At 9:53, he took off from Governors Island, the emergency canoe still hanging from beneath the plane. The one difference this time was a tiny American flag fixed to the rudder. It had been sent to him by Katharine with the request that he fly it over New York.
Again the wireless messages went off. Again signal flags were flying, and again whistles shrieked, foghorns sounded. Work came to a standstill in much of the city and there was a “stampede” to the windows and rooftops of office buildings to see the spectacle in the sky of “wonderful Wilbur Wright, the Dayton aviator,” as one New York paper was calling him.
From the new skyscrapers like the Metropolitan Life Tower the view of the harbor and the Hudson River was panoramic. Most spectacular of all was the outlook from the upper floors of the forty-seven-story Singer Building on Broadway, which, once completed, would be the tallest skyscraper on earth.
When Wilbur headed across the harbor and turned northward into the wind heading for the Hudson River the excitement grew even greater. He had climbed by then to about 150 feet and was moving at a speed of about 36 miles per hour. But on reaching the river, as he later recounted, he began getting air currents such as he had never had to cope with. They were coming off the skyscrapers and so strong and dangerous he had to drop elevation “considerably” and hug the west, or New Jersey, side of the river.
“I went to a height just a little above the ferryboats until I reached the battleships, and then I skimmed over their funnels. I passed so close to the funnels that I could smell the smoke from them.”
Asked later if one of the British battleships fired a salute in his honor, Wilbur said he did not know what it was, but something made an “awful noise.”
Seeing the dome of Grant’s Tomb on the right side of the river at West 122nd Street, he decided he had gone far enough, and after making a large 180 degree turn, he started south, back down the river, this time moving considerably faster with the wind behind him. “I think I came back in half the time. . . . I hugged the water much closer and kept further toward the Jersey shore as I passed the downtown skyscrapers.”
His return trip was greeted with enthusiasm as great or greater than that upriver. Now the Jersey hills were black with people, and piers and building roofs on the Manhattan side were packed to capacity. It was estimated a million people were watching.
At precisely 10:26 A.M., Wilbur landed at Governors Island within a few feet of the spot where he had taken off. His time in the air was 33 minutes and 33 seconds. The distance traveled to Grant’s Tomb and back was approximately 20 miles, his average speed 36 miles per hour.
In spite of stiff winds, skyscraper gusts, whistles, horns, shrieking crowds, and battleship salutes, he had done it. How formidable the wind problem had been could be measured by the small American flag Katharine had given him. Brand-new at the start of the flight, it had returned in shreds.
Charlie Taylor told reporters how extremely concerned he had been the whole time Wilbur was “up.”
I was staring with both eyes square at that big flag over the Singer building. Sometimes it layed down and hugged the pole, and then I knew Wilbur was having it good. And sometimes it stood out pretty near even and I knew he was having his troubles. And once it flipped right out and the tip began to point upward like it did all day Saturday. I began to tremble. For I didn’t know what Wilbur could do against a gust like that.
No, he had not conquered the air, Wilbur remarked to the press as he walked away. “A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool.”
Shortly afterward, to much surprise, he announced he would fly again that afternoon and this time it would be much farther, an hour-long flight in which he would circle Manhattan. But about four o’clock as he and Charlie Taylor were cranking up the plane the head of one of the engine’s piston rods blew off with a terrible roar, and the head, which was about six inches long and four wide, “flew like a cannon ball” no more than 20 inches from Wilbur’s head.
To Charlie Taylor he said, “It’s a darn good thing that didn’t happen up in the air.” The plane was taken away. The New York performances were over.
Talking with a correspondent for Scientific American magazine a little later, in the gathering dusk of the October afternoon, Wilbur was asked what the explosion of the engine indicated and what direction the development of aviation would take in the future. The broken cylinder was only “an incident,” Wilbur said. As for the future, direction was the thing: “High flying.”
We must get up clear of the belt of disturbed air which results from the irregularities of the earth’s surface. From now on you will see a great increase in the average elevation at which aviators will take their flights; for not only will they find in the higher strata more favorable atmospheric conditions, but in case of motor trouble, they will have more time and distance in which to recover control or make a safe glide to earth.
“On Monday I made a flight up the Hudson to Grant’s Tomb and back to Governor’s Island,” Wilbur wrote to his father three days later from College Park, Maryland. “It was an interesting trip and at times rather exciting.” And that was that. He had come to College Park to begin training U.S. Army pilots.
On Monday, October 18, two weeks after Wilbur’s flight up the Hudson, Orville and Katharine were in Paris. Their events in Germany successfully concluded, they had stopped for a brief stay en route home, and by all evidence were unaware that shortly before five o’clock that afternoon a Wright plane would appear in the sky causing a sensation such as Paris had never experienced. It was not only the first airplane to fly over the city, but the first to fly directly over any city. Close as he was to New York on his flight up the Hudson and back, Wilbur had flown over water only.
The Comte de Lambert, having told almost no one his plans, not even his wife, had taken off from Port-Aviation at Juvisy, fifteen miles southeast of Paris. He was spotted first in the golden afternoon sky by hundreds of visitors high up on the Eiffel Tower. Then came shouts from the streets below, “L’Aéroplane! L’Aéroplane!”
One of the most memorable descriptions of the spectacle was provided by the American writer Edith Wharton, who had just stepped from her chauffeur-driven limousine at the front entrance of the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde and noticed several people looking into the sky, as she recounted in a letter to a friend:
And what do you think happened to me last Monday? I was getting out of the motor at the door of the H. de Crillon when I saw two or three people looking into the air. I looked also and there was an aeroplane, high up against the sky . . . and emerging on the Place de la Concorde. It sailed obliquely across the Place, incredibly high above the obelisk, against a golden sunset, with a new moon between flitting clouds, and crossing the Seine in the direction of the Pantheon, lost itself in a flight of birds that was just crossing the sky, reappeared far off, a speck against the clouds and disappeared at last into twilight. And it was the Comte de Lambert in a Wright biplane, who had just flown across from Juvisy—and it was the first time that an aeroplane has ever crossed the great city!! Think “what a soul was mine”—and what a setting in which to see one’s first aeroplane flight!
What she had neglected to say was that the Comte de Lambert had soared over the top of the Eiffel Tower, the tallest structure in the world, and thus had been flying at an elevation of at least 1,300 to 1,400 feet, “high up” indeed.
Word of what happened had already reached Juvisy by the time de Lambert returned and landed. Thousands had gathered to welcome him. Stepping from the plane, “pale but radiant,” he was instantly engulfed by reporters and an adoring crowd. There also, to his great surprise, were Orville and Katharine Wright. How they heard the news and how they got to Juvisy are not known.
De Lambert insisted he was not the hero of the hour. “Here is the real man,” he said, turning to Orville. “I am only the jockey. He is the inventor,” by which he meant both Orville and Wilbur. “Long live the United Sta
tes! It is to that country that I owe my success.”
Once Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine reached home, they hardly had time to unpack before their time and attention were taken up with business decisions and patent issues, Wilbur heading off to New York one day, Washington another, then Wilbur and Orville going together to New York, then Wilbur going alone again. And except for Christmas, so it continued on into the new year.
A Wright Company for the manufacture of airplanes was incorporated, with offices on Fifth Avenue in New York. Ground was broken for a Wright manufacturing plant in Dayton. There were more dinners in their honor, more medals and awards, including the first Langley Medal, given by the Smithsonian. And there were more patent suits.
With the increase in the number of people flying, there were increases in serious accidents and deaths. In France aviators Eugène Lefebvre, Ferdinand Ferber, and Léon Delagrange were all killed in crashes.
Extremely distressing, too, for Wilbur was an unfortunate falling-out with Octave Chanute that began in January 1910 and stretched into spring. Chanute thought the Wrights had “made a blunder” bringing suit against Glenn Curtiss and said so in a letter to the editor of Aeronautics. Specifically Chanute did not think that the idea of wing warping was original with the Wrights.
In a letter dated January 20, Wilbur stated clearly to Chanute, “It is our view that morally the world owes its almost universal use of our system of lateral control entirely to us.” In response Chanute wrote, “I am afraid, my friend, that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth.”
Besides, Chanute was offended by something Wilbur had said in a speech in Boston about how he, Chanute, had “turned up” in the Wright shop in Dayton in 1901. This, Chanute felt, gave the impression that he had thrust himself upon Wilbur and omitted to say that Wilbur had been the first to write to Chanute in 1900, asking for information.
Wilbur and Orville found Chanute’s letter “incredible,” and in one of his longest letters ever to Chanute, Wilbur let him know. Concerning Chanute’s charge that greed had taken hold of the brothers, Wilbur dismissed it saying simply, “you are the only person acquainted with us who has ever made such an accusation.” He centered his considerable fury instead on the way Chanute had given the French the impression that he and Orville were “mere pupils and dependents” of his, and the fact that Chanute had never once until now expressed any question about the brothers’ claim to the invention of wing warping.
Neither in 1901, nor in the five years following, did you in any way intimate to us that our general system of lateral control had long been part of the [flying] art. . . . If the idea was really old in the art, it is somewhat remarkable that a system so important that individual ownership of it is considered to threaten strangulation of the art was not considered worth mentioning then, nor embodied in any machine built prior to ours.
Plainly wishing the dispute to be resolved, Wilbur closed on a warmer note. “If anything can be done to straighten matters out to the satisfaction of both you and us, we are not only willing but anxious to do our part. . . . We have no wish to quarrel with a man toward whom we ought to preserve a feeling for gratitude.”
When nearly three months passed with no response from Chanute, Wilbur wrote again to say, “My brother and I do not form many intimate friendships, and do not lightly give them up.
I believed that unless we could understand exactly how you felt, and you could understand how we felt, our friendship would tend to grow weaker instead of stronger. Through ignorance or thoughtlessness, each would be touching the other’s sore spots and causing unnecessary pain. We prize too highly the friendship which meant so much in the years of our early struggles to willingly see it worn away by uncorrected misunderstandings, which might be corrected by a frank discussion.
This time Chanute answered in a matter of days to say Wilbur’s letter had been gratifying, that he had been in bad health, and was about to sail for Europe. “I hope, upon my return from Europe, that we will be able to resume our former relations.”
Except for one week in February, it had been an unusually mild winter in Dayton. On February 16, as Bishop Wright recorded in his diary, more than a foot of snow fell. And it snowed “very much” again on February 18. But “considerable thawing” followed the day after, and he spent time breaking icicles off the roof. But with the first week of March the snow was “passing away.” One “bright, mild day” followed after another. His diary entries recorded: “Beautiful weather,” “Fine weather,” “Spring weather,” “most beautiful weather,” on into April.
Dayton’s West Side, Hawthorn Street, and Wright homestead looked as they had looked so often before in springtime. Gone were the homecoming flags and bunting and Japanese lanterns of the previous fall. All was as before. The West Third Street shop and the outlook from the interurban trolley on the ride out to Simms Station and Huffman Prairie were as ever.
So, too, were the Wright brothers. For all they had seen and done, the unprecedented glory bestowed on them, it had by all signs neither changed them nor turned their heads in the least. There was no boasting, no preening, no getting too big for their britches, as said, and it was this, almost as much as their phenomenal achievements, that was so greatly admired. As one writer on the scene put it, “They are the imperturbable ‘men from home,’ as always.” Katharine as well, for all her travels and the attention she had received, seemed no different than always.
Pau was a mighty interesting place—Miss Wright stoutly insists on that, too, in spite of her brother Wilbur’s dry smile; and there was pretty country in Germany, yes he will admit that, but if you want to see pretty country, you don’t have to go any farther then their own field at Simms’s. Ohio is plenty good enough for him. And Orville agrees, mildly suggesting, however, that you really can’t see it at its best till you get up about a thousand feet.
If the brothers might have had any cause for concern or annoyance, it would have been the lawsuit against the Curtiss Company over their patents. But they were confident in their case, for which there was already strong support in the press and in the country. As said in the New York Times, it was “a highly significant fact that, until the Wrights succeeded, all attempts at flight with heavier-than-air machines were dismal failures, but since they showed that the thing could be done everybody seems able to do it.”
Nor had the argument that patents by the Wrights would retard the progress of aeronautics made much headway. “The insistence of Professor Bell upon his rights did not retard the growth in the use of the telephone,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “Thomas Edison’s numerous suits for protection of his inventions have not kept any of them out of the market.” And as both Wilbur and Orville knew better than anyone, if ever the development of an idea had been thoroughly documented with written records and photographs nearly every step of the way, it was theirs.
Wednesday, May 25, 1910, was a particularly “nice day” in Dayton, noted Bishop Wright in his diary. It was also to be a very big day for the Wright family.
The brothers had invited the Aeroplane Club of Dayton, as well as friends, neighbors, anyone interested, to come to Huffman Prairie to see Orville fly, and the crowd that came numbered two or three thousand. The interurban was jammed. Automobiles lined the roadway by the field where ice cream and sandwich vendors had set up for business.
As later reported, Orville performed with his machine in such manner as to keep the spectators on tiptoe the whole time. “One minute he would be grazing the ground and the next shooting up in the air like an arrow.” He did figure eights, twists and turns all in the most “remarkable manner.” Most astonishing of all, he flew to an unbelievable height of 2,720 feet. And all the Wrights—the Bishop, Wilbur, Katharine, Reuchlin, Lorin and his wife and children—were on hand to see such proof of the genius of the brothers’ achievements performed there on home ground before a home crowd.
In all the years they had been working together Wilbur and Orville
had never once flown together, so if something were to go wrong and one of them should be killed, the other would live to carry on with the work. But on this day at Huffman Prairie, where they had developed the first practical flying machine ever, the two of them, seated side by side, took off into the air with Orville at the controls.
To many then and later, it seemed their way of saying they had accomplished all they had set out to do and so at last saw no reason to postpone any longer enjoying together the thrill of flight.
Of the immediate family of 7 Hawthorn Street, only Bishop Wright had yet to fly. Nor had anyone of his age ever flown anywhere on earth. He had been with the brothers from the start, helping in every way he could, never losing faith in them or their aspirations. Now, at eighty-two, with the crowd cheering, he walked out to the starting point, where Orville, without hesitation, asked him to climb aboard.
They took off, soaring over Huffman Prairie at about 350 feet for a good six minutes, during which the Bishop’s only words were, “Higher, Orville, higher!”
EPILOGUE
Except for one brief training flight he gave a German pilot in Berlin in June of 1911, Wilbur Wright was not to fly ever again, so taken up was he with business matters and acrimonious lawsuits. The Wright Company, from the start, demanded a great deal of time and attention. But it was the interminable patent infringement suits that put the most strain on both brothers. “When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments,” Wilbur wrote to a friend in France, “we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.”
Of far the greatest importance to both—more than the money at stake—was to secure just and enduring credit for having invented the airplane. It was their reputation at stake and that mattered most. Their pride of achievement, quite understandably, was great. Eventually nine suits were brought by them, three brought against them. Over time they won every case in the American courts.