First in Flight Read online

  Ground was broken for the current visitor center in 1957.

  The year 1963 saw the opening of a three-thousand-foot airstrip running parallel to the path of the 1903 flights. Among the noteworthy events at the anniversary celebration that December were a visit from John Glenn and the installation of a replica of the Flyer in the visitor center. It is noteworthy that, while the original Flyer was built by two self-taught brothers and a hired mechanic prone to foul language, some thirty manufacturers were enlisted to help in constructing the replica. It and a replica of the 1902 glider are the feature attractions in the visitor center today.

  According to National Park Service figures, approximately half a million people visit the park annually, with double that number anticipated at the approach of the centennial anniversary of the first powered flights.

  The Competition

  The countless tributes to the Wrights notwithstanding, their claim of being first in flight is not universally accepted.

  In his native Brazil, Alberto Santos-Dumont is still held to be the father of flight. A museum there is dedicated to him, and a city is named in his honor. In putting forth Santos-Dumont as the true pioneer of heavier-than-air flight, Brazil is effectively denying that the Wright brothers ever left the ground before 1908, either at Kill Devil Hills or Huffman Prairie.

  At the height of Santos-Dumont’s popularity in Europe, his influence was such that his drooping-brimmed hats and high double collars were widely imitated by fashionable men, who also took to parting their hair in the middle like the famous aeronaut. A monument erected at the Bagatelle field in France where he flew in November 1906 bears an inscription that translates, “Here, the first Aviation world records were established under control of the Aero Club of France by Santos-Dumont.”

  Around the time of Wilbur Wright’s inaugural public flights, some of the more patriotic members of the French aeronautical establishment also put forward countryman Clément Ader as the first to fly. Ader’s claim of having flown approximately a thousand feet back in 1897 was laid to rest by 1912.

  The Russians were not to be left out either. In 1953, at the approach of the golden anniversary of the first powered flights, the following statement was issued by Red Star, the newspaper of the Soviet army: “Careful study of our archive documents show that more than 20 years before the Wrights the Russian inventor A. F. Mozhaisky built an airplane in Russia.” The upcoming ceremonies at Kill Devil Hills and elsewhere were thus no more than “American propaganda to prove the priority of the Wright brothers.”

  On July 20, 1882, at an army field near St. Petersburg, a craft designed by Alexander Mozhaisky, a captain in the Russian Imperial Navy, supposedly made a powered flight of indeterminate length. Though Mozhaisky’s airplane apparently took off down an inclined ramp, the Russians considered the trial of sufficient length to qualify as sustained flight.

  Of course, the Cold War was just heating up when Mozhaisky’s story came to light around 1950. The Soviets were also claiming the first balloon, the first dirigible, the first parachute, the first aviation magazine, the first automatic pilot, the first helicopter, the first seaplane, and the first jet.

  Ominously for Mozhaisky’s case, his craft had checked in at over two thousand pounds—nearly three times the weight of the 1903 Flyer and Samuel Langley’s Great Aerodrome—and was driven by only thirty horsepower, split between a twenty-horse motor for a large tractor propeller and a ten-horse motor for two smaller pusher propellers.

  In the mid-1950s, Soviet investigators conducted interviews at the site of Mozhaisky’s flight and discovered, to their embarrassment, that some of the people listed as eyewitnesses had not even been born in 1882. The oldest among them was only three at the time of the flight.

  Whatever Alexander Mozhaisky accomplished in 1882, it would very likely not meet any reasonable definition of powered, sustained heavier-than-air flight.

  Even New Zealand has a claimant. Richard Pearse was a farm boy who was obsessed with flight from the time of his youth. He had no formal training, his only link to the larger world being Scientific American magazine, which he read while plowing behind his family is horses.

  In the early years of the century, Pearse is said to have made a powered flight estimated at anywhere from 100 to 440 yards. On another occasion, he supposedly took off from a 50-foot bank and flew half a mile on a gradually descending course before landing in a dry riverbed. Most notably, witnesses also said he made two and a half circuits of a field sometime in 1903, a feat that would rank him among the engineering geniuses of all time.

  Parts of two of Pearse’s airplanes were displayed in the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, New Zealand.

  The claims made for Pearse are impossible to verify. No camera ever photographed him in the air. A reclusive man, he kept no diary or logbook and wrote few letters. Though the date most often put forward for his first flight is March 31, 1903, witnesses’ recollections made it anywhere from 1902 to 1904. In letters to two newspapers, Pearse himself recalled it was 1904.

  There is no proof he ever flew at all.

  At the approach of the centennial anniversary of the first powered flights, the most strident counterclaims are sure to be heard from the supporters of Gustave Whitehead, a German-American most closely associated with the town of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  Around 1895, having claimed he made some glider flights during his days as a seaman in Brazil, Whitehead was hired as a mechanic by the Boston Aeronautical Society, an organization that stood near the forefront of the field. His chief project there was an 1897 bamboo glider that apparently had either flapping wings or paddles designed to beat the air.

  The most persistent claims for Whitehead date from 1901 and 1902, when he was living in Connecticut. His 1901 machine had two motors, one to supply power to its four wheels on the ground and the other to drive its twin propellers. Sometime before mid-June 1901, he supposedly made a flight of half a mile. Shortly after midnight, on August 14 of that year, at a site near Fairfield, Connecticut, he is said to have made another flight of half a mile—later amended to a mile and a half. Then, on January 17, 1902, with a new machine featuring a forty-horsepower motor, he supposedly made separate flights of two and seven miles over Long Island Sound, the longer flight following a circular course and reaching an altitude of two hundred feet.

  The Wright brothers knew of Gustave Whitehead at least as early as July 1901, when Octave Chanute mentioned one of Whitehead’s engine-building projects in a letter to Wilbur. However, the alleged flights of 1901 and 1902 received little play. Whitehead was an obscure figure at the time of his death in 1927, and his legacy troubled Orville Wright not in the slightest.

  Until 1935, that is. That was the year a story on Whitehead was published in Popular Aviation magazine. In 1937 came a book-length treatment, The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead, which received attention in such newspapers as the Washington Herald and the Los Angeles Times. If Whitehead wasn’t national news by then, he certainly was in 1945, when he was the subject of a Reader’s Digest story and when his son was interviewed on network radio about his father’s work.

  Meanwhile, the Whitehead story began to irritate Orville. In 1937, he criticized Stella Randolph, the author of the initial article and book on Whitehead, partly on the grounds that she “work[ed] in a doctor’s office in Washington” and “ha[d] no particular interest in aviation.” These were strange objections from a former bicycle mechanic who had no particular reason to be interested in aviation himself.

  The strongest evidence in favor of Whitehead’s claim is a fuzzy photograph purportedly showing one of his craft in flight.

  The debit side of the ledger is much more heavily weighted. The affidavits Stella Randolph collected for her book were easily picked apart. One “eyewitness” denied he had ever seen Whitehead fly and explained that the stories of the August 17, 1901, flight merely reflected what Whitehead said he planned to do, not what he had actually accomplished. When members
of Whitehead’s family were later interviewed, none of them could recall his mentioning any powered flights at the time they were said to have taken place. But the most damning evidence against his claim is that, having supposedly built a craft that flew seven miles in a circular course, he then abandoned his airplane design for lesser ones pioneered by other men.

  In recent years, a segment aired and later repeated on the television program 60 Minutes has made Whitehead’s case and kept him in the public eye.

  Even in the unlikely event that Richard Pearse, Alexander Mozhaisky, or Gustave Whitehead—or all three of them, or any of the many other claimants—flew before the Wright brothers, it probably wouldn’t matter. Such men, talented as they may have been, entered and departed the scene without leaving a ripple. Had all of them succeeded as claimed and the Wright brothers failed, the dream of powered flight would have been just as distant from the people of their time as if they had never existed.

  Frivolous challenges were one thing, but what happened at America’s national museum was more serious, and more personal.

  The most painful blow struck against the Wrights started as part of a patent suit and later assumed a momentum of its own. To invalidate the brothers’ patent, it was necessary that their opponents prove that other aeronauts had either flown or designed wing-warping-type systems before the Wrights. By the time the suit against Glenn Curtiss was in full swing, all the reasonable candidates for such an honor had been rejected in various courts of law.

  With that avenue exhausted, Curtiss hit upon the idea of proving that, while Samuel Langley’s Great Aerodrome had not actually achieved sustained flight, it had been capable of sustained flight. If the craft might have flown under favorable circumstances, then the Wrights’ claim of primacy in aeronautical design might be given a narrow interpretation, opening the field for men like Curtiss.

  Samuel Langley had his supporters and the Wrights their detractors among the staff at the Smithsonian. They granted Curtiss the opportunity to take the professor’s old machine and try to make it fly.

  The plan was to restore the Great Aerodrome to its original condition, but Curtiss soon began nibbling around the edges of that distinction. Ultimately, he rebuilt the wings with a different camber, retrussed and rewired them, installed a new system of cockpit controls, changed the tail, and rebuilt the engine with upgraded parts. Additionally, the Great Aerodrome, launched from a catapult atop a houseboat in 1903, was now a seaplane. Curtiss made these modifications in early 1914 at his facilities in Hammondsport, New York.

  On May 28, 1914, with a crowd of reporters and photographers present, Glenn Curtiss and the Great Aerodrome lifted off nearby Keuka Lake for a flight of about 150 feet. On June 2 came two more flights, probably covering a shorter distance than the first trial. Next, the craft was fitted with a state-of-the-art, eighty-horsepower Curtiss motor. That fall, Curtiss pilot Elwood Doherty made several flights in the thousands of feet.

  Early the following spring, the craft was fitted with runners to take off from the ice covering Keuka Lake. Lorin Wright, registered under a fake name in a local hotel, was present at those trials on behalf of Orville. When he attempted to take photographs of the craft, he was confronted by Curtiss’s men and his film confiscated.

  Three years later, in 1918, the Great Aerodrome was returned to its 1903 condition and put on display in the Smithsonian. The written material accompanying it boasted, “The first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight. Invented, built, and tested over the Potomac River by Samuel Pierpont Langley in 1903. Successfully flown at Hammondsport, N.Y., June 2, 1914.”

  This state of affairs grated on Orville for years. Finally, in 1925, understanding that the Smithsonian was not going to budge from its position, he took the radical step of sending the Flyer to the Science Museum of London, making it clear that the plane would not be returned to America until the controversy over the Langley craft was ended.

  An estimated fifteen million people saw the Flyer during its stay in Great Britain.

  A man not usually given much credit for his public-relations sense, Orville created an avalanche of sentiment in his favor. The Flyer had been largely ignored in the United States for years, but once it was sent abroad, it became a national treasure of the first magnitude, and its loss was felt deeply. Considerable pressure was brought to bear on Smithsonian officials to clarify the nature of the 1914 trials of the Langley craft. During the 1930s, the museum issued a couple of resolutions that went halfway toward a public recantation, but Orville held out for full disclosure of the specifications of the 1903 Langley machine and the 1914 version, to be published side by side so people could judge the modifications for themselves.

  The matter was not resolved until after Orville’s final visit to the Outer Banks. The Flyer remained on foreign soil until after his death.

  C H A P T E R 8

  BEYOND

  Let us hope that the advent of a successful flying machine, now only dimly foreseen and nevertheless thought to be possible, will bring nothing but good into the world; that it shall abridge distance, make all parts of the globe accessible, bring men into closer relation with each other, advance civilization, and hasten the promised era in which there shall be nothing but peace and good-will among men.

  Octave Chanute in

  Progress in Flying Machines,

  1894

  Myth: Flight is one of the most beneficial technological advances made by man.

  Baloney. The airplane is and has always been primarily a military weapon, capable of horrendous destruction. The atom bomb project would never have been started if there were no airplanes to deliver them; the British and Americans in one day and night in 1945 killed 135,000 civilians in Dresden solely by use of airplanes….

  Illustrious men in high offices will gather Sunday at Kitty Hawk to praise Wilbur and Orville Wright and the airplane. Those who listen might well wonder why they talk so proudly.

  New Bern (N.C.) Sun Journal,

  December 16, 1978

  The Professionals and Their Fate

  The course of the Wrights’ relationship with Octave Chanute was a sore spot to all concerned.

  Having devoted twenty full years to the flight problem, and fifteen years of part-time study before that, Chanute lived to see airplanes flying long distances, carrying passengers, and performing acrobatics. Better yet, the problem had been solved by two close friends. From the days when they first established contact with what passed for an aeronautical establishment, the Wrights had considered Chanute their primary resource. Chanute came to camp for parts of three seasons on the Outer Banks. He also visited Dayton. Wilbur stayed at Chanute’s home on Dearborn Street in Chicago when he spoke before the Western Society of Engineers in 1901.

  But pressure had been building for some time. The Wrights had long been bothered by Chanute’s willingness to publicize their design ideas and his reluctance to correct the impression that they were his pupils. Chanute thought the Wrights should more freely share their advances for the good of the science; he also felt the brothers publicly undervalued his contribution to their efforts. Still, these grievances did little to harm a relationship that had prospered through hundreds of letters.

  However, questioning the originality of the Wrights’ ideas was another matter altogether. At issue was a French patent issued to Louis-Pierre Mouillard in 1896. The Wrights’ rivals claimed that Mouillard’s patent covered a control system that presented an airplane’s wings at different angles to the wind, and so invalidated the brothers’ claim of having been the first to develop the concept. But the Wrights had pointed out many times—and been upheld in court—that Mouillard’s system allowed only flat turns and had not taken the roll axis into account at all.

  Wilbur dropped a bombshell in a letter to Chanute dated January 20, 1910:

  The New York World has published several articles in the past few months in which you are represented as saying that our claim to h
ave been the first to maintain lateral balance by adjusting the wing tips to different angles of incidence cannot be maintained, as this idea was well known in the art when we began our experiments. As this opinion is quite different from that which you expressed in 1901 when you became acquainted with our methods, I do not know whether it is mere newspaper talk or whether it really represents your present views. So far as we are aware the originality of this system of control with us was universally conceded when our machine was first made known, and the questioning of it is a matter of recent growth springing from a desire to escape the legal consequences of awarding it to us.

  Chanute fired back three days later: “I did tell you in 1901 that the mechanism by which your surfaces were warped was original with yourselves. This I adhere to, but it does not follow that it covers the general principle of warping or twisting wings, the proposals for doing this being ancient.”

  He then opened some additional wounds, new and old. As for the Wrights’ practice of bringing suit against aeronauts using aileron-type control systems, his opinion was succinct: “I am afraid, my friend, that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth.” As for his own role in the Wrights’ success, Chanute had a complaint, too:

  In your speech at the Boston dinner, January 12th, you began by saying that I “turned up” at your shop in Dayton in 1901 and that you invited me to your camp. This conveyed the impression that I thrust myself upon you at that time and it omitted to state that you were the first to write to me, in 1900, asking for information which was gladly furnished, that many letters passed between us, and that both in 1900 and 1901 you had written me to invite me to visit you, before I “turned up” in 1901…. I hope, that, in future, you will not give out the impression that I was the first to seek your acquaintance, or pay me left-handed compliments, such as saying that “sometimes an experienced person’s advice was of great value to younger men.”

  Chanute having broadened the field of argument, Wilbur responded on January 29 with a letter as hard-edged as any he ever wrote. He first restated the brothers’ position on the Mouillard patent, then moved quickly to other incendiary topics. “As to inordinate desire for wealth,” he wrote, “you are the only person acquainted with us who has ever made such an accusation. We believed that the physical and financial risks which we took, and the value of the service to the world, justified sufficient compensation to enable us to live modestly with enough surplus income to permit the devotion of our future time to scientific experimenting instead of business.”