Wright Brothers, Wrong Story Read online

  The next thing Wilbur needed was a better place to fly, with a constant wind. Ideally an environment where a soft landing might mitigate some of the dangers of experimenting with a glider that no one had ever flown before. He wrote to the United States Weather Service to see if they knew of such a place. He received the Monthly Weather Reviews sent from the Weather Bureau and saw the winds at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, were of sufficient strength. He wrote to the Weather Bureau there and another letter came back from William Tate:

  Mr. J. J. Dosher of the Weather Bureau here has asked to me answer your letter to him, relative to the fitness of Kitty Hawk as a place to practice or experiment with a flying machine. In answering I would say that you could have nearly any type of ground you could wish, you could for instance, get a stretch of sandy land one mile by five with a bare hill in center 80 feet high, not a tree or bush to break the evenness of the wind current…. We have telegraph, communication, and daily mails. If you decide to try your machine here and come, I will take pleasure in doing all I can for your convenience and success and pleasure.19

  Wilbur decided on Kitty Hawk for his glider experiments. Chanute then invited the young bicycle mechanic to come visit him in Chicago: “If you have any occasion at any time to be in this city, I shall be glad to have you call on me and can perhaps better answer the questions that have occurred to you.”20

  Wilbur wrote back to Chanute: “When next I am in Chicago I shall without doubt accept your kind invitation to see you personally and till that time while I shall not inflict upon you a voluminous correspondence about mere theories and untried experiments, I will be pleased to communicate any information of value and shall be pleased to have the benefit of your advice.”21

  The student was hungry for knowledge from his preceptor. Wilbur was not a man who asks for things. He was silent and moody, and had a sharp tongue. He did not see others as being smarter than himself, yet here he is playing up to the old engineer. He knew he needed Octave the way a high-wire trapeze artist needs a spotter. Octave would be his closest confidant in all that is aeronautical, and he needed Octave's steadying hand to go where others had not.

  “It is my intention to begin shortly the construction of a full-size glider,” he wrote in August 1900.22 There is no “we” in this sentence. Such language would not be inserted until others took the papers of Wilbur and Orville and reinterpreted events. In this letter there is Wilbur stating his intention and not mentioning his brother, who probably did not even know what his plans were. Wilbur wrote, “Hitherto I have used pine in the frames, but for the large machine I wish to use spruce, a wood not obtainable in Dayton yards. It would oblige me greatly if you would give me the name of a Chicago firm of whom I could get the timber I need. Also, I would be glad to have your advice as to a suitable varnish for the cover. I have been using shellac.”23

  So why isn't Wilbur Wright asking his brother Orville where he can get the wood he needs? Why does he ask Octave Chanute about the shellac? Clearly that would be more efficient than waiting weeks for a response. The answer is because at this juncture Orville is not involved. And Wilbur seeks another man with the answers over his brother. This flies in the face of the dreary dogma that the brothers were joined at the hip when eating, sleeping, breathing, thinking, and, of course, with all things to do with flying. They were not joined at the hip. In fact, they were not even in the same rooms.

  Wilbur commenced working on another glider in the final weeks of August. It had an eighteen-foot wingspan and would cost a whopping $15 in material, whereas Secretary Langley was spending fifty thousand government dollars on his experimental plane. The only thing he did not have were the long spruce spars, but he assumed he could get them when he headed East to Kitty Hawk. Katherine Wright wrote to her father: “we are in an uproar getting Will off. The trip will do him good. I don't think he will be reckless. If they can arrange it, Orv will go down as soon as Will gets the machine ready.”24

  What is interesting to note is that Orville's presence at Kitty Hawk, while expected, was optional at this point. Wilbur was going down to the Outer Banks to fly the glider he built. A final letter to his father then: “I am intending to start in a few days for a trip to the coast of North Carolina in the vicinity of Roanoke Island for the purpose of making some experiments with a flying machine.”25

  There is no mention of Orville going with him or going to meet him. On September 13, 1900, Wilbur Wright boarded the Big Four and C&O and chugged out of Dayton, Ohio. He was going to a remote corner of the eastern seaboard in the first year of the twentieth century. Wilbur Wright had shipped his glider ahead, and now he was going to find the secrets of manned flight.

  He was going…alone.

  “I am intending to start in a few days for a trip to the coast of North Carolina in the vicinity of Roanoke Island, for the purpose of making some experiments with a flying machine.”

  —Wilbur Wright to his father, Milton Wright,

  September 3, 1900

  1928

  Middle of the Atlantic Ocean

  The 1903 Wright Flyer had left America, and Orville was not sure whether he would ever bring it back. No one knew what the crates down in the hold of the ship contained. They were lashed down like everything else. There were stenciled letters, but the men who loaded them into the ship didn't read the words WRIGHT FLYER. It meant nothing to those men who left the crates in darkness. The Atlantic crossing to London took a week, and the seas were rough. The crates shifted but didn't move as the stormy seas tossed the large ship. Twenty-five years before, the machine in the crates had lifted from the sands of Kitty Hawk and changed the world.

  But strange sounds came from below. It happened mostly at night, when the ship was quiet, and the watch reported a hum coming from the dark recesses of the ship. The men on the ship heard the hum several times from below deck and finally tracked it down to the crates marked WRIGHT FLYER. They went to the crates and put their ears against the wood. They heard the hum inside and could come up with no good reason about what was making the sound. Eventually, they shrugged and walked away.

  That night the hum came again, as if some creature were alive. The men had no way of knowing it, but the strut wires were singing from the vibration of the ship. Wilbur would have recognized the hum instantly. He heard it every time he flew. It was the sound of flight.

  Wilbur Wright stepped down into the fetid 100-degree heat of Old Point, Virginia. His suit was wool and melting onto him like a blanket. Most suits were wool in 1900, and his high celluloid collar and black derby were increasing the heat with every second after he left the train, now chugging away. Dayton, Ohio, was a good seven hundred miles behind him. He caught the steamer Pennsylvania for Norfolk, a small, primitive fishing village that was modern in comparison to where he was going.

  He checked into the Monticello Hotel and in the morning went looking for some spruce for the spars of his glider. He could find none. Later, Wilbur found some and wrote to his father, “Finally, I bought some white pine and had it sawed up at J. E. Etheridge Co. Mill., the foreman, very accommodating.”1 After securing the pine strips for his glider, which had been crated and shipped to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, he began inquiring about transportation to the Outer Banks. The weather was near 100 degrees, and Wilbur would later write to his father again, “I nearly collapsed.”2

  Wilbur slept in the uncomfortable hotel and emerged into an even hotter day with his high laced shoes and dark suit reminding him once again that he was not in Dayton, Ohio, anymore. Another train dropped him off sixty miles south at a salty, desolate stop in Elizabeth City. Now he could smell the ocean. Dragonflies clicked in the tall reeds. Blasts of humid, super-heated air wafted up from the sand. From here all transportation stopped. At least trains did. The Outer Banks of North Carolina was a series of islands protecting the coast from the ravages of the Atlantic Ocean. They were also unreachable by horse or car or any other form of ground transportation. The Albemarle Sound had to be forded to get
to Kitty Hawk, and Wilbur could find no one who could tell him how this was to be done. “No one seemed to know anything about the place or how to get there,” he complained to Milton Wright.3

  The Civil War had been fought thirty-five years before. The frontier had only been closed for ten years, and parts of the United States were still largely uninhabited. There were no cars to speak of and no radio. Marconi had just pushed wireless to where ships could get updates, but many ships did not use this new technology. The phone was still a new thing for most people, and most of the United States was not electrified.

  So, we have the nascent inventor of flight hacking around the desolate town of Elizabeth, in a suit and a tie, unable to get to what would become his laboratory for flight. His high-top leather shoes are muddy, his black derby is an oven, and he can find no transportation to his destination. This should have told him right then and there that Kitty Hawk would be an isolated way-stop on the far peak of the eastern seaboard. If someone had asked him why he was there, then he or she might have thought this overdressed man was insane. “To fly,” he would have answered in perfect seriousness. It was a new century. No self-effacement. No self-deprecation. His grey eyes would bore right through you. “I just need someone to get me across the sound. Is there someone who can do that?” There was.

  One grizzled Israel Perry answered the call, not caring why this “dude” would want to go to Kitty Hawk, where one could die and no one would even know it for days. Isolation. That was Kitty Hawk. There were some fishermen and some houses. Most everyone was poor as dirt and barely getting by, and some were eating the dirt or trying to grow what they could not in sand. Shipping fish to the east was the only industry, and that didn't pay so much that people didn't have to plant what they could in the sandy loam to survive.

  The next morning, Wilbur was there. “I engaged with Israel Perry on his flat bottom boat,” he related to his father.4 “As it was anchored three miles down the river we started in his skiff which was loaded almost to the gunwale with three men, my heavy trunk and lumber.” The boat was a skiff that stank of dead fish and leaked like a bathtub full of holes. “The boat leaked very badly and frequently dipped water, but by constant bailing we managed to reach the schooner in safety.”5 Wilbur bailed mechanically, methodically, focused on the task in front of him. He asked only one question between the bailing of the green seawater.

  “Is this boat seaworthy?”

  “Oh, it's safer than the big boat,” Israel sang out, bailing beside him.6

  The amount of water had Wilbur bailing the whole three-mile trip down the river. The sun was brutal, and Wilbur was weak from dehydration and having nothing more to eat than some jam his sister had packed for him. There was the scent of salt and the smell of dead fish. The sun glared off the brassy green water. The skiff was leaky and barely seaworthy, but the boat they reached at dusk was not much better. “The weather was very fine with a light west wind blowing. When I mounted the deck of the larger boat I discovered at a glance that it was in worse condition if possible than the skiff. The sails were rotten and the ropes badly worn and the rudder post half rotted off,” Wilbur later wrote.7 “And the cabin was so dirty and vermin infested that I kept out of it from the first to the last.”

  To make matters worse, the weather had changed. The sky had darkened, and spiders of lightning touched down across the sound. This added to the general feeling of impending doom the schooner engendered, silhouetted against the dying light. But they headed out into the sound, into the teeth of warm, wet gusts presaging a coming storm.

  Wilbur stared across the sound toward Kitty Hawk. It was an island of trees against the storm light. Wind ruffled his pressed shirt and picked at his tie. He frowned at the time, as it was getting dark quickly. His false teeth hurt. His mouth was dry. Lightning spidered again beyond, and thunder rattled the main sail, then a strong gust caught the jib as they leaned to. He later wrote, “Though we had started immediately after dinner, it was almost dark when we passed out of the mouth of the Pasquotank and headed down the sound. The water was much rougher than the light wind would have led us to expect…After a time the breeze shifted to the South and East and gradually became stronger…The waves which were now running quite high struck the boat from below with a heavy shock and threw it back as fast as it went forward.”8

  The weather degenerated into a gale after 11 p.m., and Wilbur and a boy who had accompanied Israel bailed for their lives. Leaks appeared in the rotted wood from the constant pitching of the seas, with the boat being driven toward the shore. Any attempt to turn around at this point would invite disaster. Then the foresail suddenly broke loose from the boom and “fluttered to leeward with a terrible roar.”9 There was nothing to do but for Wilbur to go forward with the boy in the dark, in the rain and wind, and secure the sail. He was still in his vest, tie, collar, pressed shirt, and hard shoes. Wilbur inched out toward the front of the boat, with the monster whipping and snapping in the darkness. He and the boy managed to secure the sail with the boat rolling so badly he thought they might tip.

  “By the time we had reached a position even with the end of the point it became doubtful whether we would be able to round the light, which lay at the end of the bar extending out a quarter of a mile from the shore.”10 They could not turn in for safety, and then the main sail tore loose from the boom with the same roar of canvas suddenly unmoored. Wilbur again ascended to the top of the careening ship to secure the sail. The gale was tearing Israel's boat apart. The only chance was to use the jib and sail straight toward the sandbar with the wind behind. It was fitting that the boat leading to the epicenter of flight had now become a kite, and the jib would produce thrust that would either sink them or deliver salvation.

  Wilbur Wright wondered then what he had done by finding the most remote spot on the eastern seaboard to fly an experimental glider. The older brother of the two men who had created a printing press and a bicycle shop felt the darkness as something bad, something evil, across the dark, windswept bay. He pressed his tongue again against his false teeth. This forty-mile crossing to a place settled by shipwrecked sailors with only some Life-Saving stations and a Weather Bureau station had that same capacity for something going horribly wrong.

  In the storied darkness were the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and its people comprised of fishermen and those who had been stranded on the shoals of the barrier islands that protected the coast from the Atlantic. It was a 200-mile strip of sand bent like an elbow at Cape Hatteras. Some fishermen raised corn and beans and kept a few pigs, but the mosquitoes were much better adjusted to the climate than the pigs were. Even the name Kitty Hawk came from a name for the dragonflies that feed on mosquitoes and that the locals called “skeeter hawks.”11 Nags Head was twenty miles to the south, where North Carolinians had been going for a hundred years to escape the heat. Nags Head's only hotel had burned to the ground just a year before Wilbur arrived.

  Between Kitty Hawk and Nags Head was four miles of uninterrupted sand that broke for three large dunes known as Kill Devil Hills. It is here that history would be made: a perfect setup for a man with a glider. The only problem was surviving the trip over. There were no bridges in 1900 and of course this was why Wilbur was facing doom in the middle of a gale that was driving the flat-bottomed boat toward a sandbar. The Life-Saving stations and Weather Bureau stations could be of no help, though they had cutting-edge technology with a phone system and a telegraph line that connected the weather station to Norfolk. It was a government line, but telegrams could be sent to the Western Union office. This was a situation that would factor in heavily in 1903.

  The problem was that the stations were there to help those whom the Atlantic tossed onto the shoulders of the Outer Banks. Israel Perry's water-laden boat coming from the east and heading toward Kitty Hawk from the Albemarle Sound was not to be rescued. This gave Wilbur no solace as Israel Perry ran his boat up onto a sandbar, with waves breaking over the bow. His high collar had wilted, and his pants wer
e adhered to his long legs. His derby had blown off and wedged in the corner of the bow. He must have questioned the action that had brought him to a leaky boat in a typhoon.

  Why had he sent that letter to the Weather Bureau anyway?

  We have been doing some experimenting with kites, with a view to constructing one capable of sustaining a man. We expect to carry the experiment further next year. In the meantime, we wish to obtain if possible a report of the wind velocities of Chicago or vicinity for the months of August Sept Oct and November. Do any of the government publications contain such information?12

  Scouring the Monthly Weather Reviews, Wilbur found that the wind was at Kitty Hawk. That is where he would go to fly the glider. Then another letter to the Weather Bureau at Kitty Hawk. Might he know of winds, transportation, and lodging? He might. Joseph Dosher, the telegraph operator at the bureau, sealed the deal and described the “mile wide beaches with no trees and clear of high hills for sixty miles to the south.”13 But there were no houses to rent. “So you will have to bring tents…you could obtain board.” His letter had made the rounds in the fishing village, landing in the hands of William Tate, whose wife ran the post office. It was Tate who told him of Kill Devils Hills and the giant sand dunes that would be perfect for his flying machine.

  They dragged the boat up onto the sandbar. Wilbur assisted in anchoring the besieged vessel, watching the wild sea pile into the side of Perry's boat. Perry's son kept bailing, and what no one knew was that a hurricane had hit Galveston, Texas, where it had whipped up the water of the Gulf of Mexico to a depth of seventeen feet in the streets. This dying storm had descended on the Outer Banks, and it is amazing that Wilbur Wright and the old fisherman and his son had not been drowned.