To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  Will apparently did not care for it much. Some eight years after his injury in the shinny game and his ensuing illness, he finally felt fully well. Though he had suffered an attack of appendicitis the previous fall, he soon had recovered. At the age of twenty-seven, he realized he might resume his interrupted plan—to attain a college degree and pursue a professional career. In the fall of 1894, he considered the possibility seriously enough to write his father, who was traveling, to ask for his opinion and a loan.

  I have been thinking for some time of the advisability of my taking a college course. 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 would advise. I do not think I am specially fitted for success in any commercial pursuit even if I had the proper personal and business influences to assist me. I might make a living but I doubt whether I would ever do much more than this. Intellectual effort is a pleasure to me and I think I would [be] better fitted for reasonable success in some of the professions than in business. I have always thought I would like to be a teacher. Although there is no hope of attaining such financial success as might be attained in some of the other professions or in commercial pursuits, yet it is an honorable pursuit, the pay is sufficient to live comfortably and happily, and is less subject to uncertainties than almost any other occupation. It would be congenial to my tastes and I think with proper training I could be reasonably successful.

  He said he could pay most of his own way by renting and fixing bicycles. But he could not do it “unless you are able and willing to help me some,” probably to the tune of six or eight hundred dollars over four years.

  Milton did not think twice. “Yes,” he replied immediately, “I will help you what I can in a collegiate course. I do not think a commercial life will suit you well.”

  Neither health nor money was a barrier—but Will never entered college. No available document tells why. Perhaps Milton rethought his finances. Perhaps Will decided a man of twenty-seven ought to pay his own way, yet he never managed to set enough aside. He simply continued to go to the bicycle shop every morning.

  SAMUEL LANGLEY SOUGHT SOCIETY among men of learning and distinction; the Wrights spent most of their time within the circle of their family. Names were important to the Wrights. The bishop, an enthusiastic chronicler of his family’s genealogy, gave his sons unusual Christian names because he felt “Wright” was common, and needed an ornament. Nicknames proliferated. Lorin was “Fiz.” His three eldest children were “Whacks,” “Ivettes,” and “It,” while the youngest, Horace, answered to “Brother,” “Mannie,” “Boy,” “Buster,” “Bust,” “Buzz,” and “Buzzy.” Kate called Orville “Little Brother” or “Bubbos” or “Little Bubbo”; the latter two probably had been her attempts to say “brother” as a toddler. To the outsider these endearments might have seemed odd, since Orville was Kate’s big brother, not her little brother. Actually, it was fitting. Of all the Wright siblings, these two were the closest. But she was the stronger, larger figure of the pair, he the more vulnerable, the more needy of her care and attention.

  Wilbur was called “Jullum” or “Ullum,” a customer’s effort to give a German twist to “William.” Though the nickname started in adulthood, for some reason it stuck, at least with Kate. Mostly Wilbur was just “Will,” the plainest of all the family names.

  Twins, a boy and a girl, had been born between Lorin and Wilbur, but had died as infants. Only Milton ever mentioned them, and then only in fleeting notations in his diary.

  Katharine was Katharine to her father (who sometimes infuriated her by misspelling it); Kate or Katie to her friends and brothers, who also created several homemade variants of the German “schwesterchens” (“little sister”), a nod to their German forebears on their mother’s side. These were “Schwes,” “Schwessie,” “Swes,” and “Sterchens.” Thus she was “sister,” Orville “brother.” Wilbur was only Will, standing slightly aloof from the sister-brother pair.

  Kate had what the Wright men lacked—conventional, straightforward charm. She loved conversation and sparkled in it. Her brothers possessed fine senses of humor, but hers may have been keener and she shared it more generously with people outside the family. She read lots of novels. She loved to go out and battled her father’s inclination to keep her in. She was the family’s ambassador to neighbors, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. During her mother’s decline, when she was fourteen, Milton had instructed her to prepare to take over as mistress of the house. “Learn all you can about housework. . . . You have a good mind and good heart, and being my only daughter living, you are most of my hope of love and care, if I live to be old. I am especially anxious that you cultivate modest feminine manners and control your temper, for temper is a hard master.” She endured the role for a time. Then she enrolled in Oberlin College and returned four years later to become a teacher of Latin at Steele High School. She moved back in with her father and brothers and ran the household when she was not teaching, but her temper was undimmed, her spirit effervescent. “But for you,” Milton told her once, “we should feel like we had no home.”

  At some point she became engaged to be married, but broke it off. The date is not clear. She referred to it in a letter many years later, when her life had become utterly different from any life she might have imagined in her youth, and when she was contemplating marriage again at the age of fifty. After an engagement of two years, “I saw that he really didn’t care much about me—not the way I have to be cared about if I am going to care so much.” When she suggested “we had better give it up . . . he was evidently relieved.” She persuaded herself that “men were not the least interested in me, except as a friend.”

  As for her brothers, neither Wilbur nor Orville apparently came anywhere close to marriage—certainly not Will. The earliest biography, which was based in part on interviews with Orville and Katharine, said Will “was briefly attracted by one of the girls” at Richmond High School. It is the only such report. According to a close associate of the brothers in later years, “Orv used to say it was up to Will to marry first because he was the older of the two. And Will kept saying he didn’t have time for a wife. But I think he was just woman-shy—young women, at least. He would get awfully nervous when young women were around.” On the streetcars, “if an older woman sat down beside him, before you knew it they would be talking and if she got off at our stop he’d carry her packages and you’d think he had known her all his life. But if a young woman sat next to him he would begin to fidget and pretty soon he would get up and go stand on the platform until it was time to leave the car.” Orville was said to have dated a friend of Katharine’s, but nothing came of it. Many years later, Kate told an intimate that “there was a reason why none of us married.” But she chose not to elaborate, other than to cite the extraordinary closeness between the three siblings: “Always everything that interested them . . . interested me and they took up all my interests in just the same way . . . I am sure Will and Orv thought as much of me as of themselves when they made any plans.” After her engagement was broken, “I couldn’t think . . . of my narrow escape without being scared nearly to death.” Scared of an unhappy marriage? Or scared of disrupting a bond between siblings that somehow had taken on the inviolability of a marriage? There is no way to know. But clearly the bond was unusual, and terribly strong.

  So the two brothers and the sister and their father lived on together. Lorin and his wife, Netta, lived only a few blocks away, and soon had children who became regular and welcome visitors to 7 Hawthorn.

  Will worked and read books. Outside the bicycle shop he saw the members of his family and not many others. The Ten Dayton Boys—minus Reuchlin Wright, the eldest brother, who was farming out west—met now only twice a year, at a winter banquet and again on the Fourth of July. All but Will had married.
A friend remembered him at one of the summer picnics “putting up the swings for the children, and then standing aloof from the crowd much of the day. In fact, the strongest impression one gets of Wilbur Wright is of a man who lives largely in a world of his own, not because of any feeling of self-sufficiency or superiority, but as a man who naturally lives far above the ordinary plane.”

  IN 1894, McClure’s published a long article about a German engineer, Otto Lilienthal, whom the magazine called “the Flying Man.” Will knew a little about Lilienthal already; the brothers had published a brief article about him in one of their own papers. The article in McClure’s told of the German’s extraordinary recent progress in making long, flying leaps with artificial wings.

  Raised in the suburbs of Berlin, Lilienthal and his younger brother, Gustav, were fascinated by the flight of birds and butterflies. Through their teen years and their schooling as mechanics and engineers, the boys experimented with a series of flying devices. Returning home from the Franco-Prussian War, Otto said to his brother: “Now we shall finish it.” After establishing a successful career in mining engineering, with profitable inventions to his credit, Lilienthal began intensive experiments with artificial wings, beginning with cautious hops from a three-foot-high mound in his garden. Now, in the early 1890s, he was astonishing witnesses by sailing through the air for hundreds of feet. He jumped from sand hills and from an enormous artificial hill of his own design, with a shed inside to hold his machines.

  Two things were crucial about Lilienthal’s achievements. One was the act itself. The second, just as important, was that the act was photographed, and the photographs were reprinted all over the world. The dry-plate negative had been invented only in the 1870s, and it was not until 1890 that a moving object could be captured in a frozen image, without a blur. A photograph of anything in motion was still relatively new in 1894. Published images of Lilienthal hanging by his arms from his birdlike contraption, obviously many feet off the ground, were electrifying.

  From later recollections, it’s clear that Will read the McClure’s article and saw the photographs. The author explained that Lilienthal, through observation of birds and exhaustive experiment, had concluded that the key to flight lay in the proper curvature of the wing, and in holding the wing at a proper angle to the wind. He was not flying, Lilienthal explained, but “sailing”—that is, he was “being carried steadily and without danger, under the least possible angle of descent, against a moderate wind, from an elevated point to the plain below.” Americans imitating him were calling this “gliding.” A glide was a gradual, controlled fall; the more gradual the fall, the closer the experimenter came to such birds as eagles and vultures, which stay aloft for long periods without flapping their wings.

  By implication, a human being who learned to stay aloft that way might attach a means of propulsion to his artificial wings and actually fly.

  “No one can realize how substantial the air is, until he feels its supporting power beneath him,” Lilienthal said. “It inspires confidence at once. . . . I am far from supposing that my wings . . . possess all the delicate and subtle qualities necessary to the perfection of the art of flight. But my researches show that it is well worth while to prosecute the investigations farther.”

  Two years later, in 1896, newspapers reported the German had fallen to the ground, broken his neck, and died.

  “NO ONE CAN REALIZE HOW SUBSTANTIAL THE AIR IS, UNTIL HE FEELS ITS SUPPORTING POWER BENEATH HIM.”

  Otto Lilienthal experimenting in his monoplane glider, ca. 1895

  The brothers said later that Lilienthal’s death reawakened the curiosity about flying they had felt as boys. This is a little odd. It was one thing to be inspired by Lilienthal’s publicized successes earlier in the nineties. But his death, if anything, would have discouraged the potential experimenter. Certainly it discouraged others. In any case, there was nothing urgent about their new curiosity. Will wrote his letter to the Smithsonian nearly three years after Lilienthal’s death. If he and his brother discussed flying machines during that interval, they were merely amusing themselves with a puzzle. Yet in 1899 Will told the Smithsonian of his plan to study the matter closely. The evidence is not conclusive. But it suggests that Will had thought of a way to keep a flying machine balanced in the air and wanted to see whether anyone before him had had the same idea.

  THE BIBLIOGRAPHY that Richard Rathbun sent to Dayton was brief, reflecting the opinion of flight experimentation in the scientific community. One book was by Octave Chanute, a prominent civil engineer, entitled Progress in Flying Machines. Another was Langley’s Experiments in Aerodynamics, a report of his whirling-arm work published in 1891. Also on the list were the three volumes of The Aeronautical Annual, published from 1895 to 1897. These, too, were collections of scholarly articles. The editor, a wealthy Boston enthusiast named James Means, dedicated the 1897 number “to the memory of those who, intelligently believing in the possibility of mechanical flight, have lived derided, and died in sorrow and obscurity.” Will studied the Annuals thoroughly, along with the other books on the list and several Smithsonian pamphlets, including a translation of Lilienthal’s article, “Practical Experiments in Soaring.”

  It became clear to him that Lilienthal had been no trickster or kook but an intelligent and industrious worker, cautious and patient. Yet he said the goal of “independent horizontal flight”—not just gliding but actually flying at will, with a motor, independent of the wind—lay not far off. And he tried to tell what only he could tell—what it was like to fly:

  It is a difficult task to convey to one who has never enjoyed aerial flight a clear perception of the exhilarating pleasure of this elastic motion. The elevation above the ground loses its terror, because we have learned by experience what sure dependence may be placed upon the buoyancy of the air. Gradual increase of the extent of these lofty leaps accustoms the eye to look unconcernedly upon the landscape below. To the mountain climber the uncomfortable sensation experienced in trusting his foot into the slippery notch . . . may often tend to lessen the enjoyment of the magnificent scenery. The dizziness caused by this, however, has nothing in common with the sensation experienced by him who trusts himself to the air; for the air demonstrates its buoyancy in not only separating him from the depth below, but also in keeping him suspended over it. Resting upon the broad wings of a well-tested flying machine, which, yielding to the least pressure of the body, obeys our directions; surrounded by air and supported only by the wind, a feeling of absolute safety soon overcomes that of danger. . . . The indefinable pleasure . . . experienced in soaring high up in the air, rocking above sunny slopes without jar or noise, accompanied only by the aeolian music issuing from the wires of the apparatus, is well worth the labor.

  Will also read the work of an obscure Frenchman named Louis Mouillard, a farmer and poet who lived most of his life in the wilds of Algeria and Egypt. As a maker of gliders, Mouillard was insignificant, but as a missionary of flight, he was, as Will said later, “like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief.” Indeed, the Frenchman used the rhetoric of the biblical prophet: “O! blind humanity! Open thine eyes and thou shalt see millions of birds and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. . . . Many of them are gliding therein, without losing height, hour after hour, on pulseless wings without fatigue; and after beholding this demonstration . . . thou wilt acknowledge that Aviation is the path to be followed. . . .

  “If there be a domineering, tyrant thought, it is the conception that the problem of flight may be solved by man. When once this idea has invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively. It is then a haunting thought, a walking nightmare, impossible to cast off.”

  WILL HAD GIVEN UP SPORTS, but any fine athlete retains his instincts after his body has failed him. And here was Mouillard saying that any man who wanted to fly “must thoroughly know his business . . . just as he knows . . . his business as . . . a skater, a bicycle rider, an acrobat—and, in shor
t, as an expert in any gymnastic exercise.” Will had mused at length about the minor mystery of how a bicyclist keeps his balance, and here was Lilienthal saying, “The evolution of the flying machine will be similar to that of the bicycle, which was not made in a day, and . . . [the flying machine] will not be either.”

  Both Mouillard and Lilienthal argued for a pragmatic, step-by-step approach that appealed to Will. Experimenters should get out of “the closet” of mathematical theory, Mouillard said, and into the field, for “I feel well convinced that I never will meet with anybody willing to hazard his life upon the bare dictum of a formula.” Progress, Lilienthal agreed, would be a matter of “continual practice.” The experimenter need not solve the whole problem at once. Progress would come in tiny steps: “Regardless of the most ingeniously constructed apparatus, the art . . . will have to be acquired just as the child learns to stand and to walk.”

  To walk, the toddler must balance. Likewise, the skater, the cyclist, and the gymnast must above all keep their balance. “The first obstacle to be overcome . . . is that of stability,” Lilienthal urged. Octave Chanute, too, said the key problem was balance, “the most important and difficult of those remaining to be solved.”