater moved his family to Kitty Hawk during the project.

  Their first move involved building a fence around the base of the dune to keep feral cattle, horses, and hogs from wandering in and eating the vegetation they proposed to plant. Next, they laid a two-inch-deep, 250-foot-wide strip of pine straw, rotted leaves, and rotted wood around the base. They sowed it with rye and tough imported grasses from Puerto Rico and Australia, gradually working the vegetation up the northeastern slope, then around the entire dune.

  Anchoring the hill cost $27,500, or nearly thirty times what the Wrights had spent on all their aeronautical experiments up to and including the 1903 Flyer. And that didn’t begin to include the cost of the monument itself.

  Meanwhile, a jury provided by the American Institute of Architects selected the design of New York architects Robert P. Rogers and Alfred E. Poor from the thirty-five entries submitted to Quartermaster General Frank B. Cheatham. Rogers and Poor’s design was said by the jury to be “not only the most original and impressive as seen from land, but would also be extremely effective as seen from the air.” Indeed, it was no mean feat to conceive a five-thousand-ton monument suggestive of lightness and flight.

  The construction contract went to the firm of Willis, Taylor, and Mafera of New York. Beginning in February 1931, workers sunk a concrete foundation thirty-five feet into the top of the dune, then laid a star-shaped base that extends twelve feet into the sand. The base is similar to the one supporting the Statue of Liberty.

  The curving slope of the monument’s walls and the wings carved in bas-relief on two sides presented special problems for the stone cutters in Mount Airy, North Carolina, where the great granite blocks were quarried. To guarantee a proper fit, technicians had to make individual drawings of each block in the monument, then make zinc patterns for four or five faces of nearly every block—the two ends, the top and bottom, and the outer face, if it contained a portion of the bas-relief—before the stone was ever lifted out of the mountain and moved by aerial cable and railroad car to the cutting sheds. The finished blocks were then crated, shipped by rail to Norfolk, and loaded on barges for delivery near the monument site. Then came the difficult task of transporting the blocks—the greatest of which weighed ten tons—up a steep, soft pile of sand for assembly.

  The inscription on the monuments exterior reads, “In commemoration of the conquest of the air by the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright, conceived by genius, achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.” Life-size bronze busts of the Wrights rest on pedestals outside the monument. The original busts, installed in 1960, were damaged by vandals in 1985 and stolen three years later. The First Flight Society, a commemorative organization based in Kitty Hawk, subsequently raised twenty-five thousand dollars for four new busts, two of which are kept under lock inside the monument.

  The interior saw such heavy use during the days when it served as the park’s visitor center that it had to be closed permanently to the public. The bronze doors leading inside feature eight engravings, among them a depiction of Icarus falling from the sky and one of the French locksmith and fledgling aeronaut Besnier paddling his way through the air.

  The chief attraction in the interior was the second-floor map room, reached by a pair of curving stairways. There, a stainless-steel map designed by Rand and McNally showed the location and path of the world’s historic flights between 1903 and 1928, beginning with the Wrights and including such figures as Louis Blériot, the first man to fly across the English Channel; Glenn Curtiss; Calbraith Perry Rodgers, the first man to fly across the United States; French aviator Roland Garros; and Charles Lindbergh.

  From the map room, an iron stairway leads to another landing, from which a spiral lighthouse stairway extends to the top. The small platform outside once allowed visitors a spectacular view of the area.

  One of the most noteworthy features of
the monument’s design was the thousand-watt beacon that shone from the roof, visible for up to thirty miles. However, once put into use, the light only served to confuse boat captains sailing the shipping lanes, who were accustomed to a dark coast between the Currituck Beach Lighthouse to the north and the Bodie Island Lighthouse to the south. The beacon at Kill Devil Hills was soon shut down for good.

  The sixty-foot monument carried a final price tag of $225,000, the cost of the entire park coming in at $285,000.

  Orville Wright returned to North Carolina to listen to more speechifying in November 1932, when the national memorial was dedicated. The last leg of the trip was easier this time, thanks to the Wright Memorial Bridge. Opened in 1930, the bridge was initially a toll span. There was also a new asphalt road running from Kitty Hawk to Kill Devil Hills.

  The heavy rains that fell that November 19 did not cast the new memorial in its best light. At one point, the wind tore the covering off the platform where the ceremony was being held, much of the crowd getting soaked as a result.

  Again, Orville had little to say, other than a simple “Thank you” upon being handed a letter from President Herbert Hoover.

  Over the years, a 431-acre park has grown around the monument and the First Flight Area, with its five boulders marking the takeoff point and the four landing points of the flights of December 17, 1903.

  Before 1953, the park was known as Kill Devil Hills Monument National Memorial. That year, the name was changed to Wright Brothers National Memorial. The two replica camp buildings, lying between the current visitor center and the First Flight Area, also date from the fiftieth anniversary. Their authenticity—down to the bunks in the rafters and the canned goods on the shelves—can be vouched for by anyone who has ever seen photographs of the Wrights’ 1903 camp.