First in Flight Page 3

  I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on the subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language. I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible to add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success.

  Richard Rathbun, the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, responded by sending a handful of pamphlets and a list of other publications. Within a few weeks, Wilbur was already on the verge of contributing more than a “mite” of knowledge to the field.

  At the most basic level, three things were necessary to achieve powered flight: wings that generated sufficient lift, a light yet powerful motor, and a control system. Different experimenters approached the problem with different orientations. Otto Lilienthal, who compiled extensive tables showing the lifting capacity of various wing surfaces, considered lift the primary element. Samuel Langley, who oversaw the construction of one of the most sophisticated lightweight engines in the world for his full-sized Aerodrome, thought the power plant was foremost. Wilbur Wright put the emphasis on a control system. With access to the important but flawed work of Lilienthal, he also mistakenly believed that the lift part of the equation had been solved.

  Designing a control system for an airplane presented a puzzling problem. Here, for the first time, was a machine that had to be controlled in three axes of motion: the yaw axis, in which the nose of the airplane turns left or right; the pitch axis, in which the nose moves up or down; and the roll axis, in which one wing banks higher than the other. Every experimenter understood the necessity of turning left and right and moving up and down, but roll was something new—and, in the popular view, something to be avoided. When early aeronauts experienced the sensation of having a gust of wind push one wing higher than the other, they felt dangerously out of control. To combat the problem, they built their wings in a “dihedral” configuration, meaning that they sloped upward toward their tips in a kind of flattened V. This had the effect of making the craft stable; if one wing started to rise higher than the other, the wind tended to push it back down. But it also meant that such craft were limited to broad, flat turns, like those of a boat.

  Wilbur Wright had seen how birds banked in turning. As a bicycle builder and rider, he had also noted how cyclists naturally leaned into a turn. Now, in applying his observations to the flight problem, he was the first to understand the advantage in maneuverability that could be had by initiating a roll.

  One day in July 1899, while working in the bicycle shop, he began idly manipulating an empty inner-tube box in his hands. He suddenly saw how, with a simple twist, the opposite ends of the box could be presented at different angles to the wind: here was a way to control an airplane in the roll axis. If, for example, the right wing were to be angled above the horizontal and the left wing below the horizontal, the right wing would rise, initiating a left-hand turn. Wilbur was still three years from understanding the importance of rudder controls in turning, but his breakthrough with the inner-tube box was the basis for tightly banked airplane turns. The Wrights’ method of presenting their wings at different angles to the wind came to be known as “wing warping.” The principle behind it was not entirely new. Other experimenters had considered presenting the wings at different angles, but mainly as a means of correcting for roll and restoring a straight-and-level course. Wilbur thought in more aggressive terms.

  That same month, he and Orville set about building a biplane kite that bore a basic similarity to the craft they would construct through most of their career. It had a five-foot wingspan and was wired so that the wings could be warped, or twisted, by means of levers the Wrights operated on the ground. When they tested it, with ten or twelve local schoolboys as witnesses, the kite banked left and right just as they had envisioned.

  Now ready to try a man-carrying kite, the Wrights needed a place with the kind of stiff, reliable winds the Dayton area did not offer. On November 27, 1899, Wilbur wrote the United States Weather Bureau asking for information on wind velocities in the Chicago area.

  With his reply of December 4, Willis Moore, the head of the Weather Bureau, went one better than that. He sent a couple of copies of the Monthly Weather Review, which included tables of average hourly wind velocities at all the weather stations in the country. This was the means by which the Wrights first became aware of the existence of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, though the place was not of immediate interest to them.

  By May 1900, Wilbur was ready to approach Octave Chanute, beginning a correspondence that encompassed more than ten years and several hundred letters. His introductory statement must have seemed as striking to Chanute as it remains today: “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life.”

  Despite Wilbur’s protest that “the problem is too great for one man alone,” the letter is a testament to the confidence and understanding he had gained through his reading. A complete unknown, he gently criticized the methods of one acknowledged master, Otto Lilienthal, to another, Chanute, and managed to do so without conceit simply because he was right. The letter also outlined Wilbur’s basic design principles, stated his intention to tether his proposed man-carrying kite to a 150-foot tower, and asked “for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about fifteen miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather.”

  With Wilbur’s consistent use of “I” and references to “my plan,” the letter also suggests what a peripheral role Orville played in the early work.

  Wilbur Wright was joining a long line of would-be aeronauts who had come to Chanute for advice. On the other hand, he had an unusual grasp of the flight problem and was self-assured without puffing himself up. Responding on May 17 with his customary courtesy, Chanute told Wilbur where he might read of other experimenters who had tried tethering their machines, but he cautioned that he himself considered the practice complicated and dangerous. As for possible testing sites, he recommended San Diego, California, and Pine Island, Florida. “These, however,” he noted, “are deficient in sand hills, and perhaps even better locations can be found on the Atlantic coasts of South Carolina or Georgia.”

  That latter portion of the country was looking better and better. The Chicago area offered more-than-adequate winds, but Chanute’s experience with big-city media during his experiments in northern Indiana had demonstrated the need of conducting glider trials in private. California and Florida were simply too far away. But as noted in the Monthly Weather Review, isolated, obscure Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, had the sixth-highest average wind in the United States.

  On August 3, Wilbur wrote to the Weather Bureau station at Kitty Hawk for information about local wind conditions and topography. According to an article in the Durham Morning Herald, Orville later claimed that an identical letter was sent to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, but that the brothers never received a reply.

  Exactly what became of the original letter to Kitty Hawk is uncertain. In the popular version, it was received by the Kitty Hawk Weather Bureau officer, Joe Dosher, who wrote a brief reply and then passed Wilbur’s letter to Bill Tate. Dosher was not a native of the area, and he felt that Tate, a lifelong resident and the best-connected man in the community, could better address Wilbur’s concerns.

  But Dosher’s reputation has taken some lumps in a couple of North Carolina accounts. According to the Durham paper, he gave Tate the withering instruction, “You answer these nuts.” A latter-day article in the Raleigh News and Observer is even less flattering, describing how Dosher sailed Wilbur’s letter into a trash basket with the comment, “It’s from a couple of
cranks who want to know about the weather down here. They want to fly big kites or something.” Tate then rescued the letter from the ash heap of history and presumably shamed Dosher into replying.

  Actually, both these accounts are dubious, with their implication that the letter came jointly from the brothers. Wilbur was writing all the flight-related correspondence at that stage.

  Joe Dosher’s answer was dated August 16: “In reply to yours of the 3rd, I will say the beach here is about one mile wide, clear of trees or high hills and extends for nearly sixty miles same condition. The wind blows mostly from the north and northeast September and October…. I am sorry to say you could not rent a house here, so you will have to bring tents. You could obtain board.”

  Whether passed along with Joe Dosher’s blessing or pulled from a trash can, Wilbur’s letter fell into the right hands when it reached local businessman, political leader, and one-man chamber of commerce Bill Tate.

  According to Elmer Woodard, Jr., Bill’s grandson, in a tape-recorded interview with the National Park Service in 1990, the Tate family got a foothold in Kitty Hawk in the time-honored Outer Banks fashion: Bill’s father was a shipwreck victim who decided to stay and take up residence.

  Born in 1869, Bill Tate did not have an easy early life. His mother died when he was eight. Three years later, in 1880, his father was on his way back to Kitty Hawk from Currituck Courthouse on the mainland when his boat capsized in rough water. He managed to lash himself to the bottom of the boat but was frozen to death by the time he drifted ashore. Bill then lived with his uncle Dan, a Kitty Hawk storekeeper, for two years before being sent to an orphanage in the North Carolina Piedmont. He later graduated from Atlantic Collegiate Institute, located in Elizabeth City.

  A fisherman, a county commissioner, a notary public, and a former postmaster, Bill Tate was the definition of a self-made man. He addressed a more encouraging reply to a stranger in Dayton, Ohio, than Wilbur Wright had reason to hope for:

  You would find here nearly any type of ground you could wish; you could, for instance, get a stretch of sandy land one mile by five with a bare hill in center 80 feet high, not a tree or bush anywhere to break the evenness of the wind current. This in my opinion would be a fine place; our winds are always steady, generally from 10 to 20 miles velocity per hour.

  … If you decide to try your machine here & come I will take pleasure in doing all I can for your convenience & success & pleasure, & I assure you you will find a hospitable people when you come among us.

  Thanks to his new and only Outer Banks friend, Wilbur was sold. He didn’t even write a reply, but simply showed up with his bags on Tate’s doorstep almost eight weeks later.

  First Season

  Nearly as much is known about Wilbur’s trip across Albemarle Sound in 1900 as about the Wrights’ gliding experiments that year. The brothers are noted for their meticulous organization, but organization was sorely lacking on that first trip to the Outer Banks.

  Outside of attending an exhibition in Chicago in 1893, Wilbur and Orville had always stuck close to home. They were new to scientific experimentation and unsure of their abilities. What they expected to achieve is a bit ambiguous. In a September 3, 1900, letter to his father, who was traveling, Wilbur announced his upcoming venture with surprising confidence:

  I am intending to start in a few days for a trip to the coast of North Carolina in the vicinity of Roanoke Island, for the purpose of making some experiments with a flying machine. It is my belief that flight is possible and, while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit, I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it…. I am certain I can reach a point much in advance of any previous workers in this field even if complete success is not attained just at present.

  His tone was more sober by the time he reached the Outer Banks and came face to face with having to test his ideas in the field. He wrote his father from Kitty Hawk on September 23 that he had no “strong expectation of achieving the solution at the present time or possibly any time. My trip would be no great disappointment if I accomplish practically nothing.”

  The Wrights generally cast their first visit to North Carolina as a kind of sportsmen’s vacation, and only secondarily as an opportunity for serious study. Even if their ideas on flight proved unworthy, they still wanted the trip to be the adventure of a lifetime.

  That attitude is reflected in an error in judgment Wilbur made in his preparations. In one of his letters to Chanute, he had asked for advice on obtaining eighteen-foot-long spruce spars for his glider’s wings, and Chanute had responded with the name and address of a Chicago lumberyard that could fill his order. Meanwhile, Wilbur decided to postpone action, assuming he could find exactly what he needed during his layover in Norfolk. As it turned out, sixteen-foot spars were the best he could obtain, the result being that his glider’s wings were shorter and had less lifting capacity than planned. It was an oversight he never would have allowed in subsequent years.

  Another oversight came in assuming he could easily obtain passage from Elizabeth City to the Outer Banks. Wilbur had sought out Kitty Hawk partly for its privacy, but he must have been surprised to discover how truly isolated it was. It took him two days to travel from western Ohio to Elizabeth City—nearly halfway across the continent—but more than twice that time to make it across Albemarle Sound to Kitty Hawk.

  Bill Tate’s advice on coastal passage was tortuously worded: “You can reach here from Elizabeth City, N.C. (35 miles from here) by boat direct from Manteo 12 miles from here by mail boat every Mond., Wed & Friday.”

  But Joe Dosher’s letter left no doubt: “The only way to reach Kitty Hawk is from Manteo Roanoke Island N.C. in a small sail boat.”

  Wilbur stepped off the train in Elizabeth City late in the afternoon on Saturday, September 8. Having missed the regular Friday boat to Manteo, he made his way to the waterfront to inquire about passage to Kitty Hawk. To his amazement, no one had heard of the place. It was Tuesday, September 11, before he stumbled across a ragged skiff captained by a man named Israel Perry, who offered to take him across the water.

  Despite the fact that he came close to drowning one of the great men of the twentieth century, Israel Perry remains one of the most obscure figures connected with the Wright brothers’ story. There are no known photographs of him or his infamous boat, the Curlicue. As Orville put it when he arrived on the Outer Banks that year, “Will has even rescued the name of Israel Perry, a former Kitty Hawker, from oblivion.”

  Where facts are lacking, fancy has filled in the gaps.

  Perry had a helper on his boat, possibly a young black man. According to Wright biographer Fred Howard, a 1952 Warner Brothers movie script reincarnated this humble helper as a buxom brunette with romantic designs on Wilbur. Thankfully, that script was never brought to production.

  In Milford Ballance’s local re-creation, Perry rows his skiff to the dock right at Wilbur’s feet, tosses up a rope for him to hold, and introduces himself rather stiffly: “I am Captain Israel Perry. And who might you be?” The real Perry was probably saltier than that.

  Just after dinner on September 11, Perry and his anonymous helper loaded Wilbur’s lumber and heavy trunk on the skiff and made for Perry’s larger vessel, the Curlicue, a flat-bottomed fishing schooner anchored three miles down the Pasquotank River, which empties into Albemarle Sound. Wilbur soon saw he was in for a difficult time: the skiff was so overloaded that it dipped water, while the schooner was so underloaded that it was pushed backward by the headwind.

  One constant was the porousness of both boats. Though the water was calm, continual bailing was necessary aboard the skiff, Wilbur chipping in with the vigor of a man saving his own life. It was with relief that he reached the anchored Curlicue. But his hopes never got too high. As Wilbur put it, “When I mounted the deck of the larger boat I discovered at a glance that it was in worse condition if possible than the skiff. The sails were rotten, the ropes badly worn and t
he rudderpost half rotted off, and the cabin so dirty and vermin-infested that I kept out of it from first to last.” In fact, Wilbur preferred sleeping on the open deck to braving the cabin.

  The trip started off with clear weather and a light westerly breeze, but once the Curlicue passed out of the Pasquotank and into the open sound, the water proved unexpectedly rough and the wind swung around south and then east, ominous changes noted by the uneasy Israel Perry. The waves picked up as darkness fell, and the bailing began anew, what with the Curlicue springing a leak and water washing over the bow. By eleven o’clock, the wind was blowing at gale force and the boat was being pushed dangerously toward shore. There was little choice but to run for protection up the North River, which empties into Albemarle Sound several miles east of the Pasquotank. Wilbur described what happened next:

  In a severe gust the foresail was blown loose from the boom and fluttered to leeward with a terrible roar. The boy and I finally succeeded in taking it in though it was rather dangerous work in the dark with the boat rolling so badly…. The mainsail also tore loose from the boom, and shook fiercely in the gale. The only chance was to make a straight run over the bar under nothing but a jib, so we took in the mainsail and let the boat swing round stern to the wind. This was a very dangerous maneuver in such a sea but was in some way accomplished without capsizing…. Israel had been so long a stranger to the touch of water upon his skin that it affected him very much.

  It was a difficult stay on the North River, the Curlicue not getting under way again until Wednesday afternoon. Wilbur was by then a hungry man. In the galley, Perry prepared what Milford Ballance identifies as “some sort of hash,” probably as good a guess as any. Wilbur wanted none of it. In his trunk was a jar of jelly packed for him by his sister. It was the only food he ate for two days, and a preview of the rough life he would find camping on the Outer Banks.