Reluctant Genius (45 page)

Langley, like Alec Bell, had been watching birds as long as he could remember, and dreaming of manned flights. As soon as he had been appointed to the Smithsonian, he had started trying to launch from a spinning table some of the stuffed birds in the Smithsonian’s extensive collection but rarely got the carcasses off the ground. He was trying to understand, he once told a reporter, how birds could “move about the air, rising and falling, soaring up and sailing down without any motion of the wings.” The same questions had fascinated Alec, who throughout his life filled notebooks with sketches of bird skeletons or notes about the feasibility of various airborne contraptions. Sam Langley had spurred Alec’s interest when he asserted in an 1891 publication on experiments in aerodynamics, part of the
Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge,
that “[t]he mechanical suspension of heavy bodies in the air, combined with very great speeds, is not only possible, but within reach of mechanical means we actually possess.” When his Smithsonian experiments with stuffed birds failed, he moved on to other possibilities for launching a flying machine, or an “aerodrome” as he called it. Between 1887 and 1903, he would transform the Smithsonian’s carpentry and machine shops into a research and development facility aimed at the production of a successful flying machine.

Alec followed his friend’s efforts closely, frequently asking him to present his ideas at the Wednesday-evening gatherings. The experiments with steam-powered helicopters that Alec had begun conducting at Beinn Bhreagh in 1891 were inspired by similar experiments conducted by Langley at the Smithsonian. In subsequent experiments, Alec had tinkered with propeller blades, gunpowder rockets, and spring-powered helicopters. He made “whirligigs”—toy airplanes powered with rubber bands. He speculated on whether gunpowder, dynamite, or nitroglycerine was the airplane fuel of the future, and on the method by which passengers might exit a hovering machine. (His solution was that they “could be let down by rope.”) He kept careful records of all his experiments, but he also continued with his other interests. In addition to sheep-breeding, deaf education, and ideas for improving the phonograph, he made sketches in his notebook of an idea for an automatic telephone switchboard that would eliminate the need for human operators. (His heart was not in the effort, however, and he did nothing to develop his idea. This was his last foray into telephone research.) During these years, both he and Mabel had also developed an interest in photography: Arthur McCurdy had acquired one of the first Eastman Kodak cameras, and the Bells soon followed suit. Mabel set up a darkroom in the basement of the Point. Despite these distractions and despite repeated setbacks on the flying front, by the mid-1890s Alec was obsessed with theories of mechanical flight. “The more I experiment,” he wrote, “the more convinced I become that flying machines are practical.”

Both Langley and Alec also followed the exploits of the German civil engineer Otto Lilienthal. While the two Americans pursued the dream of flying machines by focusing on powered models, Lilienthal was coming at the dream from a different angle—that of manned gliders. In 1891, he had started jumping off hills near Berlin while attached to the undercarriage of a set of wings, like a modern hang glider. He maintained some control over the machine through movements of his body. What distinguished Lilienthal’s experiments was that he understood that maneuvering through air was a different proposition from maneuvering across land. There were plenty of other eager airmen trying to invent flying machines in the 1890s, including Lawrence Hargrave in Australia, Hiram Maxim in England, and Octave Chanute in the United States. Most, however, thought of themselves (in the phrase coined by historian Charles Gibbs-Smith) as “chauffeurs of the air.” They assumed that flying a plane would be like driving a carriage, and they concentrated on getting up enough speed. Lilienthal understood that the fluid medium of air made flight a quite different proposition, to which issues like lift, thrust, and drag were crucial. Like all his contemporaries, he did not yet understand the laws of aerodynamics that would govern the stability of a flying machine; but he recognized that such laws might exist—and Alec Bell and Sam Langley grasped that Lilienthal’s exploits had moved flight research into a new phase.

Langley’s flight experiments were further advanced than Alecs. In 1892, he had purchased a houseboat and towed it to Quantico, a wide, quiet stretch of the Potomac River in Virginia, thirty miles south of the capital. The river was so shallow in this area that a plane could easily be recovered from the water after the test flight. It was also out of the public eye: Langley was paranoid about press attention. The flying-machine business was attracting a fair number of cranks by now, and their antics—outrageous claims, ridiculous contraptions, phony financing—were earning the delighted derision of newspapers. The secretary of the Smithsonian Institution couldn’t stand the idea that his steam-powered, propeller-driven aerodromes might meet with ridicule.

But Langley’s loyal supporter Alexander Graham Bell had stayed up all night in 1895 to watch the first flight of Aerodrome No. 5, a sixteen-foot-long unmanned biplane launched by a catapult mechanism from the roof of the houseboat on the Potomac River. When the machine stayed aloft for six seconds, the inventor exploded with excitement. “I shall count this day as one of the most memorable of my life,” Alec wrote to his friend. On May 9, 1896, Alec delayed his return to Nova Scotia to witness Langley’s latest prototype take wing. Langley himself was a bag of nerves, and could hardly bear to watch the test. But Alec found a boy to row him out to the middle of the river so he could photograph the steam-powered aerodrome in flight. He roared with delight when he saw the huge machine, with its fragile wings constructed of spruce ribs, pine spars, and white silk, make not one but
two
successful test flights. On the first, it stayed aloft for one minute twenty seconds and covered an estimated 3,300 feet. On the second flight, it traveled some 2,300 feet before gliding slowly to the water.

Alec Bell immediately recognized his friend’s monumental achievement. For the first time, a large flying model with its own source of power had remained in the air for a substantial length of time. It was still unmanned, and its inventor had no control over its flight path and no idea what made it take a particular direction, horizontally or vertically. But it had flown. He urged his friend to release news of his success, and with Langley’s permission wrote a lengthy letter to the editor of
Science
describing the test flights. The flying machine, he wrote, ’resembled an enormous bird, soaring in the air with extreme regularity in large curves, sweeping steadily upward in a spiral path, the spirals with a diameter of perhaps 100 yards, until it reached a height of about 100 feet in the air at the end of the course of about half a mile, when the steam gave out, the propellers which had moved it stopped, and then, to my further surprise, the whole, instead of tumbling down settled as slowly and gracefully as it is possible for any bird to do.” There was now no doubt, insisted Alec, “that the practicability of mechanical flight had been demonstrated.” At the Wednesday-evening soirée a week later, members of Washington’s scientific elite were almost incoherent with excitement at their colleague’s achievement.

Within the next few months, American newspapers were filled with reports of further accomplishments in flights, usually by manned gliders rather than powered machines. Alec followed the different reports in the
New York Times
avidly. In February 1896, under the headline “When We Take to Flying,” there was a long article about recent advances, including sketches of Otto Lilienthal’s latest gliders, Hiram Maxim’s aeronautical machines, and the box kites developed by Lawrence Hargrave. The newspaper quoted Lilienthal as assuring readers that in aeronautical adventures, “the risk is but slight…. One can fly long distances with quite simple apparatus without taxing one’s strength at all, and this kind of free and safe motion through the air affords greater pleasure than any other kind of sport.” It was all too inspiring for words.

But in August the same year, Alec got a nasty shock. He was sitting in his study at Beinn Bhreagh when Charles brought him a bundle of issues of the
New York Times
that had been sent over by the Baddeck post office. Alec sorted the various copies into chronological order, and began reading. When he came to the copy for August 12, he let out a groan. On the front page, datelined Berlin, August 11, he saw the headline, “Killed on His Flying Machine” over the following report: “Herr Lilienthal, an engineer, who for many years was experimenting in the building of flying machines, met with an accident today that resulted in his death. He started with one of his machines to fly from a hilltop at Rhinow, near Berlin. The apparatus worked well for a few minutes, and Lilienthal flew quite a distance, when suddenly the machinery of the apparatus got out of order and man and machine fell to the ground. Lilienthal was so badly injured that he died in the hospital to which he was removed.”

The death of the great German aviation pioneer, aged only forty-eight, shocked Alec. Even though he had never met Lilienthal, the abrupt finish to so many plans, so much promise, must have triggered all those painful memories of the untimely deaths of his own brothers. “A dead man tells no tales,” he noted sadly. “He advances no further.” But how should other pioneers continue the work? “How can ideas be tested without actually going into the air and risking one’s life on what may be an erroneous judgment?” Lilienthal’s tragedy convinced him that safety should be a priority in flying-machine experiments.

The aeronautics craze continued unabated, prompting the
New York Times,
only a month later, to comment, “The fate of so many predecessors, from Icarus to Lilienthal, does not seem to damp the ardor of those enthusiasts who aspire ‘to essay the airy void with wings not given to man.’” In the words of Tom D. Crouch, former curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum, “even the most skeptical members of a generation that had witnessed the advent of the telegraph, the telephone and the horseless carriage were slowly coming to realize that they stood on the threshold of the air age.”

Yet Sam Langley was slow to follow up on his success. Like his fellow flying-machine enthusiasts, he wasn’t sure where to go next, and he dreaded the ridicule that failure might bring. During his visits to Cape Breton over the next few summers, he and Alec spent hours on the Beinn Bhreagh porch or the deck of the houseboat discussing the next step—manned flight in a powered machine. Alec continued to pursue his own research, filling his workshop with propellers, wings, and motors. Encouraged by Langley’s success in 1896, he spent months testing differently angled propellers and various wing shapes, trying to see which produced the most lift. “I am finding out in the laboratory that a great deal has yet to be learned concerning the best way to combine aero-planes or aero-curves, so as to gain the full benefit of the surfaces,” he noted in October 1896. It all made his mother very nervous, but Mabel reassured Eliza Bell that his contraptions were still inside the laboratory. “All Alec tries to do is to see how much lighter the machine becomes in the different arrangements of motors and wings. He will not be ready to construct an outdoor machine for many months yet.”

But Alec was smitten. Despite the regularity with which his rockets misfired, despite his ignorance of the mathematics required to calculate wing ratios and propeller angles, despite his lack of a systematic strategy for research, the idea of manned flight obsessed him, much as the telephone and the photophone once had. This left Mabel in the same old quandary: torn between her husband’s and her daughters’ needs. “He is intensely interested in his flying machine and very hopeful of success,” she wrote in despair from Beinn Bhreagh to her mother in 1896. “I cannot believe it right to take him away unless there is no other means of educating our children properly.” The following year, it was the same story. Alec had told Mabel that “he would not leave his flying machine experiments until they were in a more satisfactory shape than now,” she reported to her mother. “They are killing him, but he won’t leave them and he won’t stop, it is cruel of me to try and make him leave them.” Mabel was chafing to embark on several ventures. She was eager for more travel: invitations to her world-famous husband were multiplying—most recently he had been invited to visit the emperor of Japan in Tokyo. She knew that her parents were right when they suggested that Alec was missing valuable contacts and opportunities when he hid himself away in remote Cape Breton: “I have much the same feeling that you have,” she wrote, “that Alec ought to be more in the city with other scientific men, but I cannot get him away” She would have preferred Alec to focus on an invention that had more immediate commercial potential. Although the Bells continued to be extremely wealthy, they were living on capital, and Beinn Bhreagh’s heavy expenses far outstripped their annual income. Most important, she knew it was time to launch Elsie into Washington society.

The Bells’ two daughters were, by now, accomplished and good-looking young women. Elsie, who was nineteen in 1897, was tall and well built, with her mother’s gray eyes, thick, soft brown hair, and gentle manner. Shy and cautious in public (perhaps as a result of the enforced seclusion while she suffered from chorea), she stayed close to her mother and often let her younger sister take the lead on social occasions. Seventeen-year-old Daisy was smaller and more agile—a tomboy who often challenged authority. “She is a little inclined to be what she calls ‘fresh,’” Mabel reported to Alec, “and I [call] a ‘little impertinent.’” Daisy had her father’s dark hair and black, deep-set eyes, and her mother’s artistic tastes. In Paris, she had particularly enjoyed the visits to the Louvre and the Salon des Artistes. Frequent visits to Europe meant that both girls were fluent in French and at ease with people from different cultures, and barefoot summers in Cape Breton had given them a carefree indifference to convention. On one occasion, they were among the very few people invited to a huge Washington charity ball to brave a savage blizzard in order to attend. Julia B. Foraker, a Washington grande dame of the period, recalled in her memoirs that “[t]he two daughters of Alexander Bell waded through the snow in boots and knickers, carrying their ball dresses in their arms.”