Maiden Flight

by Harry Haskell

  Langley had conducted his last experiment a mere nine days before the Wrights made their first flight at Kitty Hawk. The aerodrome, as the Langley machine was called, was an ignominious flop. No sooner did it leave the houseboat from which it had been launched than it plunged straight into the Potomac River. Langley, being a reputable scientist, was quick to congratulate the Wrights for succeeding where he had failed. Curtiss, however, had no such scruples. Ten years later he saw an opportunity to get around the patent restrictions that Orville was fighting to enforce in the courts. If he could prove that a machine that could fly had been built before the Wrights made their first flight, he hoped for a construction of the laws that would invalidate their patents.

  With that goal in mind, Curtiss persuaded one of his friends at the Smithsonian to lend him the original aerodrome, an odd, bat-like affair that had been put on exhibition as a curiosity. Early in 1914 he transported it to Hammondsport, New York, where he rebuilt it, saving only about 20 percent of the original machine, and installed a new motor. With the reconstructed plane he was able to make some short hops, though not to stay in the air for any length of time. To any unbiased observer, it was obvious that the exercise was a publicity stunt, pure and simple. Ultimately, Curtiss’s ploy failed and the Wright patents were upheld by the courts.

  But the controversy didn’t stop there. Certain high-ranking Smithsonian officials pursued Curtiss’s campaign of misrepresentation for their own ends. For years afterward the institution’s annual reports perpetuated the myth that the rebuilt Langley aerodrome had flown “without change.” The officials undoubtedly hoped that the glory of sponsoring the first successful flight would bolster the Smithsonian’s applications to Congress for larger appropriations. Katharine was so outraged by their unprincipled behavior that she was unable to sleep for weeks. At last, out of sheer exasperation, she enlisted me and one or two other trusted friends to help set the record straight.

  Orville’s impulse, characteristically, was to let the cosmic process take its course and settle things. He calmly observed that the Langley machine had not flown and that no sensible person would believe it had. At length, however, he gave in to Katharine’s pleas and allowed her to distribute the statement we had drafted to various periodicals. The response was disappointingly predictable. To a man, the editors courteously apologized for any seeming implication that the Wrights were not the real inventors of the airplane. All felt that the outbreak of war in Europe made it an unsuitable time to print anything on the subject, especially so long after the events in question, but they promised to keep the statement on file for future use.

  So that was that. Little did the Wrights know that their battle with the Smithsonian was only beginning.

  In the summer of 1917, shortly after America entered the war, I contacted Orville in the course of my work as chief editorial writer for the Star. I wanted his help in getting the lowdown on the Wilson administration’s ham-fisted war preparedness program, which our editorial page had been criticizing pretty vigorously. Knowing that Orville was serving as an advisor to the government on aeronautical matters, I requested an introduction to his friend Edward Deeds, the Dayton industrialist who had been put in charge of wartime aircraft procurement. Orville wrote back at once, enclosing a note to Colonel Deeds in which he described me as “a very good friend of Katharine and myself” and advised that he shouldn’t hesitate to talk to me in confidence.

  On my way back from seeing Deeds in Washington, I stopped off in Dayton to interview Orville for the paper. The opportunity to observe the world’s foremost aeronautical engineer at work was too good to pass up. Katharine’s “little brother” had changed hardly at all since our first meeting in Washington eight years earlier. His dress and appearance were as fastidious as ever, his manner modest and welcoming. Deliberate, well organized, and clear-thinking, he gave the impression of complete independence in thought and action. It was plain to see why his counsel was so eagerly sought by his fellow scientists and government officials alike.

  At his scientific laboratory on Dayton’s old West Side, Orville explained that he was conducting two lines of research, both potentially important to the war effort. One was the measurement of the air resistance of curved surfaces, a continuation of the pioneering work that he and Wilbur had done on the tables developed by the great German engineer Otto Lilienthal. The other was the development of a stabilizer to make the control of the airplane more nearly automatic. Listening to Orville expound on these arcane technical subjects, as patiently and methodically as he could to a layman, I began to grasp why he had proven such a formidable witness for the prosecution in the patent lawsuits against Curtiss.

  That evening, Orville, Katharine, and I were conversing on the veranda at Hawthorn Hill, passing the time before dinner, when suddenly it came to me that I was sitting in their late father’s favorite rocking chair. Bishop Wright had died upstairs in his sleep a few weeks earlier, at the ripe old age of eighty-eight. His spirit lived on in each of his offspring, but it was Orville who most clearly bore the stamp of his upright and steadfast character. I recognized the type from my own missionary father, who died in 1914 after decades of service in the Balkans. My brother Ed said that Father would as calmly have gone to the stake for his convictions as any martyr who ever burned. The words we had inscribed on his gravestone in Oberlin, SOLDIER OF THE CROSS, seemed equally apt for the Bishop, whose lonely crusade against the forces of darkness in the church had consumed so much of his and his children’s lives.

  Like the Bishop, my father was a man of stern and unquestioning faith. This was borne home to me as a student at Oberlin, when religious difficulties began to pile up on me and give me distress. I wrote to Father in Bulgaria about some of these difficulties, including my questioning of miracles and my doubt of the doctrine of atonement, which was one of the foundations of the theology of the day. He wrote back a rather curt letter telling me that I should pay no attention to such things, as the faith as delivered to the saints was quite adequate and it was rather wicked to question it. Needless to say, I never took up the matter of religion with him again.

  Katharine and Orville dutifully kept the Sabbath out of respect for the Bishop’s memory. But they had not been regular churchgoers for years, and religion played little apparent part in their daily lives. Although they had never openly turned their backs on their father’s Old Testament creed, I sensed that deep down neither of them had any more use for the old-time religion than I did. Katharine’s self-sacrificing devotion to the Bishop was one of her most estimable virtues. Plainly, her loyalty to Orville ran no less deep. As we sat together on that balmy summer evening, rocking and talking, it struck me that they looked and acted for all the world like a contented married couple.

  From then to the end of the war, Orville furnished me with a steady stream of valuable intelligence. He was convinced that the government’s forty-million-dollar aircraft production program had been badly mismanaged and that the country would have to depend upon men from civilian life, such as Colonel Deeds, to push it through. As fate would have it, a special Justice Department investigation issued a report that came down hard on Orville’s friend. Charles Evans Hughes, the chief investigator, went so far as to recommend that Deeds be court-martialed for giving out misleading statements concerning the early shipments of airplanes and disclosing sensitive information to his former business associates in Dayton.

  Confidentially, Orville allowed that there might be something to the first charge, although he was disposed to believe that Deeds had acted innocently and not from any criminal intent. He surmised that his friend had been misled through his own enthusiasm and the overenthusiastic reports of his subordinates. As to the second allegation, I had a hunch that Deeds had awarded a contract to his friends not only because he felt they could handle it but also because he saw no reason why they shouldn’t get rich out of government contracts at the same time everybody else was. Businessmen generally seemed to regard the war as an opport
unity to get theirs—and they got.

  The sordid spectacle of wartime profiteering and incompetence left a sour taste in my mouth. But I will always be grateful to the government’s aircraft program for one thing: it gave me an opportunity to renew my acquaintance with the Wrights.

  Katharine

  It did my heart good to see Harry and Orv hit it off that summer at Hawthorn Hill. They were so much alike that it seemed only natural they should become friends. I couldn’t forget how sympathetic Harry had been when I wrote to him before the war, and how readily he had sprung to Orv’s defense in our scrap with Glenn Curtiss. At the same time, I couldn’t help noticing that he asked me to get Orv’s reaction to the Hughes report, instead of going straight to the horse’s mouth. If I hadn’t known better, I might have suspected him of cooking up an excuse to write to me!

  From then on he bent over backward to keep in touch with us both. One time—it was in 1919, I think—Orv and I drove out to Kansas to attend a family wedding. Bubbo had taken a road trip out west earlier that summer with Colonel Deeds and some other men. Their route took them through Kansas City while Harry and Isabel were away in Colorado on vacation. When Harry got home and discovered they had missed each other, he kicked up a fuss and insisted we make amends by stopping over on our way back to Kansas in October. Bubbo replied that we would be only too happy to “afflict” the Haskells with our presence—and so we did!

  Harry and Isabel lived in a pleasant suburban neighborhood, not far from my brother Reuch and his family. While Harry took Orv downtown to meet his colleagues at the Star, Isabel and I stayed home and talked a mile a minute—real, honest-to-goodness conversation it was too, not the empty-headed small talk that so many of my sect go in for. Isabel was as smart as a whip. Though I hadn’t known her well in college, I always enjoyed her company. Only later did we learn that the poor, dear creature was dying of cancer. Harry had managed to keep her condition a secret from both Isabel and their son, but young Henry seemed to sense that something was troubling his father. I remember how he sat right up against Harry all evening long, holding hands, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a high school–age boy to do.

  I had always had a happy life and didn’t want to be married, frankly. But seeing how devoted Harry and Isabel were to each other, and how their son doted on them both, got me to thinking good and hard about what I had missed. Young Henry would be heading off to college soon, and I knew what a wrench it would be for his parents to let him go, his father especially. Imagine—at Oberlin I didn’t think Harry had much feeling! I would have banked on his intellectual strength and character, but I never dreamed he cared much for companionship of any sort. How my dear old friend has changed, I said to myself. Surely it must have been married life that had developed those strong feelings in him.

  When Orv and I returned to Kansas City a year later, Isabel and Harry had built a new house for themselves in a lovely residential district that put me in mind of our neighborhood in Oakwood. The move had put such a strain on Isabel’s nervous system that she had contracted a severe case of hives. I was nearly undone when Harry took me upstairs to see her. She was frail and drawn, a pale shadow of the vital, energetic woman I had laughed and joked with a mere twelve months earlier. Harry clung by her side, petting and kissing her all the while. He looked terribly worn down himself, poor dear. Yet in spite of all the hard things that had come to them, neither of them uttered a word of complaint.

  The Haskells’ house—our house I s’pose I must call it now—was a white Dutch colonial with green shutters, set on a gently sloping corner lot. A pretty dry-laid stone wall edged the property, overhung by graceful elm trees and shrubbery. Harry and Isabel had planned and furnished the house together, just the way Orv and I had done at Hawthorn Hill. There were bright, floral-pattern curtains in the windows, oriental carpets covering the hardwood floors, and built-in bookcases downstairs and up, filled to overflowing with Harry’s precious books. Isabel was an avid reader too, though she was less bookish by nature than Harry. They seemed an ideal couple, perfectly matched and happy as larks—but of course I knew it couldn’t last, what with Isabel’s failing health, and the whole thing made me unspeakably sad.

  Orv was giving me no end of worries himself at that very time. For years he had been suffering from acute pain in his left hip. We suspected that his injuries had been poorly treated by the army doctors at Fort Myer in 1908. The pain became so intense that we had to bring in two nurses to help me care for him at home. Little Brother was pretty much flat on his back—he hadn’t even felt up to driving out to Kansas City for Reuch’s funeral that spring. Finally, one of Harry’s doctor friends referred us to a specialist at the Mayo Clinic, and we headed straight up to Minnesota after leaving the Haskells. The new X-rays showed that Orv’s sacroiliac joint had been injured in the accident and was mechanically irritating the sciatic nerve. The doctor fitted him with a tight belt to make the joint work as it should—and, lo and behold, it did the trick! Orv went home and started running up and down the stairs without any pain at all.

  What with Orv’s and Harry’s problems, piled on top of poor Reuch’s passing, my spirits had taken a terrific beating. Then something marvelous and utterly unexpected happened—almost a miracle, really. Just when I most needed a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, who should come into our lives but Stef! Orv invited him to Dayton to compare notes on their scientific work. I remember the first time we laid eyes on him in the fall of 1919. Stef looked every inch the dashing Arctic explorer, with his dark, wavy hair, high forehead, and broad, sensitive mouth. Orv and I were spellbound by the vivid accounts of his adventures in the far north. Both of us sized him up right away as being absolutely truthful—and very interesting.

  A few months later, Stef—everyone calls him that because his real name, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, is such a mouthful—came back to Dayton to give a lecture. That was another day I’ll not soon forget! As Stef was winding down his talk, the color abruptly drained out of his face, just as if somebody had pulled the plug. Orv and I looked at each other in alarm, and without saying a word I slipped onto the podium and escorted Stef out front to Orv’s waiting car. It didn’t take long for the doctor to find out what was the matter—our distinguished speaker had the Spanish influenza! Naturally, Stef was ordered to stay off his feet for several days, and while he convalesced at Hawthorn Hill, we put the long hours to good use by getting better acquainted.

  By the time Stef felt well enough to go home to New York, Orv and he had become firm mutual admirers. As for me, I found Stef a lovely character, full of whims and “insistent ideas,” and yet so gentle and considerate—as well as interesting and absolutely genuine and truthful. I was a woman of years—forty-five years, to be precise—and some experience and observation. I thought I had known just about every emotion that life had to offer. But something was stirring deep down inside me, something strange and unsettling and yet inexpressibly warm—unlike anything I had ever felt before.

  Orville

  It was a funny thing about Stef and Harry: one day it seemed we were just getting acquainted, and the next I knew they were old family friends. Didn’t Will always say that Kate and I had a way of stepping right into the affections of nice people we met? If you want my honest opinion, Swes makes friends far too easily for her own good—mine too, I might add. A great deal of trouble could have been avoided for us both if she had only learned to exercise more caution in her relations with men. Granted, I was the one who invited Stef and Harry to Hawthorn Hill in the first place, but it didn’t take long for me to cotton that they weren’t beating a path to our door merely for the pleasure of my company.

  For a man who has no technical training in aeronautics and engineering, Stef is singularly well informed. Many’s the night we’ve sat up for hours on end discussing our scientific work. If the truth be told, I do most of the talking—but Stef never seems to begrudge giving me the floor for a change. What he and Kate found to talk about while I was
away at the lab is anyone’s guess. Swes doesn’t have a scientific bone in her body, and as for Stef—well, I never pegged him as a ladies’ man. Though, now I think of it, there has been talk about him and that lady novelist whose name I never can remember—Fannie Hurst, that’s it. There’s probably nothing in it, but you never can tell. The way that Greenwich Village outfit carries on, it’s a wonder they get a lick of real, honest-to-goodness work done.

  Not that I’ve ever known Stef to be at a loss for words. Harry always said he was as good a writer as he is a speaker. I remember the first time he came up to our summer place in Canada. He brought along the manuscript of The Friendly Arctic for Kate and me to look at, and we both had about the same reaction: if the book kept on as it promised, she told him, it was sure to be a “hammer.” I don’t see how Stef does it. He thinks nothing of turning out a new book every year or two. It’s easy for a man like that to say I should write up the story of the invention of the aeroplane. Stef and Harry aren’t far wrong when they argue that it’s the only way to settle my dispute with the Smithsonian for good and always. But I’m an engineer, not a writer, and that’s all there is to say.

  Every time I think of those self-styled aeronautical “experts” in Washington, my blood starts to boil. It’s as clear as the nose on my face that Will and I built the first man-carrying flying machine. We have the evidence to prove it—notebooks, photographs, eyewitnesses. The whole world knows that Langley’s aerodrome never could have stayed up in the air—the Smithsonian people are just too proud and stubborn to admit it. The press agent gang are no better. If it weren’t for men like Harry Haskell, Arthur Page, and Earl Findley, I don’t believe a one of them would lift a finger to check their facts. I had to smile that time Harry sent me a couple of wildly inaccurate clippings from the Star about the Langley machine. It amuses me to see how responsible he and my other reporter friends feel for letting those stories slip into their papers.