Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Receipt of the Smithsonian materials set Wilbur to work in earnest. Orville, as noted, did not share his brother’s enthusiasm for the project; the Smithsonian letter had been written by Wilbur in the first-person singular.

  Within weeks, Wilbur had his first great epiphany, a counterintuitive deduction. He came to understand that the best way to achieve stability in flight was to make an aircraft inherently unstable. Whether Wilbur came to this insight from whole cloth or based on the writings of others, he had made a leap of enormous significance.

  Obsessed with creating a machine that would remain perfectly stable in the air, Langley had employed the dihedral wing arrangement to prevent his aerodrome from dipping to one side; Herring added the cruciform tail and universal joint.

  Instead of avoiding roll, Wilbur embraced it. Legend has it that one day he noticed that when he twisted an empty bicycle inner-tube box to one side, the other side would twist in the opposite direction. The resulting “warping” was similar to the way he surmised birds twisted their wing tips to maintain lateral control, rather than by shifting their weight. But it’s more likely the breakthrough was the result of more banal activities. As he would later write to Octave Chanute, “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 tip is twisted upward and the left downward the bird becomes an animated windmill and instantly begins to turn, a line from its head to its tail being the axis. It thus regains its level even if thrown on its beam ends, so to speak, as I have frequently seen them. I think the bird also in general retains its lateral equilibrium, partly by presenting its two wings at different angles to the wind, and partly by drawing in one wing, thus reducing its area.”7

  By July, Wilbur had built a prototype kite to test his theory. The design, with wings roughly six feet across, was similar to the two-surface Herring–Chanute glider, which in turn was a derivation of Lawrence Hargrave’s box kite. Wilbur’s addition was four cords that he could manipulate like a puppeteer to create a primitive wing-warping effect. For the first time, wings became flexible rather than rigid surfaces. He flew the kite for some local schoolboys in late July while Orville was on a camping trip.*3 Initial results were good—Wilbur seemed to be able to control the stability of the kite by twisting the sets of wings in opposite directions. From there, the next step was to refine the arrangement and then build a kite large enough to carry a man.

  In order to achieve success with a more complex apparatus, Wilbur had to move beyond theory and teach himself both aerodynamics and engineering. The materials from which he was working were filled with formulas, ratios, coefficients, and terminology with which he was completely unfamiliar. For the initial structure of the airfoil—its length, chord, and camber—he could rely on Lilienthal’s tables that measured the lift and drag of various configurations; any alterations, however, would involve concepts new to him, such as center of pressure and center of gravity, and he would therefore be forced to undertake a painstaking process of trial and error. There is no overstating the magnitude of Wilbur’s achievements given such a primitive starting point.

  By spring of 1900, Wilbur felt sufficiently comfortable with his level of knowledge to write to Octave Chanute. His letter of May 13 began without preamble. “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.”

  From the first, Wilbur was largely unconcerned with the aspect of the problem on which Langley had obsessed—propulsion—and therefore told Chanute that he intended to experiment without motors. Those, he asserted, would be an easy appendage to add once the aerodynamics had been perfected. “What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery.… It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge & skill.” He asked Chanute to forward details on “to what extent similar plans have been tested and found to be failures.”

  Wilbur also noted, “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 to receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery.”

  He described his proposed methodology in detail.

  I shall in a suitable locality erect a light tower about one hundred and fifty feet high. A rope passing over a pulley at the top will serve as a sort of kite string. It will be so counterbalanced that when the rope is drawn out one hundred & fifty feet it will sustain a pull equal to the weight of the operator and apparatus or nearly so. The wind will blow the machine out from the base of the tower and the weight will be sustained partly by the upward pull of the rope and partly by the lift of the wind. The counterbalance will be so arranged that the pull decreases as the line becomes shorter and ceases entirely when its length has been decreased to one hundred feet. The aim will be to eventually practice in a wind capable of sustaining the operator at a height equal to the top of the tower. The pull of the rope will take the place of a motor in counteracting drift.

  Wilbur asked Chanute to suggest the “suitable locality.”

  Chanute, by then sixty-eight years old, turned out to be the perfect correspondent, especially for one as committed to science for science’s sake as Wilbur Wright claimed to be. He responded to Wilbur’s letter with encouragement and enthusiasm, although he was wary of the light tower idea, and described his success using the box kite. He suggested San Diego and Pine Island, Florida, as locations but added that since they lacked sand hills, “perhaps even better locations can be found on the Atlantic coasts of South Carolina or Georgia.”

  On June 1, Wilbur wrote again to Chanute and said, “For the present I have but little time for aeronautical investigations, in fact I try to keep my mind off this subject during the bicycle season as I find that business is neglected otherwise. Later in the year I think I shall be able to give several months of my time. Just now I am content with trying to settle upon a general plan of operations, and find a suitable location.” Orville continued to remain uninvolved; Wilbur’s correspondence was again in the first-person singular and the wording of the letters leaves little doubt that he saw himself as working alone.*4

  But Wilbur could not keep his mind off flying. Two months later, at the peak of bicycle season, he demonstrated that he had been working nonstop on the glider when he wrote to Chanute, “It is my intention to begin shortly the construction of a full-size glider. 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.”

  Wilbur had also found his location. The United States Weather Bureau had recommended obscure, isolated Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as one of the few places in the nation with sandy stretches and steady prevailing winds of about fifteen miles per hour. Wilbur contacted the head of the local weather bureau and confirmed Kitty Hawk as the place to test his full-sized glider. He then prepared the materials in Dayton, again alone, “cut, steamed, and bent the ash ribs that would give shape to the wings, and carefully fashioned the fifty or so additional wooden pieces. Components that could not be obtained at Kitty Hawk, including metal fittings and fasteners and spools of 15-gauge spring steel wire for trussing the wings, were purchased at home and packaged for shipment. Yards of glistening sateen fabric were cut and sewn into the panels that would cover the finished wings.”8

  Wilbur left in early September and discovered that getting to Kitty Hawk was something of an adventure that included a bone-rattling ferry ride across A
lbemarle Sound. When he arrived, he boarded with a local family and began construction. Orville, who had finally signed on, joined him at the end of the month and brought materials to allow them to live in a tent at the site of their test flights. “Trying to find Will at Kitty Hawk,” he wrote to Katharine from Elizabeth City before he embarked on the ferry, “reminds me very much of a relief expedition to some lost Arctic explorer.”9 He arrived safely and from that point forward, the “I” in Wilbur’s correspondence was replaced by a “we.”

  The Wright brothers’ first season at Kitty Hawk lasted only three weeks, in which they experienced success and disappointment. The derrick arrangement that Wilbur had described in his letter to Chanute was a failure, as Chanute had predicted, and the camber of the wings—at 1:23 only half what Lilienthal had used—made high winds a necessity for flight. But the brothers learned proper positioning of the elevator, an airfoil in the front of the craft to provide additional lift and help control pitch; that the operator should lie prone rather than in a sitting position; and to change the dihedral of the lower wing to an anhedral (a downward angle from the center) to decrease stability and make the glider more maneuverable. By the time they left in the last week of October, Wilbur, who did all the flying, had succeeded in achieving a number of low, short, but significant glides.

  Wilbur in prone position, just after landing a glider.

  Back in Dayton, they wrote to Chanute, telling him of their progress and the innovations they had incorporated into their glider. Chanute was particularly impressed with the prone operator’s position, which he estimated “diminished head resistance by ⅔.” He added, “A magnificent showing provided that you do not plow the ground with your noses.”10

  Wilbur and Orville were already planning to return to Kitty Hawk in 1901, prepared to take a giant step forward.

  * * *

  *1 Although in later years, Wilbur and Orville would both claim they had come to the flight problem together, Orville had little or no input before the first visit to Kitty Hawk in autumn 1900. Wilbur, while he was alive, always publicly spoke of the two of them as a unit and after Wilbur’s death, Orville added himself to incidents in which he took no part. But that, according to Tom Crouch, was merely to assuage Orville’s sensitivity to not being included as an equal in every step of the process.

  *2 Bishop Wright’s sect survives and information about its history and activities can be found at ub.org. The New Constitution sect merged with and is now part of the United Methodist Church.

  *3 Here again, the brothers later claimed to have built the kite together, but it is hard to accept that Wilbur would have tested this watershed invention with his collaborator not present.

  *4 Orville, in a deposition for the Wrights’ case against Glenn Curtiss taken after Wilbur’s death, stated, “After reading the pamphlets sent to us by the Smithsonian, we became highly enthusiastic with the idea of gliding as a sport.” He went on to describe the entire process that led to the construction of the first glider, and in fact all the work that preceded the letter to Chanute, as having been done by them both.

  Sophomore Slump

  Unaware that his thesis had come under threat in the North Carolina dunes, Samuel Langley maintained his conviction that propulsion was the only vital element in moving from an unmanned to manned aerodrome. Octave Chanute, in an 1897 article, had given a sense of how undeveloped the ideas of thrust were. “All sorts of contrivances have been proposed; reaction jets of steam or of compressed air, the explosion of gunpowder or even nitro-glycerine, feathering paddle wheels of varied design, oscillating fins acting like the tails of fishes, flapping elastic wings like the pinions of birds, and the rotating screw.”1 Langley had always favored the “rotating screw”—the propeller—which seemed to have analogous application from use on ships. To drive the screw, a motor more powerful than anything with which Langley had experimented would be required and preliminary calculations indicated steam would not produce the required weight-to-horsepower efficiencies. Gasoline seemed like the best choice; to build such a motor, Langley cast about for an assistant with the proper expertise. He wrote to Robert Thurston, a professor of engineering at Cornell, asking for a “young man who is morally trustworthy (‘a good fellow’) with some gumption and professional training.” Thurston recommended a senior engineering student named Charles Manly and Langley hired him to oversee the design and to eventually fly the finished product.

  Langley also engaged Stephen Balzer to adapt a five-cylinder rotary automobile engine to power his aerodrome, but it soon became clear that Balzer’s designs would not be up to the challenge. Manly, the junior man on the team, took on the task. He would spend much of the next two years developing the fifty-horsepower gasoline motor that would drive the manned aerodrome.

  The Wrights were so excited to return to Kitty Hawk for the 1901 tests that instead of waiting once more until September and the end of peak bicycle season, they left for North Carolina in July. To watch the bike shop they hired a young machinist and mechanic named Charlie Taylor, a local man they’d known since high school.

  When they departed, they brought with them a glider they saw as improved in every way. The wing surface had been almost doubled to provide sufficient lift in lighter winds and they had refined the front elevator. The camber of wings had been increased from the relatively flat one inch of height for every 23 inches of width to Lilienthal’s formula of 1:12. After a series of positive tests, they would be able to add a motor—which Orville and Charlie Taylor could build—and achieve powered flight the following year. So confident were Wilbur and Orville in the season’s triumph that they invited Octave Chanute to visit them in Dayton before their departure and then to Kitty Hawk to witness their achievement. Over dinner, Chanute suggested they bring with them Edward Huffaker, who was described as being in the final stages of building a glider of his own, and a flight-obsessed physician named George Spratt.

  The brothers arrived in Kitty Hawk on July 11, but the 1901 stay in North Carolina turned out to be not a triumph but rather a study of failure, frustration, and torment, the latter inflicted by a combination of the slovenly Huffaker and a predatory swarm of mosquitoes that “came in a mighty cloud almost darkening the sun.”2

  When the glider finally flew at the end of July, it exhibited a tendency to plunge straight down into the sand unless Wilbur (who once again did all the flying) pushed himself all the way back in the middle to alter the center of gravity and then reached all the way forward to move the elevator in a full-up position. Even with these contortions, the glider flew erratically, sometimes threatening to plummet from twenty feet up or more. To go aloft in a machine that behaved so unpredictably was to invite serious injury or death. Orville wrote to Katharine that they now seemed at the same juncture Lilienthal had reached just before he was killed. Wilbur did discover that manipulating the forward elevator could bring some control to the craft, but not nearly enough to make the glides safe.

  Wilbur, Orville, Chanute, and E. C. Huffaker in the work shed at Kitty Hawk, 1901.

  The Wrights made sufficient modification to the elevator and the camber to correct the pitch problem, but then discovered that the wing-warping system, of which they had been completely confident, seemed also to create instabilities. The system was operated by a hip cradle that Wilbur wore while lying prone on the bottom wing. He would shift from one side to another to twist the wings in the direction he wanted, something of a next-generation Lilienthal kick, but rather than even out the glider, on one occasion the right wing shot downward into the sand, sending Wilbur out the front into the elevator. Unlike the first difficulty, this problem seemed intractable. In fact, Wilbur had experienced a phenomenon at low altitude that would plague early designers and cause much more serious, often fatal accidents at greater elevation. If not properly designed and flown, there was a disquieting tendency for an aircraft to increase its bank until it went into a spiral dive.*1

  Chanute, who had come to visit (fortunately f
or him, after the mosquitoes departed), left the camp in early August with George Spratt. The Wrights had enjoyed Spratt’s company, finding him intelligent, good-natured, and eager to help. They loathed Huffaker, thinking him inept professionally and revolting personally. “Some things are rather more amusing to think about than to endure at the time,” Wilbur noted later.

  When Wilbur and Orville left North Carolina at the end of August, their mood was far different than it had been the year before. Instead of vaulting forward, they had taken a step back. Even worse, the problems they were encountering seemed without solution; they cut to the core of Wilbur’s hypotheses. Wilbur was unaccustomed to being so completely wrong. And for once, home would not provide respite. Milton Wright, it seemed, had gotten himself embroiled in another fractious church legal dispute, this time with members of his own already splintered sect. And once more, Wilbur would be enlisted to see him through it.

  The head of publications for Milton’s Old Constitution sect was a preacher named Millard Keiter. Publications were a major source of church revenue and Milton began to suspect Keiter of embezzlement. He prompted an audit that seemed to confirm his fears and Keiter was removed from his post by church elders. But Keiter convinced a number of board members that the audit discrepancies were oversights or honest errors. Milton launched a pamphlet war, the tracts written by Wilbur. When the written word did not have the desired impact, Milton brought in the civil authorities without consulting other church elders and had Keiter arrested for forgery.

  At a subsequent hearing, the charges against Keiter were dismissed, albeit on technicalities, and Bishop Wright was ostracized for acting unilaterally. Milton, as always, upped the stakes and Wilbur was right there with him, auditing the books, writing letters and pamphlets, and jawboning church officials. Keiter’s supporters succeeded in turning a significant number of elders against Bishop Wright and then having him brought before a special church commission in Huntington, Indiana, on a variety of charges, including “insubordination” and “maligning” Millard Keiter. Huntington was the home of the new church college, which Milton had been instrumental in helping to establish, and the commission hearing was an embarrassment for the entire Wright family. Orville wrote to Wilbur, urging him “have someone … use his influence to keep notices out of the papers.”3 The hearing dragged on through the summer and Milton was ultimately found to have overstepped his authority and ordered to admit his error and apologize to Keiter. Predictably, Milton refused. The elders then stripped him of his post, although there was no formal mechanism for physically expelling him from church functions.*2 Most significant for Wilbur, here was another occasion where justice—and injustice—were seen as absolute, where right and wrong were without nuance and therefore closed to compromise.