First in Flight Read online

  The Curlicue limped into Kitty Hawk Bay around nine o’clock Wednesday night. Given the lateness of the hour, Wilbur had to spend another night on board.

  His duty discharged, Israel Perry became a longstanding subject of humor among the Wright family. One letter—now lost—that Wilbur sent home on the subject was supposedly the funniest thing he ever wrote. Since Wilbur’s observations are nearly all that survive of Perry, he has gone down as a man who kept a dangerously decrepit boat and a filthy kitchen and never bathed. Taking the cue, Orville wrote jokingly of Israel Perry before he ever made his acquaintance.

  In fairness to Perry, it should be noted that Wilbur was a landlubber with little knowledge of sailing on so large a body of water as Albemarle Sound. Having to bail sound boats was more a matter of course than a harbinger of doom. As for Perry’s boatmanship, he proved he could handle his craft under extreme conditions. As for his personal hygiene, the main local water supply came from cisterns, and Outer Banks residents sometimes found themselves having to dispense with the niceties due to water shortage toward the end of a long summer, as when Wilbur arrived. But perhaps the most telling thing to be said in Perry’s behalf, Wilbur’s written record notwithstanding, is that the Wright brothers crossed the sound aboard the Curlicue again.

  Wilbur finally set foot on Outer Banks soil Thursday morning, nearly a full week after he’d left Ohio. He was greeted by Elijah Baum, a boy of fourteen or fifteen who was supposedly amusing himself by sailing model boats in Kitty Hawk Bay. Baum lived in a frame house overlooking the bay. In contrast to the heavy ocean-front development at Kitty Hawk today, the village was spread out along the sound side at the turn of the century.

  Learning that Wilbur was headed to Bill Tate’s house, located about a mile inland, Baum took him there. “He offered to pay me for showing him how to reach Captain Tate’s home, but I wouldn’t take the money,” Baum recalled years later. “We did not charge people for doing favors like that when I was a boy.”

  Formally dressed as always, Wilbur greeted the surprised Bill Tate in typically formal fashion. Tate described the meeting this way: “I answered a knock at the door of my humble domicile, and found a neighbors boy, Elijah W. Baum, and a strange gentleman who took off his cap and introduced himself as Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio, ‘To whom you wrote concerning this section’.”

  Invited inside, Wilbur told Tate about his difficult journey from Elizabeth City—how his back hurt from sleeping on deck, how his arms and shoulders ached from hugging the sorry sides of the Curlicue, and how he had gone nearly without food for two days. “This last statement,” Tate later noted,

  called for action. To me the account of the trip was of small moment. In my mind it was a lesson in a mode of travel that a stranger needed to harden him up for a vacation on the coast; but to have a stranger within your gates who had been without food for 48 hours was a horse of another color. It being the breakfast hour, about 9:30 A.M., a hasty fire was made in the kitchen stove. Mrs. Tate got busy—the aroma of ham and eggs was soon permeating the house, a meal soon made ready. Mr. Wright was seated and done a he-man’s part by that humble breakfast. I didn’t ask him if he enjoyed it—that question would have been superfluous. Actions speak louder than words, you know.

  After his meal, Wilbur asked if he could board with the Tates. As he had not been expecting company, Bill adjourned to another room to talk with his wife, Addie, his successor as the local postmaster. With just two upstairs bedrooms in the home at that time—a third was later added over the kitchen—all four Tates would have to share a single room. Addie expressed concern over whether Wilbur would be satisfied with what the family could provide.

  As Bill recalled it, Wilbur overheard the conversation, came to the door, and made his case, again in rather formal terms: “I should not expect you to revolutionize your domestic system to suit me, but I should be considerate enough to subordinate myself to your system so as not to entail any extra hardship on you.”

  He followed with a translation: “I’ll be satisfied to live as you live.”

  The Tates were won over.

  Wilbur had only one request. Having seen Orville nearly die of typhoid, and having heard cautionary tales from his father, who traveled a great deal on church business, he was concerned about the quality of drinking water in strange locales. Tate showed him the family’s well “very reluctantly,” by his own admission. Sure enough, the fastidious Wilbur found it lacking. He asked that the Tates boil a gallon of water for him each morning and put it in a pitcher in his room.

  Wilbur had found an excellent friend in Bill Tate, who once described turn-of-the-century Outer Banks people this way: “Denied the advantages of good schools, subsisting upon the fruits of a battle with the sea, having little or no transportation, and being out of touch with the outside world, the average man had become immune to the fact that there was anything new.”

  More to the point, he offered this opinion on the subject of flying: “At the time the Wrights arrived in our community, we were set in our ways. We believed in a good God, a bad Devil, and a hot Hell, and more than anything else we believed that the same good God did not intend man should ever fly.”

  Had he been less modest, Tate would have exempted himself from his statement. He listened carefully to what the Wrights had to say and saw merit in their ideas. Before that first season was over, he was a believer. As Orville put it, Tate wanted “to spend his remaining days—which may be few—in experimenting with flying machines…. Tate can’t afford to shirk his work to fool around with us, so he attempts to do a day’s work in two or three hours so that he can spend the balance with us and the machine.”

  That enthusiasm never faded. Tate maintained a lifelong friendship with Orville after Wilbur’s death, exchanging correspondence and visits for over forty years. Having invited the Wright brothers to Kitty Hawk and nurtured them during their early experiments, he is one of the legitimate heroes of their story.

  Fittingly enough, the Tates’ front yard was the site where the Wrights’ first full-size glider was assembled, under a canvas shelter erected for protection from the elements. Addie Tate donated her sewing machine to the cause; Wilbur needed it to restitch the French sateen wing coverings, which had to be modified because of his inability to obtain eighteen-foot spars in Norfolk. Addie did some of the sewing herself, though she once admitted the Wrights “didn’t need much help. Both Orville and Wilbur were as good a seamstress as I am.”

  Wilbur was nearly done with the glider by the time his brother arrived.

  Orville left Dayton on Monday, September 24, and arrived in Kitty Hawk on Friday, cutting more than two days off Wilbur’s travel time. He brought camping equipment—cots, blankets, an acetylene lamp—along with such items as coffee, tea, and sugar, which Wilbur had informed him were unavailable in Kitty Hawk.

  Both of the Wrights boarded with the Tates until October 4, at which time they pitched a tent in the sand about half a mile to the south, tying one end of it to a scraggly oak tree so it wouldn’t blow away. They took a couple of pictures of this forlorn camp, among the first scenes in their classic visual testimony of their life and experiments on the Outer Banks.

  A photographic record was important to the Wrights from the start. Not long before they began their aeronautical experiments, they purchased their first camera. Notoriously frugal in building everything from printing presses to gliders, they chose one of the best, most expensive cameras on the market: a Korona-V, made by Ernst Gundlach, a German immigrant. At a price of eighty-five dollars, it cost nearly six times as much as their original man-carrying glider. It was worth the price. The airplane was the first major invention whose development was fully documented on film. And the Wrights’ camera was perhaps the only one on the Outer Banks in 1900.

  In typically meticulous fashion, they kept a written record of each picture’s f-stop, date, subject, and type of plate. All the same, the photographs they took that first season suggest that their commitmen
t to the flight problem was less than wholehearted. Young men on a vacation, they took pictures of Kitty Hawk, Kitty Hawk Bay, Kill Devil Hills, the Tates, the Kitty Hawk Lifesaving Station, the men who staffed it—but only three of their glider, none of which shows it manned. And one of the three is a view of the craft after it was wrecked by the wind on October 10.

  So, too, is the record of their flight tests from 1900 incomplete. The glider was flown as an unmanned kite during most of the trials. No one knows for certain what day it first went aloft, though it was most likely the day before they left the Tates’. The number of free glides is also unknown. The Wrights estimated Wilbur spent a total of about two minutes in the air in that capacity.

  Once Orville arrived, Wilbur left most of the chronicling of life on the Outer Banks to his younger brother. Though Orville often said he disliked writing, readers have long enjoyed his letters from Kitty Hawk. A city boy whose adventures had always taken place within a few miles of home, he liked to entertain his sister with tales of how hard-bitten he and Wilbur were, roughing it in the dunes. He wrote of trying to sleep in freezing conditions, of going to bed without knowing whether their thin tent would be picked up and carried away by the wind during the night, and them with it. He wrote of rations so poor that eating condensed milk off a spoon was a good dessert.

  In Orville’s estimation, the Wrights’ pantry at home “in its most depleted state would be a mammoth affair compared with our Kitty Hawk stores. Our camp alone exhausts the output of all the henneries within a mile. What little canned goods, such as corn, etc., is of such a nature that only a Kitty Hawker could down it.”

  As for the livestock that roamed freely through the marshes, he noted that “the poor cows have such a hard time scraping up a living that they don’t have any time for making milk. You never saw such poor pitiful-looking creatures as the horses, hogs and cows are down here. The only things that thrive and grow fat are bedbugs, mosquitoes, and wood ticks.”

  The Wrights understood the Outer Banks as a land of poverty amid plenty, remarking on the residents’ wishful attempts at making beans, corn, and turnips grow from the sand, while simultaneously marveling at the woods filled with game, the eagles, buzzards, and sea gulls so abundant in the sky that Wilbur grew sick of watching them, and the fish “so thick you see dozens of them whenever you look down in the water.”

  That last fact told a great deal about the local state of affairs: the Wrights found that in Kitty Hawk, a fishing village, there were no fish they could buy. “It is just like in the north,” Orville wrote, “where our carpenters never have their houses completed, nor the painters their houses painted; the fisherman never has any fish.”

  Or perhaps it said something about the local tradition of self-reliance. If the Wright brothers wanted fish, they could catch them themselves. And so they did.

  Wilbur quickly understood how far Kitty Hawk existed outside the mainstream. He wrote his father a description of Bill Tate’s house, noting that while it was the best in town, it was unpainted, unplastered, and unvarnished, and had sparse furnishings, no carpets, and no pictures. Nonetheless, he came to the conclusion that there was no real suffering among the Tates or anyone else in the area. As Orville once put it, the residents of Kitty Hawk “never had anything good in their lives, and consequently are satisfied with what they have.”

  In some obvious ways, the Wrights remained unaffected by the local environment. Regardless of the weather, they wore suits and stiff collars. And as they had promised their father, they did not experiment on Sundays, even when the weather was favorable.

  But they were much less set in their ways than is generally believed. These were men who, at home in Dayton, had once taken the front wheels from two high-wheel bicycles and used them in an oversized tandem, which they rode through the streets together to the amusement of townspeople. At various times on the Outer Banks, they rigged a balloon-tire bicycle to carry them effortlessly across the dunes, washed their dishes with sand, hunted mice indoors with guns, and ran up and down the beach flapping their arms in imitation of the birds.

  The first day they tested their 1900 craft, they intended only to fly it as an unmanned kite, but it wasn’t long before Wilbur felt the urge to climb aboard. On the beach near the Kitty Hawk Lifesaving Station, he apparently flew for a matter of minutes, Orville and Bill Tate holding lines that kept him a few feet off the ground. Orville and Tate then played out the lines, and Wilbur attained a height of perhaps fifteen feet before the craft began to bob. According to Orville, Wilbur brought the session to an abrupt end with his first utterance on the experience of flight: “Let me down!” They then returned to unmanned tests.

  Notwithstanding a suggestion in one of Orville’s letters that “we”—both he and Wilbur—flew aboard the glider that first day of testing, it is generally believed that Wilbur did all the flying in 1900, as well as in 1901. If that is true, the reason is not immediately clear. The Wrights were close in size, so a difference in weight is not the explanation. Perhaps Wilbur still considered the project primarily his; in fact, he continued to write nearly all the technical correspondence related to flight for years.

  But even if he was an adjunct member of the partnership initially, Orville quickly grew beyond that. At one point that season, after a day spent tinkering with the position of the glider’s elevator, he wrote his sister that “Will was so mixed up he couldn’t even theorize. It has been with considerable effort that I have succeeded in keeping him in the flying business at all.” Wilbur got the Wrights started on the flight problem, but Orville in many ways sustained the effort.

  The Wrights’ gliders from 1900 and 1901 are easy to identify in photographs. The wings had a broad chord—the distance from the front edge to the back edge—giving them a short, stubby look. Those early gliders also had no tail. More accurately, they had half a tail—the horizontal portion, the elevator, which directed the craft up or down—but it was positioned in front of the glider, not behind.

  The short wing spars left the Wrights with 165 square feet of wing area, rather than the planned 200 square feet, which meant that they needed a wind of nearly 25 miles per hour to sustain the craft with a 150-pound man aboard.

  A light wind was blowing during their second day of trials—date unknown—so they were restricted to kiting the craft once more. Wilbur wasn’t prepared to go airborne without further unmanned tests anyway.

  That day, in one of the first instances of what was to become a trademark—the careful gathering of data on the forces acting on their gliders—they loaded the craft with chains of different weights and rigged a fish scale to measure the air resistance under a variety of wind speeds, as determined by a hand-held wind gauge loaned to them by Joe Dosher at the Weather Bureau station. Though the Wrights’ information-gathering procedures always retained a home-built character, their results were invariably more accurate than those of their predecessors, one of the main keys to their success.

  Their third day of testing was Wednesday, October 10. They spent the morning kiting the glider in thirty-mile-per-hour winds but in the afternoon moved to a small dune south of Kitty Hawk and erected a derrick. It was a humble affair compared with the 150-foot model Wilbur had proposed in his first letter to Octave Chanute.

  They made just one test with the glider tethered to the derrick, during which the craft rose to a height of about twenty feet. While they had the craft on the ground making adjustments, a gust of wind lifted it and threw it twenty feet across the sand, breaking a number of wires, ribs, and struts. The Wrights carried the shattered machine back to camp.

  Their disappointment ran deeper than just the accident of October 10. Progress was proving extremely slow. Operating the wing warping and the elevator in tandem proved so difficult that they reconciled themselves to trying to master the elevator alone.

  And their wings were not producing nearly the lift that Otto Lilienthal’s tables said they should. Though the process was not completely understood at the time,
a wing generates lift because the wind moving over its curved upper surface travels faster than the wind moving over its flat lower surface. The slower-moving air has a greater pressure than the faster-moving air; in rising, a wing is moving toward the area of less pressure.

  But simply perceiving that a curved wing generates lift did not solve the problem for glider designers. Lifting efficiency varies according to a wing’s chord, its camber (the ratio of its thickness to its chord), the placement of its thickest point, its span (the distance from tip to tip), the shape of its leading edge, and other factors.

  Otto Lilienthal was the man who had taken the fledgling science of wing design farther than anyone. The Wrights’ problems with lift were partly of their own making, as they had built their wings with a flatter curvature than that recommended by Lilienthal. But still, the tables suggested that they should have been able to maintain their craft in the air with its wings angled just three degrees above the horizontal; in practice, they found the actual angle to be a whopping twenty degrees, a major discrepancy.

  Their lack of success with the derrick was another blow. Otto Lilienthal, history’s greatest aeronaut to that date, had spent five full years accumulating a scant five hours in the air, and had died in the process. Tethering their manned glider to a derrick was to have been the Wrights’ means of spending hours, rather than seconds, in the air, an infinitely better opportunity for working out the problems of control. But as Octave Chanute had warned, the practice was patently dangerous; without forward progress to help sustain it in the air, the craft would crash immediately should the wind die. Like Lilienthal, the Wrights would have to amass flight time second by second.