by James Tobin
A PHOTOGRAPHER NAMED W. S. CLIME had been to the parade ground to shoot several earlier flights. On this day he arrived late at the south end of the field, where a press tent had been set up. He was told that Wright and Selfridge were about to fly, and he decided to stay where he was, so as to photograph them from the front as the machine rose. A moment later he did so, just as “it swept by with the grace and ease of a soaring bird.” As the machine circled the field once, twice, three times, at about thirty-eight miles per hour, Clime did not keep his eyes fixed on it, “the novelty having worn off to such an extent that one only gave a glance upward when it went directly overhead.” On the machine’s fourth time overhead Clime looked up, and from a distance of roughly a hundred feet, he could see Orville, “hands on levers looking straight ahead, and Lieut. Selfridge to his right, arms folded as cool as the daring aviator beside him.”
Clime made another exposure. He turned and began to walk toward the shed when he heard “a crack like a pistol shot coming from overhead.” He looked up and saw a long piece of material falling from the machine, off to the right.
About a quarter-mile away, where a crowd of some twenty-five hundred was gathered, the sharp report that Clime heard was indistinguishable from the bang-bang-bang of the engine. Only a few people noticed the piece of falling debris.
Clime saw the machine swerve to its left. Then it appeared to slip backward, then to right itself for an instant, then to pitch forward in a nearly perpendicular course toward the ground.
ORVILLE CUT THE ENGINE and struggled with the levers. Selfridge uttered a soft, “Oh! Oh!”
SOME IN THE CROWD thought the machine nearly recovered itself. Then it struck the ground.
Clime, the photographer, sprinted toward the billowing dust—only two soldiers on horseback beat him to it—and found the machine “an inconceivable mass of wreckage.” He heard moans. He dropped his camera, grabbed a wing surface, and pushed upward as hard as he could until it gave way. Underneath he found Orville Wright suspended from a cable and a strut, his arms hanging limply, his shoes barely touching the ground. Blood streamed down his face. Selfridge was underneath Wright, lying on his back, his knees drawn up, apparently unconscious. There was blood all over his clothes.
Clime and the two horsemen were able to get hold of Orville and carry him out of the wreckage, but Selfridge was pinned by cables and debris. Clime looked across the field for more help, and “a weird spectacle presented itself. Horsemen were galloping madly across the broken field in our direction, a picture of my idea of a cavalry charge in actual battle, and in their rear a mass of humanity blended together by the twilight into a low black line, and approaching with ever increasing rapidity.”
CHARLIE TAYLOR was among those who reached the wreck next. He helped to get the machine off Selfridge. He stood with Orville for a moment, then walked over to the machine, leaned against it, and sobbed. Charlie Furnas was so disturbed by what he saw that he would never work for the Wrights again.
Dr. J. A. Watters, a New York City physician, pushed through the cavalrymen. Orville said: “It’s my leg, doctor, and my chest. They hurt me fearfully.”
A half-dozen Army orderlies arrived on the run. With the crowd surging around, they carried the injured men to the post hospital at the north end of the parade ground.
Dr. Watters told Charlie Taylor that he believed Orville would be all right, and the mechanic began to gather up the wreckage. Parts of it were in pieces. The fabric was torn all over. He examined the engine closely and concluded that Orv had switched it off and tried to glide the machine safely to the ground.
In the hospital, the orderlies carried Wright and Selfridge up creaking stairs to the second floor. Chanute was among those waiting, as was Charles Flint. The doctors came down after a time and said Wright was in shock but able to talk. Speaking very softly, he had asked them to telegraph his family in Dayton and his brother in France.
Selfridge had suffered a fracture at the base of his skull. Surgeons operated to remove large fragments of bone. Five minutes after they completed the procedure, Selfridge died.
KATE BOARDED A TRAIN for Washington that night.
Will was not told of the crash until the next morning. Stricken, he called off his own flights for the time being and searched the newspapers for particulars that might allow him to diagnose the exact cause of the accident. He concluded immediately that the fault lay principally with himself; he felt his worst fears had been confirmed. His brother lacked the fierce discipline that permitted Will to freeze out unwanted guests, and it must have been these distractions that caused him to overlook whatever mechanical flaw had led to the accident. He wrote to Kate:
I cannot help thinking over and over again “If I had been there it would not have happened.” The worry over leaving Orville alone to undertake those trials was one of the chief things in almost breaking me down a few weeks ago. . . . A half dozen times I was on the point of telling Berg that I was going to America in spite of everything. It was not right to leave Orville to undertake such a task alone. I do not mean that Orville was incompetent to do the work itself, but I realized that he would be surrounded by thousands of people who with the most friendly intentions in the world would consume his time, exhaust his strength, and keep him from having proper rest. When a man is in this condition he tends to trust more to the carefulness of others instead of doing everything and examining everything himself . . . I cannot help suspecting that Orville told the Charleys [Taylor and Furnas] to put on the big screws instead of doing it himself, and that if he had done it himself he would have noticed the thing that made the trouble, whatever it may have been. . . . Tell “Bubbo” that his flights have revolutionized the world’s beliefs regarding the practicability of flight. Even such conservative papers as the London Times devote leading editorials to his work and accept human flight as a thing to be regarded as a normal feature of the world’s future life.
“I will never leave him alone in such a position again,” Will told Milton. As for Selfridge, he said, “It is a great pity, a great pity.”
MABEL BELL was distraught for many days. “I can’t get over Tom’s being taken,” she wrote her husband, who left Baddeck for Washington immediately upon receiving the news. Selfridge had become a special favorite of hers, “a knightly boy,” during his months at Beinn Bhreagh. She treasured his deep reserve, his “quiet fun and good humor,” his solicitous regard for the older women who lived and worked on the Bell estate, his habit of seeing to such small needs as bringing a screen to her side to block a draft.
“Isn’t it heart breaking? Yes and yet it is better for him than to die as poor Langley did. He was so happy to the very end.”
She grieved for Bell “in this breaking of your beautiful Association.” But she asked him not to substitute another man for Selfridge in the AEA. “It was beautiful and the memory of it will endure:—‘Bell, Curtiss, Baldwin, Selfridge, and McCurdy.’. . . Do anything you think best, but let the A.E.A. be only those to the end, and then take some other name . . . let’s hold tight together all the tighter for the one that’s gone.”
KATE WAS MET BY ARMY DOCTORS, who told her Orville’s injuries were serious but not life-threatening. He faced a long recovery and could not be moved home for several weeks.
She found him “looking pretty badly.” His face was gashed and his badly broken left leg was in traction. “He was looking for me, and when I went in his chin quivered and the tears came to his eyes but he soon braced up again. The shock has weakened him very much, of course. The only other time that he showed any sign of breaking down, was when he asked me if I knew that Lieut. Selfridge was dead.” Chanute was there, and “can’t be nice enough,” and Lieutenant Lahm, of the Aeronautical Section, who became the Wrights’ near-constant attendant and, soon, a good friend.
She was missing school. Despite the brothers’ extraordinary achievements, this nevertheless posed a financial stringency for the family. But “school can go and my salary, too . . . Little bubbo shall
not be neglected as long as I am able to crawl around.”
Will, knowing of the strain she already had been under that summer, offered an apology for upending her life with a flying machine. But he had no qualms about her ability to represent the family in the crisis.
I am awfully sorry that you have had to pass through so much trouble of a nerve-wracking character this summer. However I am sure that as soon as Orville is well on the way to recovery you will enjoy yourself immensely at Washington. Orville has a way of stepping right into the affections of nice people whom he meets, and they will be nice to you at first for him and then for yourself, for you have some little knack in that line yourself. I am glad you are there to keep your eagle eye on pretty young ladies. I would fear the worst, if he were left unguarded. Be careful yourself also. . . .
I presume that poor old Daddy is terribly worried over our troubles, but he may be sure that, like his Keiter trouble, things will turn out all right at last. I shall be not only careful and more careful, but also most careful, and cautious as well. So you need have no fears for me. I promise you that I will be as careful of myself as I was in 1900 when I gave you a similar promise. It is a pity Orville is not with me as he was then.
When she was not nursing her brother, she was conferring with doctors and Army officers, fending off reporters, sorting through stacks of telegrams and letters, and receiving Orville’s visitors—General Nelson Miles (“a pretty fine old fellow, socially”); a Navy admiral (“I was disgusted with [him]”); Charles Flint, her brothers’ financier, and his wife (“fearful blowhards”); and many others. Among other items of business, she arranged for an extension of her brothers’ contract with the Army until the following year. And she pretty clearly fell at least half in love with Lieutenant Lahm. “I should have died if it hadn’t been for him. . . . To look at him you would never imagine how kind and sympathetic and thoughtful he can be.”
Managing all this and more, and nearly going without sleep, she nonetheless received a stern reminder of her father’s exacting standards. In this case, she had failed to keep her promise to write every day. “The natural inference,” Milton wrote, with hurtful sarcasm, “is that you are down with typhoid fever. . . . We are ashamed to tell the many inquirers after Orville’s condition, that for four days (to-morrow) we have no word from you, so we have to say, that we suppose you are sick. But if you are down sick, news might disturb you. So I will close. Your father, M. Wright.”
DESPITE THEIR SHOCK and grief, none of the Wrights thought Will should stop flying in France. Four days after the crash, he flew for more than an hour and a half at d’Auvours, breaking Orville’s records for distance and duration.
He flew all that fall and into the winter, taking up a long string of officers, statesmen, and journalists with him, and a number of women, as well. On the last day of 1908, to win the twenty-thousand-franc Coupe Michelin for the longest flight of the year, he flew two hours and eighteen minutes, some of it through freezing rain and sleet.
“I am sorry that I could not come home for Christmas,” he wrote Orville, “but I could not afford to lose the Michelin Prize, as the loss of prestige would have been much greater than the direct loss. If I had gone away, the other fellows would have fairly busted themselves to surpass any record I left. The fact that they knew I was ready to beat anything they should do kept them discouraged.” His closest competitor had been Farman, with a flight of forty-four minutes in October.
IT WAS NO LONGER POSSIBLE to deny the Wrights’ achievements. But the achievements could be defined in such a way that the Wrights seemed odd and quirky—certainly not the practical, efficient, business-minded men who would be required to bring the new age of flying beyond this difficult infancy.
In an essay circulated within the AEA only a week after the crash at Fort Myer, Glenn Curtiss sketched his view of aviation beyond the Wrights. “The airship which, within ten years, will carry men and freight from place to place, will be a natural evolution of the aerodromes of today and not the semi-accidental discovery of a genius. It will be the work of a man who is thoroughly familiar with the laws of fluid movement; with the effects of wind currents and the means of overcoming the numerous difficulties which are encountered in the air. It is in the practical application of the scientific knowledge at hand that the solution of the problems of aerial flight will be found.”
As Curtiss wrote these words, it seems not to have dawned on him that he was precisely describing the approach that had led, at Kitty Hawk and Dayton, to the creation of the aeroplane. Perhaps, in his zeal to muscle in on the founding of an era, he had to interpret the Wrights’ work as “the semi-accidental discovery of a genius.” That would leave the field open to him, the practical man who would bring aviation to its true fulfillment.
Chapter Thirteen
“The Greatest Courage and Achievements”
“THEM IS FINE.”
Orville watches as Wilbur and Kate prepare to fly at Pau, France
SOON AFTER SELFRIDGE’S DEATH, Mabel Bell gave ten thousand dollars to keep the Aerial Experiment Association alive for six more months, until March 31, 1909. Her husband, still reeling from the tragedy at Fort Myer, had seen enough of aeroplanes. In the time remaining to the AEA, he wanted to return to his original purpose—“placing a tetrahedral structure in the air.” In the face of the Wrights’ patents, he felt it made more sense than ever to create an altogether different form of flying machine. Winning patents for the AEA aeroplanes would be “extremely doubtful,” Bell now believed. Yet they would have “no difficulty in securing good patents upon aerodromes embodying tetrahedral structures.” Trials of Douglas McCurdy’s new Silver Dart would go forward. Otherwise, Bell wanted to concentrate on his kites.
So as autumn moved toward winter at Beinn Bhreagh, the seamstresses of Baddeck fashioned twenty-two hundred new cells of silk. Carpenters joined these to the five thousand cells left over from 1908 to create what Bell at first called Drome No. 5, soon to be renamed Cygnet II. Like its namesake, it was a behemoth of geometrical intricacy clothed in brilliant red silk. In fact it was larger than the first Cygnet. But Bell had it built without interior cells—a concession to Baldwin and the others, who argued that interior cells added weight with no increase in lifting power. The original Cygnet had been only a manned kite. Its successor would carry an engine, propellers, and a horizontal rudder in front, like the Wright and AEA aeroplanes. A powerful boat was to pull the structure into the air with a man aboard. Once aloft, he would start the engine. If the engine were strong enough, the tow line would go slack. The passenger would suddenly be a pilot. He would cast off the tow line, and Bell would have his triumph—a flying machine no longer at anchor, a tetrahedral aerodrome flying through the air under its own power, serene and safe even in turbulent winds.
Yet the Cygnet II would embrace the wind with little more aerodynamic grace than a brick wall. To overcome its stubborn tendency to resist the wind, it would need an extremely powerful engine. For that, Bell needed Glenn Curtiss, who “has only to look at the engine to get it to run well.” But in the months after Thomas Selfridge’s death, Curtiss became an increasingly elusive partner in the quest for Bell’s dream.
In fact, all three of the remaining AEA youngsters soon sidestepped Bell’s plea for more work on tetrahedrals. In Hammondsport, where Curtiss was supposed to be building a new engine for the Silver Dart and the Cygnet II, he and McCurdy were spending nearly all their time on the Silver Dart, and on a plan for aeroplanes that would take off and land on water. At Baddeck, with Bell, Casey Baldwin, too, was spending most of his time on water-based craft.
Bell, waiting week after week for news from Curtiss, became exasperated. “What we want to know from Hammondsport,” he declared, “is the answer to the question: ‘What are you doing?’ . . . Silence does not give us any information. . . . The delay in completing the new engine affects us all, for it is needed at Beinn Bhreagh as much as at Hammondsport.” When Curtiss did write, he spoke only of m
alfunctions and delays. He confessed: “We have read so much of the Wrights and others flying, not to mention the fact that we should have been through here long ago, that we are getting very uneasy.”
Bell scheduled a full meeting of the AEA for January. With its charter due to expire at the end of March, he wished to make important decisions about the future, and it was essential that all members be present to make applications for patents. But Curtiss begged off, saying the directors of his own company were about to meet. Besides, he said, he had “other important business.”
When Douglas McCurdy arrived at Beinn Bhreagh alone, carrying Curtiss’s proxy for the patent decision, Bell wired: “YOUR PRESENCE NECESSARY TO DETERMINE THE NAMES TO BE SIGNED TO THE APPLICATION FOR A PATENT. NO PROXY WILL MEET THE CASE. PLEASE COME IMMEDIATELY AFTER YOUR DIRECTORS’ MEETING IF POSSIBLE.” Bell heard nothing for several days. Then Curtiss’s reply came—by leisurely letter, not by wire. He would come, he said, when the engine for the Cygnet II was ready, a reason well calculated to soothe Bell’s impatience.
When Glenn and Lena Curtiss finally got to Baddeck at the end of January, the Bells staged a convivial “old home week.” But when the talk turned to business, Bell could not have escaped a growing understanding that his disagreements with Curtiss now went beyond the issue of aeronautical design.
Bell was all caution. Even if they could acquire patents on the distinctive features of the AEA aeroplanes, they would have to wait years for approval. If they sold aeroplanes in the meantime, the Wrights would sue. Orville Wright’s letter left no doubt about that. Bell’s memory of his own patent war remained vivid, and he feared another, especially with his own fortune at stake. “I am very much averse to attempting to make money under our present organization,” he said, “or under any organization that would throw the financial responsibility on me alone, for I am the only member of the Association that could be touched in the matter.” Since before Selfridge’s death, he had been thinking about converting the AEA into a nonprofit association to encourage the development of aviation in the United States, giving grants to poor inventors and sharing information broadly—an institutionalizing of the work of Octave Chanute. Working in this way, they might proceed unhindered by the Wrights and advance the cause of flight as a great collective endeavor. In the meantime, he thought they might raise money by designing and selling flying toys. He was also exploring the possibility of selling aeroplanes through the Canadian government to the British empire.
