Wright Brothers, Wrong Story Read online

  So, with money to burn, Langley went in search of a lightweight gasoline engine. He found Stephen M. Balzer, a machinist “who had designed and built the first automobile to run in the streets of New York.”3 The vehicle was powered by a three-cylinder rotary engine (that is, the engine revolved around its shaft). Balzer had been looking for someone to finance and market his automobile, and he saw Langley as a source of income to that end. Secretary Langley believed in lots of assistants and engineers to fill out his plethora of men who would make him look great by their innovations, and he asked the dean of the Cornell College of Engineering to recommend “the best young engineer he knew to become his assistant.”4 Charles M. Manley appeared at the Smithsonian on the eve of his graduation, to assist Balzer in designing the new motor. He was a small, lithe man with a high forehead and a diminutive mustache. Langley respected his intelligence and suspected he was more talented than Balzer, who had just unveiled his motor.

  “Balzer's pattern was a 5-cylindered rotary engine the cylinders arranged radially, like the points of a star. It was to be air-cooled. When it was finally up to testing, this motor could produce no more than 8 horsepower when the contract called for a minimum of 12 horsepower.”5 Langley and Manley quickly combed Europe looking for another engine and, not finding it, returned to deal with Blazer's underpowered combustion engine. Secretary Langley had lost all faith in his original hire and paid off Blazer, leaving Manley to alter the engine and increase the horsepower. The engine was shipped to the Smithsonian, where Manley could work in secrecy.

  As Cecil Roseberry wrote in Glenn Curtiss: Pioneer of Flight, “The first thing Manley did was convert it from a rotary to a static radial engine. The power picked up instantly. He made it water-cooled and gave it lighter pistons, along with other refinements. Ultimately the engine Manley installed in Langley's ‘aerodrome’ produced 52.4 horsepower.”6 The secretary had found the perfect assistant in Charles Manley. He was a brilliant man who was able to work under pressure and wanted not fame, but only to please his boss. Secretary Langley immediately cut off all information about his project to the outside world: “It is the practice of all scientific men, indeed of all prudent men, not to make public the results of their work until they were certain.”7

  The secretary let the grass grow long outside the carpentry shop, to stave off any curiosity about the airplane being constructed inside. Secrecy would become a hallmark of aviators and put the secretary of the Smithsonian on a collision course with another man who valued secrecy, Wilbur Wright, who guarded the privacy of his remote location for experimentation. For there was no place more secret than the barren sands of Kitty Hawk. When Langley's plane was ready, it would fly off the Arc on the Potomac like a flapping white bird ushering in the brilliant new century. Secretary Langley, like a lot of men of his time, felt the twentieth century would belong to America, and it would be fitting that he should conquer the skies for the Smithsonian and make himself the most famous man in the world.

  Wilbur rode his Van Cleve bicycle outside of Dayton. He wanted to test a theory on balance. He rode very fast down the farm road and then slowly took his hands off the handlebars. If someone had seen him, they would have observed a man in a tie and a brimmed cap with his arms straight out like Christ on the cross. Wilbur felt the wind passing over his body and kept his eyes straight ahead. Balance. He was perfectly balanced, and this was keeping the bicycle straight up. As long as he kept pedaling, the momentum kept the bike in a state of suspended animation. Balance and movement were in tandem. If he leaned to one side or the other ever so slightly, then the bicycle turned to that side. A plane must fly on the same principal, one of perfect balance.

  Wilbur would later write, “I had asked dozens of bicycle riders how they turn to the left. I have never found a single person who stated all the facts correctly when first asked. They almost invariably said that to turn to the left, they turned the handlebar to the left and as a result made a turn to the left. But on further questioning them, some would agree that they first turned the handlebar a little to the right, and then as the machine inclined to the left, they turned the handlebar to the left and as a result made the circle, inclining inwardly.”1

  Wilbur put his hands back on the handlebars and turned around. He had to get back to the bike shop, but first he wanted to write a letter. He returned and put his bike in the back room. Orville barely looked up from his work on putting together the latest Wright Van Cleve bicycle. They had become manufacturers of bicycles, and this was very exciting for a while. Even though the bicycle shop had expanded to two locations and business was still good, Wilbur never quite gave up the idea of becoming something else: “I have always thought I would like to be a teacher. Although there is no hope of obtaining such financial success as might be attained in some other professions or in commercial pursuits yet it is an honorable pursuit.”2

  The life of the mind. Even though he and his brother had come out with two different models for bikes and business was doing well, this wistful man did not feel engaged. In fact, the bicycle craze had started to wane in 1897, and by the time Wilbur took his bike ride it had slowed. This gave him pause, but the truth was “he felt trapped in a commercial pursuit for which he was ill suited and which had not enabled him to develop his latent talents and abilities.”3

  Then, of course, fate took a hand on a late summer day. Maybe it was in the waning days of the bicycle craze, but a man came in for an inner tube, and Wilbur brought out the tube in a long cardboard box. After the man had left, Wilbur held the box in his hand and flexed it. He noticed that one end of the box flexed down, but the other side flexed up. He ripped the ends off the box, and the flexing became more apparent. Was this the prelude to the groundbreaking idea of wing warping?4 How could a bird turn? The creature flexed its wings ever so slightly and veered right or left. This was surely truer than the helicopter that many point to as the pivotal moment that brought the Wright brothers to study flight. Some would hail this cardboard-box moment as the beginning of modern flight. The lore is he went home and showed it to his brother Orville, and they both agreed that wing warping was the key to aeronautical control. If this was a great moment in the journey toward flight, then Orville would certainly add the “we,” if not in fact then in thought.

  The Kelly biography puts Orville as the man who had this idea first, but there is no support for this. As Fred Howard wrote in Wilbur and Orville, “It was Wilbur who stumbled on the solution…. He sold an inner tube for a bicycle tire. He removed the tube from the long narrow box in which it came and while talking to a customer, began absentmindedly to twist the ends of the box in opposite directions…. It suddenly occurred to him that if a frail pasteboard box could survive such strain, it might be possible to twist the cloth covered wooden frame of a flying machine in the same fashion.”5

  It was Wilbur, not Orville, who then began to build a kite to demonstrate this new principal. Orville was fighting for business and building bikes, but Wilbur was taking every spare moment and going above the bike shop on West Third Street and constructing a kite of split bamboo and paper. His first laboratory was cold and unheated and dimly lit. Perfect. It was the first kite he had ever built, and this would be Wilbur's first aircraft. He based the kite on Octave Chanute's design for his glider, and built a biplane with two wings on top of each other. The nascent engineer trussed it together like a bridge with cross wires and vertical pine struts. The innovation was the two cords that would allow the wings to warp and could be controlled by someone on the ground. This was an aviation first accomplished by a man with no experience or training—the first ailerons fitted to an experimental kite or aircraft of any kind. This would become a point of contention years later.

  Decades later, Orville would admit that he was not there but would speak of it as “we” and describe the flying wing very technically: “I was not myself present when the kite was flown. Wilbur gave me an account of the tests upon his return, and a few days later I was told about it by a
couple of boys who were present….”6 Here again is where history is fudged. Orville had little to do with Wilbur's new obsession. His brother was building a kite above the bike shop in his spare time. Everyone had hobbies. So what? Similarly, the printing press was more Orville's than it was his brother's.

  Orville wasn't there when Wilbur took the kite in August 1899 to a field outside of Dayton on a late windy afternoon. The scent of hay and earth rose from the field. Maybe some manure. America was transitioning still from a nation of farms to a nation of cities. Wilbur and Orville had flown kites in the same field with Wilbur's friend Ed Sines when they were boys, but this time it was just Wilbur with a very different kind of kite.

  Now it was Wilbur feeding out the line and holding firm to the two control sticks. Small boys stopped on the edge of the field and stared up at the giant kite blotting out the sun as it was being flown by a man in a tie and high collar. A carriage clopped by. A dog barked. Adults did not fly giant kites in fields, as far as they knew. Wilbur felt the tug on the line. The kite wanted to fly and went higher and higher. It was time to see if his idea, which had been born in a moment in the bike shop with an inner tube box, might turn the kite. Wilbur held one stick steady and then began to pull on the other one.

  As Fred Howard explained in Wilbur and Orville, “The big kite responded promptly to the warping of the wings. The wing with the positive angle lifted; the wing with the negative angle dipped.”7 Wilbur pulled on the stick again, and the kite flew right and then left. He was aviating, though he didn't know it. The control exerted over a bicycle was now being applied to a machine in the air. Wilbur pulled back again, and suddenly the lines went slack and all control was lost. The kite dove for the ground, and the boys dove to the earth. The lines pulled tight again, and Wilbur was able to correct the dive as the kite swooped upward. The stall that had killed Lilienthal was there. You could dance with the wind and you could court her, but she was a dangerous and fickle bride. Already Wilbur knew more than anyone else investigating aeronautics. Wing warping worked, and yet there was a great black hole in the center of navigating the heavens that could kill a man in seconds. This knowledge of risk would keep Wilbur Wright alive.

  Wilbur pulled and watched the kite glide across the late-summer sky. The taste of pollen, a hint of autumn, as the kite flew back and forth under the control of a man who had never flown anything in his life, not unlike the sailor who takes to the sea with the natural ability and the feel of controlling a boat. How long did he fly the kite? No one knows, because he was the only one there, save for the boys. His brother was not there, and we are led to believe he went home and told Orville about the success of his wing-warping system. “According to Wilbur's account to me,” Orville would testify years later (and then he inserted the “we”), “we felt that the model had demonstrated the efficiency of our system of control. After a little time, we decided to experiment with a man-carrying machine….”8

  This is highly doubtful. Orville was not interested in flying yet. His brother was just flying a kite, after all, but for Wilbur it was enough. Wilbur then did two things: he determined that he would next build a man-carrying kite, and he sat down and began to write a letter to the French engineer Octave Chanute. It was a bolt of inspiration out of the blue to contact the grandfather of aeronautics, but he needed someone who was further along in this new science, and more than that he needed a kindred intellect. Here is the curve away from the Wright-brother myth that Orville was Wilbur's primary sounding board. He was not. Octave Chanute was the link to the rarefied world of aeronautical science that Wilbur desperately needed:

  For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field. My general ideas of the subject are similar to those held by most practical experimenters to wit: that what is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery….9

  Wilbur then laid out his plan to construct a tower of one hundred and fifty feet and to fly a large glider from the tower to gather data. After summarizing what he had learned from Lilienthal, he wrote a line that would later haunt him: “I make no secret of my plans for the reason that I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine, and that only those who are willing to give as well as receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery. The problem is too great for one man alone and unaided to solve in secret.”10 In time, Wilbur would reverse himself on both assertions. He would pursue financial gain for his discovery and invention of the first powered airplane, and he would become secretive to the point of his own detriment and the wrath of the world.

  But here he is the supplicant. He needed openness. The sixty-eight-year-old engineer opened the envelope of blue stationery and read the bicycle mechanic's dissertation on the progress and prospect of manned flight. These five pages were the beginning of an official record that would track the invention of flight. Wilbur starts out by naming the two flaws that ultimately killed Otto Lilienthal. One, he didn't fly enough; he didn't have enough experience. Two, his method of throwing his weight around to guide his glider was wrong. Wilbur pointed out that birds do this with their wings and not their bodies: “The fact that in five years’ time he only spent about five hours altogether in actual flight is sufficient to show that his method was never adequate…. My observations of birds convince me that birds use more positive and energetic methods of regaining equilibrium than that of shifting the center of gravity.”11 Wilbur then explained to Chanute his concept and his discovery of wing warping: “My observation of the flight of buzzards leads me to believe that they regain their lateral balance, when partly overturned by a gust of wind, by a torsion of the tips of the wings. If the rear edge of the right wing is twisted upward and the left downward the bird becomes an animated windmill and instantly begins to turn.”12

  This is the first time Wilbur mentions his discovery of wing warping to Chanute, and it shows his willingness to divulge what would turn out to be the pivotal invention of his method of control. This too will come back to haunt Wilbur years down the road and will lead to a permanent break between the two men. Chanute does not point out in his reply that this wing warping was never used before, and he does not mention it at all in his reply. This would become a salient point for what transpired after the flight of 1903.

  It is interesting that, for the next six months, Wilbur will never mention his brother in his correspondence. In fact, for a long time, Chanute would be unaware of Orville Wright's existence. There was not the usual, “my brother and I”13 or “we,” that would pop up later in correspondence with other people. Wilbur's first letter of 1900 is a declaration of his aspirations: “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.”14

  This is a mission statement of Wilbur Wright. “Chanute's only clue to the existence of another Wright brother would be Orville's name in small type under that of Wilbur in the upper left-hand corner of the Wright Cycle Stationery letterhead.”15 Clearly, Wilbur was on a one-man mission to solve the problem of manned flight, and he would keep Octave Chanute to himself. It is rare to find a letter that passed between Orville Wright and Wilbur's new mentor, even as they closed in on the date of the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903.

  Even in this first letter, Wilbur asks for advice that he would take and that would change the course of events: “I would be particularly thankful for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about fifteen miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather.”16 Chanute lost n
o time in writing back to the nascent inventor and pushing him away from the tethered-tower idea and toward finding some place where the wind blew consistently. Chanute responded: “The two most suitable locations for winter experiments which I know of are near San Diego, California, and St. James City, Florida, on account of the steady sea breezes which I have found to blow there. These however are deficient in sand hills and perhaps even better locations can be found on the Atlantic coasts of South Carolina or Georgia.”17

  This would begin a lifelong correspondence between Wilbur Wright and Octave Chanute on the aspects of aeronautical science that would have to be solved before man could fly. Let me say this again, this is the science of aeronautics that has to be worked out to produce controlled flight and then powered flight. Literally no one understood the real or correct math of lift for a wing, and here is where Wilbur Wright will shine as a pioneer. There is no “we” in this endeavor for Wilbur. He needed Chanute to find the path, and then he would use him to cast off the final shackles of known science and go it alone.

  Like the writer of the novel, only one person can solve the unsolvable. In the over four hundred letters between Octave Chanute and Wilbur Wright found in The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, it is but a school of one. Not unlike a great chess player who takes a novice under his wing, Octave was the chess player whom Wilbur needed to face down. Historians have painted Orville as this counterweight to Wilbur's dominant intellect, and this may be true in the mechanics, but for the heavy lifting, the sheer intellectual leap that was required for a man contemplating the complexities of a world where no man had gone, Wilbur needed an equal.

  Octave Chanute would be a mentor, and though the student would rebel against this assignation once manned flight had been achieved, the proof is in the voluminous correspondence where theories were tested, discounted, and reinforced, where new theories were proposed and old theories destroyed. This was the life of the mind, and Wilbur needed a sparring partner, if not a guide: “There was only one person in the United States who possessed that kind of knowledge [aeronautical] and experience; that French-born Chicagoan, that former bridge builder and civil engineer, that semi-retired manufacturer of railroad ties and consultant in wood-preserving, Octave Chanute.”18