First in Flight Read online

In mid-October, they received word from their sister that she had found it necessary to dismiss the man they had left tending their bicycle shop. Concerned about the state of their business—Wilbur had been absent since September 6—the Wrights decided to make a couple of last attempts at meaningful progress and return home.

  On Thursday, October 18, they headed for some steep dunes a mile from camp, intending to try their first free glides. Their craft would produce more lift moving forward into the wind than tethered to the ground by ropes, meaning that it would support a man in a lighter breeze. However, by the time they reached their destination, the wind was blowing at only ten miles per hour. Not wanting to waste the trip, they spent the day tossing the glider from the dunes and carefully observing its progress until it would, in Orville’s words, “whack the side of the hill with terrific force.” They then patched the damage and carried the craft back up for another throw. Though the glider took a beating, they were pleased with its durability.

  Their last day of testing—it may have been either October 19 or 20—salvaged the entire season. For the first time, they made the four-mile trip south to Kill Devil Hills, most likely with the aid of a horse and cart procured by Bill Tate, who accompanied them. Though only seven or eight miles above the resort of Nags Head, Kill Devil Hills was isolated from vacationers in those days, as was Kitty Hawk. All local traffic passed east and west between Manteo and Nags Head, with few beachcombers making it as far as Kill Devil Hills.

  The Wrights liked the high dunes at Kill Devil Hills so well that they never flew again at Kitty Hawk. Standing at either wingtip, Orville and Bill Tate started the glider down the slope of one of the big dunes and ran with it, holding the wings level until they could no longer keep pace. Though many aeronauts considered it suicidal, Wilbur lay prone, a position the Wrights chose because the pilot’s air resistance was only half that of a man sitting upright; in practice, it proved safe for landing in the sand. The elevator control worked perfectly. Wilbur was able to maintain the craft about five feet above the sand until he brought it smoothly back to earth.

  Though they didn’t record the exact length of the glides that day, they later estimated that Wilbur’s last efforts stretched three to four hundred feet. Few men had ever flown farther. And with the pilot controlling the craft from an internal position—controlling it by using his brain, rather than by swinging his legs—they were already moving beyond their forerunners.

  The Wrights were entirely unsentimental about their early gliders. They had gotten their use out of the 1900 craft, and they knew they could design a better one next time. When the day was done, Bill Tate expressed interest in the patched-up craft, and they told him he could have it.

  Addie Tate later made the trip to the glider’s resting place with her pair of scissors. Using the same sewing machine Wilbur had borrowed to stitch the French sateen into wing coverings, she fashioned it into dresses for her daughters, Irene and Pauline, ages four and three.

  The Outer Banks had left a mark on the Wright brothers, but the Wright brothers had not yet left much of a mark on the Outer Banks. When the Kitty Hawkers came “peering around the edge of the woods and out of their upstairs windows,” as Orville put it, it was not to watch the Wrights’ experiments but to see whether their miserable camp had survived the latest storm. Local residents were more interested in the Wrights’ camp stove—fueled by what is believed to have been the first gasoline ever brought to the Outer Banks—than in their glider.

  Except for the Tate family, that is. The bond established between the Wright brothers and the Tates that year grew through three generations.

  Though never a pilot, Bill Tate in later years became a member of the National Aeronautic Association. During the time he worked as a lighthouse keeper, he printed business cards saying he was the “Original N.C. Aviation Booster” and the “First Lighthouse Employee to Inspect Navigational Aids by Air.” He organized the first American monument to the Wright brothers, a replica of which still stands in what was once his front yard. A fixture at commemorative ceremonies honoring the Wrights, he introduced Amelia Earhart on the day the cornerstone was laid for the national memorial at Kill Devil Hills.

  His nephew Tom Tate did even better than that. Sometime after Wilbur’s aborted attempt at flying the glider as a manned kite that first season, when his plans for tethering the craft and accumulating hours of practice were falling apart, the Wrights hit upon the idea of sending ten-year-old, seventy-pound Tom aloft. Different dates have been offered for Tom’s ascents. It was not recorded how many times, or for how long, he went up. And of course, the Wrights controlled the craft from the ground. It very likely flew at a height of ten feet or less. All the same, Tom Tate experienced what only a handful of men—and certainly no one else so young—could claim. Orville once described him as “a small chap … that can tell more big yarns than any kid of his size I ever saw.” But the best story of his life—that he flew aboard a Wright brothers glider nearly two years before Orville Wright, the world’s first heavier-than-air pilot, ever did—was no tall tale.

  Bill Tate’s half-brother Dan assisted the Wrights during three seasons on the Outer Banks, helping launch their gliders hundreds of times.

  In 1908 or 1911, one of Bill’s young sons followed in Tom Tate’s footsteps by gliding briefly aboard a Wright craft. His other son later started a small museum to the Wrights and became a pilot.

  One of Bill’s daughters married a New Jersey aviator and flew over fifty thousand miles with him, many of them on trips home to see her parents in coastal North Carolina.

  Though the Wright brothers didn’t know a soul in North Carolina before their first visit, they made one good set of friends by the time they headed back home in 1900.

  C H A P T E R 2

  1 9 0 1

  If report is to be credited, there is building on an unfrequented part of Carolina’s coast an airship which is to put Santos Dumont’s now far-famed flying machine to the blush. An Ohio inventor with two companions and fellow-workmen, it is stated, have located with their various constructive material and appliances at a quiet spot near Nags Head … and have been there busied for some time in the perfection of a machine with which they expect to solve the problem of aerial navigation. The utmost secrecy is being maintained in regard to the same and the aerial craft itself is kept within an enclosed structure. Scant courtesy is shown and but meagre information doled out to the few inhabitants who have been led by curiosity to this isolated spot.

  Elizabeth City North Carolinian,

  August 1, 1901

  Mixed Reviews

  Though there were four small newspapers in Elizabeth City at the turn of the century, there was no competition over the Wright brothers’ story. In fact, members of the press made no attempt to contact the brothers or witness their activities on the Outer Banks until after their powered flights of 1903. Even secondhand reports were few.

  Perhaps that says something about the status of aeronautics. A little hyperbole for the benefit of the townsfolk notwithstanding, it was generally understood that attempts at flying came to nothing. Idly predicting that a local experiment might put the famous Alberto Santos-Dumont “to the blush” was easy. But when it came time to allocate newsmen’s time, it was unanimously agreed among the local papers that investigating such an experiment wasn’t worth the trip across Albemarle Sound.

  Perhaps the Wright brothers would have been a bigger drawing card if they’d conducted their experiments after the manner of Alberto Santos-Dumont. A wealthy young Brazilian living in France, the heir to a coffee fortune, Santos-Dumont cultivated an obsession with flying that was highly public. Beginning in 1898, people in and around Paris turned to the skies as he navigated a series of small dirigibles of his own design. The winner in October 1901 of one of aviation’s first great prizes, awarded for flying a circuit from the outskirts of Paris around the Eiffel Tower, Santos-Dumont was the world’s most famous aeronaut at the turn of the century.

 
For the public, captivated by the achievements of Santos-Dumont but not understanding the difference between lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air craft, the reasons for conducting experiments in private were less than obvious. It was only those who knew the limitations of dirigibles—their poor maneuverability, the degree to which they were subject to the wind, their small lifting capacity despite their great size—who understood that the race for true flight was far from won.

  The “utmost secrecy” and “scant courtesy” of Wilbur and Orville Wright are taken as articles of faith among their detractors, who feel that the Wrights borrowed what they could from Octave Chanute and other believers in community effort, yet jealously tried to keep their own contributions from becoming public knowledge. Even the Wrights’ simplest actions—like constructing a shelter to protect their gliders from wind, rain, and sand—have at times been given a sinister slant.

  Those who actually knew them in North Carolina saw them differently. While it’s true that Wilbur selected Kitty Hawk partly because of its isolation, it’s equally true that the Wrights were freely visited at their camps by a number of local people, some of whom not only asked questions but also assisted in handling the gliders.

  Beginning in 1901, other aeronauts began visiting the Wrights on the Outer Banks and experimenting with them. The brothers saw this as an intrusion and took a personal dislike to a couple such interlopers, but all the same, they were more than willing to discuss the flight problem at length with their peers.

  The Wrights didn’t issue invitations to members of the aeronautical community to come and experience life on the Outer Banks. Octave Chanute did it for them.

  After the 1900 season, Wilbur wrote Chanute from Dayton informing him of the progress of his recent experiments. Chanute was sufficiently interested to want to include a mention of the Wrights in a paper he was writing and to arrange a personal visit. That visit took place in Dayton on June 26 and 27, 1901, as the brothers were preparing for their second trip to North Carolina.

  Two days after the visit, Chanute wrote Wilbur asking if a protégé of his, Edward Huffaker of Chuckey City, Tennessee, could accompany the brothers to the Outer Banks to test a glider he was building. In the same letter, Chanute extended a similar request on behalf of George Spratt, a young physician from Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Chanute, too, was tentatively planning a trip to the Wrights’ camp.

  Chanute’s stated mission was simply to provide assistance to the Wrights—assistance Wilbur and Orville didn’t need or want. According to some historians, Chanute was more likely trying to re-create the kind of community of experimenters among whom he had found his greatest aeronautical success in the Indiana dunes in 1896.

  Whatever Chanute’s motive, there was no gracious way for the Wrights to decline his offer. They would have company on the Outer Banks that year.

  The Camp

  The Wrights left home on July 7 and had an uneventful trip as far as Elizabeth City, where they were detained for several days by a major storm. Its exact severity is unknown, since the local wind-measuring instruments broke at either 93 or 107 miles per hour, depending on the account from the Wrights.

  That year, for easier access to the big dunes, they decided to establish a more permanent camp at Kill Devil Hills, where they arrived on July 12 after spending a night in Kitty Hawk with the Tates. They soon began building their inaugural hangar, a 25-foot-long, 16-foot-wide, 6½-foot-high affair whose ends were hinged so they could be raised and used as awnings. Constructed of materials ordered in Elizabeth City, delivered by Bill Tate, and framed by another local man, Oliver O’Neal, that simple building, later joined by a larger sister, was one of the most famous symbols of the Wrights on the Outer Banks.

  In 1901, the structure served the glider only, the Wrights and their guests continuing to sleep outdoors or under a tent. Over the next couple of years, it was gradually converted to personal space. In 1902, the Wrights extended the rear of the building to create a kitchen and a living room. They also built two bunks in the rafters so they could finally get out of the elements at night; when guests arrived, they added another four bunks. In 1903, they converted a used carbide can into a combination heater and stove, supposedly the best such device in the Kitty Hawk area. They also engaged Dan Tate, Bill’s half-brother, to build a second structure, which served as their main hangar, workshop, and storage facility.

  Each season after 1901 began with several days of repairs on the camp. Tar paper had to be reattached to the roof and leaks patched; the ends of the original building had to be raised because sand had blown out from underneath them; pilings had to be sunk; boards had to be replaced; a foot of sand had to be removed from the floors; old glider parts had to be unearthed or retrieved from where they’d fallen; field mice had to be chased out. When the Wrights were absent for more than a year, they returned to find little intact but the exterior walls.

  There were other threats to the structure as well. Bill Tate wrote the Wrights in Dayton one winter asking whether he could have their 1901 building, which he apparently intended to give to a neighbor. Adam Etheridge, a lifesaver at the Kill Devil Hills station, also wrote, asking whether he could use the buildings. Vacationers at Nags Head stopped by in later years to pick through whatever looked interesting. The Kill Devil Hills lifesavers appropriated the Wrights’ water pump for their own use. Indeed, pieces of the buildings and the gliders they contained came into the possession of a good number of Outer Banks people. The Wrights eventually put Adam Etheridge on a yearly retainer to keep an eye on the camp and let them know how badly deteriorated it was.

  Still, the camp held together through Orville’s last glider trials in 1911. The buildings were ultimately blown down and carried off by scavengers.

  In his taped interview with the National Park Service, Elmer Woodard, Jr., Bill Tate’s grandson, told of a day in the late 1920s when he accompanied his grandfather and Orville Wright on their attempt to authenticate the site of the first powered flights. Having ridden down the beach in a Model T Ford fitted with balloon tires, the three met with a few of the first-flight witnesses at Kill Devil Hills.

  According to Woodard, the plan was to spread out and try to locate debris from the old camp—preferably the buildings, since Orville was confident he could use them to determine the exact takeoff point. The men didn’t expect to find much on the flat expanse of sand. The great dunes had migrated considerably by that date, so the whole area seemed unfamiliar. But to their surprise, someone stumbled across the corner of one of the old buildings. They then discovered that some of the below-ground timbers had left brown streaks in the sand as they rotted, and thus a perfect outline of the hangar.

  That was apparently the ultimate fate of the camp buildings. From the marks in the sand, Orville used a compass and his extensive notes to locate the site of the famous flights, marked by the large boulders at Wright Brothers National Memorial today.

  In fact, it is well established that in November 1928, when plans for the national memorial were being finalized, Bill Tate met with witnesses Willie Dough, Adam Etheridge, and Johnny Moore to authenticate the site of the flights. But Orville Wright is not generally reckoned to have been part of any such proceedings.

  The camp buildings were reincarnated in the 1950s, when the National Park Service constructed replicas on the grounds of the national memorial. The replica of the original building is identifiable by its vertical boards; the boards of the later hangar run horizontally. Unlike the originals, which were abandoned for nine or ten months of the year at best and for years at a time at worst, the replica buildings have a full-time staff to help maintain them. Still, they take a pounding from the Outer Banks weather.

  In 1901, the camp was in its infancy, the Wrights’ tent pitched within a couple of feet of their building, but looking considerably less forlorn than it had tied to a tree near Kitty Hawk a year earlier.

  Huffaker and Spratt

  In retrospect, the Wrights should not have waited until 1902
to build their bunks in the rafters. With several days of wet weather following the storm of July 1901, conditions were ideal for the breeding of mosquitoes. Indoor shelter might have afforded them modest protection from the greatest predator of the Outer Banks.

  English-speaking travelers to the New World began registering their complaints about mosquitoes in the late sixteenth century. The word supposedly entered the language courtesy of the writer M. Phillips in The Principal Navigations Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, published by Richard Hakluyt in 1589. As Phillips lamented, “We were also aftertimes greatly annoyed with a kinde flie…. The Spanyards called them Musketas.”

  In Georgia, it was colonial official William Stephens, who described one of the coastal islands there as “a Place so exceedingly pestered with Musketoes, by Reason of the adjacent Marshes, that no Person would ever be fond of taking his Abode there.”

  In South Carolina, it was famed explorer John Lawson, who noted as he headed north from Charles Town that “although it were Winter, yet we found such Swarms of Musketoes, and other troublesome Insects, that we got but little Rest that Night.”

  In North Carolina in more recent times, it was the Wright brothers. If eloquence is any gauge as to depth of misery, few travelers have been as badly troubled as Wilbur and Orville and their companions in the summer of 1901.

  Orville wrote that the swarm of mosquitoes “came in a mighty cloud, almost darkening the sun…. The sand and grass and trees and hills and everything was fairly covered with them. They chewed us clear through our underwear and socks. Lumps began swelling up all over my body like hen’s eggs.” Arranging nets over their cots provided little relief, since “the tops of the canopies were covered with mosquitoes till there was hardly standing room for another one; the buzzing was like the buzzing of a mighty buzz saw.”

  According to Wilbur, the plague that season was the worst that the oldest local inhabitants had ever witnessed. He promptly wrote Octave Chanute, due to arrive later, that he should “by all means bring with you from the North eight yards of the finest meshed mosquito bar you can find.”