Meantime, the automobile had made its appearance in the streets of Dayton in the form of a noisy homemade machine built by a friend of the Wrights named Cord Ruse, who occasionally helped out at the shop and with whom they enjoyed talking about all manner of mechanical problems and solutions. Orville was particularly interested in Ruse’s automobile and thought perhaps he and Wilbur should build one of their own.
For Wilbur the idea had no appeal. He could not imagine, he said, how any contrivance that made such a racket and had so many things constantly going wrong with it could ever have a future. His mind was elsewhere.
II.
On Tuesday, May 30, 1899—Decoration Day, as it was then known—the weather in Dayton was unseasonably cool, the sky overcast, the Wright house uncommonly quiet. Wilbur was home alone. The Bishop and Katharine had gone to Woodland Cemetery to plant flowers at Susan Wright’s grave. Orville was off somewhere else apparently.
Wilbur seated himself at Katharine’s small, slant-top desk in the front parlor to write what would be one of the most important letters of his life. Indeed, given all it set in motion, it was one of the most important letters in history. Addressed to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, it filled not quite two sheets of the Wright Cycle Company’s pale blue stationery, all set down in Wilbur’s notably clear hand.
“I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes after the style of Cayley’s and Pénaud’s machines,” he began. (Sir George Cayley, a brilliant English baronet and aeronautical pioneer, had also devised a toy helicopter very like the one by Alphonse Pénaud given to the brothers by Bishop Wright.) “My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable. . . .
I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.
Lest there be any doubts about him or the seriousness of his intentions, he added: “I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.”
From the list of books provided by the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, Richard Rathbun, and with a generous supply of Smithsonian pamphlets on aviation forwarded to him, he and Orville both began studying in earnest.
Especially helpful were the writings of Octave Chanute, a celebrated French-born American civil engineer, builder of bridges and railroads, who had made gliders a specialty, and Samuel Pierpont Langley, an eminent astronomer and head, or secretary, of the Smithsonian. Formerly the director of the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh and a professor of astronomy and physics at the Western University of Pennsylvania, Langley was one of the most respected scientists in the nation. His efforts in recent years, backed by substantial Smithsonian funding, had resulted in a strange-looking, steam-powered, pilotless “aerodrome,” as he called it, with V-shaped wings in front and back that gave it the look of a monstrous dragonfly. Launched by catapult from the roof of a houseboat on the Potomac River in 1896, the year of Lilienthal’s death, it flew more than half a mile before plunging into the water.
Along with Lilienthal, Chanute, and Langley, numbers of others among the most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the nineteenth century had been working on the problem of controlled flight, including Sir George Cayley, Sir Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison. None had succeeded. Hiram Maxim had reportedly spent $100,000 of his own money on a giant, steam-powered, pilotless flying machine only to see it crash in attempting to take off.
Meanwhile, the French government had spent a comparable sum on a steam-powered flying machine built by a French electrical engineer, Clément Ader, and with such dismal results that the whole project was abandoned, though not before Ader gave the name avion, for airplane, to the French language.
Along with the cost of experiments in flight, the risks of humiliating failure, injury, and, of course, death, there was the inevitable prospect of being mocked as a crank, a crackpot, and in many cases with good reason.
For more than fifty years, or long before the Wright brothers took up their part, would-be “conquerors of the air” and their strange or childish flying machines, as described in the press, had served as a continuous source of popular comic relief. In the 1850s, one French inventor’s ingenious idea had consisted of a chair, a pair of wings attached to his back, and a huge umbrella. (Whether the umbrella was for “ascensional power” or shade was never explained.) In the 1870s, one Charles Dyer of Georgia came up with a flying device in the shape of a duck. In the 1890s, a San Francisco Chronicle roundup report on the subject described “the flying-machine crank” as one who, with advancing age, gets increasingly foolish to the point of “imbecility.”
Among the more elaborate new ideas flooding the U.S. Patent Office for approval was a gigantic, fishlike machine called an “aerostat,” with sheet aluminum body and fan-shaped tail. According to the Washington Post:
The body is supported by a pair of wings that run its length, their inclination being controlled by a pilot wheel, so that the aerial vessel is able to rise or descend at will. It is propelled by a series of explosions in the rear, small pellets of nitroglycerine being fed automatically into a cup opening backward and discharged by electricity.
“It is a fact,” the Post later categorically declared, “that man can’t fly.”
Of all that was reported or said by way of ridicule nothing evoked such widespread delight, or would be so long remembered and quoted, as a comic poem titled “Darius Green and his Flying Machine.” Written by a popular New England author, J. T. Trowbridge, it had been a favorite for public readings and recitals at family gatherings the country over for more than thirty years.
Darius was a slow-witted farm boy who pondered: “The birds can fly and why can’t I? Could blue-bird and phoebe, be smarter than we be?” In secret in the loft of a barn, he set to work
. . . with thimble and thread
And wax and hammer and buckles and screws,
And all such things as geniuses use; —
Two bats for patterns, curious fellows!
A charcoal-pot and a pair of bellows;
. . . Some wire, and several old umbrellas;
A carriage-cover for tail and wings;
A piece of harness; and straps and strings . . .
These and a hundred other things.
When Darius leaped into the air in his creation from the barn loft, it was only to crash below in a heap of “tangled strings, broken braces and broken wings, shooting stars and various things,” the moral of the story being, “Stick to your sphere.”
In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Otto Lilienthal, they could be killed.
In an article in Cosmopolitan magazine several years before Lilienthal’s death, Samuel Langley had emphasized that those willing to attempt flight ought to be granted the kind of attention and concern customarily bestowed on those who risk their lives for a useful purpose. It was a risk, however, from which both Langley and Octave Chanute had excused themselves, because of age.
All the same, and importantly, the times were alive with invention, technical innovations, new ideas of every kind. George Eastman had introduced the “Kodak” box camera; Isaac Merritt Singer, the first electric sewing machine; the Otis Company had installed the world’s first elevator in a New York office building; the first safety razor, the first mousetr
ap, the first motor cars built in America—all in the dozen years since Orville started his print shop and Wilbur emerged from his spell of self-imposed isolation.
Then, too, there was the ever-present atmosphere of a city in which inventing and making things were central to the way of life. At about this time, just prior to the turn of the century, according to the U.S. Patent Office, Dayton ranked first in the country relative to population in the creation of new patents. The large factories and mills of Dayton kept growing larger, producing railroad cars, cash registers, sewing machines, and gun barrels. (The Davis Sewing Machine Company, as one example, was turning out four hundred sewing machines a day in a factory fully a mile in length.) In addition were the hundreds of small shops and workrooms making horse collars, corsets, soap, shirts, brooms, carriage wheels, rakes, saws, cardboard boxes, beer kegs, and overalls, not to say bicycles.
In his letter to the Smithsonian, Wilbur had made mention of his interest in birds. To achieve human flight, he had written, was “only a question of knowledge and skill in all acrobatic feats,” and birds were “the most perfectly trained gymnasts in the world . . . specially well fitted for their work.”
Among the material the Smithsonian provided him was an English translation of a book titled L’Empire de l’Air, published in Paris in 1881. It had been written by a French farmer, poet, and student of flight, Louis Pierre Mouillard. Nothing Wilbur had yet read so affected him. He would long consider it “one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature” ever published. For Wilbur, flight had become a “cause,” and Mouillard, one of the great “missionaries” of the cause, “like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight.”
At the start of his Empire of the Air, Mouillard gave fair warning that one could be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of flight could be solved by man. “When once this idea has invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively.”
That said, Mouillard moved on to the miracle of flying creatures, writing with unabashed evangelical fervor.
Oh, blind humanity! Open thine eyes and thou shalt see millions of birds and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. All these creatures are whirling through the air without the slightest float [support]; many of them are gliding therein, without losing height, hour after hour, on pulseless wings without fatigue; and after beholding this demonstration given by the source of all knowledge, thou wilt acknowledge that aviation is the path to be followed. . . .
By merely observing with close attention how the winged tribes perform their feats, by carefully reflecting on what we have seen, and, above all, by striving correctly to understand the modus operandi of what we do see, we are sure not to wander far from the path, which leads to eventual success.
It was only necessary to have “good eyes,” and know how to keep in sight, with telescope or field glasses, a bird going at full speed, but still more “to know what to look at.”
Wilbur had taken up bird-watching on a rugged stretch along the banks of the Miami River south of town called the Pinnacles. On Sundays he would ride off on his bicycle to spend considerable time there observing as Mouillard preached.
Mouillard had spent much of his life in Egypt and Algeria, where he came to love especially the great soaring vultures of Africa. He had observed them by the thousands, yet however often he saw one fly high overhead, he could not help following it with a feeling of wonderment.
He knows how to rise, how to float . . . to sail upon the wind without effort . . . he sails and spends no force . . . he uses the wind, instead of his muscles.
This, Mouillard said, was the way of flight that would “lead men to navigate the immensity of space.”
III.
For Wilbur and Orville the dream had taken hold. The works of Lilienthal and Mouillard, the brothers would attest, had “infected us with their own unquenchable enthusiasm and transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers.”
They would design and build their own experimental glider-kite, drawing on much they had read, much they had observed about birds in flight, and, importantly, from considerable time thinking. They had made themselves familiar with the language of aeronautics, the terms used in explaining the numerous factors involved in attaining “equilibrium” or balance in flight, where balance was quite as crucial as in riding a bicycle. Lift came from air moving faster over the arched top of a wing, thereby making the pressure there less than that under the wing. Pitch was the lateral tilt of the flying machine, front and back, nose down, nose up. Roll applied to the rotation of the wing, up or down on one side or the other, like a boat rocking. Yaw applied to the direction of the flight, the turning of the plane pointing the nose left or right.
Equilibrium was the all-important factor, the brothers understood. The difficulty was not to get into the air but to stay there, and they concluded that Lilienthal’s fatal problem had been an insufficient means of control—“his inability to properly balance his machine in the air,” as Orville wrote. Swinging one’s legs or shifting the weight of one’s body about in midair were hardly enough.
Wilbur’s observations of birds in flight had convinced him that birds used more “positive and energetic methods of regaining equilibrium” than that of a pilot trying to shift the center of gravity with his own body. It had occurred to him that a bird adjusted the tips of its wings so as to present the tip of one wing at a raised angle, the other at a lowered angle. Thus its balance was controlled by “utilizing dynamic reactions of the air instead of shifting weight.”
The chief need was skill rather than machinery. It was impossible to fly without both knowledge and skill—of this Wilbur was already certain—and skill came only from experience—experience in the air. He calculated that in the five years Lilienthal had devoted to gliders and gliding, he spent a total of only five hours in actual flight. It was hardly enough and not how he and Orville would proceed.
On an evening at home, using a small cardboard box from which he had removed the ends, Wilbur put on a demonstration before Orville, Katharine, and a visiting Oberlin classmate, Harriet Silliman. He showed them how, by pressing the opposite corners of the box, top and bottom, the double wings of a biplane glider could be twisted or “warped,” to present the wing surfaces to the air at different angles or elevations, the same as the birds did. Were one wing to meet the wind at a greater angle than the other, it would give greater lift on that side and so the glider would bank and turn.
With “wing warping,” or “wing twisting,” as it was sometimes referred to, Wilbur had already made an immensely important and altogether original advance toward their goal.
IV.
In the summer of 1899, in a room above the bicycle shop on West Third Street, the brothers began building their first aircraft, a flying kite made of split bamboo and paper with a wingspan of five feet. It was a biplane, with double wings, one over the other, the design Octave Chanute used for his gliders and that was believed to provide greater stability. The wings were joined in the fashion of a bridge truss, with vertical struts of pine and crisscrossing wires. Also included was an original system of cords whereby the operator on the ground, using sticks held in both hands, could control the wing warping.
In early August, Wilbur tested the model in an open field outside of town. Orville, for some reason, had been unable to attend. A few small boys were the only witnesses.
According to Wilbur’s account of the tests [Orville later wrote], the model . . . responded promptly to the warping of the surfaces . . . when he shifted the upper surface backward by the manipulation of the sticks attached to flying cords, the nose of the machine turned downward as was intended; but in diving downward it created a slack in the flying cords, so that he was not able to control further. The model made such a rapid dive to the ground that the small boys present fell on their faces to avoid being hit.
Nonetheless, the brothers felt the test had plainly demonstrate
d the efficiency of their system of control and that the time had come to begin work on a man-carrying glider.
In April of 1900 Wilbur turned thirty-three. Four months later, in August, Orville and Katharine turned twenty-nine and twenty-six. For her birthday, as Katharine was pleased to tell their father, “the boys” had given her a bust of Sir Walter Scott.
With the three of them working now, Katharine had decided to hire someone to come in by the day to help around the house. Carrie Kayler was fourteen years old and so small still that to reach the gaslight in the kitchen she had to stand on a chair. Orville loved to tease her about it until she was near tears and Wilbur would say, “I guess that’s about enough, Orv.”
“Mr. Orville would stop instantly,” she would remember. “Mr. Orville always listened to Mr. Will, but never to anyone else.” Carrie Kayler was to remain part of the family for nearly half a century.
On May 13, 1900, Wilbur wrote a letter to Octave Chanute—his first letter to the eminent engineer—asking for advice on a location where he might conduct flying experiments, somewhere without rain or inclement weather and, Wilbur said, where sufficient winds could be counted on, winds, say, of 15 miles per hour.
The only such sites he knew of, Chanute replied, were in California and Florida, but both were “deficient in sand hills” for soft landings. Wilbur might do better along the coasts of South Carolina or Georgia.
Wind was the essential, the brothers had already come to appreciate. And clearly, if ever they were to succeed with what they had set their minds to, they must learn—and learn from experience—the ways of the wind.