It seems to me [Cabot wrote] that this may fairly be said to mark the beginning of flight through the air by men unaided by balloons. It has occurred to me that it would be eminently desirable for the United States Government to interest itself in this invention.
Senator Lodge passed the Cabot letter on to the War Department where nothing came of it. As for the reaction in Dayton, probably not one person in a hundred believed the brothers had actually flown in their machine, or if they had, it could only have been a fluke.
Work at the bicycle shop on West Third Street resumed with, as Charlie Taylor said, no “jig steps” over what had been achieved.
Of course, they were pleased with the flight. But their first word with me, as I remember, was about the motor being damaged when the wind picked up the machine and turned it topsy-turvy. . . . They wanted a new one built right away. . . . They were always thinking of the next thing to do; they didn’t waste much time worrying about the past.
The intention now was to build a heavier version of the Flyer with a more powerful and efficient engine. Nor could they neglect earning an income sufficient to cover expenses both at the shop and at home, not to say the cost of their experiments. As Charlie Taylor would repeatedly remind people, “There wasn’t any other money.”
As it was during the first several months of 1904, bike repairs were numbering a steady fifteen to twenty a week. Then there were the sales of a great variety of bicycle “sundries,” as they were referred to in the shop’s large ledger books, including bike tires ($3.25 each), bike bells (10 cents), lamps ($1.00), pedal guards (5 cents), spokes (10 cents), bike pumps (35 cents). Also, as usual in winter, sharpening ice skates (at 15 cents each) provided a steady additional sum.
Sales of the brothers’ own line of bicycles, the larger part of their income, would not pick up until April. So to have a sufficient number on hand took up most of their time at the workbenches behind the shop. The only wages to be covered were Charlie Taylor’s $18 a week and Carrie Kayler’s $2.50.
To help cut expenses for continuing work on their flying machine, it was decided that further expeditions to Kitty Hawk, with all the attendant costs of travel and shipment of tools and material, could be dispensed with by finding a suitable stretch of open land close to home to serve as a practice field. Wilbur and Orville also wanted Charlie Taylor at hand, and there was concern, too, that the wind-driven sands of Kitty Hawk could play havoc with their engine.
The likeliest “flying field,” they concluded after some investigation, was a peaceful cow pasture of approximately eighty-four acres eight miles northeast of town called Huffman Prairie. For years a popular science teacher at the high school, William Werthner, had been bringing his students, including Orville and Katharine, on field trips there—outings Orville loved, which probably had something to do with the choice.
The setting was spacious and relatively private, yet nothing like Kitty Hawk, with its broad horizons, wind in abundance, and nearly total privacy. Here, the space to maneuver had clearly defined parameters. Barbed wire and trees lined the borders, and there were besides a number of trees within the pasture, including one fifty-foot honey locust covered with thorns. The field itself, as Wilbur said, was so full of groundhog hummocks it might have been a prairie dog town. In addition the electric interurban trolley line from Dayton to Columbus skirted one side of the property and so could provide passengers on board ample view of whatever might be going on.
The work to be done here, the brothers knew, could well be the final, critical stage in the maturation of their whole idea. Here they would have to learn to do far more than what they had at Kitty Hawk. They must master the art of launching themselves safely into the air, of banking and turning a motor-propelled machine, and landing safely. Therefore, Wilbur stressed, they would have to learn to accommodate themselves to circumstances.
If space was limited, then all the more need to learn to make controlled turns. If the interurban trolley meant daily public exposure, it would also provide ready, inexpensive transportation—a ride of forty minutes for a 5-cent fare—to and from town, and with a handy stop known as Simms Station at the edge of the field. They also knew the trolley’s schedule, so if need be they had merely to time their flights to those hours when no one would be passing by.
The pasture belonged to Torrence Huffman, president of Dayton’s Fourth National Bank, whom the Wrights knew. When they inquired if they might rent it for their use, he said there would be no charge, so long as they moved the cows and horses outside the fence before flying their machine. While he liked the brothers well enough, Huffman was among the many who had little faith in their project. “They’re fools,” he told the farmer who worked the adjoining land.
Meanwhile, in what time they had to themselves, the brothers were sawing and planing lumber for the ribs of the new machine and working with Charlie Taylor on the new motor.
Their nephew Milton, who as a boy was often hanging about the brothers, would one day write, “History was being made in their bicycle shop and in their home, but the making was so obscured by the commonplace that I did not recognize it until many years later.”
With the advance of the spring of 1904, Wilbur and Orville could be seen out in the grass at Huffman Prairie swinging scythes or working with shovels leveling off ground hog mounds. When it came to building a shed in which to assemble and store their new machine, they put it in a corner as far removed from the trolley stop as the field permitted.
Prior to their first test flight, lest anyone think them overly secretive, the brothers invited friends and neighbors to come and watch. The press would be welcome, too, but on the condition that no photographs be taken. Their concern centered on the chance of photographs being used to study those devices and control mechanisms of their own invention, which set their machine apart from others.
On May 23, a Monday, despite an early morning rain, some fifty spectators gathered at Huffman Prairie. Bishop Wright, Katharine, Lorin and family were all present, as were a dozen or more reporters. But there was too little wind, and the test flight had to be postponed. Motor or not, wind was still essential.
On Wednesday, when the crowd gathered again, rain caused another cancellation. The morning after, May 26, there was more rain. But then, during a brief lull in the afternoon, and with hardly any wind and signs of another storm about to break, the brothers decided to “make a start.” With Orville at the controls, Flyer II rose a mere 8 feet and came down at once, within seconds after leaving the starting track. Something had gone wrong with the motor.
It was hardly a premiere to stir excitement or silence the doubters. A few reporters, in an attempt to say something of interest, either praised the sturdiness of the machine or took liberties with the facts, such as to say the plane had gone 75 feet in the air. Bishop Wright, who had been watching with perhaps greater anticipation than anyone present, could only record in his diary, and accurately, that Orville had flown all of 25 feet.
It would be speculated later by some that the failure that day had been a hoax staged as a way to deflate further interest by the public and the press. But this seems absurd given the nature of the brothers and the fact that almost nothing went right for them for the next three months.
On June 10 the machine hit ground because of faulty steering. Another day, a tail was smashed during a landing. “Tail stick broken in starting,” Wilbur recorded of his flight on August 2. On another, the tail wires became “disarranged.” On August 5, Orville “struck ground at start.” Wilbur went again on August 8 and a wing hit the ground before leaving the track. Two days later, a rudder was smashed, a propeller broken. It seemed, as Wilbur would say, they had become “a little rusty” at the art of flying.
“There was nothing spectacular about these many trials,” remembered Werthner, the high school science teacher who was lending the brothers a hand with “their great white bird,” as he called it, “but the good humor of Wilbur, after a spill out of the machine, or a break
somewhere, or a stubborn motor, was always reassuring.
Their patient perseverance, their calm faith in ultimate success, their mutual consideration of each other, might have been considered phenomenal in any but men who were well born and well reared. These flights, or spurts at flying, they always made in turn; and after every trial the two inventors, quite apart, held long and confidential consultation, with always some new gain; they were getting nearer and nearer the moment when sustained flight would be made, for a machine that could maintain itself aloft two minutes might just as well stay there an hour, if everything were as intended.
At last, on August 13, to their utter amazement, Wilbur flew over a thousand feet, farther than any of the flights at Kitty Hawk and five times what they had been able to do thus far at Huffman Prairie.
“Have you heard what they’re up to out there?” people in town would say. “Oh, yes,” would be the usual answer, and the conversation would move on. Few took any interest in the matter or in the two brothers who were to become Dayton’s greatest heroes ever. Even those riding the interurban line seem to have paid little or no attention to what could occasionally be seen in passing, or to the brothers themselves as they traveled back and forth from town on the same trolley looking little different from other commuters.
An exception was Luther Beard, managing editor of the Dayton Journal, who, because of a class he taught occasionally at a school near Huffman Prairie, rode the interurban as far as Simms Station. “I used to chat with them in a friendly way and was always polite to them,” Beard would recall, “because I sort of felt sorry for them. They seemed like well-meaning, decent enough young men. Yet there they were, neglecting their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous flying machine.”
They were also putting their lives at risk, as well they knew. On a flight on August 24, hit by a sudden gust of wind, Orville smashed into the ground at 30 miles an hour and though he suffered no broken bones was so badly shaken and bruised he was unable to fly for another month.
Where Samuel Langley had required the least wind possible for his aerodrome experiments, the Wrights needed more wind. Clearly at Huffman Prairie they would have to make up for what had been so plentiful at Kitty Hawk, to devise, in Wilbur’s words, some way to “render us independent of wind.” The solution would have to be both simple and inexpensive, and so once again straightforward improvisation solved the problem.
They designed and built their own “starting apparatus,” a catapult powered by nothing more than gravity. Its components consisted of a 20-foot tent-shaped tower, or derrick. Made with four wooden poles, it looked like a drilling rig. At the apex, over a pulley, hung by a single rope metal weights totaling as much as 1,600 pounds. The rest of the rope ran from the base of the tower down the launching track on pulleys to the end of the track to another pulley. Then the rope ran back again to the starting point, where it hitched on to the front of the Flyer, which sat on the launching track on a large rimmed bicycle hub.
With a team of horses the brothers would haul the weights up to the top of the derrick. Then, when all was ready, the pilot would release the rope, the weights would drop, the machine would be pulled rapidly down to the end of the track, then shoot into the air at a speed greater by far than possible when attempting takeoff by motor only.
On September 7, with scarcely any wind, Wilbur tested the new catapult for the first time, starting with only 200 pounds of weights. By day’s end, having added another 400 pounds, he could take off with no difficulties and flew longer distances than ever. Little more than a week later, on September 15, he not only flew fully half a mile but for the first time succeeded in turning a half circle, a major achievement.
Not one reporter bothered to attend during this time. Nor did public interest increase. With few exceptions there seemed no public interest at all, no local excitement or curiosity or sense of wonder over the miraculous thing happening right in Dayton’s own backyard.
Nor did anyone seem to appreciate the kind of minds, not to say the extraordinary skill and courage, needed to succeed at so daring a venture. In five months the brothers were to make no less than fifty test flights at Huffman Prairie, and Charlie Taylor, ever on hand in case of motor trouble, would say that every time he watched either of them head down the starting track, he had the awful feeling he might never again see him alive. To Wilbur and Orville, it seemed fear was a stranger.
Writing his autobiography later, James Cox, publisher of the Dayton Daily News, remembered reports coming “to our office that the airship had been in the air over the Huffman Prairie . . . but our news staff would not believe the stories. Nor did they ever take the pains to go out to see.” Nor did Cox.
When the city editor of the Daily News, Dan Kumler, was asked later why for so long nothing was reported of the momentous accomplishments taking place so nearby, he said after a moment’s reflection, “I guess the truth is that we were just plain dumb.”
II.
That same September, 200 miles to the northeast in Ohio, a small, elderly gentleman set off in his automobile, as he had before earlier in the summer, for Huffman Prairie on invitation from the Wrights to come see the progress they were making.
He was Amos Ives Root of Medina, a town just south of Cleveland. Always neatly dressed, his short white beard trimmed, he stood no more than five feet three. But his energy and curiosity were great indeed. His bright hazel eyes seemed to miss nothing.
Born in a log cabin, he had started his own business, manufacturing and marketing beekeeping supplies, in 1869, at age thirty, and soon became widely known as “the bee man” of Ohio. At sixty-four, he was extremely well-off, happily married, a father of five, proud grandfather, and quite free to pursue a whole range of active interests. As would be said in the Medina County newspaper, Amos Root bubbled with enthusiasm and a constant desire to “see the wheels go round.” He loved clocks, windmills, bicycles, machines of all kinds, and especially his Oldsmobile Runabout. Seldom was he happier than when out on the road in it and in all seasons.
While I like horses in a certain way [he wrote], I do not enjoy caring for them. I do not like the smell of the stables. I do not like to be obliged to clean a horse every morning, and I do not like to hitch one up in winter. . . . It takes time to hitch up a horse; but the auto is ready to start off in an instant. It is never tired; it gets there quicker than any horse can possibly do.
As for the Oldsmobile, he liked to say, at $350 it cost less than a horse and carriage.
He was also deeply religious, a Sunday School teacher, an active supporter of the temperance movement, and enjoyed conveying his thoughts and ideas on these and a host of other topics in the column he wrote for the Root company’s beekeepers trade journal, Gleanings in Bee Culture.
It was to be he of all people, the Ohio bee man, who would recognize as no one yet had the genius of the Wrights and the full importance of their flying machine. He would describe in detail what he saw happen at Huffman Prairie, and further, he would describe it accurately. It was not the Dayton papers that finally broke the story—or the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times or Scientific American—but Amos Root’s own Gleanings in Bee Culture.
He had begun correspondence with the Wrights in February. “I hope you will excuse me, friends, for the liberty I take in addressing you. Let me say briefly that I have all my life had an idea in my head that a flying machine should be made on the principle of flying a kite.” He wanted very much, he continued, to be on hand for their experiments and promised never to “undertake to borrow any of your ideas.”
In response the brothers had said they would let him know when their new machine was ready for trial. Through spring and into summer, waiting for word to come, Root kept writing. “Please excuse me, friends, but I am so anxious to see that airship I can hardly sleep nights.”
When in mid-August word finally came, he was off at once for Dayton in his Runabout, a journey of no little uncertainty then given the state of the
roads. He had arrived at the time when the Wrights’ machine was not performing well—certainly not as they wished—but for Root the spectacle of actual flight was “one of the bright spots in my life,” as he told them in gratitude.
He had promised he would say nothing of what he had seen at Huffman Prairie in anything he wrote in his Gleanings in Bee Culture, and good as his word, he described only his venture by automobile.
“In a recent trip of 400 miles through Ohio,” he wrote, “I passed through Ashland, Mansfield, Marion, Delaware, Marysville, Springfield, Dayton . . . so many different towns in a brief period of time that I can hardly remember now which was which.” He told how he tried and succeeded in not killing any of the numerous chickens on the road, or scaring any of the horses. He wrote of having to give the engine fresh water every ten or fifteen miles, and how wherever he stopped, for water or gasoline, a crowd gathered. He described the torn-up streets and mud roads en route, but then could not resist adding:
And, by the way, we are already, at least to some extent, ignoring not only mud roads, but roads of every kind, and climbing through the air, and I do not mean by means of the gas-balloon either. But I am not at liberty just now to tell all I know in regard to this matter.
In the second week of September came word from the Wrights that he should return without delay. He reached Dayton on Tuesday, September 20, 1904, the day Wilbur would attempt something never done before in the history of the world. He would fly a power machine in a complete circle.
Still recovering from his crash in August, Orville would be on the sidelines watching with Root and Charlie Taylor. Apparently no one else was on hand at Huffman Prairie.