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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Santos’s plans to sweep the field were scotched when his airship was destroyed by vandals. Tom Baldwin had better luck. Baldwin, a daredevil American balloonist and parachute jumper, came to the fair with the California Arrow, a one-man airship that refused to leave the ground with its 210-pound designer on board. Fortunately, a substitute pilot was at hand. Young A. Roy Knabenshue operated a pair of tattered captive balloons used to give visitors a bird’s-eye view of the Fair. He had already captured press attention with a spectacular 200-foot hand slide down the balloon tether cable.

  Knabenshue created yet another sensation when he flew the California Arrow for the first time on October 25, negotiating a figure-S over the fairgrounds. He earned substantial prize money but, like everyone else, failed to win the grand prize.

  Of course Chanute was there. He hired Bill Avery, who had flown with him on the Indiana Dunes ten years before, to demonstrate a new version of the two-surface glider. As there were no suitable hills, Avery devised a motorized winch to tow him into the air. Everything went fine until a twisted ankle forced his withdrawal as the only entry in the heavier-than-air competition.

  Colonel Capper was disappointed with the Americans and their fair. “It is of no use whatever,” he wrote, “pointing anything out to an ordinary American; they are all so damned certain they know everything and so absolutely ignorant of the theory of aeronautics that they only resent it.”4

  He did admire the “beautifully made” Chanute glider, and traveled to Chicago for a long meeting with its designer. Then it was on to Dayton to make the acquaintance of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Before his departure, Capper had asked Patrick Alexander, Baden-Powell, and others for advice on whom he should meet in America. Everyone insisted that he include the Wright brothers. Their names were well known in England now. Alexander had met them; Baden-Powell and a handful of others had corresponded with them. No one, however, had the slightest idea what they had been up to since the flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Capper hoped to take their measure for himself.

  Sure enough, Dayton proved to be the most interesting stop on Capper’s American tour. The Wrights liked him, though not well enough to show him the airplane. They let him see some photographs of the machine in flight, something they would not do for subsequent visitors, and explained the basics of their technology. Capper was impressed, and said so in his official report: “Both these gentlemen impressed me favorably; they have worked up step by step, they are in themselves well-educated men and capable mechanics, and I do not think them likely to claim more than they can perform.”5

  Capper was not authorized to negotiate with the Wrights, but encouraged them to tender a proposal for the sale of an airplane to the War Office. “We told him,” Orv later recalled, “that we were not yet ready to talk business.”6

  Capper’s visit, closely followed by the long flights at the close of the 1904 season, convinced the Wrights that they were in fact, ready to talk business by January 1905. But as Wilbur admitted to Chanute, “we would be ashamed of ourselves if we offered our machine to a foreign government without giving our own country a chance at it….”7

  Uncertain how to proceed, Wilbur called on his local congressman, Robert M. Nevin, at his Dayton home on the evening of January 3. Nevin advised him to describe his machine’s performance and the terms for its sale in a letter that he would present to Secretary of War William Howard Taft. Their consciences soothed, the brothers decided to forge ahead on two fronts simultaneously.

  Wilbur wrote to Colonel Capper on January 10. He outlined their successes during the final weeks of the 1904 season, adding that although “no spectacular performances were attempted, the … results were so satisfactory that we now regard the practicability of flying as fully established.” Which brought him to his main point: “There is no question, but that the government in possession of such a machine as we can furnish, and the scientific and practical knowledge and instruction that we are in a position to impart, could secure a lead of several years over governments which waited to buy perfected machines before making a start in this line.”8

  If the British government was interested in the purchase of a machine to carry two men through the air at a speed of 30 miles per hour, the Wrights could supply one. Eight days later, the brothers wrote to Congressman Nevin, describing their craft as a machine that “not only flies through the air at high speed, but lands without being wrecked.”

  They offered either to sell an aircraft capable of meeting government performance requirements, or to furnish “all the scientific and practical information we have accumulated in these years of experimenting, together with a license to use our patents; thus putting the government in a position to operate on its own account.”9

  Nevin was ill when the letter arrived. Unaware of his promise to take the matter up personally, a clerk forwarded the letter directly to the U.S. Army Board of Ordnance and Fortification for comment. Major General G. L. Gillispie, president of the Board, replied through Nevin’s office on January 26:

  I have the honor to inform you that, as many requests have been made for financial assistance in the development of designs for flying machines, the Board has found it necessary to decline to make allotments for experimental development of devices for mechanical flight, and has determined that, before suggestions with that object in view will be considered, the device must have been brought to the stage of practical operation without expense to the United States. It appears from the letter of Messrs. Wilbur and Orville Wright that their machine has not yet been brought to the stage of practical operation, but as soon as it shall have been perfected, this Board will be pleased to receive further representations from them in regard to it.10

  Wilbur and Orville took Gillispie’s letter as a personal affront. They had told him that their machine was “fitted for practical use” and described its performance. The sons of Milton Wright did not intend to deal with those unwilling to accept their word as honest men. “It is no pleasant thought to us that any foreign country should take from America any share of the glory of having conquered the flying problem,” Will told Chanute on June 1,

  but we feel that we have done our full share toward making this an American invention, and if it is sent abroad for further development the responsibility does not rest upon us…. If the American government has decided to spend no more money on flying machines till their practical use has been demonstrated in actual service abroad, we are sorry….11

  War Department officials have often been portrayed as short-sighted and conservative in their early dealings with the Wright brothers. That was not the case. If anything, the Army had rushed too quickly into the airplane business. The members of the Board were still experiencing serious difficulties arising out of their support for the Langley Aerodrome project. The action of the Board in granting $50,000 for the Aerodrome had been a courageous and far-sighted decision. In 1898, Langley’s program seemed enormously promising, but the spectacular demise of the craft in December 1903 set the Board up as a target for congressional inquiry and censure.

  Representative Hitchcock led the attack, castigating the Board for “permitting an expenditure for scientific purposes of thousands in a vain attempt to breathe life into an air-ship project which never had a substantial basis. You can tell Langley for me,” Robinson added, “that the only thing he ever made fly was Government money.”12

  The Aerodrome episode became the focal point for a general congressional attack on government-funded research. The Board survived the onslaught, but it was badly burned. The career officers involved would handle the question of mechanical flight very gingerly in the future.

  To make matters worse, the Langley publicity generated a flood of crank proposals from would-be aviators with surefire schemes for mechanical flight. Yet another letter, this one from two “inventors” who claimed to have solved the problem of the ages in the back room of a bicycle shop, was not calculated to impress.

  The Wrights had not included any photos of t
heir gliders or powered machines in the air, nor provided letters from eyewitnesses. In fact, they offered no proof at all, only the bald assertion that their machine worked. To expect a positive response from the War Department on that basis indicates Wilbur and Orville’s inability to understand and deal effectively with a government bureaucracy.

  Whitehall’s reaction was strikingly different. The War Office listened to Colonel Capper, and Capper knew the Wrights. He forwarded Wilbur’s letter to his immediate superiors in the Aldershot engineering command with a covering note calling “very special attention” to the proposal. “I have every confidence in their uprightness,” he added, “and in the correctness of their statements. Taking their letter for granted, it is a fact that they have flown and operated a flying machine for a distance of over three miles at a speed of thirty miles an hour.”13

  Capper restated the details, pointing out that the machine was entirely heavier-than-air, and closing with a strong personal appeal:

  I wish to urge most strongly that I be permitted to answer this letter stating that I think it probable that their offer would receive consideration from His Majesty’s Government. I would point out that such an answer would in no way tie His Majesty’s Government to anything beyond giving full and due consideration to any offer made by these gentlemen. I cannot but feel that if these gentlemen are prepared to make any reasonable offer, their statement is a true one, and they should meet with every encouragement from us in the interest of progress in our war appliances.14

  Capper’s personal assurances worked. Although the matter of the Wright airplane was withdrawn from his hands and passed to higher authority, enthusiasm for the project took root. On February 11, Capper’s immediate superior, Richard Ruck, wrote to the Wrights, inviting them to provide a description of their machine’s performance and a statement of terms.15

  They replied with a long letter on March 1, offering to provide a machine carrying two men for a distance of from ten to fifty miles through the air at a speed of not less than 30 miles per hour. Their price would be computed at a rate of £500 for each mile covered during the best of the trial flights. Alternatively, they could negotiate the sale of their patents (not yet granted) and engineering data that would permit the English to construct their own flying machines.16

  Ruck was unwilling to purchase a machine on the basis of a trial flight of less than fifty miles. And the price for such a craft, according to the Wright formula, was £25,000, a sum far beyond his allocated resources. The matter moved up a rung in the chain of command to the Royal Engineer Committee, the War Office body charged with making scientific and technical decisions. The committee responded on April 22, suggesting that the military attaché in Washington be sent to Dayton to see the machine in the air.

  On May 13, Reginald H. Brade, Assistant to the Secretary of the War Office, advised the Wrights to expect a communication from Colonel Hubert Foster, military attaché to the British Embassy. Foster, in turn, was instructed to arrange a visit to Dayton.17

  Had Foster made contact in the spring, summer, or fall of 1905, the course of history might have been altered. Possibly the Wrights would have been willing to allow an official English visitor the privilege of witnessing a flight. But it was not to be. Foster, accredited both to Washington and Mexico City, spent the months of March through October 1905 in Mexico. He made no attempt to contact the Wrights until November 18. So far as Wilbur and Orville were concerned, it was just as well. Back in the air, they wanted no interruptions from the British or anyone else while they worked through their final difficulties.

  Work began on the third Wright Flyer on May 23. They rolled the machine out for its first flight just a month later, on June 23. The new craft reflected what they had learned during the previous season. The span and chord of the wings were unchanged, but the camber was 1/20 again, as it had been in 1903. The Flyer was longer than any of its predecessors and stood a bit taller as well, giving it additional ground clearance.

  A pair of “blinkers”—semicircular vanes—were set between the twin elevator surfaces to prevent the sideslips so common in 1904. The propellers featured “little jokers,” tabs on the trailing edge designed to halt the deformation that had been observed the year before. Both the rudder and elevator were larger than in 1904.

  The most important change was in the control system. Since 1902 they had flown with the rudder directly linked to the wing-warping system. With the experience of three seasons, they decided to give the pilot full control at last. His hips would remain in the warping cradle, with his hands on two control levers, one for the elevator and one for the rudder.

  Flight testing began on June 23, and continued with eight hops over the next twelve weeks. There was no improvement over the performance of the 1904 machine. The longest flight was only 19.5 seconds. Without exception, every day ended with an accident and damage to the aircraft.

  The most serious mishap in two years of experimenting with powered machines occurred on July 14. Orville had been in the air for only twelve seconds when, as Wilbur reported, “the machine began to wobble somewhat and suddenly turned downward and struck at a considerable angle.”18

  The accident was a result of those undulations—Orv had lost control of the elevator. The machine smashed to earth, head first, at a speed of 30 miles per hour. The elevator and outrigger supports crumpled instantly. What was left of the machine bounced three times down the field, upending on the front edges as it slid to a stop. Orville was catapulted out of the cradle and through a broken section of the top wing. They found him, dazed and bruised, lying in the remains of the elevator.

  This was the catastrophic accident they had dreaded ever since they first began gliding. Safety was much on their minds that summer. Not long after Orv’s accident they received word that Daniel Maloney had been killed flying a glider designed by Californian John Joseph Montgomery.

  Twenty years before, in 1883 or 1884, Montgomery had made one short, nearly disastrous glide. The first American to take to the air aboard a heavier-than-air craft found the experience so sobering that he immediately ceased flying and devoted his time to laboratory work.

  Chanute met him at the Chicago meeting in 1894, and included an account of Montgomery’s early work in Progress in Flying Machines. Disagreements over the value of the Californian’s “theoretical” contributions led to a falling out, however. Chanute had not heard from him in over a decade.19

  Suddenly, in the spring of 1905, Montgomery’s name was in the headlines. This time he had built a tandem-wing glider vaguely reminiscent of the Langley Aerodrome. Rather than testing the craft himself, he hired two daredevil “pilots,” Daniel Maloney and Charles K. Hamilton, who allowed themselves to be carried aloft with the glider dangling beneath a hot-air balloon. The idea was to cut loose at an altitude of several thousand feet and glide back to earth. It was an incredibly dangerous stunt to try with a craft that could scarcely be controlled except by weight shifting. Small wonder that the newspapers paid attention.

  The inevitable catastrophe occurred at Santa Clara University on July 18. Maloney dropped free and maneuvered a little, then the spectators noticed that something was seriously wrong. The aircraft smashed to earth. Maloney died shortly afterwards.

  All that spring, Chanute’s letters were filled with the latest news of Montgomery’s “bold performance.” The Wrights remained silent. With Maloney’s death, however, Wilbur felt compelled to comment.

  The tragic death of poor Maloney seemed the more terrible to me because I knew it was coming and had tried in vain to think of some way to save him. I knew a direct warning would tend to precipitate rather than prevent a catastrophe. The Montgomery pamphlet showed an entire misapprehension of the real facts regarding the distribution of pressures and the travel of the center of pressure with increasing speed, and it seemed to me something awful that poor Maloney should cut loose high in the air and lightly cause the machine to dart and describe circles without knowing that there were critical p
oints beyond which it would be absolutely impossible for him to right the machine.20

  The Wrights knew infinitely more than Montgomery about the forces playing across the wings of a flying machine, and they would never have been so foolish as to release themselves in the air under such conditions. Control was the key to safety. Clearly, their own machine was often out of control in pitch. Orv’s crash forced them to come to terms with the final problem.

  The solution lay in some modification to the elevator. In rebuilding the forward section of the machine, they enlarged the elevator surface area from 52.74 square feet to 83 square feet; they also moved the elevator from 7.32 to 11.7 feet in front of the leading edge of the wing. The longer “moment arm” served the same function as the addition of weight beneath the elevator in 1904.21

  The aircraft that emerged differed significantly from that of a few weeks before. It embodied all they knew about flying—and some educated guesses. Back in the air on August 24, an enormous improvement in performance was immediately apparent. After less than a week of practice Orville was flying four circuits of the field, remaining aloft for 4 minutes and 54 seconds. The accidents vanished abruptly. By September, two-, three-, four-, and five-minute flights became common—without a single serious accident.

  The impact of the design breakthrough was apparent by the end of the month. On September 26 Wilbur remained in the air for 18 minutes, 112/5 seconds. For the first time, they ran the gasoline tank dry. The record continued to climb: 26 minutes on October 3; 33 minutes and 17 seconds on October 4.