Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  It worked, first time.

  Older brother Wilbur managed to take off and pilot Flyer II in a complete circle of a distance of just over 4000 feet and remain aloft for a full minute and a half! A couple of months later, the distance covered had grown to 3 miles and they were able to stay aloft for over five minutes. With each flight the brothers were growing in understanding what modifications their machine needed to get better control in the air, and also feeling that air better, how it was filled with eddies, pockets and currents, which were not necessarily apparent to an observer on the ground. And, of course, other intrepid aviators from all parts of the developed world kept doing their utmost to get aloft and replicate what the Wright brothers had done. Nowhere were they trying harder than in France, where, with its long tradition of trying to thwart the laws of gravity in balloons and gliders, the nation was positively beside itself with enthusiasm for flying…

  For the French, the great breakthrough came on 12 November 1906, when a Brazilian-born man by the name of Alberto Santos-Dumont took off from the Parisian park Champs de Bagatelle, within the Bois de Boulogne, in a machine built in secret by the frères Voisin—two brothers who operated what was later acknowledged as the first commercial aircraft factory in Europe. The plane, christened 14-bis Oiseau de Proie (bird of prey), but colloquially dubbed Canard, was an enormous version of Lawrence Hargrave’s box kite, based directly on his still unpatented designs, with an engine and propeller attached. In this strange contraption the foundation member of ‘the beautiful people’—with his always fashionable dress, bowler hat and impeccable suit set off by his gaily billowing red scarf and perpetually preened moustache—succeeded in tearing across the ground like an ‘infuriated grasshopper’,28 and then taking off to fly un magnifique 239 yards in less than twenty-two seconds! Victory! The first real flight in Europe!

  Santos-Dumont, alternately laughing and crying with joy, was carried around the field on the shoulders of his many admirers. Paris was agog, and its immense excitement was manifested by the wall-to-wall coverage in the French newspapers the following day. To this point the 33-year-old Santos-Dumont had been famous in Europe as a rather foppish pioneer of the lighter-than-air dirigibles, and he had been a frequent and famous sight above the streets of Paris in a basket beneath his elongated balloon, elegantly floating along. He was a trendsetter, as witness the fact that once, over dinner at Maxim’s—celebrating his victory in a balloon race around the Eiffel Tower—he had complained to his jeweller friend Louis Cartier how difficult it was to check flight times on his pocket watch while flying, so Cartier had invented something called a ‘wristwatch’ for his friend. And now everyone was wearing them!

  But nothing Santos-Dumont had ever done had attracted attention like this. Clearly, he had abandoned balloons and was now going for heavier-than-air planes. And whereas the Wright brothers had needed a rail and derrick and weights to launch their plane—and it only worked when the wind was blowing in the right direction—the thing about Santos-Dumont’s aeroplane was that it had needed none of that. He had wheels to launch himself along the ground, and an engine to provide propulsion, and he had flown. Le tout Paris had seen it!

  One observer who was present at the flight and keenly interested in the press reports the following day was Britain’s Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of the Daily Mail. Immediately upon reading his own newspaper’s coverage of the event the outraged Lord Northcliffe—who had begun his serious journalistic career by becoming editor of Bicycling News—got his editor on the phone and put his views in the strongest terms.

  ‘The news,’ he said deliberately, ‘is not that Santos-Dumont flies 722 feet, but that England is no longer an island. There will be no more sleeping safely behind the wooden walls of old England with the Channel our safety moat. It means the aerial chariots of a foe descending on British soil if war comes.’29

  The implications of flying were huge, they were going to change the world and sell a lot of newspapers. The Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe told his editor, had to be at the forefront of this coverage and he further instructed that the man he had recently appointed as the world’s first specialised aviation correspondent, Harry Harper, be immediately dispatched to Paris to interview Santos-Dumont. From that point on, the indefatigable Harper, with his owl glasses, quizzical but distracted manner, and mania for taking notes in his notably large copperplate script, became a perpetual presence at airfields around Europe. If it ‘appened, ‘Arry was there. Or at least heard about it.

  One such aeronautical event that Harry Harper covered early in his new job was a flight by a British Army soldier, Sapper Moreton, who, attached to an extraordinary collection of Hargrave box kites, was borne aloft to an altitude of 2600 feet above Sussex, and stayed there for over an hour! With just such a system, the British Army intended to be able to easily discern enemy movements well before they reached the men on the ground.30 A veritable revolution was under way.

  ‘The kindness of parents to their children,’ Lawrence Hargrave wrote to a friend, at a time when he was not only crook but going through familial turmoil, ‘is like presents to savages. Both are incapable of appreciating a gift. Whatever love you feel for your offspring, be careful of not showing it, be stern, and give as you would a bone to a dog.’31

  It was, of course, a severe statement from an occasionally severe man, and yet the truth of it was that the older Lawrence Hargrave became, the more difficult he found it not to show his love for his children. He and his long-suffering wife, Margaret—who had no interest in his wretched experiments, and only wished they wouldn’t so dominate their lives—had had seven children, of whom five had survived, and Hargrave was always very conscious of his duty to his offspring. As to which ones he was closest to there was little doubt. His first-born daughter, Nellie, and his only son, Geoffrey, were the sole members of the family who really took an interest in his endless experiments. And after Nellie and one of his other daughters, Margaret, moved to England to study art and subsequently marry, the relationship between father and son became closer than ever. This led to the quietly spoken Geoffrey even becoming his father’s scientific collaborator after the young man began attending Sydney Technical High School. One of Geoffrey’s great passions would become the modifying and refining of his father’s original rotary engine design—whose first version had run on compressed air—by building a petrol-fuelled rotary engine. ‘If he develops a little ambition,’ the proud father had written to a friend, ‘I think he will outstrip the ruck…‘32

  Of course Geoffrey was not the only person to become interested in his father’s engines. Lawrence Hargrave was soon approached by some German professors visiting Australia, with the offer to display his kites and engines in Munich’s Deutsches Museum, where his work could be readily accessed by all interested workers in the field. Given that none of the Commonwealth government, New South Wales government, Melbourne Museum, Smithsonian Institution, or any of the British museums had previously shown any interest in displaying them, Hargrave agreed, and it was not long before European engineers were all over them, paying particular attention to his revolutionary—in both meanings of the word—rotary engine.33 And well before that, almost as soon as he had invented it, Hargrave had provided notes on the concept to Railroad and Engineering journal, an English publication, and it was this that had first attracted Chanute’s attention to him. Thus, while the Wright brothers continued to zealously guard their every breakthrough and take exhaustive legal action against everyone who they felt tried to copy them, Hargrave’s approach, from the beginning, could not have been more different.

  It was a current that was surely going to kill him. On the hot afternoon of 2 January 1907, the ten-year-old Chilla—on a brief holiday back home in Australia with his mother, paid for by Catherine’s father—was swimming out beyond the breakers with his cousin Rupert Swallow at Bondi Beach when the two boys were suddenly gripped by a strong rip that carried them further out to sea.34

  Chilla was almost
immediately in trouble, as was Rupert. Try as they might to swim towards the shore, the land quickly receded and they were soon exhausted, their arms feeling like lead. Both began to flounder, and Chilla to swallow water, as a haze of blackness began to envelop him.

  So easy…now…to stop…thrashing…to let go…to sink down…just a little…letting go…

  Suddenly a strong hand descended into the water and gripped him, probably at the last possible instant. The hand belonged to a man by the name of Warwick Wilce, of Croydon, and he was in turn attached to what was know as a lifeline, a long rope stored in a box on the beach which allowed the lifesaver to stay connected to the shore.35 Back on the beach, the surf lifesavers of the newly established Bondi Surf Life Saving Club began to haul on the line, and both Chilla and his rescuer, Wilce, were quickly brought back to the shore, just as Rupert Swallow was, by other lifesavers. Rupert quickly recovered from the ordeal, but not Chilla. Once back on the sand in the middle of the crowd that had gathered, he not only looked dead, but probably was.

  To most of the bystanders it was obvious that his rescuers had got there too late and he was gone. And yet even as some people, mostly women, began to wail at the tragedy of his loss—and young Rupert, wrapped in a towel, gazed dully at his seemingly lifeless cousin, trying to comprehend the magnitude of what had just happened—a short, angular woman with a no-nonsense attitude about her strode forward and took charge. Her name, with title, was Nurse Sweeney. (Her Christian name was Sadie, but no-one ever called her anything other than Nurse Sweeney. She really looked as though she had just been born a ‘Nurse’, and there had never been any need to call her anything different.) She was from Quirindi, a bit over 200 miles north of Sydney, and was visiting Bondi to get some sun and fresh air, as she had herself been poorly from an undiagnosed illness. Luckily Nurse Sweeney had been trained in the modern method of resuscitation—the Sylvester Method.

  Turning the young lad over on to his back, she kneeled at his head, pulled his tongue forward to clear a passage to his throat, and then grabbed both his arms at the wrists and pulled them out and upwards until they were above his head, pulling his ribs up and sucking air into his lungs. She then pushed his arms back down and applied a gentle pressure on his ribs to force the air back out again—and repeated the process between fifteen and twenty times a minute.36 A persistent woman, Nurse Sweeney. Even when a quarter of an hour had passed and there was still no response from the lad, she didn’t give up. She had made a career of beating death back from the door and if, in this case, death was in fact already through the door and halfway down the hallway before she caught up with it, well, it was just going to have to be dragged out again. For some onlookers in the crowd it was so obvious that she was wasting her time that they began to drift away, some of them even returning to the surf. And then suddenly, after nigh on half an hour, the kid coughed. He coughed!

  It was true.

  Somewhere from the darkest depths where death lurked, Chilla, or the thing inside him that still stood for life, was slowly, slowly, agonisingly making its way to the surface, and when he finally did burst through, coughing furiously and expelling the last gulp of water from his lungs, it sounded almost like a spluttering motor…

  Though shocked and trembling when he at last came to, there was nothing physically wrong with him that a shaky night in bed, with his calm and caring mother watching over him by candlelight until dawn, couldn’t fix. Emotionally, it might have been another question…

  Sadly, in the case of Nurse Sweeney, death would have its ultimate revenge when—though still fighting it to her last breath—just a few weeks later she succumbed to her illness and passed away.37

  And finally it had come to this.

  After endless experimentation and modification mixed with many test flights—nearly all of it well away from the public eye and journalists—the Wright brothers’ latest version of Flyer I and II, Flyer III, had magically grown and changed shape from its previous incarnations. The propellers were still driven by a single 16-horsepower engine, but the elevator and rudder were twice the size of the earlier models and extended back twice as far from the wings, which now had a slight upward tilt from the fuselage. Flights of up to 24 miles in figures of eight and of thirty-nine and a half minutes’ duration had been accomplished.

  The new version of Flyer III, in which they had hoped to interest the US Army Signal Corps, was powered by an improved engine producing between 30 and 40 horsepower, and the pilot sat upright for the first time, exerting control by virtue of twin ‘joysticks’ variously connected to the wing-warping cables, elevator and rudder.

  Despite a shocking setback when the plane had crashed during a demonstration for the US Army, breaking Orville’s left thigh and several ribs and killing his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge (a member of the official army board, who now had the disastrous distinction of being the first fatality from a powered flight), the brothers still felt that they were at last ready to demonstrate their flying machine to an international audience. Specifically, they wanted to show it in France, which—absurdly, in the Wrights’ view—considered itself the centre of world aviation. Ideally, the brothers wished to make it clear that anyone buying a plane in Europe should buy a Wright plane from either them or one of their European agents, otherwise they would not be getting the best.

  So it was that at Hunaudières racetrack, about 7 miles from Le Mans and 132 miles south-west of Paris, on the Saturday afternoon of 8 August 1908, Wilbur Wright continued to fuss about the machine that he had personally and oh so methodically assembled over the previous two months, as the impatient, sceptical crowd waited. No matter that these spectators from the French aviation community were there at Wilbur’s specific invitation, he was oblivious of the expectations of others, and kept to his own schedule—just as he had done since arriving in France—leaving nothing to chance, and doing everything personally to ensure that every last tiny detail was looked after, under his own hand and done absolutely perfectly to his satisfaction.

  ‘LE BLUFF CONTINUE’, a Parisian newspaper had trumpeted in a headline the day before, as Gallic impatience had boiled over into irritation and frustration at the continued delays to the flight. Yes, they had read all the stories about these Wright brothers and knew that flight in some form was possible—as witness the wondrous leap of Santos-Dumont—but could this strange, gaunt little man in his dusty, dark grey suit with a starched white wing collar, all ‘neath a ludicrous green cap really do what he claimed and fly this awkward-looking thing wherever he wanted? He seemed so odd, so disdainful of all around him, so charmless, so unfashionable—especially when compared with their own incomparable Santos-Dumont—it was inconceivable that one so ordinary could accomplish something so miraculous. He really must be a bluffeur…

  ‘Even if this man sometimes deigns to smile,’ the French aviator Léon Delagrange, there for the occasion, would write of first meeting with him, ‘one can say with certainty that he has never known the sweetness of tears. Has he a heart? Has he loved? Has he suffered? An enigma, a mystery.’38 The French were accustomed to visitors to their shores raving about the wonders of their country, the wine, the food, the women, the Eiffel Tower, but this strange one barely said a word.

  On this afternoon, Wilbur Wright continued his preparations regardless, entirely untroubled. His every move was calculated and even, yes, rather birdlike, in the kind of twitchy way he did things—tightening nuts, checking struts, using a screwdriver on the carburettor—but that was the only thing that remotely resembled flying.

  Suddenly, however, Wilbur straightened, smiled, yes, smiled, and spoke. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, to no-one in particular among those standing around, ‘I am about to fly.’39 With which, and with absolutely no fanfare for the common man, he climbed aboard the aeroplane, gave the signal for the engines to be started up, and moved into position as the twin propellers whirled.

  As the crowd pressed forward and positively crackled with excitement, Wilbur pulled
the release mechanism, causing six large discs of iron to plummet from the derrick, and the plane accelerated along its rail until, four seconds later, the strange American was airborne! What followed was nothing less than extraordinary. While some in the crowd had previously witnessed flying of some sort—and two of them in Léon Delagrange and Louis Blériot who had themselves flown, a little—the vast majority of the flights witnessed or executed had been of a few seconds in duration, or perhaps a minute, and all of them in a roughly straight line.

  Now, though, before their very eyes, Wilbur Wright took the plane twice around the field in an almost perfect circle—several consecutive arcs of triumph—before executing a perfect figure eight. Around the racecourse, many local children—boys and girls both—who had climbed trees in lieu of an invitation, cheered Wilbur to the echo and waved their caps at him as he passed overhead. He then brought the plane in for a precisely executed landing, 107 seconds after take-off.40

  Uproar. Complete pandemonium. Cheering, whistling, crying. All those who had been critical and sceptical had now been definitively proved wrong. The Wrights really could fly, and superbly at that. With such control! Such finesse! Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

  Even Wilbur himself seemed moved by the crowd’s reaction and gave a small cheery wave upon alighting from the plane. He was particularly pleased at the stunned reaction of some of the French flyers, who had come to see him perform.

  ‘Cet homme a conquis l’air,’ voices in the crowd exclaimed. ‘Il n’est pas bluffeur!’

  ‘Nous sommes battus,’ cried Delagrange, while furiously pumping Wilbur’s hand. ‘Eh, bien. Nous n’existons pas!’

  For his part, Blériot—a tall man with sad, hound-dog eyes and a perpetually sleepy moustache—was equally congratulatory.