by James Tobin
Both wrote clearly and well, though Orville detested writing while Will enjoyed it and wrote far more often. Family members thought Orville was perhaps the better mathematician.
The chemistry between them was complex and probably irrecoverable. “Wilbur was good at starting things,” Ivonette remembered. But “he’d get discouraged, and Orville would just be bubbling over. He’d want to go on with it, you know—‘If you do so and so, it will do so and so.’” But Orville was too much the tinkerer, always seeing a new way to improve something, and never finishing it. Will would rein him in and say, “Quit inventing. Let’s go with what we’ve got.” Once, when Orville was doing an assembly by himself, Kate told Will that “Orv seems to be getting along pretty well with putting the machine together, though, of course, we all understand that a machine can never really be finished!”
Both undoubtedly possessed intellectual gifts of a very high order. But Orville’s intelligence tended to be purely practical, while Will was both practical and wise. He saw more, and thought more broadly. It appears that he had the superior imagination of the two, and extraordinary powers of concentration.
Once the brothers began to talk about the problem of flight in earnest, their ideas became more or less indissoluble. But it is impossible to imagine Orville, bright as he was, supplying the driving force that started their work and kept it going from the back room of a store in Ohio to conferences with capitalists, presidents, and kings. Will did that. He was the leader, from the beginning to the end.
THE DAYTON WRIGHTS saw little of Reuchlin, the eldest son, and his young family. Reuchlin had married Lou Billheimer, the daughter of United Brethren missionaries, and moved to Kansas, where he struggled to make a living as a farmer. Relations were a little strained, for Reuch and his father had clashed in the past, and the Dayton Wrights did not care for the Billheimer clan. Reuch and Lou had three children—Helen Margaret, Herbert, and Bertha Ellwyn (after a daughter, Caroline, died). During their Christmas visit to Dayton in 1900, Will, Orv, and Kate had seen a good deal of the children, and silently disapproved as the sisters bullied their little brother, and especially as Reuch and Lou showed a tendency to take the girls’ side, since “Herbert was the one who raised the least strenuous kick.” Will’s heart went out to Herbert, “a bright manly little fellow,” and “a little quieter in his disposition than most children.” But he held his tongue, not wanting to interfere.
Then Will learned that Reuch and Lou planned to take Herbert out of school and start him early in a business career. Will was appalled, and decided he must say something on the youngster’s behalf. He sent a letter, which does not survive, expressing his concern. Lou, apparently misreading much of what Will had said, fired back a hurt letter of her own, saying that not only Herbert but all the Wright males could use a strong push in the direction of ambition and success.
Responding, Will chose his words carefully. He pointed out the discrepancy between raising a child on the Golden Rule and then pushing him into the marketplace to make his living.
When I learned that you intended to put him into business early I could not help feeling that in teaching him to prefer others to himself you were giving him a very poor training for the life work you had chosen for him.
In business it is the aggressive man who continually has his eye on his own interest who succeeds. Business is merely a form of warfare in which each combatant strives to get the business away from his competitors and at the same time keep them from getting what he already has. No man has ever been successful in business who was not aggressive, self-assertive and even a little bit selfish perhaps. There is nothing reprehensible in an aggressive disposition, so long as it is not carried to excess, for such men make the world and its affairs move. I agree that a college training is wasted on a man who expects to follow commercial pursuits. Neither will putting a boy, who has not the aggressive business instinct, to work early, make a successful business man of him.
Will conceded the truth of Lou’s dig about the shortcomings of the Wright men. “I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are all lacking in determination and push,” he said. “That is the very reason that none of us have been or will be more than ordinary business men. . . . Not one of us has as yet made particular use of the talents in which he excells other men. That is why our success has been only moderate. We ought not to have been business men.” For that very reason, it would be unwise to push Herbert into business, for he was cut from the same cloth. The boy had the gifts to accomplish something “really great,” Will said, but he must be steered in a direction that matched his talents.
There is always [a] danger that a person of his disposition will, if left to depend upon himself, retire into the first corner he falls into and remain there all his life struggling for a bare existence, (unless some earthquake throws him out into a more favorable location), when if put on the right path with proper special equipment he would advance far. Many men are better fitted for improving chances offered them than in turning up the chances themselves. . . . If left to himself he will not find out what he would like to be until his chance to attain his wish is past.
This letter may be as close to autobiography as Wilbur Wright ever came. In the concern for his nephew, one can trace his understanding of what had happened in his own life—the missed chances for college and a vocation in science or teaching; the unintended drift into business; the misplaced talents seeking a proper outlet.
A single word provided a clue that at thirty-four, he had not lost hope in his own chances: “Not one of us has as yet made particular use of the talents in which he excells other men.”
IN JUNE 1901, Octave Chanute asked the Wrights if he might pay them a visit. The household went into an uproar of preparation. Prominent churchmen had dined at the Wrights’ table, and the occasional Dayton dignitary, but no one like Chanute, an international leader in his field, a friend of such men as Samuel Langley.
In a warm conversation that lasted far into the evening, the Wrights described their experiments and plans in detail. Chanute advanced a proposal. He had been thinking of organizing “a sort of tournament” where aeronautical experimenters might share ideas as they competed in gliding. Such an event could be held at the Wrights’ camp at Kitty Hawk later that year. He proposed to join them there and invite two other men—Edward Huffaker, Langley’s former assistant, who was building a new glider for Chanute; and George Spratt, a young Pennsylvanian who was building his own glider. Chanute said all of them, sharing ideas, could make faster progress together than on their own. He had few hopes for his own new glider, but the Wrights might “extract instruction from its failure.”
The Wrights needed no assistance and wanted no guests. They had little enough time to work on their own ideas, and none to spare for the ideas of others. Will tried gently to parry Chanute’s proposal, but the older man failed to take the hint.
Still, this unexpected inconvenience paled in comparison to the compliment of such a figure as Octave Chanute paying close attention to their experiments. Will could not resist the temptation to crow a little to Reuchlin. He recited Chanute’s accomplishments as an engineer and as “the leading authority of the world on aeronautics,” then reported that he had been “very much astonished at our views and methods and results, and after studying the matter over night said that he had reached the conclusion that we would probably reach results before he did.”
Several days later, the Wrights received a gift from Chanute in the mail—a hand-held brass instrument, about the size of a compass, called a clinometer, which could be used to measure the angle of a sand dune, the descent of a glider, or the angle of their tether rope. It would dramatically improve the precision of their measurements. “We are of course delighted with so beautiful a little instrument,” Will replied, “and our pleasure in it is very much increased by the fact that it is to us a token of your friendly interest in us and our experiments. We find it very convenient and quite accurate.”
> The brothers had brought on a new man to help at the shop—Charlie Taylor, a mechanic who had married into the family of their landlord. They asked him to watch the business while they were gone, and they got away earlier than expected, on the seventh of July.
AS THE WRIGHTS APPROACHED the Atlantic, Samuel Langley was in the South Pacific. He had left Washington a few weeks earlier, before the worst of the tidewater humidity crawled up the Potomac. In Chicago he spoke with Octave Chanute, then went on to the West Coast, where he boarded a ship for Tahiti.
Langley was satisfied now that Charles Manly could handle the aerodrome work unsupervised for a few weeks. And he would not deny himself the diversions and relaxation of a summer journey. On his trips he could enjoy being the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution without the burdens of the job itself. Crews on passenger trains and great steamships accorded him all the little privileges and comforts due a man of his high station. He could escape the political headaches of Washington and give his mind over to science, the arts, and the contemplation of nature.
He could look back over the winter of 1900–01 with a mixture of frustration and satisfaction. He and Manly had done a good deal of hiring. The aerodrome staff now included seven machinists and three carpenters. This meant faster progress, but also a monthly payroll of more than eight hundred dollars, a figure that included neither Manly’s salary nor the ever-growing costs of the engine, the giant houseboat (and all its associated fees for dockage, towing, and upkeep), not to mention the flying machine itself. At this rate his appropriation would not last for long.
For his expenditures over the last year, he could record steady improvement in the great aerodrome’s engine. Manly had converted Stephen Balzer’s handiwork from a rotary to a radial design that was achieving eighteen horsepower in bench tests. That was much better than Balzer’s best. But the engine still lacked the power they thought necessary to get the aerodrome into the air.
To settle questions of the aerodrome’s design and construction, Langley had ordered Manly to build a quarter-scale model that would match the great aerodrome down to its own tiny, custom-made gasoline engine. If it could keep its balance, then the full-sized version should be able to do so, too. For weeks that spring Manly raced to get the quarter-scale ready for a trial before Langley’s trip, despite smashed cylinders, ruptured propellers, and a bent frame. Then, on June 18, 1901, on the same remote stretch of the Potomac where Langley had flown his original models in 1896, the quarter-scale made several straight-line flights in a barely detectable breeze of two miles per hour. The engine overheated each time, cutting the flights to a few hundred feet. Nonetheless, Manly recorded, they “showed conclusively that the balancing of the aerodrome was correct, at least as far as motion in a straight line and in a quiet atmosphere was concerned.”
Even before this, Manly had gained enough confidence in his and Langley’s handiwork to make a critical personal decision. He and his patron had spoken several times about “the question of who will be the aeronaut to accompany the large aerodrome in its coming field trials.” Langley had pondered the problem with a good deal of anxiety, knowing the moral burden that would fall on him if the aerodrome met with disaster. Manly had said he wanted the job, though the secretary thought he was “not anxious” for it. And Langley hesitated to give it to him, believing that “engineering knowledge . . . is of less consequence than a general clear head and ability for quick decision and action united with a most important quality implying the absence of nervousness which for want of a better word I will call unperturbability, a quality which prevents a man from losing his head at the critical moment.” He considered one of Charles Walcott’s young men at the Geological Survey. But Manly now put himself on record, perhaps at Langley’s request. “I am now, as I have been at all times during the past two years, ready to occupy this position . . . I fully recognize the danger to which I should be subjected in such experiments in free flight and I desire to assure you that in accepting such a position I do so entirely at my own suggestion and of my own free will and accord, and I beg that you will permit me to express to you my great appreciation of the very kind interest which you have shown in pointing out . . . the personal danger to which I would be subjected.
“I shall make no attempt to here express my appreciation of your unceasing kindness to me ever since my first connection with the work, for such a task would be impossible.”
Langley agreed. With that resolved, and the design of the aerodrome settled, they could look forward to the perfection of the engine over the coming winter, then trials in 1902. In the meantime, for a few weeks in the South Seas, the secretary could think about something else.
LANGLEY HAD READ ABOUT the fire walkers of the Pacific islands—aboriginal priests who uttered incantations that allowed them to walk barefoot across red-hot stones without burning themselves. Reliable witnesses had given accounts of such ceremonies in Hawaii, Tahiti, and elsewhere around the world. Langley had read the great Scottish anthropologist James Fraser’s account of them in The Golden Bough, and just recently, a scholarly description by the scientist Andrew Lang. In Tahiti, “respectable eyewitnesses and sharers in the trial” told Langley the thing really had been done. His curiosity was aroused. “I could not doubt that if all these were verified by my own observation, it would mean nothing less to me than a departure from the customary order of nature.” There were many who said his aerodrome was an attempt to violate that order. So this would be “something very well worth seeing indeed.”
Thus it happened that the elderly Boston astrophysicist in frock coat and starched collar, descendent of Puritan divines, met the elderly Tahitian Papa-Ita, one of the last priests of Raiatea and “the finest looking native that I have seen; tall, dignified in bearing, with unusually intelligent features,” and “dressed with garlands of flowers.” Langley offered to cover the cost of a fire walk ceremony, but the priest said through an interpreter that would not be necessary. He planned to make a fire walk on July 17, the day before Langley’s ship was to sail for home.
At a place near the beach, within the sound of breakers on the barrier reef, the secretary observed the preparations closely. He watched men lay firewood at the bottom of a trench twenty-one feet long, nine feet wide, and two feet deep. They set the logs on fire, then covered the blaze with three or four layers of stones, each one weighing, he estimated, forty to eighty pounds. Four hours later, when the ceremony was about to occur and a crowd had gathered, Langley observed that the lowest of the three layers of stones had become literally red-hot, some of the stones “splitting with loud reports.” The stones of the top layer—which were “certainly not red-hot”—were pushed away with long poles. It was the next layer down—the middle layer, not directly in the fire, though “no doubt very hot”—that Papa-Ita, after uttering spells, proceeded to walk across several times. Other Tahitians followed, mostly in bare feet, then a number of Europeans, mostly in shoes. (Langley himself demurred.) None was burned, though tongues of fire could be seen among the glowing stones at the bottom of the trench.
But “the crucial question,” Langley said, “was, How hot was the upper part of this upper layer on which the feet were to rest an instant in passing?”
He received Papa-Ita’s permission to have one stone removed for an immediate test. He chose one that everyone had stepped on. Its lower end had rested in what appeared to be the hottest part of the fire. “I could think of no ready thermometric method that could give an absolutely trustworthy answer.” So to arrive at a rough estimate, he had the stone dropped in a large bucket half-filled with water. The water roared into a violent boil. When the boiling stopped, Langley measured the water remaining in the bucket, to determine how much had evaporated. By this method he made a rough estimate that the stone’s mean temperature was about twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit—nearly hot enough to glow red, and certainly hot enough to burn skin.
Langley broke off a chunk of the stone and took it back to Washington. There,
Smithsonian scientists solved the puzzle. The stone turned out to be a highly porous form of basalt. You could hold a piece of it in your hand, heat the other end indefinitely with a blow-torch, yet your hand would not be burned. The substance was “an exceedingly bad conductor of heat.” The stones got burning hot on the bottom, but not on the top.
In view of the recent interest the fire walk had aroused among scholars, Langley decided to report his findings. In a letter to the British journal Nature, he described the scene, his improvised field test, and his ultimate discovery that the properties of the stone, not magic, explained this apparent violation of the “order of nature.” In conclusion he said: “I have reason to believe that I saw a very favorable specimen of a fire walk. It was a sight well worth seeing. It was a most clever and interesting piece of savage magic, but from the evidence I have just given I am obliged to say (almost regretfully) that it was not a miracle.”
