The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Crouch, Tom D.

  The claim was rejected a second time, the cardboard box dismissed as “of no assistance.” The examiner did offer the Wrights one useful bit of advice, suggesting that they “employ an attorney skilled in patent proceedings” if they wished to press their case. Puzzled and a bit worried, they decided to set the matter aside until they had flown the powered aircraft.12

  Chanute spent the spring of 1903 digging out from under the correspondence that had accumulated during his absence in Europe. One letter awaiting an answer was from an old acquaintance—Major Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell.

  A career officer and brother of the founder of the Boy Scouts, Baden-Powell thought of himself as an inventor. In fact, his technical gifts were limited; his enthusiasm, however, was unbounded. He had joined the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1880. Founded sixteen years before by a group of gentlemen amateurs and professional engineers interested in flight, it was initially an active group, publishing the only English-language periodical devoted to aeronautics, and sponsoring key experiments, including the pioneer wind-tunnel studies of Francis Wenham and John Browning.13

  By the time Baden-Powell joined, the Aeronautical Society had fallen on hard times. The founders had passed from the scene and interest in flight was on the wane. Elected secretary in 1897, Baden-Powell poured all of his energy into reinvigorating the group. The grateful members elected him president during his absence on duty in South Africa. Now, in September 1902, he wrote to his old acquaintance, Octave Chanute, for help in preparing a belated presidential address.

  Baden-Powell apologized for having been out of touch for so long, but stressed he was “keen as ever about aeronautics.” He asked to be brought up to date on events in America. In particular, he was curious about “a Mr. Wright” who, he had heard, was doing some “good work.”14

  Chanute responded immediately, enclosing a copy of Wilbur’s paper and a letter describing the 1902 season. “Wright is now doing … well,” Chanute concluded, “and I am changing my views as to the advisibility of adding a motor.”15

  Baden-Powell incorporated the contents into his address on December 4. He spoke of the “wonderful progress” that the Wrights had made, and suggested there was no reason why “such experts, having attained proficiency in the delicate art of balancing themselves … should not be able to soar away on the wings of the wind and remain indefinitely in mid air.”16

  The speech had a profound impact. The Wrights were not unknown in England, but Baden-Powell was the first to call attention to the triumph achieved at Kitty Hawk in 1902 and to identify them as leaders in the field. Listening closely that evening was Patrick Y. Alexander.

  Alexander, the son of the manager of the Cammels steelworks in Sheffield, was brought up, according to a friend, “in an atmosphere of armaments, Naval programmes, and scientific developments generally.” A shadowy figure, he had been so heavily involved in Russian railway construction projects that the newspapers occasionally identified him as a Russian. Aeronautics was his passion. Alexander owned eight balloons before 1894, had made parachute jumps, and believed that balloons, airships, and airplanes would one day be abandoned in favor of pure levitation.17

  He was also impulsive. Three weeks and a day after attending Baden-Powell’s speech in London, he knocked on the door at 7 Hawthorn Street and introduced himself. He had first called on Chanute, a complete stranger, requesting a letter of introduction to the Wright brothers. Chanute, startled by this fellow who traveled across the Atlantic at the drop of a hat, provided the letter and sent him on to Dayton. “We both liked him very much,” Wilbur told Chanute after the visit, but that impression would not last. By 1907, Wilbur had become convinced that Alexander was a British spy.18

  There is nothing to indicate that Pat Alexander was ever a “spy” in any official sense. He was an aeronautical gadfly and enthusiast, determined to learn everything he could about the Wrights, and quite willing to pass what he knew along to acquaintances at Whitehall and friends in France. Over the next five years he would become a major source of information on the brothers.

  On January 3, 1903, Chanute and his two daughters (his wife Annie had died the year before) boarded the steamer Commonwealth in Boston bound for Alexandria, Egypt, the first stop on a combined business and pleasure trip through Europe.

  Officially, Chanute was acting on behalf of the St. Louis group planning the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Like the great fair in Chicago ten years before, the St. Louis Exposition would include a series of engineering congresses. His task was to promote the event, and to spread word of the Fair’s aeronautical program.

  Chanute welcomed the trip as an opportunity to meet many of his correspondents for the first time. He told Wilbur eagerly that Ferdinand Ferber “has been trying experiments with a machine similar to yours.” The craft was a rough copy of the 1901 Wright glider. As Chanute noted, it was “rudely made by a common carpenter,” and had no lateral control system at all. Nevertheless, Ferber had made eight to ten glides, the best of which had covered a distance of 150 feet. “He says that he is much inclined to go to America,” Chanute added, “to take lessons from you.” Ferber also expressed an interest in purchasing both the 1902 Wright glider and the Lamson oscillating-wing machine.19

  Chanute was in Vienna on March 13, where he met Wilhelm Kress, an Austrian experimenter who had been heavily influenced by Alphonse Pénaud. Kress’s large tandem-wing flying boat had capsized and sunk in the Tullernach Reservoir in October 1901. Chanute went to see the rebuilt machine, and reported to the Wrights that “it might fly if a lighter motor than the present one [a 30-hp Daimler] can be obtained.”20

  He was in Paris on April 4, and planned to “give several talks … and to promise to write something for publication.”21 In fact, Chanute had given the most important address of his long and distinguished career just two days before, at a dinner-conference of the Aéro-Club de France. The talk would have untold consequences for Wilbur and Orville Wright.

  The Aéro-Club de France, founded in 1898, was the meeting place for one of the wealthiest and most fashionable social sets in fin-de-siècle Paris—the balloonists. Ballooning, for over a century the province of the scientist, soldier, and showman, had become the passion of the wealthy dilettante. A voyage aloft, dangling beneath a gaily decorated bag of hydrogen, was just the thing for a jaded young man with time on his hands and money in the bank. Members of the old balloon-making families—Paul Lechambre, Gabriel Yon, the Godards—found their services in great demand. Stories of idyllic excursions over the French countryside aboard balloons laden with picnic baskets and bottles of champagne filled the society pages of the newspapers.

  By 1900, some leading members of the Aéro-Club had begun to transform the organization into something more than a sportsman’s group. Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe was the leader of a faction encouraging new aeronautical technologies. For Deutsch de la Meurthe, the airplane was to be little more than a distant dream—the airship was the thing.

  He had made his fortune in petroleum, and recognized that the industry’s future depended on the development of a lightweight gasoline engine. He wrote books on the subject, sponsored experiments with new types of power plants, and presented President Carnot with one of the first gasoline-powered automobiles constructed in France.

  His interest in aeronautics arose naturally from his enthusiasm for the internal-combustion engine. In the fall of 1900, Deutsch de la Meurthe established a 100,000 franc prize for the first airship flight from the Aéro-Club’s Parc d’Aérostation at Saint-Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in half an hour or less.

  Alberto Santos-Dumont, a wealthy Brazilian living in Paris, was everyone’s favorite candidate to win the Deutsch Prize. Twenty-three years old when he arrived in Paris to study engineering in the fall of 1897, he was the son of Henriques Dumont, a Brazilian planter who had made a fortune satisfying the American craving for good coffee.

  Le Petite Santos weighed only fifty kilograms and stood five feet f
ive inches tall in his shiny patent leather button boots fitted with lifts. Dark hair, parted sharply in the center and held in place with a thick coat of pomade, capped a cadaverous face. Those who knew him assure us that his faintly comic appearance was more than offset by a cold, patrician manner.22

  Santos acquired his first balloon, Brazil, in 1898. Dissatisfied with the limitations of operating at the mercy of the winds, he built a small one-man airship later that fall. Six more airships followed over the next three years. The sight of the little Brazilian chugging along just above the rooftops epitomized the spirit of la Belle Epoque.

  After several abortive attempts, Santos won the Deutsch Prize on October 19, 1901. In typically grand style, he donated 75,000 francs to the Paris poor and divided the remaining 25,000 francs among the members of his crew. Popular as he was, knowledgeable members of the Aéro-Club recognized that Santos-Dumont had contributed little to aeronautical technology. While popular attention in France focused on the Deutsch Prize, a man of much larger vision, Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, captured the real leadership in lighter-than-air technology for Germany.

  In July 1900, the count had made an 18-minute, three-and-a-half-mile flight with the 420-foot-long LZ-1. Initially, even German enthusiasts had difficulty recognizing the potential of the Zeppelin. As the Frankfurter Zeitung reported, the experiment “proved conclusively that a dirigible balloon is of no practical value.” Zeppelin persevered. In 1909, the aging count established a sightseeing passenger air service linking major German cities.

  Inspired by Zeppelin, Paul and Pierre Lebaudy, sugar refiners from Nantes, launched the first in a series of large semirigid airships in 1902. But the Zeppelin and Lebaudy programs were expensive, government-supported ventures in which the members of the Aéro-Club de France took little interest. In the wake of his Deutsch Prize victory, even Santos lost his enthusiasm for the airship. “To propel a dirigible balloon through the air,” he announced, “is like pushing a candle through a brick wall.”23

  Ferdinand Ferber sensed that Aéro-Club enthusiasm for lighter-than-air flight was waning by 1902, and saw an opportunity to draw the organization into the mainstream of heavier-than-air developments. He began with an article published in February 1903.

  “Expériences d’Aviation” warned Frenchmen that leadership in aeronautics had been forfeited to the United States. Ferber called for other enthusiasts to join him in gliding experiments that would enable France to recapture the lead from Langley, Chanute, and those mysterious figures, “Messrs. Orville and Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio USA.”24

  Chanute’s speech at the Aéro-Club on the evening of April 2 fanned the spark kindled by Ferber’s article. He described his own work as well as that of Huffaker and Herring, closing with a lengthy description of the Wright experiments of 1900–02. It was a great success but not one of Chanute’s finer moments.25

  An aging widower returned in triumph to the city of his youth, Chanute exaggerated his own role and misrepresented his relationship with the Wrights. He spoke of them as his “devoted collaborators,” as “young, intelligent and daring, pupils” who worked under his guidance. A newsman noted that the brothers had written to Chicago for technical information, on the basis of which they built “machines similar to those of Mr. Chanute” and were actively carrying “his” work forward to completion.26

  Chanute’s description of the Wright technology was so sketchy as to be useless to any experimenter. His reply to a question about the Wrights’ lateral-control system was vague: “To regulate lateral equilibrium, he [Wilbur] operates two cords which act on the right and left side of the wing by warping [gauchisement], and simultaneously by moving the rear vertical rudder.”27

  Was Chanute muddying the waters to protect the Wright “secrets,” or was he simply unable to provide a more accurate description? Either way, the talk did little to illuminate the basic principles of the 1902 glider. He had misled the French about a great many things. What they did understand was that les frères Wright were well on their way to solving the problems of mechanical flight. The comte de La Vaulx, a confirmed nationalist, described the reaction:

  For most of the listeners, except Ferber and his friends, it was a disagreeable revelation; when we spoke in France rather vaguely about the flights of the Wright brothers, we did not doubt their remarkable progress; but Chanute was now perfectly explicit about them and showed us their real importance. The French aviators felt at last that… they had been resting on the laurels of their predecessors too long, and that it was time to get seriously to work if they did not wish to be left behind.28

  Ernest Archdeacon was even more disturbed.

  Will the homeland of the Montgolfier suffer the shame of allowing this ultimate discovery of aerial science—which is certainly imminent, and which will constitute the greatest scientific revolution since the beginning of the world—to be realized abroad? Gentlemen scholars, to your compasses! You, the Maecenases; and you, too, of the Government, put your hands deep into your pockets—else we are beaten!29

  A wealthy lawyer and a balloonist with a reputation for fearlessness, Archdeacon found a new mission in life. “Anxious to retain for his nation the glory of giving birth to the first man-carrying aeroplane,” the comte de La Vaulx recalled, “Archdeacon set out to shake our aviators out of their torpor, and put a stop to French indifference concerning flying machines.”30

  Ferber did not attend Chanute’s lecture, but he was aware of the sudden stir in Paris. He wrote to Archdeacon, suggesting that a glider competition sponsored by the Aéro-Club would revive French aeronautics. “Our experience has taught us that racing leads to improved machines; and the airplane must not be allowed to reach successful achievement in America.”31

  The notion appealed to Archdeacon, who offered to contribute 3,000 francs to a prize fund. In addition, he raised the issue of a glider competition at the next meeting of the club’s Technical Committee on Aerial Locomotion on May 6, 1903. The members created a special Subcommittee on Aviation Experiments, with dirigible builder Charles Renard as president and Archdeacon as secretary. Over the next five years this subcommittee would completely overwhelm both the parent committee and the Aéro-Club itself.

  Ferber’s competition was never held, but he was no longer alone. Within a matter of months the club became the headquarters for a band of experimenters so determined to fly that they took to calling themselves “les aviateurs militantes.” They had set off in pursuit of the Wrights too late to catch them, but not too late to write their names large in the history of flight.

  chapter 19

  SUCCESS

  June~December 1903

  Wilbur addressed the Western Society of Engineers for a second time on the evening of June 18, 1903. There was a new confidence in his voice. The major problems were behind him now. Back in Dayton, Charlie and Orv had the engine up and running. Instead of the 8 horsepower they had expected, it developed 16 horsepower when first started and dropped off to 12 after a few seconds running time. They had overcome the propeller problem as well. Orville summed it up in a letter to George Spratt: “Isn’t it wonderful that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them.”1

  Wilbur had every reason to feel confident, and every reason not to talk about it. The rejection of their patent application was a serious blow. They had no legal protection for their ideas—ideas that suddenly seemed very interesting to the French. Chanute, just back from France, had been invited to contribute an article to the Revue des Sciences, and was pressing for the release of additional information. “Should the warping of the wings be mentioned,” he asked on June 30. “Somebody may be hurt if it is not.”2

  Wilbur was firm. “It is not our wish that any description of this feature of our machine be given at present.” When Chanute sent them a copy of his article for approval, they found it riddled with errors. The author gave the camber of the 1902 machine as 1/20 rather than 1/25, and stated that the rudder was contro
lled by “twines leading to the hands of the aviator.” “Really,” Wilbur noted, “this is news to me!”3

  Chanute was taken aback. How was he to describe the function of the rudder when they had asked him not to discuss the wing-warping system? Wilbur ignored the comment, noting that he and Orv had called only the most substantial errors to Chanute’s attention. There were others. The article claimed that they had tested only forty-one surfaces in the wind tunnel and that all of them had been “straight, from tip to tip.” Chanute had also claimed that the Wright machine was guyed with “piano wire.” They had allowed those minor errors to pass, but the twines running to the hands were too much.4

  “But,” Chanute retorted, “it does not answer the question: How is the vertical tail operated?”5 The Wrights realized that Chanute was not looking for a means of describing the action of the rudder without revealing any secrets. He honestly did not know how it worked.

  “The vertical tail is operated by wires leading to the wires that connect with the wing tips,” Wilbur informed him. “Thus the movement of the wing tips operates the rudder.” He added quickly that this was “not for publication, but merely to correct the misapprehension in your mind.” There was to be no further release of technical information.

  As the laws of France & Germany provide that patents will be held invalid if the matter claimed has been publicly printed we prefer to exercise reasonable caution about the details of our machine until the question of patents is settled. I only see three methods of dealing with this matter: (1) Tell the truth. (2) Tell nothing specific. (3) Tell something that is not true. I really cannot advise either the first or the third course.6