First in Flight Read online

  Years later, he told his hometown paper, the Coatesville Record, that his involvement in aeronautics grew partly out of a desire to create employment opportunities in the poor economic climate at the end of the century. If so, he may have been unique among early flight enthusiasts in envisioning an industry growing from such humble experiments as had been done up to that date.

  Spratt began by surveying the literature on flight. He then took to flying kites and trying to balance tin pie plates in the wind, neither of which taught him much.

  Next came careful field study of birds and insects. Spratt thoroughly enjoyed observing birds, sometimes lying on his back in the fields for hours to study their flight. Afraid his neighbors would think him eccentric, he bought a fishing pole and began doing his bird-watching near water, hoping that by dangling a line and cultivating the look of a man out to catch his dinner, he could present himself as a more legitimate kind of outdoorsman. However, the fact that he never brought along any bait on his fishing excursions tended to give him away.

  Spratt soon noted how well equipped birds were to deal with their native environments. He observed how species inhabiting thickets, where abrupt turns and landings on small branches were a matter of course, seemed to have the most prominent tail feathers, since they needed the greatest degree of control. By contrast, seabirds seemed to have nearly no tail feathers at all. Spratt began capturing birds and cutting off their tail feathers. Upon releasing the birds, he noted how little the loss of those feathers affected their performance.

  Spratt also observed that birds have curved wings, and he postulated that insects, which have flat wings, achieved the same effect by moving their wings in a curved path.

  He then began building small cardboard glider models, with little success. More notably, he designed and built an elementary wind tunnel and a pressure-recording device, using the two to test the effects of wind pressure on a variety of surfaces. The date Spratt began doing wind-tunnel work is uncertain, but it may have been before 1899. The wind tunnel was invented in 1871 by Englishmen Francis Herbert Wenham and John Browning. By Spratt’s day, science-minded men were using a variety of means to test wind effects, with highly contradictory results.

  When he felt he had knowledge worth offering the aeronautical community, Spratt, like so many others, wrote Octave Chanute. Despite Spratt’s lack of engineering know-how, Chanute was intrigued by his theoretical observations, even going so far as to pay him a personal visit in Coatesville sometime in the latter part of 1900. At that meeting, Chanute supposedly showed the Pennsylvanian a letter from Wilbur Wright. Chanute somehow came away with the impression that Spratt’s principal occupation was farming, though that line of work is never mentioned in the extensive coverage of Spratt in the local press and would probably have been too rigorous for him.

  When Chanute petitioned Wilbur Wright to welcome Spratt to the Outer Banks in 1901, he did it under the guise of offering free help. Trying to disabuse Chanute of the notion that he and Orville needed any help at all, Wilbur agreed to accept Spratt only if “you wish to get a line on his capacity and aptitude and give him a little experience with a view to utilizing him in your work later.” The Wrights were sorry Spratt was coming at all, though Wilbur couldn’t put it to Chanute in those terms.

  In his later years, George Spratt grew fond of telling of his first meeting with the Wright brothers, a tale that may have been more fancy than fact. According to Spratt, the Wrights’ 1900 glider had wings with a circular curve—that is, the highest point of the wings was halfway between the front and back edges. Spratt, on the other hand, favored wings with a parabolic curve—meaning that the highest point was located toward the front edge of the wings. He somehow conveyed that opinion to the Wrights, presumably through Chanute.

  As the story goes, the Wrights then built their 1901 wings according to Spratt’s design. With Spratt due to arrive in Kitty Hawk Bay on July 25, they made the trip north from their camp at Kill Devil Hills to meet him. Though Spratt had never laid eyes on Wilbur and Orville, he had no trouble identifying them—they were the ones on the shore yelling, “It won’t work, Dr. Spratt, it won’t work!” Normally a sober man, Spratt was moved to rise to his feet in the unsteady sailboat in which he was riding, shake a spirited fist at the overdressed brothers, and reply, “It will work! It must work! It can’t help but work!”

  Unfortunately for Spratt’s story, the Wrights were likely using parabolically curved wings before they ever heard of the man from Pennsylvania; the simple drawings Wilbur included in his letter to Chanute immediately after the 1900 season seem to suggest so. And it remains to be seen why the Wrights would go to the trouble of building wings according to a principle they didn’t believe in, on the secondhand recommendation of someone with no reputation in the aeronautical field. They certainly never gave George Spratt credit for introducing them to wings with a parabolic curve.

  That is not to say they didn’t like him. The Wrights were pleasantly surprised with Spratt. They found him to be intelligent, witty, diligent, and uncomplaining. His grasp of the flight problem was better than they’d expected. During idle hours, and thanks to his training in biology, he entertained everyone in camp with his ability to identify all the plant species they happened across on the Outer Banks.

  Wilbur in particular sensed Spratt to be a kindred spirit. Spratt was prone to bouts of depression, an experience Wilbur had suffered during his own youth. Indeed, Wilbur sometimes tried to cheer up Spratt and bolster his confidence in the letters he wrote the Pennsylvanian.

  And like both of the Wrights, Spratt was given to personal understatement. He much preferred talking about the flight problem to talking about himself. His frequent interviews with the Coatesville-area media tell much about his views on bird flight and airplane wings and his various aeronautical projects, but they reveal precious little of the man himself. The Wrights would have envied him that.

  Among the outsiders Octave Chanute invited to the Outer Banks to experiment with the Wrights, only George Spratt received an invitation to return.

  Second Season

  Actually, the Wrights were luckier than they realized to have Huffaker and Spratt. It was in 1901 that the brothers butted heads with some of the most intractable problems faced by early aeronauts. Though Huffaker and Spratt had made little progress toward applying their ideas to practical ends—Spratt had never even seen a glider fly, much less built a full-scale craft of his own—they were at their best in tackling theoretical issues.

  The Wrights had completed the design for their new glider back in Dayton in May. The machine was assembled and ready for trial on the Outer Banks by Friday, July 26. There were no shortcuts for lack of long-enough wing spars this year.

  The 1901 Wright glider was the largest ever flown to that date. It had 315 square feet of wing and elevator surface, as compared with the 165 square feet of the 1900 machine. The wings measured 22 feet from tip to tip and 7 feet from front to back. They also had an aggressive curvature. The 1900 wings had boasted a camber of 1:23—meaning that, at their highest point, they were 1 inch high for every 23 inches from front to back. The new wings had a camber of 1:12, which was what Otto Lilienthal’s tables recommended for maximum lift.

  Wilbur still had visions of flying a glider as a manned kite. This year, he hoped to lie aboard the new craft as it was held on ropes by men on the ground. When the machine attained sufficient height, the ropes were to be cut loose, after which the craft would glide slowly back to earth. Wilbur would thus be able to accumulate a good deal of time in the air, and the Wrights and their helpers would be spared carrying the glider all the way back up the dunes after each flight. The increased wing surface and bolder curvature were intended partly to support the craft and its pilot in an average Outer Banks wind without forward movement through the air in a free glide.

  The first trials were held on July 27. It was soon obvious that the plan of kiting the glider with Wilbur aboard would again come to nothing. The new craf
t simply didn’t fly as well as the 1900 machine. During the initial attempts that Saturday, the glider showed a tendency to dive nose-first into the sand. Wilbur tried to compensate by positioning himself farther and farther toward the back, until he could barely stretch his arm to reach the elevator control. Even then, the glider would respond to the elevator only when it was in the full-up or full-down position. As a result, the craft nosed rapidly up and down, Wilbur unable to maintain anything resembling a level course.

  That Saturday ended on a dangerous note. On one attempt toward the end of the seventeen free glides that day, the glider nosed up sharply until it slowed to stall speed. Wilbur scrambled forward on the wing to try to direct the craft downward so it could regain speed, but instead, the glider fell flat—or “pancaked”—into the sand from a height of about twenty feet. Luckily, neither pilot nor craft was injured.

  The last glide of the day was even more ominous. The craft stalled nose-high again, and this time started falling backward toward the ground before Wilbur managed to bring the nose down. This was the same phenomenon that had killed Otto Lilienthal, the Wrights knew. It was time to end the manned trials until they could make a thorough inventory of the glider’s shortcomings.

  The lack of responsiveness in the elevator control was only the most obvious of several problems.

  A major deficiency came to light in flying the glider as an unmanned kite in the succeeding days. The wings were only producing about a third of the lift they were supposed to. The craft, weighing between 75 and 100 pounds, had been designed to carry a 150-pound man in an 18-mile-per-hour wind. In practice, it wouldn’t remain aloft, even unloaded, in winds of less than 23 or 24 miles per hour. The Wrights began to suspect that Lilienthal’s air-pressure tables, which they had taken to be one of the few firm foundations in aeronautics, were seriously in error.

  Edward Huffaker and George Spratt had more bad news for them. They suspected that the glider’s tendency to dart suddenly toward the ground was the result of a reversal in the travel of the center of pressure, a phenomenon they had both encountered in their private studies.

  In order for an airplane to fly, the craft’s center of gravity must correspond to the wind’s center of pressure. In the hang gliders of experimenters like Lilienthal and Chanute, the pilot was able to physically change the center of gravity by swinging his legs to compensate for changes in pressure. But with the pilot lying prone in a Wright glider, the center of gravity was fixed, meaning that the surfaces of the craft itself had to be adjusted in accordance with the center of pressure. In straight-course flight, that responsibility fell mainly on the elevator, which directed the nose of the glider up or down to correct for changes in wind.

  Straight-course flight was proving less than simple, however. If a wing is stood on its edge and positioned perpendicular to the flow of wind, the pressure is centered at the wing’s midpoint. If the wing is then tilted gradually toward the horizontal, the center of pressure travels steadily forward. Ultimately, when the wing reaches a horizontal position, the center of pressure is on the leading edge.

  Or that’s the way it is with a perfectly flat wing, at least. Experimenters using curved wings were discovering that at a certain angle above the horizontal, the center of pressure tended to reverse and travel rapidly to the rear of the wing, throwing the craft nose downward, with potentially disastrous results.

  The Wrights used a simple test to verify that this was what was happening with their glider: they took a wing and flew it as a kite. In moderate winds, when the wing had to assume a relatively steep angle above the horizontal in order to be maintained in the air, it flew fine. But in higher winds, when the wing should have flown at only a slight angle above horizontal, it darted sharply toward the ground.

  There were other problems with the 1901 glider as well. It had much greater head resistance than the 1900 craft. And it failed to pick up speed in downhill glides.

  Once they had inventoried the craft’s shortcomings, the Wrights set about addressing them.

  They reduced the size of the elevator by almost half, hoping to reduce the lift at the front of the glider and make the craft more responsive to up-and-down commands. This was of limited success in itself.

  They altered the front spars of the glider to reduce head resistance. This helped the craft gain speed in dives.

  Most important, they reshaped the wings to give them a flatter curvature, reducing the camber from 1:12 to 1:19. This had far-reaching effects. It caused the center of pressure to travel steadily forward toward the leading edge of the wings at low angles above horizontal, so the craft would no longer be thrown into a dive. And in combination with the smaller elevator, the flatter wings made the glider as responsive to up-and-down control as the Wrights had hoped. Wilbur could again fly a straight course without fearing for his life.

  There was little they could do at present about the lack of lift supplied by the wings. That would have to await another season.

  The Wrights received one piece of good news during the early trials of 1901: their craft was safe under extreme conditions. In their original 1900 design, they had placed the elevator in front of the wings rather than behind them in the belief that it would be most responsive in that configuration. It had never entered their minds that their forward elevator would find its greatest usefulness as a safety feature. During a stall, it brought the nose of the craft up, so that the glider fell flat to the ground rather than entering an uncontrollable dive.

  The sandy landing surface of the Outer Banks and the slow speeds and low altitudes at which the Wrights conducted their tests did not make gliding a safe activity. Many of their predecessors had died in circumstances no more dangerous. In fact, death and serious injury were as much responsible for the slow progress in aeronautics as was a lack of technical vision. Their forward elevator may have saved the Wrights’ lives on a number of occasions.

  Whatever satisfaction the Wrights derived from correcting a few of their glider’s shortcomings didn’t last long.

  Octave Chanute arrived for his first visit to the Outer Banks on August 5. The paper-tube glider Huffaker had built for him was by then well on its way to melting into the sand. The fact that the craft had never left the ground came as little surprise to him.

  Still, Chanute’s trip was not a complete loss, as he was very much interested in what the Wrights were doing. Their modified glider was ready for testing on August 8. Among the thirteen glides Wilbur made that day were seven that lasted at least twelve seconds, the longest stretching 389 feet.

  The next day, the Wrights judged themselves ready to make their first attempt at using wing warping in a free glide. Banking the wings would allow Wilbur to compensate for side gusts. He also wanted to initiate a roll to turn the craft in flight.

  His negative opinion of the Wrights in later years notwithstanding, Edward Huffaker was impressed with them at the time. As he noted that day in the diary he kept for Chanute, “A number of excellent glides were made, Mr. Wilbur Wright showing good control of the machine in winds as high as 25 miles an hour. In two instances he made flights curving sharply to the left, still keeping the machine under good control—length of flight in each case 280 ft. Longest flight about 335 ft.”

  By contrast, the Wrights could not have been more disappointed.

  Their wing-warping system had proven so successful in kite tests in 1900 that they took it for granted. When an airplane rolls to make a turn, its wings are presented at different angles to the wind. The craft turns away from the higher wing; if the right wing is banked high, the airplane turns left. In actual practice with their 1901 glider, however, the Wrights were discovering that this could not be depended upon. Sometimes, their craft even turned toward the higher wing. In the last glide on August 9, the craft ran hard into the ground during a failed turn, Wilbur suffering a bruised nose and a black eye. If Chanute and Huffaker remained impressed after such a performance, it was only because of their incomplete understanding of the flight
problem.

  The Wrights had reached their limit that year. The technical hurdles confronting them seemed insurmountable. They turned to kiting the glider with sandbags aboard, only to see their wing-warping problems continue. Wilbur tried a few more free glides, but his distances decreased.

  Meanwhile, Chanute, Spratt, and Huffaker departed camp separately in mid-August.

  In 1900, the Wrights had arranged their Outer Banks trip so as not to interfere with their bicycle business. By 1901, they had grown so enamored of flying that they left their business in the hands of a friend during peak season so they could get to North Carolina at the ideal time of year for experimenting. Now, they were ready to leave the coast with six or eight weeks of good weather remaining. They broke camp on August 22 simply because they had no reason to stay.

  In describing their dark mood, Wilbur once wrote, “We doubted that we would ever resume our experiments…. At this time I made the prediction that men would sometime fly, but that it would not be within our lifetime.”

  It was the closest they ever came to quitting.

  Meanwhile

  Between the Wrights’ first two seasons on the North Carolina coast, another major experimenter—and a future correspondent and friend of Orville’s—was setting up shop just across Roanoke Sound from the site of their flights. Thanks to this man’s efforts, the opening years of the twentieth century would have been the greatest era of invention in Outer Banks history even if it weren’t for the Wright brothers.

  Reginald Fessenden was born in 1866. Growing up in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada, he dreamed vaguely of radio as other boys dreamed of flying machines. The telegraph and the telephone were developed before he entered active experimentation. Those, however, required a vast network of lines connecting every point of transmission and every potential receiver. The idea that an electronic signal could be broadcast omnidirectionally through the air and received by anyone with suitable equipment was considered a pipe dream.