First in Flight Read online

  Fellow experimenter Edward Huffaker found the conditions “all but unendurable,” noting that “the mosquitoes are so slender that they slip through the meshes and after making a meal off of us are too large to get out again and so tend to accumulate.”

  The mosquitoes arrived about the same time Huffaker did, on July 18. That first night, the Wrights and Huffaker tried going to bed at five o’clock on cots under the hangar’s awnings, wrapping themselves completely in blankets except for their noses. But when the twenty-mile-an-hour wind abruptly died, they judged the summer heat worse than the mosquitoes and shed their blankets, at which time they changed their minds again and decided they preferred the heat. So it went until three in the morning, when they gave up and began preparing for their workday. When morning finally arrived, the pests’ persistence caused them to cancel all plans to begin assembling the Wrights’ glider.

  Sleeping under netting was the next plan. Orville reported how the men initially “lay there on our backs smiling at the way we had got the best of them … but what was our astonishment when in a few minutes we heard a terrific slap and a cry from Mr. Huffaker announcing that the enemy had gained the outer works and he was engaged in a hand-to-hand conflict with them.” After wandering through the sand for several hundred feet in search of a “place of safety,” they were back to sleeping under blankets in the steamy heat.

  By the time George Spratt arrived from Pennsylvania on July 25, the men had graduated to dragging old tree stumps to camp from distances of up to a quarter-mile away and setting them afire to drive out the mosquitoes with smoke. Unused to the rigors of Outer Banks camping, Spratt relocated to the open air when he began choking on the smoke, but soon returned with a report that the pests were worse. He spent his first miserable night moving back and forth between the fire and the mosquitoes.

  Spratt probably wouldn’t have believed it at the time, but the plague was already beginning to wane.

  Mosquitoes weren’t the only problem in setting up camp that season. The Wrights couldn’t keep their tent pegs from pulling out of the wet sand. Then they lost their drill bit when they went searching for a water source, forcing them to drink the rainwater that ran off their tent’s roof, generously flavored with the soap they’d used as a mildew retardant.

  But the single biggest problem, in the Wrights’ view, was Edward Huffaker. It wasn’t for lack of talent or credentials. Huffaker was better known in the aeronautical community at that stage than were Wilbur and Orville Wright. Rather, it was a conflict of personality.

  Like the Wrights the son of a minister, Huffaker was born in Seclusion Bend, Tennessee, near Nashville, in 1856. He spent most of his life in Chuckey City, located on the Nolichucky River in the mountainous eastern part of the state between Greeneville and Jonesborough. In 1888, after graduating from nearby Emory and Henry College in southwestern Virginia with that school’s top prize in mathematics, Huffaker began graduate studies at the University of Virginia. Before receiving his master’s in physics, he had already published a textbook on applied mathematics. He then received an offer of a Ph.D. scholarship from Johns Hopkins University. That he was uncertain about his direction in life is obvious in the fact that he declined the scholarship on the grounds that he was tired of academic life, only to turn around shortly thereafter and accept a job teaching at a private college in Mississippi. After a year of teaching, he returned to Chuckey City to work as a civil engineer. Among his credits was the resurveying of a tract in West Virginia to correct an error George Washington made during his days as a surveyor.

  Huffaker’s interest in flight dated from 1891. He liked to repair to the grassy hills around Chuckey City with a transit, a stopwatch, and a notebook to observe and record the performance of soaring birds. When he desired a closer look, he simply shot the birds out of the sky with a blast from his shotgun.

  From his readings in journals, his observations of wing shape during flight, and his records of birds’ wingspans, wing area, and weight began to grow a theory of flight. Having noted how wing curvature created differences in air pressure, generating lift, and having noted how birds’ tails were used in controlling direction, he sought to apply the same basic principles to a flying machine.

  In early 1892, Huffaker began building small-scale wooden gliders and sailing them from the East Tennessee hills, mostly on idle Sunday afternoons. By July, he was experiencing considerable success.

  That same year, Huffaker initiated contact with the two principal figures in American aeronautics at that time.

  As Wilbur Wright would do eight years later, Huffaker wrote Octave Chanute, offering his observations on the mechanics of soaring birds, a subject dear to Chanute’s heart. Impressed, Chanute honored him with a visit in March 1893, at which time he witnessed the performance of Huffaker’s flying models. He liked what he saw, even going so far as to offer the young Tennessean a chance to present a paper at a major conference on aeronautics in Chicago. That well-received paper, “On Soaring Flight,” was later included among the materials sent to Wilbur Wright when he wrote the Smithsonian with his historic request for reading matter on the subject of flight.

  Long before Edward Huffaker came along, men had been trying to take the performance of birds, boil it down to a few basic principles, and apply those principles toward systems of human flight.

  One thing that was obvious by Huffaker’s day was that there was little of practical value to be gleaned from small birds. The earliest aeronautical experimenters had gravitated toward dressing themselves up as birds and beating their arms in the wind, or building ornithopters—craft that moved by flapping their wings. All such attempts ended in disappointment for a simple reason: they underestimated the strength of small birds relative to their weight, as well as their enormous generation of energy. For a man to fly by donning feathers and flapping his arms, he would need fifty times his natural strength. Even using mechanical means, there was simply no way to duplicate small birds’ ability to consume approximately their body weight in food every day and convert it to usable energy.

  It seemed more fruitful to study soaring birds like hawks and vultures, which remain airborne for long periods while expending little energy. Of particular interest to Huffaker was the way that birds soaring in a spiral pattern could manage to gain altitude in what appeared to be a dead calm. His paper “On Soaring Flight” put forth the argument that under certain conditions, a bird soaring in a spiral could “disturb the equilibrium” so as to create “a feeble ascending current of warm air,” a kind of “natural chimney” that would gather in strength, bearing the bird upward hundreds or thousands of feet even when there was no wind. In other words, birds had the power to create their own updraft. If what Huffaker said was true, the implications for human flight were great. To bolster his argument, he cited an experiment of his own in which he had taken strands of silk, waved a fan under them—thus “disturbing the equilibrium”—and watched them rise to great heights in calm air.

  In truth, students of flight never learned much more from soaring birds than they did from small birds. For example, hawks and turkey vultures—two of the soaring birds most often studied—have wingspans of five and six feet, respectively, but weigh only four and five pounds. Such facts shone little light on how to sustain a minimum two hundred pounds of man and machine in the air. As Orville Wright once put it, “Nature has never succeeded in building a large creature which could fly. I believe the Pterodactyl [sic], which was the largest, weighed only in the neighborhood of thirty pounds, and evidently was but a poor flyer.”

  Further, students observing the same phenomenon often came to different conclusions. Where Edward Huffaker saw a turkey vulture creating its own updrafts when there was no wind, Wilbur Wright saw air currents hidden from the naked eye. His own pronouncement on the subject was short and final: “No bird soars in a calm.”

  Around the same time that he established contact with Octave Chanute, Huffaker began writing Samuel Langley in an effort to at
tract the great professor to his theories on bird flight. Langley twice rebuffed him, but in Huffaker’s third letter, he made the tantalizing claim that his theories had recently been validated in model-glider trials. He offered to forward a paper outlining his principles. Langley took him up on it and liked what he read. A staunchly upright man, Langley then requested a confidential letter from Chanute on Huffaker’s morals. When Chanute testified to Huffaker’s good character, Langley promptly hired the Tennessean.

  Through an association lasting several years, the fastidious Langley always had a respect for Huffaker’s abilities, though he developed some reservations about his personal habits, as would Wilbur and Orville Wright several years later. Huffaker’s opinion of Langley, a notoriously difficult man to work for, was less flattering.

  Soon after Huffaker’s arrival in Washington, Langley wanted a demonstration of one of his flying models. They climbed to the roof of the Smithsonian, Huffaker struggling with his glider on the narrow stairs. When they reached the top, Huffaker made his choice of direction, tossed his craft over the parapet, and watched with Langley as it made a graceful, gradual, impressive descent stretching six hundred feet. Langley promptly put him to work designing wings for his Aerodromes.

  Their personal relationship suffered its first blow one morning when Langley walked past Huffaker’s office and saw him sitting there without coat or tie, his feet up on the desk, and using a tin can for a spittoon.

  A more important factor in their relations was the pressure under which Huffaker was forced to work. A perfectionist, Langley sometimes gave his engineers contrary instructions, or expected them to bear responsibility for things out of their control. These conditions took their toll. Arriving at the Smithsonian in 1894, Augustus Herring, who later accompanied Octave Chanute to the Indiana dunes and the Outer Banks, described Huffaker as “considerably worried—so much so that I believe he is on the verge of nervous prostration—he cannot multiply two numbers together without making a mistake.”

  Huffaker once wrote enviously of another Smithsonian employee who “cursed [Langley] first in English and then he tried cursing him in French, and then ended by cursing him in German. Unfortunately, I can only swear in English, and not very proficiently at that.”

  All the same, Huffaker hung on long enough to witness the successful flights of Langley’s model Aerodromes on the Potomac in May 1896. He even lasted well into the development of Langley’s man-carrying craft. His tenure ended in 1899, when his wife, Carrie Sue, staying with family in Tennessee after the birth of their second child, contracted typhoid and died. Following the tragedy, Edward Huffaker went home to Chuckey City.

  Octave Chanute remained interested in Huffaker’s work. He first commissioned the Tennessean to build a biplane model with movable wings, designed to produce automatic stability. That model was tested on the windy hills around Chuckey City. Satisfied with its performance, Chanute commissioned Huffaker to build a full-scale five-wing glider in the summer of 1900, even offering to bring Huffaker to Chicago for lessons in hang gliding as the craft neared completion.

  When Chanute left Dayton in June 1901 after his first meeting with the Wright brothers, he headed directly to Chuckey City in his private railroad car to check on the progress of his glider. The arrangements were nearly set for the Wrights’ second visit to the Outer Banks, with Chanute, it seemed, doing a fair portion of the planning.

  Chanute was disappointed with what he found in Tennessee. Huffaker’s greatest strengths were in the areas of theory and design, not building. Chanute, an engineer with an eye for solid construction, was concerned about the strength of portions of the glider’s frame, which were made of paper tubing, and the strength of the wings, which could be folded for ease of transportation.

  Usually a kind man, Chanute criticized Huffaker’s work in letters to third parties the Tennessean hadn’t even met yet.

  “The mechanical details and connections of the gliding machine which Mr. Huffaker has been building for me are so weak,” he wrote Wilbur Wright, “that I fear they will not stand long enough to test the efficiency of the ideas in its design…. If you were not about to experiment I should abandon the machine without testing, but perhaps it will stand long enough to try as a kite.” He would send the craft to the Outer Banks, he told Wilbur, only “if you think you can extract instruction from its failure.”

  Chanute also wrote to George Spratt about the quality of Huffaker’s glider. “Mr. Huffaker is to join [the Wrights] with a folding gliding machine which he has been building for me,” Chanute wrote Spratt. “This latter will prove a failure, in my judgment.”

  It seems to have slipped Chanute’s mind that the paper-tube frame and folding wings—the features for which he criticized Huffaker—were built according to his own specifications.

  In his last-minute instructions to Huffaker, Chanute also offered an opinion that was soon to be proven badly in error: “I do not think you will need shelter for your machine.”

  The Wright brothers were thus prepared for Edward Huffaker to contribute little to their camp that season, but they probably wouldn’t have liked him under any circumstances. Huffaker and the Wrights could hardly have been more opposite. Huffaker was a mountain man with a first-class education but little sophistication. The Wrights were city boys with modest educations but considerable savvy. The Wrights’ do-it-yourself attitude extended to such mundane tasks as preparing meals and doing the dishes, which Huffaker wanted no part of. He was more inclined to give moral lectures to Wilbur and Orville—two men who have gone down in history as models of upright character.

  Huffaker couldn’t understand why the Wrights dressed daily in fresh celluloid collars in a place that was nearly deserted. The Wrights couldn’t understand why Huffaker wore the same ripe shirt during most of his stay, or why he borrowed personal items without asking, or why he laid measuring instruments carelessly in the sand, or why he used their camera as a place to sit, or why he departed camp with property belonging to them.

  In the years that followed, Huffaker never conceded that the Wrights were anything more than “bicycle mechanics”—his pet term for them. He felt the only thing they had over him was their skill in building, and he swore they had no idea why their machines flew. The Wrights resented that. They called the craft Huffaker had built for Chanute the “$1000 Beauty” and considered its signature feature to be its folly.

  The Chanute-Huffaker glider never had a chance. Assembled, it looked frail. The Wrights’ glider occupied the entire new hangar, so Huffaker’s machine had to be stored outdoors. The Wrights’ original man-carrying glider had survived such a fate in 1900, but Huffaker’s could not. Its paper tubing melted away in a rainstorm, the craft never having been tested.

  The Wrights took a parting shot at Huffaker. George Spratt left camp before Huffaker or the Wrights that year. After the season, Wilbur wrote Spratt, “When it came time to pack up I made the unpleasant discovery that one of my blankets that had lived with me for years on terms of closest intimacy, even sharing my bed, had abandoned me for another, and had even departed without a word of warning or farewell. Although I regretted to part with it, yet I felt happy in the thought that its morals were safe, and it was in the company of one who made ‘character building’ rather than hard labor the great aim in life!”

  Orville had photographed Huffaker’s ruined machine, titling the shot “The Wreck of the $1000 Beauty.” Wilbur sent a selection of photographs with his letter to Spratt. “I enclose a few prints,” he noted. “That of the Huffaker machine you will please not show too promiscuously. I took it as a joke on Huffaker but afterward it struck me that the joke was rather on Mr. Chanute, as the whole loss was his. If you ever feel that you have not got much to show for your work and money expended, get out this picture and you will feel encouraged.”

  Edward Huffaker’s reputation has suffered through the years, but in fairness, it should be noted that the opinions Octave Chanute and the Wright brothers held of him—an
d not his legitimate accomplishments—have gone down as his legacy. Despite his many strong points, Chanute was not always the best judge of glider design. And the Wrights saw Huffaker at his absolute worst during the 1901 season.

  But if his mastery of such difficult concepts as ground effect and the travel of the center of pressure are taken into account, then Edward Huffaker was a man who made some important contributions to early aeronautics.

  At least Huffaker brought solid credentials to the Outer Banks. The Wrights held out even less hope for George Spratt, their other young guest that season. Neither pilot nor technician, neither scientist nor designer, Spratt was a complete unknown in the aeronautical field. His only selling points were an active mind and a correspondence with Octave Chanute.

  Spratt spent most of his life in and around Coatesville, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. His grandfather, a Baptist minister, was one of the founders of Bucknell University, and his father was a locally prominent physician and scientist. It was George Spratt’s intention to follow his father into the healing arts, but upon his graduation from medical college in Philadelphia in 1894, he learned he had a heart condition. The life of a country doctor was a difficult one in those days, two of its principal features being irregular hours and long travel, often at night or in bad weather. It was too strenuous an occupation for Spratt. He ran an office practice for a time but had little luck getting established, most people preferring to be treated in their homes. Indeed, Spratt’s health problems were to limit his activities throughout the remainder of his life.

  In searching for an avocation, Spratt turned to the flight problem. His epiphany came one spring morning as he watched a large flock of geese heading north, a sight he had witnessed many times before. He suddenly saw the air as a kind of free highway for all manner of birds and insects—and perhaps man as well.