To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  As Will studied, it became clear how he ought to proceed. It was going to be an athletic endeavor, and its principal goal would be proper balance, as in skating or bicycling or gymnastics. When first mounting the parallel bars or the bicycle seat, you simply tried it, expecting to fall. So it would be with this. In the instant of the fall you might have an idea about how you could have turned your body differently or placed a hand elsewhere. You tried again, fell again, considered, adjusted. In this way he would learn new things. He would attempt to build on others’ successes, particularly Lilienthal’s, with the aim of answering the question he and Orville apparently had discussed off and on for three years. How could one fly, yet escape Lilienthal’s fate?

  SOMETIMES WILL RODE HIS BICYCLE to a spot just south of Dayton called the Pinnacles, where strange, pointed outcroppings jutted up from the heights overlooking the Miami River. Buzzards and hawks wheeled over the formations. But they flew so high that even a careful observer had trouble following the movements of their bodies and wings. The small birds of the garden were no more helpful. They dove, darted, and twisted in paroxysms of gymnastic mastery, their movements far too quick and minute to study.

  In Dayton, summer is southern, yet the Wrights wore heavy long pants and long sleeves all year round. Even with the windows and doors of the shop open, the atmosphere inside was close at best, stifling at worst. When business was slow, it was natural to step out onto Third Street, and it probably was there, as wagons and bicycles passed back and forth, that Will noticed something in the flight of a pigeon.

  From his reading, he had begun to learn a new vocabulary to describe the subtle movements of flight. The “center of gravity” was the point at which a bird—or, in theory, a flying machine—would balance, both fore to aft and side to side. It depended on the distribution of weight. The “center of pressure” was the central point where all the forces pushing the bird upward were concentrated, the fulcrum on which the bird was resting. It depended on the shape, size, and angle of the wings. When the center of gravity and the center of pressure coincided, at least roughly, then the bird had its balance under control. When the two points got too far off kilter, a plunge to the ground was imminent. Clearly, the birds knew the trick of keeping the two centers in equilibrium. But how they did so was a mystery.

  Will now knew what Octave Chanute and Louis Mouillard thought about how birds kept their lateral balance—that is, their balance from side to side. They said a bird draws one or the other of its wings inward, close to the body, thus decreasing the lifting surface on that side. The center of pressure would move toward the opposite side, and the bird would regain its balance. They also said the bird “sometimes rocked its body over toward the high side in order that the increase of weight on that side might help to bring the high wing down.”

  But one pigeon of West Dayton failed to conform to theory. As Will watched, he saw the pigeon wobble, a quick side-to-side oscillation. “That is,” he recalled later, “it tilted so that one wing was elevated above its normal position and the other depressed below its normal position and tilted in the opposite direction.” Will pondered the speed of the bird’s oscillation. Could it shift its weight rapidly enough to cause so rapid a back-and-forth movement? That seemed unlikely. Besides, Will could see no sign that the pigeon was drawing either wing closer to its body. Something else must account for its wobbling. “The thought came that possibly it had adjusted the tips of its wings . . . so as to present one tip at a positive angle and the other at a negative angle, thus, for the moment, turning itself into an animated windmill . . .” In other words, by turning the leading edge of one wing tip up and the leading edge of the other wing tip down, the pigeon changed the degree of lift on both sides of its body. One wing rose, the other fell; the center of pressure shifted, and the bird was now rolling. When its body had rolled far enough in one direction, the bird then reversed the angles of its wing tips, and began to roll back in the other direction. The pigeon, in this view, wasn’t adjusting its center of gravity at all. Nor was it pulling in a wing to move the center of pressure. It was using the air rushing over both wings to move its center of pressure around its center of gravity in perfect control.

  How to apply the pigeon’s lesson to a man-made glider? It implied a method very different from the one Otto Lilienthal had used. He had shifted his center of gravity by swinging his legs this way and that—an exceedingly difficult and dangerous task, since it sent the center of pressure darting all over with every change in angle and airspeed. Will’s idea, instead, was to control the center of pressure by controlling the angles of the wing tips. Apparently he discussed the problem with Orville. Perhaps, they thought, wings could be mounted on metal shafts connected to gears at the center of a glider. Turning the gears would turn the wings, one side angling up, the other down. But they could not imagine such a device being strong enough to do the job, yet light enough to fly.

  A new idea occurred to Will in the bicycle shop. He held an empty bicycle tube box, squeezing it, feeling the springy resistance of the stiff paper. He lowered his eyes to the box and saw the shape of a double-wing glider. The box was twisted in the beginning of a spiral—a helical coil, to use an engineer’s phrase. If his ideas about the pigeon’s wings were right, then he was pressing this flimsy box into the shape of human flight.

  WILL BUILT A KITE. Its shape resembled the shape of the cardboard box. It consisted of two rectangular planes made of linen stretched over light wooden frames. Each surface was five feet wide and thirteen inches from front to rear. One plane was superimposed on the other, about thirteen inches apart, connected to each other by uprights or struts. The struts were attached with wire loops, so the upper plane could shift forward and back relative to the lower plane. A horizontal rudder or “elevator” protruded from the center rear strut. In front, Will attached two pairs of cords, with each pair tied to the ends of a stick. The two sticks were his controls.

  “HE HELD AN EMPTY BICYCLE TUBE BOX.”

  Wilbur conceives the theory of wing-warping

  On a day with a strong breeze, Will took the kite out to a field near Bone-brake Seminary in West Dayton. Two small boys, John and Walter Reiniger, went along. The boys stood with the kite, pulling until the cords were almost taut. When the breeze quickened, Will told the boys to give the device a little upward toss. It rose.

  By angling the sticks in opposite directions, he could make the kite’s surfaces twist, or warp, with one side presenting itself to the wind at a higher angle than the other. The high side rose, the low side dropped, and the kite rolled. By angling the sticks in the same direction, he could change the angle of the elevator, making the kite dive or climb. It worked.

  Chapter Three

  “Some Practical Experiments”

  “I SHALL BE ABLE TO STATE ITS PERFORMANCE WITHIN A SHORT TIME.”

  The Aerodromics Room in the South Shed of the Smithsonian

  SAMUEL LANGLEY ENJOYED few of his duties more than conducting important guests through the exhibit halls and laboratories of the Smithsonian, especially when the matter at hand exhibited his own contributions to science. He had such an opportunity on November 21, 1899, when members of the Board of Ordnance and Fortification arrived at the Smithsonian Castle.

  In his youth Langley had possessed the good looks of a leading man of the stage. Now, at 65, his face and physique had grown puffy from many fine meals, and his dark eyes, once intense, were squinty under sagging lids. He always greeted special guests in what an aide called “the ‘dim religious light’ of the Regents’ Room,” where dark oils of Smithsonian titans hung under a thirty-foot groin-vaulted ceiling. Here he delivered a lecture on the work completed since the awarding of the aerodrome contract. Under his instructions, “great difficulties” in constructing a new launching apparatus had been “substantially conquered,” in part by new flights of No. 5 and No. 6. (It didn’t hurt to reinforce board members’ recollection that in all the world, he alone possessed the power to send heav
ier-than-air machines through the air, even if they were unmanned.) The frame of the great aerodrome had advanced far enough that “it is expected to be in condition for its first trial of balancing in free air before the close of the present year.” A design for two superposed wings—one wing above the other—had been tried and found less effective than the original design, with one wing forward and one aft. As for the engine, it was being constructed in New York by “the only competent builder in the United States,” and “though it has been many months in hand, it is expected here from day to day . . . and I shall be able to state its actual performance I hope within a short time.”

  Then Langley led his guests out of the Castle, into the secret cloister of the South Shed and up the stairs to the cavernous Aerodromics Room. The unwieldy assemblage of rods and cables clearly constituted something less than a flying machine. Still, Charles Manly thought the members seemed “very much interested and pleased at the progress of the work and at the intricacy of the problems connected with it.” More inspection followed at the Eighth Street Wharf, where Langley showed off the new houseboat, the new launching apparatus, and a fully assembled No. 5, a promise of greater things to come.

  The military officers on the board must have guessed that Langley had been talking a better battle than he had so far fought. Surely some of them recalled his prediction of trials of a finished aerodrome by now—the end of 1899—and it was clear that he had a long way still to go.

  At the moment, actually, Langley was less worried about the work itself than about how to pay for it. With his original allotment of $25,000 running low, he had learned, finally, what no one had made him understand the previous fall—that the BOF never had approved his full request of $50,000, but only half that amount, with no more than an informal promise to consider another $25,000 upon seeing evidence of progress. Taken aback by this revelation, Langley was eager to welcome every board member to the Aerodromics Room, where they might catch the whiff of excitement and promise. He need not have worried so much, for the BOF’s reputation—and the War Department’s—now lay at the mercy of the aerodrome almost as much as did Langley’s own. The board members, eager to see their support for Langley vindicated, approved the additional $25,000 at their next meeting.

  Still, it was a close call. By January, the original $25,000 was gone, save for $1,500 reserved to pay Stephen Balzer for his engine. Richard Rathbun found there was not even enough money to cover January paychecks for the aerodrome workers. Langley sent a panicky query to Captain Isaac Newton Lewis, his contact at the BOF, who rushed a check over from the War Department by messenger.

  WORKING ON LANGLEY’S engine was threatening to drive Stephen Balzer out of business. By New Year’s Day, 1900, the engineer had spent more than twice the total contract price of $1,500. His original deadline had passed nearly a year earlier, and the engine was still far from finished. According to Charles Manly, Balzer now had “practically no means, outside of a small income required for personal living expenses, at his disposal for carrying on the work.” Manly urged Langley not to lose faith in Balzer’s “integrity of purpose,” and to advance him an additional $500. But Manly now felt his own credibility was at risk. He told the struggling engineer: “I have had to practically guarantee this amount myself and further assure the Secretary that the engine will be ready for its official test by the third of February. Now pray don’t disappoint me in this matter as I have staked a great deal on your being certain to allow nothing to interfere with the completion of the engine by February 3.”

  AFTER ONLY A YEAR on the job, Manly knew it was risky to keep the secretary waiting. With each passing month, the Smithsonian staff felt the rising pressure of Langley’s desire to make the great aerodrome fly.

  He was eternally impatient, as if haunted by a fear that he would fall short of his aims only because underlings and contractors and correspondents were always late. He preferred telegrams to letters, thinking they prompted quick responses—though his correspondents soon learned Langley’s telegrams were no more urgent than anyone else’s letters. He “was often unfairly impatient with assistants, and would betray irascibility by unduly raising his voice when things did not get on to suit him.” One day, John Brashear, his old associate and friend from Pittsburgh, watched Langley huffing and puffing over some delay. Brashear slipped a note to a friend in the room: “Same old nervous driving energy, but gets no further ahead than the easy man.”

  The portly R. L. Reed, foreman of the aerodromics shop, was a frequent target of Langley’s impatience. Cyrus Adler recalled being on hand one morning at about eleven o’clock when Langley summoned Reed. The secretary whipped off a sketchy design for some small device for the aerodrome and directed Reed to make a working model. Reed asked Langley when he wanted it. The secretary, rushing out the door, said, “This afternoon, at two o’clock.”

  Reed pondered this impossibility for a moment. Then he turned to Adler and remarked: “Do you know why the Secretary never married?”

  “No,” Adler said. “Why?”

  “He would have married one day and expected a grown-up family the next.”

  The secretary wanted work done not only quickly but to the highest standard of quality. Machines built under his eye should not only work properly but look good. Once, when it was decided that some parts on the aerodrome should be strengthened by brazing—a process that would blend two visually dissimilar surfaces—Langley remarked that it was a shame to spoil the elegant appearance.

  To most of the Institution’s staff, he was a cold and distant presence, seldom seen and never to be disturbed. He greeted few of the lesser employees by name; he didn’t know their names. From assistant secretaries down, staff members learned that if you happened to be walking with the secretary, he wanted you to stay a step or two behind, like a vassal behind a lord. Those who provoked his temper might find themselves face to face with a sputtering, stamping child. Once, rushing out of his office for an appointment, he barked to his valet: “William, my hat!” When the fellow returned a moment later with the secretary’s derby, Langley hurled it down the hall and shouted: “I said a hat!”

  Not only low-level staff feared him. Long after Charles Abbot became one of Langley’s successors as secretary, he recalled that as a young scientist in the Smithsonian’s astrophysical observatory, hand-picked by Langley himself, even one of his favorites, “I used to have cold shivers down my back whenever he sent for me.” Abbot learned to speak only when Langley asked a question. Otherwise the secretary was not listening.

  Only one member of the staff could face him down. This was the capable and clever William Karr, the Smithsonian treasurer, master of the arcane ledgers and budgets in which Langley took little interest. Once Langley returned a draft memorandum to Karr and ordered: “Take this and correct it and bring it back.” Karr coolly replied: “It’s correct already.” Usually Langley simply left Karr alone, a practice he would live to regret.

  Virtually no one but Langley and his two servants ever saw the inside of his townhouse in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, with its long view of the Castle through the humid haze. His social life, though robust, was conducted in private sanctums—the elegant homes of his friends and the mahogany lairs of his favorite clubs in Washington (the Cosmos), New York (the Metropolitan), and Boston (St. Botolph’s). When traveling, he had only to show one of the complimentary free passes provided to him annually by the Pennsylvania Railroad. (His personal shipping was provided gratis, too, courtesy of the major express companies.) He shunned the rough and tumble of political life in the capital. He detested appearing before Congress, delegating this chore whenever possible to scientist-politicians such as Charles Walcott. And though he had written widely for the popular press, he distrusted and disliked “our friends the reporters.” To discourage their curiosity, he ordered his groundskeepers to let the grass grow long around his laboratory sheds, so that passing journalists would think nothing important was going on inside. By his orde
r only three men carried a master key to the Castle’s innumerable doors—the assistant in charge of the office, the trusted Richard Rathbun, and himself. The doors to Langley’s own offices remained closed to all but his closest aides, and even they were forbidden from a smaller room adjoining his main office, which was sealed off as “a sort of holy place reserved for the Secretary alone.”

  Though in conversation he was erudite, even charming, he often displayed the awkwardness of a man who worries too much about the impression he is making. He had a sense of humor, but when he told a joke, he would spin on his heel and rush away, as if afraid of the consequences. Even among friends, he had trouble looking people in the eye. He would hold forth as if speaking to the floor.

  Yet among his circle of friends, and there were many, he was “not only revered, but loved.” They insisted that his forbidding “shell of hauteur” was shyness. All considered themselves lucky to spend time in his company; all spoke of warmth, generosity, and kindness which few others—except children—ever saw. Those close to him were touched by “his longing for friendship, for real affection, and his appreciative gratitude when he found it,” said a woman friend who knew him for many years. “I don’t think any one could know him well, could have glimpses of his inner life, and not love him.” Alexander Graham Bell was a gregarious man with friends around the world, yet Bell’s son-in-law believed Bell’s closest friend was Langley. The astronomer Charles Abbot overcame his early terror to decide that Langley was “a staunch friend,” “a great man with a warm heart, against whom none of us who long served him bear any grudge in our memories.” Favors and gifts, small and large, were common. When George Brown Goode’s widow made plans to move away from Washington, leaving her fifteen-year-old son in the city to finish school, Langley offered to house the boy. When Langley dined with his elderly friend John Wesley Powell, who had lost his right arm to Confederate fire at the battle of Shiloh, the secretary quietly cut up the food that Powell could not cut for himself. Walcott spoke of “his habit, when he once trusted a man, of implicitly trusting him in all things.”