Wright Brothers, Wrong Story Read online

  A Chicago pressman stopped by and examined the homemade press. Ed Sines, an employee of the new company, recalled that the pressman “went back into the press room, stood by the machine, looked at it, then sat down beside it and finally crawled underneath it…. He got up and said, ‘Well it works, but I certainly don't see how it does work.’”28

  Even though they together formed the firm of Wright and Wright, it was Orville's baby. The paper had changed its name to the Evening Item, and Orville felt they were doing well, but he picked up on his brother's indifference: “I've been making [$]2.00 to [$]3.25 a day in the office but I have to divide it with Will so that when the week is over I don't have much left. Will's working on the press, at least he says he is, but I can see little signs of it from the appearance of things.”29 Little brother was questioning big brother's commitment. The truth is business bored Wilbur, while Orville found business and mechanical challenges absorbing.

  Wilbur would later write to his father that he was thinking again of going to college: “I have thought about it more or less for a number of years but my health has been such that I was afraid that it might be time and money wasted to do so, but I have felt so much better for a year or so that I have thought more seriously of it and have decided to see what you think of it and advise.”30

  The printing business ran its course about the time a national craze took over America that, at least for Wilbur Wright, would eventually lead to the building of the first airplane, namely, interest in the bicycle. The advent of the safety bicycle, an improvement over the high wheelers, lead to the opening of the Wright Cycle Exchange and then the Wright Cycle Company, where they would manufacture their own brand. Wilbur would be the reluctant partner until another catastrophic event involving his brother would alter his life again.

  Wilbur Wright had been cast adrift by a madman and then fell under the tutelage of a father who, with the certitude of John Brown, believed that outside the family evil lurked. Business would be another prison for the man without direction. Escape had to be a terrestrial concern, if not an existential mission. In the gloom of his father's parlor in those years of physical and mental anguish, Wilbur must have looked out the window and seen the birds soaring on the wind and thought to himself…if only he could fly away.

  Newspapers changed everything in 1896. “The linotype machine, curved stereotype plate, and high-speed rotary press”1 allowed a publisher to set an enormous amount of type in a short time. Mass-produced newspapers demanded news that excited and titillated. The sports section was born and became the dominant section of a paper. William McKinley was running for president against William Jennings Bryan. Bryan traveled the country and gave six hundred speeches while McKinley stayed home and gave speeches from his front porch.

  America was taking a breath before the Great American Century just around the corner. In Detroit, a mechanic built a car in the shed behind his house. He worked for Thomas Edison's new company that was busy electrifying cities and suburbs. The young man was a little odd and kept to himself, spending all his free time in the shed. When he was finished, he couldn't get his machine out the door. Henry Ford had to take apart his shed to free his new car.

  The hard news was one thing, but Americans also wanted to be entertained. Funny news was born with the first comic strip, The Yellow Kid.2 But there was nothing funnier than those crazy men who build machines and then tried to fly them. People all over the country read their papers and drank their coffee and followed the antics of men who ran off cliffs or hillsides, were pulled behind horses, or jumped off fences or roofs, or into the sea. Nobody could fly, but then Alexander Graham Bell said that powered flight was just around the corner. People listened to him as they listened to his phone, Edison's phonograph, and eventually large wax discs that recorded voices. Maybe man could fly, but nobody seemed to be able to do it.

  Then Alexander Graham Bell and Secretary of the Smithsonian Samuel Pierpont Langley took a train to Quantico, Virginia, and then they took a boat to an island in the middle of the Potomac. Langley was a self-taught engineer who had switched to astronomy, built a telescope, toured Europe, then returned as an assistant at the Howard Observatory, followed by the United States Naval Academy and then Pittsburgh, where he became a professor of physics and director of the Allegheny Observatory. Over the next two decades, he would perform experiments, build a whirling arm device, disprove Newton's hypothesis that flight was impossible, and assert that motorized flight was possible. He landed an assistant secretary position at the Smithsonian, and when the secretary died, following the normal method for career advancement, he became the secretary of the Smithsonian Institute.

  Bell and Langley stepped ashore and headed for the Mount Vernon Ducking Club, a very exclusive hunting club for Washington elite who worked just forty-one miles away by train. The two men passed the club and traveled down to a marsh, where a flat-bottomed boat was anchored. “Dubbed the Ark by the press, the strange craft featured a wooden structure almost as wide and long as the boat itself built on the deck. Four large windows on either side of the deckhouse were sealed with heavy wooden shutters. A spidery wooden superstructure on the roof supported a single twenty-foot rail extending over the rear of the boat.”3 It looked like a launching platform for a large bug.

  Secretary Langley was thick-bodied, imperious, and known to be bluff, and he had younger assistants perform the experiments he supervised. Imperious is the right word for this man, who insisted that the nuts and bolts on his airplane models be polished, and who gave detailed instructions that were then followed by contradictory instructions. He was the secretary of the Smithsonian, an august, even somewhat-glamorous position in Washington. Alexander Graham Bell had sought him out to discuss science, and the science he wanted to discuss most was that of flying. Langley was way ahead of him, having published Experiments in Flying in 1891. It was a sensation even if the basic data of powered flight would prove to be disastrously flawed. No matter, Bell was an articulate and brilliant man. If he wanted to talk with Langley, then he must be brilliant too.

  Langley was all about the experiment. Aeronautical data simply was not that important. It took power to fly; of this he was certain. No need to build gliders when one could build a fully powered, steam-driven model that, if it flew, would simply be a matter of size. One just built a bigger model to carry a man. None of the rubber models his assistants built took to the air, but Secretary Langley was confident that power was the key. Build a powered model and it will fly. The aerodromes were constructed out of spruce and pine, with a silk covering for wings. A small steam engine brought the aerodromes in at around thirty pounds. A launching system was devised and put on top of the houseboat, the Ark, and the Potomac was selected as the site.

  Three initial aerodromes were just too heavy, and the steam engine too small. Langley didn't bother with those. Instead, he had his assistants, of which there were many, build two more aerodromes. “Tandem sets of wings fore and aft of the motor set in a dihedral—in an upward slant from the body forming a V—did well in simulations and, with a cruciform tail, provided the proper stability.”4 All that was left to do was fly the models, which some said looked like steam bugs.

  Some workmen took the two visitors inside the boat, and on a table in the deckhouse were two silver models numbered 5 and 6. This was the cutting-edge technology of the moment. Ten years in the making, these two models were designed to fly. They might have been viewed as art, “glistening with copper pipes, brass fittings, and thin walled steel fuselages.”5 Fourteen-foot tandem wings with a steam engine at the center powered twin propellers. A delicate insect, these two models had yet to fly at all. The secretary of the Smithsonian asked the workmen several questions. He was now sixty-two, bearded, august, and the foremost authority on the new science of aeronautics.

  Experiments in Aerodynamics was published by the Smithsonian in 1891, and Langley set the bar by stating boldly, “The most important general inference from these experiments…is that…
mechanical flight is possible with engines we now possess.”6 Langley's critics laughed behind his back. For the last five years he had been building models that shot off the catapult on his boat and went right into the water. Too heavy, too weak, and underpowered, the first rubber-band-powered models nosed into the deep green of the Potomac. Then the steam-powered models followed: when hurled off the catapult launching system, the gleaming man-made insects whined, smoked, and puffed steam like crazed locomotives, and then splashed into the mighty river and sunk. Langley went back to the drawing board and made adjustments. Now Aerodrome 6 was ready to launch, and no less than Alexander Graham Bell was there to observe.

  Langley had taken on two new assistants to help build the machine that would fly. Edward Charles Huffaker, “a Tennessean who went by E. C. was a forty-year-old slovenly, tobacco-chewing engineer who had submitted a paper in 1893, ‘The Value of Curved Surfaces in Flight,’ to the Congress on Ariel Navigation.”7 Octave Chanute, another self-taught engineer who was making headway on his plans to fly, recommended him to Langley. Huffaker drove Langley crazy with his habit of spitting tobacco juice by his desk, but put him to work on devising the airfoil configuration on the model.

  Augustus Moore Herring, born in Georgia, was a trained engineer who had worked for Octave Chanute as well and built two gliders before being hired by Langley to work on the aerodrome. Herring only lasted eight months, complaining that Langley took all the credit for his accomplishments, but he had made “invaluable contributions to the design of Aerodrome 6, particularly in the wing configuration and tail assembly. Without his participation, Langley would have no chance.”8 Both men would appear again down in the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

  The catapult was ready. A powerful streetcar spring would shoot No. 6 down the rails and hopefully into the sky. It was 1:10 in the afternoon of May 6, 1896. A gentle breeze stirred the Potomac. A superintendent of the Smithsonian carpentry shop was behind the machine. He pulled the lever and “one of the guide wires holding the frail wings in place snapped now on launch, allowing the left forward wing to bend sharply up.”9 The aerodrome shot down the rails, puffing and whining, with the propeller spinning madly, then arced to the left and sank with a sad plop beneath the tranquil waters. Secretary Langley puffed on his pipe. He was the secretary of the Smithsonian, and he was embarrassed, but he had been here before. They fished out the model from the water. The propellers were smashed and the engine damaged. Number 6 would not see the air again. Bell waited patiently while model No. 5 was put on the catapult. A Smithsonian photographer stood by. He had missed a shot of model No. 6. It had gone down into the water too fast. Secretary Langley, whose face was red and brow furrowed, let the photographer know he better not miss the shot with No. 5.

  Alexander Graham Bell knew that experiments often failed initially and stood silent while the workmen fired up the boiler on the model to develop 150 pounds of steam. The propellers began to spin and quickly reached their top speed. The Smithsonian photographer readied himself. This time he would get a shot before No. 5 disappeared beneath the sparkling green water. An assistant pulled the release again, and No. 5 shot down the rails and disappeared over the side.

  Langley and Bell stared anxiously, expecting to hear the telltale gulp of failure, when they heard a whine, and a gleaming silver insect rose up above the deck not unlike some alien creature. Langley and Bell watched, open-mouthed, as the model did something none other had ever done before: it caught the wind and began to climb in a slow-building arc. The unmanned steam-engine plane began a slow, circling glide and went around the houseboat twice. The whine was that of an automated insect, and to the men on board it sounded like the new century just around the corner. They were speechless as No. 5 ran out of steam and then settled back into the water and landed on the Potomac. The steam-powered model floated, turning ever so slightly in the current. The plane—they could call it that now—had flown 3,000 feet at a speed of 25 miles an hour.10 The men on the boat cheered, and Langley shook hands with Bell. By God! By God! The plane had flown!

  Alexander Graham Bell would later give an account to the newspapers: “The aerodrome or flying machine resembled an enormous bird soaring in the air with extreme regularity in large curves, sweeping steadily upward in the spiral path, the spirals with a diameter of perhaps 100 yards, until it reached a height of 100 feet in the air at the end of a course about a half of mile.” The great inventor then added, “to my further surprise, the whole, instead of tumbling down, settled as slowly and gracefully as is possible for a bird to do, touched the water without any damage, and was picked out immediately and ready to be tried again.”11 Bell was telling the world that a model plane had been built and had flown. They flew the model again in the afternoon, and it did the same thing. The laughter behind Langley's back ceased. The black spot on his reputation that had threatened to fester into being just another crank had blossomed into the vindication that heavier-than-air flight was possible.

  There were pictures and articles in the newspaper, and it is hard to say whether the great gliding man of his time, Otto Lilienthal, over in Germany, knew about Langley's success, but he probably did. He was about to jump off another cliff and was ready in his “flannel work shirt, twill knickerbocker trousers with padded knees, heavy brogans, and a close-fitting skull cap.”12 He looked like an early-century football player with his stocky build, red hair, and full beard. He would basically wear his twenty-foot bi-plane, with his legs hanging down for takeoff and navigation. He had flown two thousand times in his hang gliders, and now he was going to fly for Robert Wood, a correspondent for the Boston Transcript. His son and a mechanic helped him on with his wings while the correspondent took notes:

  So perfectly was the machine fitted together that it was impossible to find a single loose cord or brace, and the cloth everywhere was under such tension that the whole machine rang like a drum when rapped with the knuckles…. Here was a flying machine, not constructed by a crank, to be seen at a county fair at ten cents a head, or to furnish material for encyclopedia articles on aerial navigation, but by an engineer of ability…a machine not made to look at, but to fly with.13

  The reporter Wood readied his camera. Lilienthal was already world-famous for his glides, and the pictures that he shot around the world. He was ready-made for the new age of mass communication, and the newspapers ate up the photos and descriptions of the “Flying Man,” as he had come to be known. Unlike Langley, Lilienthal did not believe man would fly from building steam-powered models. Man would only fly by ascending into the sky himself and learning how to fly or at least how to glide. The air must be tamed, and control must be wrestled from the chaos of the invisible air currents he rode with regularity. The American papers loved the strange, bearded German acrobat in the padded knickers. The papers published the photos and reports on front pages. It was the perfect blend of daredevil, science, and oddity, with a tinge of humor.

  Lilienthal crawled under his wings and wiggled his way into a set of “cuffs that would give him leverage on the machine,”14 grasped a bar near the forward edge of the wings, and stood “like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol.”15 The stocky German ran forward off the edge of the hill and was immediately lifted off into the sky. He passed over the reporter's head fifty feet below and then went into a wide left turn, kicking his feet to right the wings. The wind was strong, and the German's beard was smoothed back. He had tamed the air and enjoyed the ride. Lilienthal passed over some haystacks and in a bit of drama kicked the hay with his feet and then kicked his feet straight up, putting the nascent airplane into a mild stall, he then floated down to Earth.

  The reporter was over the moon: “I have seen high dives and parachute jumps from balloons…but I have never witnessed anything that stung the nerves to such a pitch of excitement or awakened such a feeling of enthusiasm and admiration as the wild and fearless rush of Otto Lilienthal through the air.”16

  Then Wood tried the glider. Lilienthal positioned h
im on the hill, and then he began to run with the heavy wings. The wings caught the wind, and Wood was lifted: “The feeling is most delightful and wholly indescribable. The body being supported from above, with no weight or strain on the legs, the feeling as if gravitation had been annihilated”17 The reporter left Lilienthal to write his article and sing the German aviator's praises.

  The following Sunday, Lilienthal went gliding on August 9, 1896. He again took off from the edge of a mountain. The wind was stronger than before, and he shifted his weight forward to keep the plane level. Still, the lift was too much and the wings turned up. Lilienthal kicked violently forward to head off the stall, but the glider lost all life and turned down. The German was too far forward and became a missile headed for the ground. The glider then turned on its back and plowed Lilienthal head-first into the ground, snapping his neck. He had fallen fifty feet when his glider stalled. He died the next day in a Berlin hospital. The news made headlines all over the world. The Flying Man had died. It was the summer of the flying men, and there was one more man who was about to tempt fate—Octave Chanute.

  Two months before, on June 22, 1896, Chanute took a train from Chicago to Miller, Indiana. He had just read of Langley's success and was anxious to get his own glider unloaded. Octave Chanute looked like a trimmer Burl Ives. With a white Van Dyke goatee, a cherubic face, and piercing blue eyes, the French-born Chanute moved his family to Kansas City after working in New York for very little pay on the Hudson River Railroad. He contracted out to design the bridge crossing the Missouri River and established his reputation as an engineer with national prominence. In 1873, he became chief engineer for the Erie Railroad. On a family trip to Europe in 1875, he began to read about aeronautics. He was always puzzled with the way wind affected a roof or the bridges he built over rivers.

  After 1884, he retired and began to scour libraries and institutions for any information on anything to do with aeronautics or flying. He sponsored aeronautical sessions at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. These meetings at Buffalo and Toronto were responsible for getting Samuel Langley interested in solving the problem of heavier-than- air flight. In 1893, Chanute organized the International Conference on Aerial Navigation, to be held at the Columbian Exposition World's Fair in Chicago that year. 18