Wright Brothers, Wrong Story Read online

  Wilbur and Orville Wright would go to the fair in the spring of 1893, but they said nothing about Chanute's conference. Still, we have men who would solve the problem of flight in close proximity to each other ten years before manned flight would be solved. Like moths drawn to a light, Wilbur and Chanute were both extremely intellectually curious, and the World's Fair of 1893 brought culture and science together. Chanute's conference on flying caught the attention of the newspapers, and he found himself at the center of many stories.

  The Pittsburgh Dispatch summed it up this way: “The Chicago Conference undoubtedly marks the new era in aeronautics. It brought together many scientists and engineers who have been seriously working on the problem of flight…. It is no longer considered to be the hobby of cranks.”19 Chanute then published Progress in Flying Machines in 1894, and it quickly became the most up-to-date text to consult for any would-be aviators. Chanute then had several gliders built according to his design and hired Edward Huffaker to build and fly his glider. Having previously worked for Langley, Chanute enlisted another Langley refugee, Augustus Moore Herring. He used a multi-wing design that brought workers to refer to his plane as the Katydid.

  Chanute was sixty-four years old and was not looking to kill himself in a glider. Herring made the flights at the Indiana Dunes. The dunes had been born over thousands of years and were gigantic, soaring hills that rose up from Lake Michigan like two sand-colored mountains. Wind was erratic, though, and in the heat of summer there was often no wind at all. The sulfurous smell of the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, wafted over with the whistles of passing freight trains headed for Chicago. Chanute waited patiently in the stifling heat while his two identical gliders, the Lilienthal and the Katydid, were launched. Neither plane responded to the controls and flew only one hundred feet. Herring then came up with a small, monoplane kite that flew very well. Chanute wanted a glider built on the same principles, and Herring suggested a cruciform tail that would move for stability. This would predate a major Wright brothers’ improvement by seven years in terms of using a rudder on the tail of a plane.

  Flight testing back at the dunes began again after Lilienthal's death. They began with a triplane glider but quickly removed one wing. Their glides now grew to 359 feet. They continued flying into September, with newsmen from Chicago recording every flight and making Chanute a public celebrity. Now that the Flying Man was dead, someone had to fill the news cycle, and why not another flying man of a more refined ilk? A sort of flying professor. Octave Chanute, with his small, white beard, was just such a man, and the space reserved for the German pioneer now was given to the men flying gliders in the Indiana Dunes. Chanute became sunburnt, and his joints ached, but he appreciated this new drug, fame. Still, he wouldn't fly himself. He would leave that to younger men.

  As a younger man, Wilbur Wright read every word about Langley, Lilienthal, and—more important—Octave Chanute, while quietly nursing his brother Orville back to health from typhoid fever in 1896. He would write a letter to the flying professor, Chanute. Meanwhile, the War Department, with President McKinley's backing, gave the secretary of the Smithsonian, Samuel Langley, fifty thousand dollars to build a large-scale version of his aerodrome that had circled over the Potomac. Never had public funds been spent on trying to solve the problem of manned flight. It was an amazing endorsement of Secretary Langley and the Smithsonian. It was incredible. People had just gotten used to that invention that had overtaken America, the bicycle, and now there was going to be a machine that flies with a man on board. Good God!

  It may have been the well at the back of the bike shop. That well was quickly sealed, but it was too late. Orville went down in August 1896 with typhoid fever. The dreaded disease of the nineteenth century would kill Wilbur in sixteen years. In Chicago in the late nineteenth century, a typhoid epidemic broke out just before the 1892 Columbian Exposition. Human feces was the problem. Food or water tainted with feces became a potential carrier of the disease.

  Indeed how could there not be typhoid in a city with 40,000 privies and people who wouldn't connect to the sewer even when threatened with legal action…. The four-mile tunnel came on line in December, 1892. Typhoid deaths had begun to fall in 1893, partly due to the cleaner water from the tunnel but probably also due to the new public awareness about boiling or filtering the water. Work on the huge Ship and Sanitary canal project, which was to famously turn the Chicago River around and send its waters and Chicago's sewage down to St. Louis instead of into Lake Michigan, had begun in September 1892.1

  Chicago would reverse its main river to combat the disease and keep people from drinking contaminated water. When this didn't work, city engineers built water cribs, which were giant intakes situated a mile out in Lake Michigan, for drinking water to get clear of the sewage along the lakefront. The extremely high fever from typhoid produced delirium and, many times, organ failure. During the Spanish-American War, more men would die from typhoid than were killed in combat. Training camps with poor sanitation were often the culprit.2 New York and other cities had typhoid outbreaks when drinking water was contaminated with raw sewage. It was the disease of terror in the late nineteenth century, with no antibiotics to stop the ravaging disease marked by death in many cases.

  In the late summer of 1896, Orville was confined to bed, with his temperature spiking to 105.5°F. Dr. Spitler was called to the house but could do little beyond confirming that it was typhoid fever. Medical science had no weapons at all for any sort of infection, and the best anyone could do was try to keep the patient hydrated and strong while the fever raged and delirium set in. Typically, in the first week, the fever rises dramatically with a cough, maybe a bloody nose, while the white-blood-cell count plunges. In the second week, the fever hovers around 104, and rose-colored spots break out all over the torso. Delirium is now a constant, earning typhoid the nickname “nervous fever.” In the third week, diarrhea takes hold, the appetite vanishes, and the spleen and liver are enlarged. Patients often succumb when organ failure sets in.3

  The bishop was nowhere to be found. He was traveling for church business and instructed Katherine and Wilbur from afar. They were to put Orville in the best room and sponge him “gently and quickly with least exposure, followed by rapid friction…boil the water you all drink, and set in ice water to cool. Use the best economy about rest. Be temperate in articles eaten. Be regular.”4

  For the month of September, Wilbur stayed by Orville's bed, along with his sister. This allowed him to once again sink into books. During the last few years, Wilbur and Orville had been consumed with their bike business, with no time to read anything. The bicycle in 1892 was the link between the horse and the automobile. As Tom Crouch explained in First Flight, “It marked the first convergence of technologies crucial to automobile production, ranging from electrical welding and work on ball bearings to experience with chain and shaft transmission systems, metal stamping technology and the manufacture of rubber tires.”5

  The first bicycle business in America sold “high-wheel ordinaries,” which were the large-wheel bikes that only the brave could sample. The “safety bicycle” had two wheels of the same size and allowed everyone to now ride the contraption that was better, in many ways, than riding a horse. Orville quickly purchased a bicycle and determined their next course: fixing and manufacturing bicycles.

  Millions of bikes began pouring out of American factories in 1895. People could now pedal to work or go out for long rides in the country. The technology that was used for bikes would later be used in cars and then planes. It was a craze, with the church and moralists warning against the degradation that would follow bicycles. Strangely, the biggest moralist of them all—Bishop Wright—would have no objection to his sons’ new business. Now children could leave their neighborhood out of the view of their parents. Children were going for a bike ride when they should be reading their books. In fifteen minutes, children could be over a mile away from their parents. Later, cars would be attacked for the very same reas
on. Mobility was equated to moral decay, and at the very least it meant sex. Nobody cared about the outrage, though, and bicycles swept the country and swept up the Wright brothers.

  In a prescient article published by the editor of the Binghamton, New York, Republican on June 4, 1896, he predicted that the flying machine would probably be invented by bicycle manufacturers: “The flying machine will not be in the same shape or at all in the style of the numerous kinds of cycles, but the study to produce a light, swift machine is likely to lead to an evolution in which wings will play a conspicuous part.”6 That summer, bicycling and flying were dominating the news. Swift, balanced, rolling on air-inflated tires, people did feel like they were flying. Others saw a more direct relation.

  James Howard Means wrote in the Aeronautical Annual, “it is not uncommon for the cyclist, in the first flash of enthusiasm which quickly follows the unpleasantness of taming the steel steed to remark: ‘Wheeling is just like flying!’”7 Wilbur and Orville purchased bikes and went for long rides on the roads outside of Dayton. One can see Wilbur taking Means's next words to heart when he would later write, “to learn to wheel one must learn to balance…to learn to fly one must learn to balance.”8 He would equate the control of the bicycle with the control of an airplane.

  In 1893, their company, the Wright Cycle Exchange, started doing business by offering to sell and repair bikes. The Wright brothers opened at one location and then moved to a bigger one as business improved. But Wilbur and Orville diverged again: “Bring up the subject of the shapes of handlebars or types of pedals on early safety bicycles and his whole face lights up,” a contemporary would later recall.9 He was talking about Orville. Wilbur, we can be sure, was bored to distraction. In a letter to his brother Lorin, he spelled out his problem, though he speaks in the plural sense.

  In business it is the aggressive man who succeeds who continually has his eye on his own interest…. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors…. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition…. I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push. That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary businessmen…. There is always a danger that a person in this disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life struggling for bare existence….10

  In other words, Wilbur did not want to fall into “the first corner” or any corner. This he knew after crawling out of his three-year journey into the dark night of the soul. At this point, he is the artist without calling. He knows what he doesn't want to do, and that is any type of business. This is a split in the Wright-brother motif of combined aspirations. Orville would have been quite satisfied to be a printer or the owner of a prosperous bicycle company. The intellectual boredom was not there for the younger brother, but it was there for Wilbur. So, like every man who has not found his calling, his destiny, Wilbur was looking for the path, the challenge that would satisfy the intellect that could have taken on Yale and that had burned through Milton's library for three years.

  Then fate took a hand again with Orville becoming ill. It would be a month before he could sit up, but it was during Orville's illness that Wilbur began to read about the death of the German glider, Otto Lilienthal. It is here he would pin his interest in flight: “My own active interest in aeronautical problems dates back to the death of Lilienthal in 1896…and led me to take down from the shelves of our home library a book on Animal Mechanism by Prof. Marey, which I had already read several times.”11

  Common lore has it that Wilbur began to read to Orville about the glider's demise, and this seeped into the deliriums of Orville, and he emerged as his brother, intent on solving the problem of manned flight. The truth is that caring for his brother gave Wilbur time again to think and wonder and to contemplate something commensurate with his own intellectual, spiritual, and existential needs. Besides the fabled helicopter toy that caught the two brothers’ imagination, this is the first time Wilbur Wright considered the problem of human flight.

  So, while Orville slept or tossed and turned in delirium, Wilbur read about the German pioneer. Lilienthal, like many early pioneers, had a day job manufacturing steam engines and was a mining engineer by trade. He had some money, and this helped put flying squarely in the realm of an expensive hobby. Men trying to fly had to be careful; history was littered with cranks and nuts who had jumped off castles, cliffs, boats, and hills, all to either perish or suffer severe injury. Even Wilbur, years later, would remark that flying was his hobby and the bicycle shop was most important. This was just cover—it is much easier to tell people that flying is just something on the side, when most people saw flying as crazy. In the late nineteenth century, anyone attempting to ascend to the heavens was clearly insane, in the view of most middle-class Americans. The analogy today would be someone dedicating his or her life to time travel; the technology did not support the ambition in either case.

  But Lilienthal was deadly serious and had built up to a dozen gliders. He was the perfect late-nineteenth-century flying enthusiast joining athleticism with a quest to fly like the birds. His wings were shaped like a bird and made of white muslin, with a large rudder protruding off the back of the glider. Wilbur read about Lilienthal taking a running start off the side of Rhinower Mountains, a range about two hours by train from Berlin. Running off the side of the mountain, he would be lifted from the earth. Hanging down like a praying mantis, he kicked his legs one way or the other to go left or right. It was crude and very dangerous, but Wilbur recognized immediately that this red-haired maniac was flying. The only things he lacked were an engine and, more important, control.

  Lilienthal was savvy enough to have pictures taken of himself while in flight, setting the bar for all would-be aviators to follow. If you do fly in the air, make sure you record it so the world can know what you are up to. This was not lost on Wilbur Wright. Lilienthal's glides had made him world-famous, and when he crashed on August 9 in one of his favorite gliders, it was national news. He broke his neck and died the next day, at the age of forty-eight, but he left behind an admonition for the young man looking for a path in life: “It must not remain our desire to acquire the art of the bird. It is our duty not to rest until we have obtained a perfect conception of the problem of flight.”12

  Wilbur had his charge. While his brother lay writhing in the damp sheets on Hawthorne Street in the hell of typhoid, the man who had found nothing in this life to engage him since before the assault by the murderous Haugh now had something as big as his mind's capacity to wonder and scientifically attack a problem. Like the writer who finally finds the theme, the subject that will become the book of his life, Wilbur now had the ultimate engineering problem that had to be solved. Man must fly, man could fly, and it was up to him to crack the code of powered flight.

  This was not a bicycle that had to be fixed or a business that had to be managed. This was something so complex, so varied, so unknown, that Wilbur would have to find out every known fact and start from there and then, like Lilienthal, jump off the side of the mountain to see where he would land. Once he had the bug, there was no turning back. Man should fly. It was in his grasp, but no one had put the pieces together. He knew this intuitively. Was it destiny? Maybe. Teddy Roosevelt had survived three years in the Badlands of the Dakotas, and there were cowpunchers who told him one day he would be president. Wilbur Wright knew this was his destiny, yet there were no markers of aeronautical greatness for others to recognize. It was simply a complex mechanical, spiritual, life goal. It was big. Bigger than anything anyone could imagine at the time. It was perfect for the man who had gone inward for three years and emerged with a tabula rasa, a blank slate of ambition and intellect. Here is where he would engage the world. This would be his San Juan Hill to climb. It would be his point of contact before he would take to the air and leave Earth forever. To fly would be t
he ultimate escape from the terrestrial hell of humans, pettiness, evil, concerns, and responsibilities. The world had seemed strange and demonic during his journey into the dark night of the soul, and yet he had to enter back into it. There would be no family for him. No partner. No woman. He would commit himself to the holy grail of manned flight and improve the world.

  Wilbur looked up from the paper and looked at his brother Orville, now sleeping. It was October, and he had survived the worst of it, but it would be weeks before Orville could leave his bed. Wilbur would need assistance. He had built a printing press with his brother and then bicycles, but they were both Orville's projects. Now Orville could come along with him. He would take his younger brother along for the ride. If they were on a ship, he would be the navigator and Orville would man the tiller. But he would set the course for both.

  Wilbur immediately dove into his father's book Animal Mechanism. He would base all of his initial science on the winged creatures who had already solved flight: birds. Étienne-Jules Marey, a French physician, had become fascinated with birds thirty years before and had drawn a line between winged flight by birds and man: “How frequently has the question been raised, whether man must always continue to envy the bird and the insect their wings; whether he too may not one day travel through the air as he now sails across the ocean.”13

  From the beginning, Wilbur saw flight as a problem of control. The science was there. Air could lift a creature and could lift a man, but the bird could control the air currents and ride them at will; man had a bad habit of getting killed when he went aloft. Wilbur then discovered J. Bell Pettigrew's treatise, Animal Locomotion or Walking, Swimming, and Flying with a Dissertation on Aeronautics. These writings centered on birds and more specifically the birds’ wings as the key to solving the problem of flight. This makes perfect sense to us now, but would-be aviators had been busy for fifty years strapping on rockets and feathers, and creating bouncing, flapping machines that went nowhere. Time would prove that Wilbur differed from men who believed flight was a matter of power. Strangely, no one had taken on the simple concept of a wing. How does it provide lift, and how does one control that lift?