To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  Through the last days of August and early September, he worked alone in dreadful heat. Milton was away on church business. Orville was apparently not much help. He was devoting his free hours to a new mandolin. “We are getting even with the neighborhood at last for the noise they have made on pianos,” Kate informed her father. “He sits around and picks that thing until I can hardly stay in the house.”

  Kate’s own summer had been lonesome, punctuated only by a spur-of-the-moment excursion to Chicago to visit friends and see the sights. Back in Dayton on August 19, her twenty-sixth birthday, she “added one more year to my already advanced age” with only her preoccupied brothers for company, plus a bust of Sir Walter Scott, which they presented to her as their birthday gift. Now Orville announced that he, too, was about to leave her. He had decided to follow Will to North Carolina once the glider was assembled there. She pulled her own trunk out of storage for Will and cleaned out Milton’s trunk for Orv.

  Will went about the house in a silent fog of concentration. Suddenly he realized he had not yet told his father about his plan.

  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. It is my belief that flight is possible and, while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit, I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it. It is almost the only great problem which has not been pursued by a multitude of investigators, and therefore carried to a point where further progress is very difficult. I am certain I can reach a point much in advance of any previous workers in this field even if complete success is not attained just at present. At any rate, I shall have an outing of several weeks and see a part of the world I have never before visited.

  Milton’s reaction has not survived, but he seems to have expressed some alarm. Will promised he would be careful. Kate tucked a jar of jam in his trunk.

  AS WILL PREPARED to travel far from civilization, Langley and Manly did the opposite. From Liverpool, they went straight to London, where they presented their compliments to Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim. Besides Langley and Lilienthal, no figure stood larger in the chronicle of those who had pursued the goal of powered flight.

  Born in Maine in 1840, Maxim had taught himself coach-building and engineering, then found success in New York’s newborn electrical industry in the 1870s and 1880s. Visiting the Paris Exhibition in 1881, he is said to have met a fellow engineer who advised Maxim that if he wanted to make his fortune, he should “invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.” On that advice, Maxim developed a gun that would fire six hundred rounds per minute—the first truly automatic machine gun. When the weapon was adopted by the armies of Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Russia, Maxim had his fortune, and the leisure to pursue his fascination with flight. He convinced himself of the theoretical possibility of artificial flight, then focused on the problem of a proper engine. Like Langley, he chose not to focus on balance and steering. “It is neither necessary nor practical to imitate the bird too closely, because screw propellers have been found to be very efficient,” he wrote in 1892. “Without doubt, the motor is the chief thing to be considered.”

  At his rented estate in Kent, Maxim constructed a flying machine that weighed four tons. Its wings—one set above and one below—stretched 107 feet from tip to tip. The craft held two 180-horsepower steam engines, one for each of two eighteen-foot propellers, and space for a crew of three men. Maxim laid a track eighteen hundred feet long across his fields. One rail ran below, to carry the craft on its takeoff run. Another rail ran along above the first, with a guard to keep the machine from rising more than a few inches. Maxim just wanted to see if he could get it off the ground; he had no way to control the craft in the air. On July 31, 1894, at a cost of some twenty-thousand pounds, the machine accomplished Maxim’s aim. Engines roaring, it reached a speed of forty-two miles per hour, heaved itself off the track, and promptly smashed the upper guardrail. Maxim cut the engines and bumped to earth, his aerial experiments at an end. He asked the United States to grant him a patent, but his application was denied because the machine lacked a balloon to provide lift, and so “was not, in the eye of the law, a useful invention.” Nonetheless, Maxim had been recognized ever since as a pioneer of the heavier-than-air school of flight enthusiasts, and his prestige, like Langley’s, lent the field a little more respectability.

  Hearing Langley tell of his troubles, the imperious Maxim dismissed Stephen Balzer’s rotary design and advised Langley to see Comte Albert de Dion, the French pioneer of the internal combustion engine. With Georges-Thadee Bouton, the count had built steam- and gasoline-powered engines for tricycles, quadricycles, and now automobiles. Maxim believed de Dion had a suitably light engine that could meet the need for twelve horsepower.

  But in Paris, de Dion could tell Langley nothing more than how much time he had wasted. In near-perfect English, the count dismissed rotary engines, which he said he had tried and abandoned. He also spoke of difficulties inherent in building a radial engine of sufficient lightness. Yes, he was thinking of building a flying machine engine of his own, but no, he “would not care to give any drawings for work that is incessantly being modified.” And no, he had “no engine to sell.” De Dion advised Langley that his own successes had been won only “at the cost of incessant experiment in detail and of numberless failures.” “As for my work,” Langley said, “like any other inventor’s work, he believes there is nothing for it but time and patience.”

  So Maxim and de Dion lost their chance to power the first man into the air—but they also effectively killed Stephen Balzer’s last chance. Large reputations weighed heavily with Langley, and here were two premier inventors in England and France who said Balzer’s plan was no good. Both men had reinforced the secretary’s instinct to stick with what had been done before—the very instinct he was following in the design of the aerodrome’s frame and wings. He had barely left de Dion’s shop when he drafted instructions to Manly, who had had no luck finding an engine-builder in either Germany or Belgium. “In view of the advice of Mr. Maxim against a rotary engine and the strongly confirmatory opinion of the Comte de Dion . . . I decide as follows:. . . further work on the original Balzer engine is to be discontinued when the experiments in actual construction are finished.”

  Manly sailed for New York, went directly to Balzer’s shop, and tested the engine. In June it had made eight horsepower. Now it barely registered six. Manly told Balzer to box everything and ship the lot to the Smithsonian. Balzer was finished.

  In Paris, Langley stewed and grumbled. He blamed not only the hapless Balzer himself, but the steadfast Manly, too, for sticking up for Balzer so long. “I should be disposed to begin afresh,” he wrote Richard Rathbun, “rather than spend more time and money in any modification of this unhappy Balzer affair, for if it has not wrecked the whole of my efforts to make an effective flying machine threatens to do so as we draw near the end of the money.”

  Rathbun knew how to soothe his superior. “I regret that you have not been able to secure more instruction about light engines,” the assistant secretary wrote from Washington, “as that would make your work here so much easier, but still, if you do it all yourself, the honor will be the greater, and I for one have entire confidence in your ultimate success.”

  IN SEPTEMBER 1900, the nation was sweltering in a weather pattern driven by a hurricane over the western Atlantic. As Will arrived by train at Old Point, Virginia, and crossed Hampton Roads to Norfolk by steamer, the storm was entering the Caribbean Sea on a line that would take it across Cuba toward Galveston, Texas, where it would kill six thousand people. In Norfolk the immense weather pattern drove temperatures close to one hundred degrees. Will, dressed in his usual business woolens, searched the lumber yards in vain for spruce. He had to settle for sixteen-foot lengths of white pine—three feet shorter than he ne
eded—which he sent on to nearby Elizabeth City, North Carolina. This was the closest mainland town to the Outer Banks. But he could find no one there who had even heard of a village called Kitty Hawk, let alone someone who could tell him how to get there.

  In a steaming hotel room, Will wrote a letter calculated to calm his father about his safety. “I supposed you knew that I was studying up the flying question with a view to making some practical experiments.” The region offered the wind he needed and safer conditions than any place close to Dayton. “In order to obtain support from the air it is necessary, with wings of reasonable size, to move through it at the rate of fifteen or twenty miles per hour. . . . If the wind blows with proper speed support can be obtained without movement with reference to the ground. It is safer to practice in a wind provided this is not too much broken up into eddies and sudden gusts by hills, trees &c.” Moreover, it was “much cheaper to go to a distant point where practice may be constant than to choose a nearer spot where three days out of four might be wasted.

  “I have no intention of risking injury to any great extent, and have no expectation of being hurt. I will be careful, and will not attempt new experiments in dangerous situations. I think the danger much less than in most athletic games.”

  Finally Will found a malodorous fisherman named Israel Perry who agreed to carry him, his trunk, and his supplies to his destination. Night was coming on as Perry, who struck Will as “a little uneasy,” piloted his schooner out of the protected Pasquotank River into the broad, choppy waters of Albemarle Sound. They spent the night struggling against a sudden gale that tore two sails from Perry’s half-rotted masts and tossed waves over the stern. Will believed that “Israel had been so long a stranger to the touch of water upon his skin that it affected him very much.”

  BILL TATE, forty years old, was a fisherman, a commissioner of Currituck County, and the best-educated citizen of Kitty Hawk, population about sixty. He also acted as assistant to the postmaster—his wife, Addie. Tate was the son of a shipwrecked Scotsman. This made him not at all unusual among the residents, many of whom were descended from people who had made lives on the Outer Banks only because Atlantic storms had stranded them there. The Tates lived in Kitty Hawk’s finest home—a two-story frame house, unpainted and unplastered, with no books, no pictures on the wall, and little furniture. The rest of the village was a collection of wind-bleached shacks. The weather station stood about a mile away. It was “about as desolate a region as exists near civilization,” a visitor said.

  Tate had replied to the kite man’s letter on August 18 but had heard nothing more from Ohio. Now, three weeks later, he opened his door to find a formal young man, neatly dressed but haggard, who introduced himself as Wilbur Wright, “to whom you wrote concerning this section.” The visitor told Tate he had had nothing to eat for forty-eight hours but one jar of jelly. Addie Tate fed him eggs and ham and insisted he stay with them.

  For two weeks, the Tates, their two young daughters, and a passing parade of fishermen, Coast Guard lifesavers, and their families watched as the stranger worked in the yard in front of the Tates’ house. The product of his labor was a two-wing kite large enough to carry a man. Gently curving ribs gave the wings a shape like a bird’s wing. They were covered in white French sateen, a finer fabric than most Kitty Hawkers had ever seen. A rectangular surface of the same material stuck out in front. Slim wooden uprights and criss-crossing wires gave the structure a light, springy strength.

  On September 28, a second Mr. Wright arrived at Kitty Hawk. This one wore a mustache and was a little more fastidious in his carriage and grooming. He joined his brother at the Tates’. The two outlanders tinkered for another day or two, then said their machine was ready for a test.

  • • •

  ON WEDNESDAY, October 3, Will and Orv emerged from their tent after breakfast to find the wind rippling their sleeves and blowing a hollow chorus in their ears. Whoever left a drill on the ground for an hour would come back to find it half-covered with sand, a tiny drift at its edge. If they leaned over to tie a shoe, they could feel the sting of invisible grains on their hands. For old kite flyers like the Wright brothers, it was a good day.

  “THEY FELT ITS WEIGHT EVAPORATE.”

  The Wrights’ first glider, flown as a kite at Kitty Hawk, 1900

  They walked out on the dune. Bill Tate went along to help. Out near the lifesaving station, the brothers stood at either end of the glider, gripping the uprights to keep it steady. Turning it to face the wind, they felt its weight evaporate. They attached lines and let the thing rise as a kite. Another test or two showed that by pulling a string tied to the horizontal rudder at the front, they could ease the glider up and down as they pleased. This was enough to make Will want to try a manned test. He stepped into the eighteen-inch slot they had left for an operator in the lower wing. With Orville at one tip and Tate at the other, each holding the kite strings, the three men ran along together. Their shoes sank in the sand, but they developed enough momentum for Will’s feet to leave the ground. Orv and Bill kept running, hauling the lines behind them, and Will rose to a height of about eight feet. When he tried the bar in front that controlled the rudder’s angle, the machine pitched and rose. “Lemme down! Lemme down! Lemme down!” he cried. Orv and Tate slowed to let the glider come down. Later Will would only say: “I promised Father that I would take care of myself.”

  TO ANYONE WHO YEARNS TO FLY, the pull of a multiline kite on its strings is mesmerizing. Though not aloft himself, the operator feels the sensations of flight through the lines—the tension of wing against wind and the remarkable power to turn the kite right or left or up or down by tugs on the strings. Both Wrights knew something of this feeling from boyhood. Now, with the largest kite they had ever flown, they lingered on the beach whenever the wind was good, squinting upward as the sun passed overhead and fell toward Albemarle Sound. The kite had lessons to teach, and the Wrights were patient students. They developed a system for measuring its lift and drift at various angles to the wind. With a grocer’s spring scale they measured the pounds of pull on the rope, and they measured the angle of the rope from the vertical, probably using a straight edge with a protractor head, a common tool they likely would have used in their shop at home. With a little high school trigonometry, they could arrive at figures for lift (the pull straight up) and drift (the backward pull). The numbers were perplexing. The kite possessed lift, but significantly less than Lilienthal’s tables had predicted, and not enough to support the weight of an operator in a moderate wind. The brothers gave up Will’s scheme of flying the glider from an improvised tower and began to accept the inevitable. If Will wanted to ride the machine, he would have to run down a slope and glide forward through the air, like Lilienthal. And it would take a strong wind to lift him.

  Bill Tate began to rush through his daily work in two or three hours so that he could hang around with the brothers for the rest of each day. Kids and fishermen walked over to watch as time permitted. They asked the obvious questions: What were they up to? What was this really all about? As the Ohio men answered, little by little it became clear that they were not just interested in experiments with kites, but in inventing a flying machine.

  To the Kitty Hawkers, the Wrights’ kite would have looked nothing like a bird or a kite or anything familiar at all, except perhaps an oversized crate with its sides cut out. The Ohioans called the cloth platform in front a horizontal rudder, but the Kitty Hawkers knew boats and this looked like no rudder they had ever seen. Yet as the crate hovered overhead, bucking a bit with every gust, the experimenters would tug on a string in front. Then Tate and the others saw that indeed the little contraption in front did act as a rudder, though it moved the crate up or down instead of side to side. When the brothers pulled other lines, the whole contraption contorted slightly, as if an invisible hand were squeezing it out of its proper shape. Then one side or the other would descend a foot or two, like a shoulder dropping. One day a gust caught the contraption as
it sat on the sand and flipped it up and over in a crashing cartwheel, cracking spars and ribs. But the brothers went at the thing with their tools, and three days later they had it back in the air. Sometimes they loaded heavy chains on the lower surface to see if it would lift the weight. It did.

  One day Bill Tate’s eight-year-old nephew Tom was standing around. He was a chatty kid who had been telling the visitors tall tales; they liked him. The brothers asked if he cared to ride. Tom said he would, and a moment later he was lying on his belly up in the air.