Wright Brothers, Wrong Story Read online

  After finally making landfall that night, the Curlicue was tied up to a wharf in the quiet village of Kitty Hawk. The houses were few. Mostly there was the darkness and the sand and the roar of the ocean agitated from the passing hurricane. There were no souls to be seen. No lights on in any home or cottage. What would become a resort town fifty years later was still the lone outpost on the edge of the eastern seaboard.

  Wilbur stared toward the ocean and felt the steady wind on his face. There was no choice but to bed down on the deck of the Curlicue. Wilbur slept outside with the mosquitoes, quite preferring this to where Israel and his boy slept along with the creatures that had found refuge in the cabin of the old schooner. He lay down on the dried-out wood of the deck. He slapped at a mosquito. He felt the wind and listened to the crash and roar of the ocean. He had traveled eight hundred miles to capture that wind. He loosened his tie. A bicycle mechanic without a high-school degree was lying on the deck of a broken-down ship in the middle of nowhere, having come to solve manned flight. Wilbur Wright sniffed, closed his eyes, then fell fast asleep.

  It wasn't three hours later when he woke on the hard deck, feeling pain rippling between his shoulder blades. Israel's snoring from below deck was a throbbing saw that knew no bounds. He and son both had slept in the cabin with the vermin that kept Wilbur outside with the mosquitoes and now facing the blinding-hot sun already baking by 8 a.m. He dug out Katherine's jam and ate some of the sweet strawberries now warmed. It was the only thing he would trust. He looked out from the wharf at Kitty Hawk.

  He had seen trees in the distance the night before, but now he saw no trees. He saw sand and a few stumps. Kitty Hawk was composed of a series of houses along the Albemarle Sound, a store, and then the Life-Saving stations along the shore. That was it. The fishing boats headed out from Kitty Hawk or Manateo into the sound and then entered the ocean from the Oregon Inlet. But most people just saw sand stretching forty miles down the coast, broken up by enormous dunes like the three mountains of sand called Kill Devil Hills.

  Years later, Orville would describe the area as “like the Sahara or what I imagine the Sahara to be.”14 History abounds in Kitty Hawk. Seventy years later, there would be an outdoor production on the lonely island of Roanoke to commemorate an English colony that mysteriously disappeared. The earliest history goes back to when the explorer Giovanni de Verrazano stumbled upon the Outer Banks and landed at Nags Head woods. He remarked upon the enchantment of the land and kidnapped a native boy to take back to France.

  Pirates abounded. The name of a large dune was called Nags Head and Jockey's Ridge, so named for the men who would lead a horse up the giant dune with a lantern tied around its neck. This would trick mariners into thinking that the bobbing light was an inland ship, and they'd run their own ships aground. Cargo and plunder would then be the prize for the land-bound pirates. Blackbeard the pirate had died off the coast of Ocracoke in 1718, and the locals said his decapitated body could be seen swimming around.15

  William Tate had warned the Ohioan what he would find and said life in Kitty Hawk was one of “Double Barreled Isolation.”16 Clothes were made at home, children went to school for three months a year, and mail came three times a week. The double-barreled isolation must have excited and repelled Wilbur Wright in 1900; he had a laboratory to conduct his experiments with a steady Atlantic wind and an unbroken landscape of sand for soft landings.

  Wilbur left the sleeping Israel and his son and set out for the Tates’. The only problem was he didn't have any idea where the Tate home was. He pulled on his derby, which he had found wedged between the sails, and saw a barefoot boy named Baum with a large straw hat and suspenders. It was September 13, 1900. The boy shut one eye against the sun and nodded. Yes, he knew where the Tates lived, and he would lead him there. Wilbur followed his barefoot guide with his own hard shoes squishing in the sand that was already in his socks, his shirt collar, and even in his mouth.

  The boy watched the strange, angular man in the high collar, leather shoes, white shirt, and tie now carrying his suit coat over his arm. He didn't look like anyone the boy had ever seen. Nobody in Kitty Hawk dressed like that and truth was nobody had the money to entertain dressing like that. They were hardscrabble, poor, and just hanging on. In the year 1900, the Kitty Hawkers were people who lived by their wits and went from one job to another. Fishing was the only industry and that was spring and summer, and there was some hunting in the fall. The Life-Saving stations were the only option for men along the coast. Fifty dollars a month if they slept in the stations from December to March.17 It wasn't enough for the risk to their lives when going out into the surf at night in the middle of a gale to rescue men on ships that had run ashore. Between these moments of incredible danger, they walked the beaches with lanterns and shot off flares to warm the ships away from the graveyard of the Atlantic otherwise known as the Outer Banks. But, of course, in this medieval operation of taking a boat into a raging surf, they possessed the only line to the outside world through their phone system and then to the telegraph.

  Houses were unpainted, rude structures with leaning porches and floors of unvarnished pine. The Wright home was a palace compared to the Tates’, which now appeared at the end of a sandy lane. It had no rugs, no books, and no furniture to speak of. A dilapidated sign hanging above the door read “Kitty Hawk N.C. Post Office.” A surviving picture shows the Tates as looking like a family from Appalachia or some Depression-era family out of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. But the Tates were better off than most.

  William Tate was the unofficial mayor of Kitty Hawk. His wife ran the post office, but he was the actual postmaster. Tate sported many hats: notary public, commissioner of Currituck County. His house was two stories and one of the better, if not one of the best, homes in the area. When Elijah Baum knocked on his door and the man behind him doffed his cap and introduced himself as “Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio,” Tate was well equipped for the task at hand. It had taken Wilbur a week to travel from Dayton to reach Tate's front door. Wilbur must have hidden his shock at the unplastered walls and bare pine floors with the salty scent of the ocean on the man and the home.18 “There may be one or two better houses here but his is much above average,” he would later write his father.19 “A few men have saved up a thousand dollars but this is the savings of a long life. Their yearly income is small. I suppose a few of them see two hundred dollars a year. They are friendly and neighborly and I think there is rarely any real suffering among them.”

  Wilbur asked if he might stay there until Orville arrived and they could stake their tent out on the sand dune. The Tates retired to another room and discussed the man in the white shirt and tie. Tate's wife felt their home would not do for such a man.

  “I would be happy with whatever accommodations you can provide,” Wilbur said, stepping to the door.20 It was settled. He would stay at the Tates’ until his brother came. After a few days’ rest, William Tate introduced him around to the Kitty Hawkers and the men at the Life-Saving station who would play a crucial role later, in the early flights. The weekly freight boat eventually arrived with Wilbur's large crates. He went back to the wharf and took delivery of his glider, having it transported a half a mile from the Tates’ home to an area overlooking the ocean. He had not been able to find the spruce spars he needed for his glider and had to borrow the Tates’ sewing machine and change the size of the fabric, a white French sateen. He erected a canvas shelter in the Tates’ front yard under which he could work, but the Tates and others woke many times to find in the yard a man wearing a vest and tie with a sewing machine, pumping away with his foot and with needles in his mouth. Years later, a stone marker would be placed to mark the spot where Wilbur worked on his glider.

  Tate and his wife, Addie, were the perfect hosts, and Tate would remember later an awed Wilbur Wright recounting his voyage across Albemarle Sound when he first arrived at the Tates’: “His graphic description of the rolling of the boat and his story that the muscles of his
arms ached from holding on, were interesting, but when he said he had fasted for 48 hours that was a condition that called for a remedy at once. Therefore, we soon had him seated to a good breakfast of fresh eggs, ham and coffee, and I assure you he did his duty by them.”21

  Wilbur Wright could have been an alien from another planet, and it would have been no different. There were no cars on Kitty Hawk. There was no electricity to speak of. There was the telegraph and the phones of the Life-Saving stations. But most people lived an eighteenth-century existence. Yet here was a man who dressed like someone going to a funeral in New York City and who had come to fly into the sky. The notion that Wilbur Wright had come to this primitive outpost to build a machine to fly was the same as someone landing in our vicinity today and declaring he was from another planet. There was no point of comparison, and some Kitty Hawkers who thought he was crazy would take to the woods and stare at the man fitting spars and running material over the frame of wings. Wilbur Wright was an early celebrity and a curiosity; awe, caution, and respect were just some of the emotions the people cut off from the world at large felt when seeing the man dressed always in his Sunday best.

  The seventeen-foot wingspan of Wilbur's glider was not to be hidden from the prying eyes of boys, men, or women who had never even seen an automobile, much less a machine designed to ride the air currents. The Tates’ quiet visitor kept to his work and asked for very little, except for a boiled pitcher of water every morning in his bedroom. Orville's near death at the hands of typhoid had forever seared this caution into Wilbur's daily routine. This was the age of typhoid fever, an infection brought on by tainted water. The Tates thought it odd but provided the pitcher every morning. They had no way of knowing Orville Wright had almost died in 1896 from drinking a cup of bad water. Nor that in twelve years Wilbur would be dead from the same strain of salmonella that was behind the hell of Typhoid Mary.

  The next day, Wilbur headed out toward the ocean and sat on the sand dunes. The birds held the answers. It was that simple. Understand how a bird flies, and you are almost there. They roll their bodies right or left and then just turn. To bank or lean is the same as a man on a bicycle. But how the birds achieve this is another matter. Only through constant observation could the secret be learned. This had Wilbur sitting on the side of the dune, with the ocean wind ruffling his thin hair that had receded to his crown.

  He watched the hawk wheel and look down over the ocean. Still, it did not flap its wings but went even higher, seeing the strip of land that was part of the Outer Banks. The hawk rode in the upward-moving thermals in tight circles. The creature flexed his wings slightly and banked toward the sand dune that spread out into three hills. It was amazing. The hawk glided effortlessly above Wilbur like a god of the air, riding the long, slow, hot drafts of upward-moving air. Wilbur called this soaring.

  The hawk saw movement and leaned in and then banked again. It was a man, and the hawk soared above him, passed over, and headed inland. The man scribbled furiously in a notebook as the hawk sailed away, never having to flap his wings. The hawk rode the air as Wilbur wished to do. He rode on what God put there.

  Wilbur Wright made a sketch of the hawk. He had to hurry because his brother was coming, and he wanted to meet him at the Tates’. He looked over his notes:

  A bird when soaring does not seem to alternately rise and fall as some observers have thought. Any rising and falling is irregular and seems to be due to disturbances of fore and aft equilibrium produced by gusts. In light winds the birds seem to rise constantly without any downward turns.

  A bird sailing quartering to the wind seems to always present its wings at a positive angle, although propulsion in such positions seems unaccountable.

  No bird soars in a calm.22

  The object of the tail is to increase the spread of surface in the rear when the wings are moved forward in light winds and thus preserve the center of pressure at about the same spot. It seems to be used as a rudder very little. In high winds it is folded up very narrow.23

  Hawks are better soarers than buzzards but more often resort to flapping because they wish greater speed.

  A damp day is unfavorable for soaring unless there is a high wind.24

  He had just written Bishop Wright a letter that he wanted to give to Tate to post. “I have my machine nearly finished. It is not to have a motor and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a view to solving the problem of equilibrium.”25 Wilbur had already decided that control was everything. While Langley believed in the intrinsic power of the engine to loft a man into the air, Wilbur believed power was secondary: “When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will quickly be solved. A failure of motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall.”26

  Wilbur then assures his father that he does not intend to take chances:

  I do not expect to rise many feet from the ground, and in case I am upset there is nothing but soft sand to strike on…. 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. It is almost the only great problem which has not been pursued by a multitude of investigators and therefore carried to a point where further progress is very difficult. I am certain I can reach a point much in advance of any previous person. At any rate, I shall have an outing of several weeks and see a part of the world I have never visited before.27

  Wilbur points out immediately that his machine will be better constructed than Lilienthal's and will have more control: “The safe and secure construction and management are my main improvements.”28 It is a foregone conclusion that he, not his brother, will be doing the flying in the glider. The glider had a wingspan of 17 feet, 5 inches, with a total weight of 50 pounds. Wilbur would lie “in a cutout section of the lower wing with his feet resting on the T bar controlling wing warping.”29 It would be the father, Milton, who would have the final word. He demanded that the brothers be equal, and this would include the early experiments in Kitty Hawk. But, years later, he would write to Wilbur in France: “I think that aside from the value of your life to yourself and to ourselves you owe it to the world that you should avoid all unnecessary personal risks. Your death or even becoming an invalid would seriously affect the progress of aeronautical science. Outside of your contacts and your aviations, you have much that no one else can do as well. And, alone, Orville would be crippled and burdened.”30

  When his father wrote these words, it was at a time when Wilbur and Orville were at their pinnacle of fame. They were the Wright Brothers, equal before the world, yet Milton knew that Wilbur was the one who broke the code of flight. Orville would receive no such letter, and the bishop followed up with a letter to Katherine during this period that was somewhat cruel but showed his true feelings toward his sons: “It does not make much difference with you, but Wilbur ought to keep out of all balloon rides. Success seems to hang upon him.”31 The best he could say of Orville was that “his mind grew steadily.”32

  This may be damning with faint praise, but the reason to bring it up is that with Orville's arrival in Kitty Hawk the grand plurality began. The “I” would be replaced with “we” from now on in Wilbur's letters to both his father and Chanute. The other Wright brother knocked on William Tate's door on September 28, 1900. Tate must have thought he was seeing double. Here was another man in a high collar, tie, dark coat, cap, and mustache, looking like he just stepped out of an office in the city. He wore the same shined, hard-sole shoes and spoke with the same Dayton twang that came through the nose when the voice came through at all.

  Tate opened the door wide and admitted the man, who was “equipped with a tent and cots, as well as coffee, tea, sugar, and a few other items unavailable in Kitty Hawk.”33 Wilbur met his brother, and who knows what Tate thought of the two men who said little but shook hands affectionatel
y. Wilbur had been gone a good deal of the time working on his flying machine out by the camp he had established that would have a tent and cots and food and would become their home. Orville did stay with Wilbur at the Tates’ a few days until the glider was completed. While they worked, Wilbur and Orville observed the local birds and had made many notes. A local man named John T. Daniels would later write, “They would watch the gannets and imitate the movements of their wings with their arms and hands…. We thought they were crazy.”34

  Their camp on the edge of the dunes began on October 3. Orville's letters then began, and many were to their sister, Katherine, concerning the conditions of the camp. They suffered through several storms: “When one of these 45-mile Northeasters strikes us, you can depend on it, there is little sleep in our camp. We have just passed through one which took two or three wagonloads of sand from the NE end of our tent and piled it up eight inches on the flying machine, which we had anchored about fifty feet southwest. The wind shaking the roof and sides of the tent sounds exactly like thunder. When we crawl out to fix things the sand fairly blinds us.”35

  Kitty Hawk was a desolate outpost and, like all remote areas in 1900, there was a lack of items the Wrights took for granted in Dayton. Besides being out of communication with the world except by mail that went out only three times a week, basic foodstuffs were lacking as well—to say nothing of getting parts for a flying machine. The Wrights were pushing known technology to its very limit in an area of the country that resembled America in the early nineteenth century. This was confirmed by Orville in a letter sent later to his sister: “There is no store in Kitty Hawk, that is, not anything you would call a store. Our pantry 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…they [residents] never had anything good in their lives and consequently are satisfied with what they have. In all other things they are the same way, satisfied with keeping soul and body together.”36