“God in his great mercy has permitted me to be, at least somewhat instrumental in ushering in and introducing to the great wide world an invention that may outrank electric cars, the automobiles . . . and . . . may fairly take a place beside the telephone and wireless telegraphy,” Root would begin his eyewitness account.
But before describing what he saw happen, he made a point of stressing that the Wrights were not just the sort who love machinery, but were “interested in the modern developments of science and art.” He had been “astonished” by the extent of their library and to find in conversation that “they were thoroughly versed not only in regard to our present knowledge, but everything that had been done in the past.” In saying this in what he wrote, he would be the first to recognize how much more there was to Wilbur and Orville than most imagined, even among the relative few who took time to give it some thought.
They were not simply “another Darius Green,” Root stressed, but “scientific explorers” serving the world much as Columbus had.
He described in his account of September 20 how Wilbur took his place lying flat to offer less wind resistance, how the engine was warmed up to speed, and, how, with everything ready, “a sort of trap” (the catapult) was sprung, and suddenly the machine was aloft.
The plane flew low, never rising more than 20 to 25 feet above the ground. “I was surprised at the speed and I was astonished at the wonderful lifting power.” Then it had turned and headed straight back toward him, and with feelings very like those expressed by John T. Daniels after seeing the first flight at Kitty Hawk, he wrote:
When it first turned that circle, and came near the starting point, I was right in front of it, and I said then, and I believe still, it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life.
The plane was still flying low, and Orville, who was standing close by Root, urged him to get to one side, for fear it might suddenly come down.
To Root the landing of the plane was hardly less amazing:
When the engine is shut off, the apparatus glides to the ground very quietly and alights on something much like a pair of light sled-runners [skids], sliding over the grassy surface perhaps a rod or more. Whenever it is necessary to slow up the speed before alighting, you turn the nose uphill. It will then climb right up on the air until the momentum is exhausted, when, by skillful management, it can be dropped as lightly as a feather.
The “skillful management” was breathtaking. It was not just that the machine was like no other on the face of the earth, he wrote, but there was probably no one “beyond these two who learned the trick of controlling it.”
When Columbus discovered America, he did not know what the outcome would be, Root would conclude his account. Not even “the wildest enthusiast” could have foreseen. “In a like manner these two brothers have probably not even a faint glimpse of what their discovery is going to bring to the children of men.”
As for Huffman Prairie, it was henceforth historic ground. Here man and his machine had “ ‘learned to fly,’ very much like a young bird out of its nest learns by practice to use its wings.”
Root pictured a wondrous time near at hand, “when we shall not need to fuss with good roads nor railway tracks, bridges, etc., at such enormous expense. With these machines we bid adieu to all these things. God’s free air, that extends all over the earth, and perhaps miles above us, is our training field. . . .
When you see one of these graceful crafts sailing over your head, and possibly over your home, as I expect you will in the near future, see if you don’t agree with me that the flying machine is one of God’s most gracious and precious gifts.
In December, Amos Root returned to Dayton—and by the interurban this time—and met with the Wrights at 7 Hawthorn to read aloud what he had written in advance of publication. It was one last step to ensure accuracy and apparently it all went well. What suggested changes, if any, or comments the Wrights may have offered are not known.
Why they had put such trust in Root was never explained. But clearly they had much in common. He, too, in the early days of his beekeeping enterprise had been taken for a “nut.” He had succeeded with his ideas only by close study. Importantly, beginning with his first visit in August, he had shown himself true to his word and ready to cooperate in any way he could to achieve accuracy in what he wrote.
Like their father, he was a man of strong religious convictions, and it was of no small importance that Bishop Wright approved. As he wrote in his diary, “Mr. Root seems to be a fine gentleman.”
Perhaps above all, Wilbur and Orville knew from their first meeting with Root that his regard for them was altogether genuine, his belief in the possibility of human flight no less than their own.
At the time his article appeared in Gleanings in Bee Culture in January 1905, Root sent a copy to the editor of Scientific American, saying it could be reprinted at no charge. The editor paid it no mind. Instead, in an article published a full year later, “The Wright Aeroplane and Its Fabled Performances,” the magazine chose to cast still more doubt:
If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face . . . would not have ascertained all about them and published . . . long ago?
The thought that Amos Root was the “enterprising reporter” apparently never entered the editor’s mind.
For their part the brothers refused to get worked up or to speak out. “If they will not take our word and the word of many witnesses,” wrote Wilbur, “. . . we do not think they will be convinced until they see a flight with their own eyes.”
III.
In October, a month after Amos Root’s visit, came the first clear sign that if the American press and the U.S. government had no interest, there were those on the other side of the Atlantic who did. An officer of the British Army’s Balloon Section, Lieutenant Colonel John Edward Capper, appeared in Dayton and did not hesitate to inform the brothers that he had come at the request of his government.
Reluctant to have him come with them to Huffman Prairie just yet, they instead showed him photographs of recent flights. But it was they themselves who impressed the visitor more than anything, and he invited them to submit a proposal for the sale of their Flyer II to the British government.
They were unwilling to comply, partly because they were “not ready to begin considering what we will do with our baby now that we have it,” as Wilbur had confided to Octave Chanute. Furthermore, as patriotic Americans, they would be ashamed to offer it to a foreign government without their own country having a first chance.
On November 9, in celebration of President Theodore Roosevelt’s resounding election, Wilbur flew almost four circles around the field at Huffman Prairie. Then, on the third day of the new year 1905, he called on the newly elected local congressman, Republican Robert Nevin, to explain the situation. Nevin suggested that Wilbur write a proposal for Secretary of War William Howard Taft.
The letter, dated January 18 and signed by both Wilbur and Orville, stated that their efforts of the past five years had produced a flying machine that “not only flies through the air at high speed, but it also lands without being wrecked.” During 1904 they had made 105 flights. They had flown in straight lines, circles, over S-shaped courses, in calms and great winds, and brought flying to the point where it could be of great practical use in various ways, “one of which is that of scouting and carrying messages in time of war.”
Congressman Nevin forwarded the letter to the War Department. From there it was passed on to the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, the same agency that had seen the $50,000 it provided to Samuel Langley come to nothing.
Congressman Nevin then received a standard formal rejection from the board, dated January 26, explaining that so great were the num
ber of requests for allotments for experiments in mechanical flight that the device in question must first stage a “practical operation” at no expense to the United States; and from Wilbur and Orville’s letter it appeared to the board that their machine had not yet reached that stage. It was a standard reply sent irrespective of the fact that the Wrights had made no appeal for financial support.
Possibly this was an instance of extreme wariness within the board because of the Langley experience of becoming involved again with experimental aviation. Or it could have been a case of plain bureaucratic ineptitude. Or that the claims made by the Wrights for their Flyer, like those in so many crank proposals, seemed too preposterous to be taken seriously.
To Wilbur and Orville it was a “flat turn down,” which they seem to have been expecting. “We have taken pains to see that ‘Opportunity’ gave a good clear knock on the War Department door,” Wilbur told Octave Chanute.
It has for years been our business practice to sell to those who wished to buy, instead of trying to force goods upon people who did not want them. 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, but we cannot reasonably object. They are the judges.
The brothers had already written to Colonel Capper in England to say they were ready to make their proposal. The British War Office responded at once, and serious correspondence began.
As always, they had no time to waste. Work went on. A new 1905 Flyer III was under way, a machine “of practical utility,” as the Wrights would say. In fact, the Flyer III would prove to be the first practical airplane in history.
Talk of ideas continued without cease among themselves and with Charlie Taylor while at work in the shop, or standing beside the Flyer between tests at Huffman Prairie, or at work inside the shed, or while riding the trolley.
The fascination with birds continued no less than ever. If Ohio offered nothing comparable to the multitudes of gannets and gulls and buzzards in the skies of the Outer Banks, Ohio provided crows aplenty. In language few others could possibly have understood or appreciated, Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute:
The power consumed by any bird or flying machine may be figured from the formula wv/ac, in which w = weight, v = velocity 1/a = ratio of drift to lift, and 1/c = efficiency of the screws or wings of propellers. In the case of the crow flying at 34 ft. per second, or 2,100 ft. per minute, I would fix the value of 1/a at 1/8, and 1/c at 1/.75; when we have (1 × 2100)/(8 × .75) = 350 ft. lbs. per pound of weight. The minimum value of 1/a may be rendered independent of velocity by regulating the size of the wings. The value of 1/c is about the practical limit of the efficiency of screws under usual conditions, and I see no reason for believing that wings are more efficient than screws, as propellers. . . .
Birds unquestionably develop power many times greater than is consumed by our Flyer, per pound weight. If you will fix in your mind the distance within which a small bird acquires full speed, say 30 miles an hour, and then figure the power necessary to accelerate its weight to this velocity, I think you will be astonished.
And there was more, always more to learn and think about. The new Flyer III was more sturdily built than its predecessors, its motor more powerful, producing as much as 25 horsepower. The double rudder had been enlarged, the wing area slightly reduced, and the leading edges of the wings made more effective. But the “improvements” this time, as the brothers would stress, resulted mainly from “more scientific design” and changes in methods of balancing and steering. The most important change was to move the forward rudder even farther forward—for better longitudinal, or nose to tail, control. They had discovered that most of their troubles could be remedied by tilting the machine forward a little so its flying speed could be restored.
“The best dividends on the labor invested,” they said, “have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.”
Once the test flights got under way in June, it became clear the improvements were working. Moreover, the two pilots were “rusty” no longer.
In one important close call on September 28, as Orville would recount, he was circling the great honey locust tree when the machine suddenly began to turn up one wing and stall. “The operator, not relishing the idea of landing in a thorn tree, attempted to reach the ground.” The left wing struck the tree at a height of 10 or 12 feet and carried away several branches, but by putting the plane into a brief dive Orville was able to nose the plane upward again, and the flight, which had already covered 6 miles, continued on to the starting point. The lesson learned was another step forward—the brief dive had restored the speed needed to increase the lift and thereby straighten the effect of the warp.
Wilbur by then had flown 11 miles on a single run, Orville, 12 miles, then 15. To both of them, this, their Flyer III, with its “improvements,” was as big an advance as Flyer I had proven to be at Kitty Hawk.
It was at Huffman Prairie that summer and fall of 1905 that the brothers, by experiment and change, truly learned to fly. Then, also, at last, with a plane they could rely on, they could permit themselves enjoyment in what they had achieved. They could take pleasure in the very experience of traveling through the air in a motor-powered machine as no one had. And each would try as best he could to put the experience in words.
“When you know, after the first few minutes, that the whole mechanism is working perfectly,” Wilbur was to say, “the sensation is so keenly delightful as to be almost beyond description. Nobody who has not experienced it for himself can realize it. It is a realization of a dream so many persons have had of floating in the air. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace, mingled with the excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.”
Once into the air Orville would write, the ground was “a perfect blur,” but as the plane rose higher the objects below became clearer.
At a height of one hundred feet you feel hardly any motion at all, except for the wind which strikes your face. If you did not take the precaution to fasten your hat before starting, you have probably lost it by this time.
The operator moves a lever: the right wing rises, and the machine swings about to the left. You make a very short turn yet you do not feel the sensation of being thrown from your seat, so often experienced in automobile and railway travel. You find yourself facing toward the point from which you started. The objects on the ground now seem to be moving at much higher speed, though you perceive no change in the pressure of the wind on your face. You know then that you are traveling with the wind.
When you near the starting-point, the operator stops the motor while still high in the air. The machine coasts down at an oblique angle to the ground, and after sliding fifty or a hundred feet comes to rest. Although the machine often lands when traveling at a speed of a mile a minute, you feel no shock whatever, and cannot, in fact, tell the exact moment at which it first touched the ground.
The motor close beside you kept up an almost deafening roar during the whole flight, yet in your excitement, you did not notice it till it stopped!
By now the brothers were openly encouraging family and friends to ride out and see the show. Bishop Wright and Katharine, Lorin and his wife and children, and some seventeen friends and neighbors came by trolley or automobile, and many more than once.
Next-door neighbors John Feight and his son George were among them. Torrence Huffman, a doubter no longer, brought along three of his children. Charles Webbert came to watch, as did Frank Hale, the grocer, and druggist W. C. Fouts, whose respective establishments were close by the bicycle shop on West Third Street; and Frank Hamberger, the hardware dealer whose inventory Wilbur and Orville had helped save at the time of the 1898 flood.
On the afternoon of October 5, 1905, before more than a dozen witnesses, Wilbur circled the pasture 29 times, landing only when his gas ran out.
“I saw Wilbur fly twen
ty-four miles in thirty-eight minutes and four seconds [in] one flight,” wrote the Bishop. In fact, this one flight was by far the longest yet, longer than all the 160 flights of the three previous years combined.
By the time the experiments ended, the brothers had made 105 “starts” at Huffman Prairie and thought it time now to put their creation, Flyer III, on the market.
By this point, too, the Dayton press had at last awakened. The Wrights, reported the Daily News, were making sensational flights every day as local witnesses were happy to attest. W. C. Fouts, the druggist, was quoted saying:
When I went out to Huffman Prairie I expected to see somebody’s neck broken. What I did see was a machine weighing 900 pounds soar away like an eagle. . . . I told a friend about it that night and he acted as if he thought I had gone daft or joined the liar’s club.
An American correspondent for a German aeronautical journal had come to Huffman Prairie and begun a series of articles on the brothers. The French were beginning to make inquiries.
Prodded by Octave Chanute to try one more time to rouse interest in Washington, on the chance that the new president of the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, Major General J. C. Bates, might be of different mind, the brothers wrote again. Their earlier proposal appeared to have been given “scant consideration,” they said in their letter of October 9. “We do not wish to take this invention abroad, unless we find it necessary to do so, and therefore write again, renewing the offer.”
By this time the brothers were routinely making controlled flights in their aircraft of 25 miles or more. But the response from Washington, as Katharine wrote to the Bishop, was “the same thing that they had before.” The only difference was they were told that before any consideration of their machine, they must provide “such drawings and descriptions . . . as are necessary to enable construction,” something the Wrights refused to do.
They tried again, asking what requirements in performance were expected by the board, and were told the board did not care to formulate any requirements until a machine was produced and able to provide “horizontal flight and to carry an operator.”