by James Tobin
OCTAVE CHANUTE’S WIFE died in April 1902. He himself was seventy, and slowing down. “I do not expect to experiment further,” he confessed to Langley. Yet he clung to the hope that by sponsoring and coordinating the efforts of younger men, he might still become, if not the father of flight, at least its grandfather. And he still believed the solution lay in a wing that would adjust automatically to the vagaries of the wind, ensuring equilibrium without depending on the fallible instincts of the operator.
Chanute proposed to give two machines to the Wrights for testing at Kitty Hawk in 1902—one designed by Charles Lamson, a manufacturer and flight hobbyist who had experimented with manned kites, another designed by Chanute himself, with help from the experimenter Augustus Herring. The brothers were desperate to make the most of their precious time. They wanted nothing less than to be burdened with extra work. Their memory of the lazy, preachifying Edward Huffaker remained strong from the summer before, when “my brother and myself . . . could do more work in one week, than in two weeks after Mr. Huffaker’s arrival.” Augustus Herring sounded worse. They had heard that he was prickly, unpleasant, and “of a somewhat jealous disposition,” always seizing more credit than he was due and picking fights with collaborators. Chanute chose not to tell Will that Herring had come to Chicago that summer with a plea to “let him rebuild gliding machines, ‘to beat Mr. Wright.’” Had Will known that, his polite parries would have turned to frosty rejection.
As it was, the stolid Chanute either missed all Will’s hints or simply chose to ignore them. He was determined to have a role in—or at least a look at—the Wrights’ work at Kitty Hawk. The best Will could do was encourage him to delay his arrival at Kitty Hawk for several weeks, leaving the brothers time to work undistracted with their enormous new machine.
A YEAR IN THE WIND had so buckled the Wrights’ wooden shed at Kitty Hawk that the roof sloped sharply at either end and the interior “strongly resembles the horror of an earthquake in its actual progress.” Though both Will and Orv caught colds on the train, they went about the work of rebuilding the camp undismayed. The sun was shining and mosquitoes were scarce. They bolstered the shed’s sagging floors and built a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot addition. With a device of their own invention they drilled the best well in Kitty Hawk, finding “splendid water” seventeen feet down. They upholstered their wooden chairs with excelsior and burlap and laid two layers of burlap and another of oilcloth over their dining table to make a soft top. More burlap made two comfortable bunks in the rafters.
In Elizabeth City they had picked up an oven and a barrel of gasoline. Orville had brought a rifle to shoot the small water fowl that skittered among the breakers, so they had occasional fresh meat, though the birds were so small that “after a bullet has gone through one of them there is just a little meat left around the edges.” To ease the long round trip between the village and the camp, they had brought a bicycle, in parts, and fussed with the gears so they could ride it over sand. Their shelves were soon stocked with precise rows of canned goods.
“We fitted up our living arrangements much more comfortably than last year,” Will told George Spratt. “There are . . . improvements too numerous to mention, and no Huffaker and no mosquitoes, so we are having a splendid time.” He invited Spratt to join them.
In Kitty Hawk the Wrights were now treated as familiar and welcome guests. The locals had seen enough of them to respect them and finally to like them, though they had not been the easiest men to get to know. “They didn’t put themselves out to get acquainted with anybody,” said John Daniels, one of the regulars at the lifesaving station. “Just stuck to themselves, and we had to get acquainted with them. They were two of the workingest boys I ever saw, and when they worked they worked. I never saw men so wrapped up in their work in my life. They had their whole heart and soul in what they were doing, and when they were working we could come around and stand right over them and they wouldn’t pay any more attention to us than if we weren’t there at all. After their day’s work was over they were different; then they were the nicest fellows you ever saw and treated us fine.” The brothers shared good food cooked well and asked questions about the local economy, the land, the weather, and the families of the village. They were good with the children. That surely scored points, as did their “uniform courtesy to everyone.”
The flying proposition remained dubious among the villagers. Two years earlier, they had regarded the Wrights as “a pair of crazy fools,” Daniels said. “We laughed about ’em among ourselves.” When the early gliders stayed in the air, they gained a shred of credibility. Yet their behavior, for all their hard work and obvious good character, remained decidedly odd. Sometimes the lifesavers would look over from the station and see the Ohioans standing near the beach, faces upturned, watching intently as gulls soared and banked overhead, even spreading their arms and twisting their wrists in imitation of the birds. An hour later the lifesavers would look again and there the brothers would be, still watching the birds.
IN FACT, the brothers spent less time watching the gulls than they did watching the eagles, ospreys, hawks, and buzzards that flew some distance inland from the crashing breakers, above the dunes where the brothers flew themselves. The gulls’ gymnastics in the turbulent air of the shoreline were fascinating. But the big carrion-eaters and birds of prey spent more time in the aeronautical state of soaring—that is, hanging more or less motionless in the air, neither falling nor rising, their wings held steady. A soaring bird, as Will put it, is “gliding downwards through a rising current of air which has a rate of ascent equal to the bird’s relative rate of descent.” The soaring bird enjoys a perfect balance among the forces of lift, drift, and gravity. It was what the brothers aspired to.
On cold, cloudy days, the Wrights observed that the birds could soar only along the line where the forest met the dunes, taking advantage of the wind’s upward turn as it collided with the trees. On clear days, the birds found what Will deduced to be columns of air rising from the sun-baked sand. They would flap their wings to reach a certain height, then “rise on motionless wings” in wide spirals. One day the brothers noticed a tiny flash of light far below a spiraling eagle; it was a falling feather reflecting the sun. They watched as the feather reversed directions and rapidly rose out of sight. “It apparently was drawn into the same rising current in which the eagles were soaring, and was carried up like the birds.”
Will’s favorites were the buzzards, which soared more often than the others. One day, atop the summit of the West Hill, he watched a buzzard at eye level only seventy-five feet away. It hung all but motionless over the steep slope. Will believed his own artificial wings were—or could be—as good as this bird’s. He was less sure he could develop the buzzard’s skill. “There is no question in my mind that men can build wings having as little or less relative resistance than that of the best soaring birds. The bird’s wings are undoubtedly very well designed indeed, but it is not any extraordinary efficiency that strikes with astonishment but rather the marvelous skill with which they are used. . . . The soaring problem is apparently not so much one of better wings as of better operators.” To develop that skill remained the brothers’ chief desire, and they could attain it only with the sort of prolonged practice that long, safe glides could afford them.
If the wind tunnel tests had told the truth, and if the brothers had interpreted the tests correctly, then their new machine would carry them on long, flat glides, with the operator able to keep his balance in sudden gusts, and to turn left and right. Their ultimate aim remained the same as in 1900. If their sustaining surfaces were of the proper size and shape, and the wind just right and the operator canny, they might approach the feat of soaring. That is, the pilot might coast on the wind for moments at a time with only the most gradual loss in altitude. He could practice and eventually master the art of equilibrium that had eluded Otto Lilienthal. Indeed, he might conceivably hover above a single spot for a minute, two minutes, perhaps many more minutes
, as the invisible forces of lift, drift, and gravity held the machine in perfect equilibrium. “When once it becomes possible to undertake continuous soaring advancement should be rapid.”
IN THE SHED AT KITTY HAWK, the brothers took apart the old glider from the summer of 1901 to make space for the new machine. They opened their crates and began the assembly. Over eleven days, the machine took shape.
It was an extraordinary work of art, science, and craft. It was created to serve a beautiful function, so the form, following the function, took on its own odd and ungainly beauty. The leading corners of the wings were quarter-circles, the trailing corners shaped like scoops. In cross-section, the wings humped in front and trailed away in a graceful curve to the rear. The linen skin was taut under the hand, the wires tight. With 305 square feet of wing space, it was much bigger than Lilienthal’s gliders and Chanute’s double-decker, which it resembled only in the biplane configuration and the trusslike connections between the wings. Viewed directly from in front or from the side, there was hardly anything to see but a spare collection of lines—horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and curved. Only when viewed from above or below did the craft seem to turn solid and substantial, owing to the wings, thirty-two feet from tip to tip and five feet from front to back. Yet the glider weighed only 112 pounds. One man could stand at a wingtip, grasp a wooden upright with one hand, and easily lift his end several feet off the ground. Three men could pick the glider up and carry it around with little trouble. If they dropped it, it shuddered, but there was no damage. “It was built to withstand hard usage,” Will said, and though it looked thin and spare, almost weak, it felt sturdy. When they faced it into a steady breeze, it no longer seemed ungainly. Suddenly they were no longer holding it up but holding it down.
On Wednesday, September 10, the brothers tested the completed upper wing as a kite. Two days later they tested the lower wing. Attaching a hand-held scale to the ropes, they found that these curved surfaces, flown by themselves, exerted much less pull on the lines than their 1901 machine had. This meant the wind was guiding the wing into a flatter angle of attack, which promised flatter, longer glides.
Their first gliders, especially the one built in 1900, had flown as any child’s kite flies, with the line at a slanting angle of about forty-five degrees. The closer a kite’s line ascends to the vertical, the greater its efficiency. A kite whose cord runs on a vertical line down to the operator is, in effect, soaring. That is, its ability to generate lift counteracts its tendency to drift backward in the wind. It is aerodynamically perfect. If it could move forward under its own power, it would be flying.
Next, the brothers assembled the entire glider and carried it to a slope they measured at about seven degrees. In a steady wind, they let out their lines. The glider rose. The lines stood nearly straight up and stayed there.
IN DAYTON, Charlie Taylor was running the bicycle shop. The brothers had asked Kate to look in on him from time to time and offer help when he needed it. In their haste to get away from Dayton, the brothers had left their business affairs in a mess. This enflamed the strain that already existed between the taciturn mechanic and the opinionated schoolteacher. “It’s a wonder I have any mind left,” Kate told them.
The business is about to go up the spout to hear Charles Taylor talk. Say—he makes me too weary for words. He is your judge, it seems. Everything that happens he remarks that it struck him that you left too much for the last minute. Today I got wrathy and told him that I was tired of hearing him discuss your business. But really, I don’t see how we can keep things going. You didn’t leave any checks or anything . . . I wish you would send me a check for $25. I don’t enjoy going to the store after money. Mr. Taylor knows too much to suit me. I ought to learn something about the store business. I despise to be at the mercy of the hired man.
As ever, the brothers were unmoved by the trouble they had caused “your lovin’ swesterchen.” “You will have to get used to some of Charles’ peculiarities,” Orville replied dryly. “They don’t bother us.”
More on their minds was the turn their father’s ordeal had taken. From Kate and other correspondents, they learned that the elders of the Brethren’s White River conference in eastern Indiana—one of Bishop Wright’s own jurisdictions—had tried Milton in absentia and declared him guilty of libel against Millard Keiter, “insubordination to constituted authority,” and “going to law” against a fellow Christian. They offered Milton sixty days to confess his errors or face expulsion from the Church.
At Kitty Hawk, the brothers’ reactions differed sharply. On the Sunday following their receipt of the news from White River, after midday dinner with Bill Tate, both brothers wrote letters. Orville’s went to Kate. In eight hundred words, he recounted the details of the boat trip to Kitty Hawk, the refitting of the camp, the laying in of supplies, and his own “merry chase,” armed with a gun, after a mouse that was making nightly raids on their kitchen. About the bishop’s problems Orv said nothing, though he was well aware that his sister was following every step in the drama and was deeply worried. Will wrote to Milton, who was traveling in the Midwest, visiting his conferences and performing his duties as bishop in defiance of his colleagues. Will analyzed the Keiterites’ perfidies, offered moral support, and issued no fewer than five specific and detailed instructions on how Milton should respond. There could be no plainer illustration of the contrast between the two—Orville playing ingeniously at the trivial hunt for a mouse; Wilbur assuming responsibility for leadership in the family’s crisis.
Kate wrote to Milton every few days. “We are not going to let this thing go—not by a long chalk. Just wait till the boys are back again, with Will feeling strong again!”
“We will bear in mind your caution to be careful,” Will reassured the bishop. “We have no intention of being disabled while that gang of rascals is still attempting to injure you, and rob the church.”
ON THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, September 19, Will made the first twenty-five test glides of the season, with Orv and Dan Tate running alongside with a hand on the wingtips. That day and the next, Will found that slight adjustments in the angle of the new front elevator offered him “abundant control” of the glider’s fore-and-aft movements. And the tail seemed to prevent the perplexing problem of the previous summer, in which the glider occasionally pivoted around the tip of the higher wing.
But the new control device was tricky. To turn up, the operator had to push the elevator-control bar down—the reverse of the 1901 controls. With this movement not yet instinctive, Will found himself aloft in a “somewhat brisk” wind. Suddenly a cross-gust caught the left wingtip and pushed it skyward “in a decidedly alarming manner.” Eager to return to earth, Will, in confusion, turned the elevator up instead of down and found the glider suddenly angling upward “as though bent on a mad attempt to pierce the heavens.” He recovered from the stall and landed without damage. But he continued to have problems keeping the balky wingtips level in crosswinds.
For a long, rainy Sunday the brothers stewed and debated, “at a loss to know what the cause might be.” What new forces had they summoned by lengthening the wings and adding a tail? The next day, they retrussed the wings so that the tips dipped slightly below the level of the center section. With this slight arch, the glider took on the droop-winged look of gulls, which fly well in high winds. Kite tests vindicated their intuition. Now crosswinds, if anything, seemed to improve their lateral balance. “The machine flew beautifully,” Orv wrote that evening, “and at times, when the proper angle of incidence was attained, seemed to soar.”
Even as a kite, this new machine inspired confidence. It simply looked more stable in the air than its bobbing and dipping ancestors of the previous summers. Perhaps this is why Orville now decided to take an equal part in piloting the craft.
He began the morning after the wings were retrussed, practicing assisted glides to get the feel of the controls. After their midday meal, he tried free flights, taking turns with Will, who stretched
his glides to beyond two hundred feet. The tips were so responsive that in one flight he “caused the machine to sway from side to side, sidling one way and then the other a half dozen times in the distance of the glide.” Orville managed one respectable flight of 160 feet at an admirably low angle of descent. Then, while concentrating on a tip that had risen too high, he lost track of the elevator controls and rushed upward to a height of twenty-five or thirty feet. Will and Dan Tate cried out. Orv stalled, then slid backward through the air and struck the ground wing first with a crackle of splintering spruce and ash. “The result was a heap of flying machine, cloth, and sticks in a heap, with me in the center without a bruise or a scratch.” Only the seat of his pants suffered injury. This “slight catastrophe” meant days of repairs. But that evening the brothers were so pleased with the glider that “we are . . . in a hilarious mood.” Orville told Kate: “The control will be almost perfect, we think, when we once learn to properly operate the rudders.”
The control was not perfect. The winds of the Outer Banks blew in turbulent swirls altogether different from the pristine currents of the wind tunnel, and on the dunes there was no lift balance to hold the glider’s wings safe and steady. In the next few days, the repaired machine made many more glides under good control. Will even managed to fly the glider in the path of an S, turning perpendicular to the wind and then back into it. But every so often, “without any apparent reason,” one wingtip would rise and fail to respond to the pilot’s insistent warping of the opposite wing. Tilting heavily to one side, the machine would go into a sickening slide sideways in the direction of the tilt, “just as a sledge slides downhill,” Will said, “or a ball rolls down an inclined plane, the speed increasing in an accelerated ratio.” One side of the glider rose and gathered speed, the other side dipped low and slowed, and the whole craft spun into a frightening, out-of-control circle. The low wingtip would crunch into the soft sand and continue to spin, gouging out a curved trough. The motion reminded the Wrights of the device they had used to sink their well, so they called it “well-digging.” The problem was dangerous and bewildering, and they could not claim control of the glider until they had solved it.
