The Bishop's Boys (44 page)

The Wrights first attempted to fly the new craft on May 23. They had given considerable thought to this moment. By Dayton standards, Huffman Prairie was isolated; compared to the fastness of the Kill Devil Hills, however, it was a tourist mecca. The fifth-largest city in the state lay only eight miles to the west, and two prosperous country towns less than two miles to the east. Several farmhouses and all of the surrounding fields had a clear view of the Prairie; a major traction line carried hundreds of people directly past each day. If curiosity seekers and newsmen came looking, there would be no place to hide.

Wilbur and Orville were astounded at the ease with which journalists had twisted the story of the first flight out of all recognition. Wild tales about the events at Kitty Hawk were still circulating. The national magazines were as bad as the newspapers. On January 17, the
New York Herald Magazine
identified the Wright machine as a balloon. The new issue of
Collier’s
appeared on the newstands a week later with a piece on “The Machine That Really Flies,” including a drawing of the 1896 Chanute glider identified as the 1903 Wright airplane.

Wilbur (right) and Orville transferred operations to Huffman Prairie in the spring of 1904. Here they built and flew two more machines, the first of which rolled out of the hangar in May 1904.

“The Experiments of a Flying Man,” which appeared in
The Independent
on February 4, was cobbled together from Will’s two lectures to the Western Society of Engineers—lectures that had been copyrighted by the Society. The editor had even “forged” Wilbur’s name to the piece. Chanute, they learned, had provided copies of the lectures and a photo of the 1902 glider. The brothers considered suing, but settled for a printed apology.

Determined to improve their handling of the press in 1904, the Wrights sent letters to the leading papers in Dayton and Cincinnati announcing that they would attempt to fly their new machine during the last week in May. No photographers would be allowed, but reporters were welcome.

A crowd of perhaps forty spectators, including a dozen newsmen, was present at Huffman Prairie on the morning of May 23. Unusually high winds gave way to a dead calm that kept them on the ground, even with the new 100-foot-long rail designed to be used on low-wind days. Finally, late in the afternoon, Will announced that they would make a demonstration run down the track. Nothing was going right. The engine proved difficult to start, and was obviously misfiring. The machine ran right off the end of the rail without rising an inch into the air.
¹⁶

The fiasco of May 23 was followed by two days of hard rain that kept everyone indoors. Finally, on the 26th, with several hardy reporters still on hand, Orville just managed to get off the ground. Not even Bishop Wright could become too excited about a flight of twenty-five feet.

The newsmen tried hard to find a story in what they had seen. One account described the machine as rising seventy-five feet into the air—three times as high as the actual length of the “flight.” Another reporter, struggling to say something positive, commented that the Wright airplane was “more substantially constructed than any other machines of its kind.”

Did the Wrights actually intend to fly for the reporters? If so, they were luckier than they knew. They had shown the press enough to be disappointing but not enough to make them look complete fools. Over the next two years the rumors of flights being made out at Huffman Prairie that circulated through the region would not surprise reporters or editors who had seen Orville actually lift off the ground for twenty-five feet. It was nothing to get excited about.

A few remained mildly curious. Luther Beard, a member of the Dayton
Journal
staff and a part-time school teacher in Fairfield, occasionally sat with the Wrights as they rode the trolley back and forth between Huffman Prairie and West Dayton. “I used to chat with them in a friendly way and was always polite to them,” he recalled. “I sort of felt sorry for them. They seemed like well-meaning decent young men. Yet there they were, neglecting their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous flying machine. I had an idea they must worry their father.”
¹⁷

In the fall of 1904, one of Beard’s students enquired if he knew what was going on over at the Prairie. The next time Beard saw Orv on the train, he asked if anything “unusual” had occurred. Orv said no, but Beard stayed in touch with them, chatting on the train and phoning once in a while. One evening Orv mentioned that his brother had flown for five minutes that afternoon, circling round and round the field. That sounded impressive enough for a couple of Dayton boys, but Beard knew that over in France the great Santos-Dumont had stayed up much longer than that, flying his dirigible airship all the way from the outskirts of Paris to the Eiffel Tower and back.

For the next five months there was little good news to report at Huffman Prairie. Flying was limited to a series of very short hops of 100 to 200 feet, most of them ending in a crash. Not until August 13 did they beat the 852-foot Kitty Hawk record. Their notebooks for the period are a litany of broken wings (the pine spars “shattered like taffy”), smashed propellers, damaged rudders, and broken supporting members.
¹⁸

The field itself was the most difficult problem. At the Kill Devil Hills they had strong, steady winds. Here, there was usually no wind at all. When there was a breeze, it was gusty and uncertain. The Wrights were forced to use up to 240 feet of track to get up flying speed in the gentle spring and summer winds.

Laying that much track was backbreaking work. Each twenty-foot length of rail had to be carefully butted to its neighbor, checked for precise alignment, and staked into place. All too often the wind would shift just as the job was finished. When that happened, there were only two choices: to begin all over again, or risk the dangers of a crosswind takeoff.

It was a trying situation, as Wilbur explained to Chanute:

They would lay the track in the early morning calm, prepare the machine, then sit and wait for the wind to rise. At times they could see it coming in the distance, riffling the grass as it approached the launch site. There was a sudden flurry of activity as they rushed to get the machine moving down the track in time to meet the oncoming gust. If they did succeed in lifting off, the slightest drop in wind velocity deposited them back on the ground.

The dangers were appalling. Mrs. Beard kept a close watch on the Prairie through her kitchen window. When she saw the craft lift off, then fall abruptly out of sight, she would send one of her youngsters scurrying across the road with a bottle of linament. Charlie Taylor told her that every time he watched one of the brothers start down the rail, he had the feeling he might be seeing him alive for the last time.
²⁰

Orville made just such a hurried takeoff on August 24: the craft rose off the rail, then smashed back to earth as the supporting wind died. It was a miraculous escape. The upper wing spar came crashing down on him, broken, fortunately, just where it would have hit his back. He escaped with only bumps and bruises, but it was obvious that something would have to be done to reduce the chancy takeoffs.

Their answer was a catapult launch system. First put into operation on September 7, it consisted of a twenty-foot tower constructed at the foot of the rail. A 1,600-pound weight was drawn up to the top of the tower. A rope attached to the weight ran over a geared pulley down to the base of the tower; over a second pulley and down the length of the rail; then over a third pulley and back down the rail again to be fastened to the front of the airplane. The machine was anchored in place by means of a second rope attached to a stake in the ground.

When the pilot was ready for flight, he reached over the leading edge of the wing and released a clip holding the anchor line. With the loop open, the weight dropped, pulling the machine down the rail. They found that they could make safe takeoffs from a sixty-foot rail even in extremely light winds.

Before September 7 they had completed less than forty starts, most of which had resulted in very short flights because of insufficient air speed. Suddenly there was an unmistakable jump in performance. Now the brothers could fly the length of the field without difficulty. By September 15, they were making flights of up to half a mile in length complete with their first full turns in the air. The great break-through came five days later, when Orville flew a complete circuit of the Prairie, covering 4,080 feet in just over 1 minute, 35 seconds.

Amos Root, the eccentric operator of a beekeeping supply house in Medina, Ohio, was there that day. He had heard rumors about two young men who were actually flying from a cow pasture down in Dayton, and passed the news along to his Sunday School class. In mid-September he packed a suitcase and drove 175 miles to Fairfield to investigate the miracle for himself.

Root lodged with the Beards, who were far more impressed by the distance he had driven an automobile than by what was going on in the field across the Pike. His timing was perfect. He walked over to the Prairie on the morning of September 20 and introduced himself to the Wrights, who were quite taken with him. That afternoon he witnessed the first circular flight of an airplane in the history of the world. It was a moment he would not forget.

Root described what he had seen to the readers of
Gleanings in Bee Culture
, the journal he published for customers of his supply house. Over the next two years he continued to provide progress reports. He also offered to allow the editor of
Scientific American
to reprint his articles, but that gentleman refused. For the two years, 1904–05, when Wilbur and Orville Wright were perfecting their invention, the only accurate coverage appeared in a journal aimed at an audience of beekeepers.

By now, neighboring farmers also had begun to pay more attention to the Wrights. The Beards, the Harshmans, the Millers, and old Amos Stauffer, who farmed the land right next to the Prairie, visited the field on occasion and got to know the boys. Huffman Prairie became a topic of conversation among the DS & U crews as well. At first the Wrights had timed their experiments to avoid the passing trains. That became more difficult as the flights grew longer. On November 9, Mr. Brown and Mr. Reed, two supervisors on the Dayton-Springfield line, ordered the crew of their inspection train to hold up at the station for an extra five minutes while they watched Wilbur fly four complete circles of the field.
²²

Accidents remained commonplace. Some, like the one on November 1, were the result of simple carelessness. Orv started the engine and was conducting a pre-flight inspection when the machine suddenly edged forward—the anchor peg had pulled loose from the soft ground. He leaped onto the skid, reached forward, and depressed the elevator lever as the craft went careening down the rail. The result was a sprained shoulder and some minor damage to the machine.

Other problems required more ingenuity. The brothers had trouble orienting themselves in turns, frequently miscalculating, banking too steeply, or allowing the nose to rise so high that the aircraft stalled. The answer was a long string tied to the crossbar of the elevator. When the craft was flying straight and level, the string blew directly back toward the pilot. When banking, or flying with the nose up or down, the position of the string enabled him to gauge the attitude of his machine. It was the first flight instrument.

The last flight of the season came on December 9, almost a year after the first short hops at the Kill Devil Hills. The first year back in Ohio had been a mixture of success and disappointment. The catapult launch system had enabled them to extend their time in the air, and to make their first turns. Twice they remained aloft for more than five minutes, circling the field four or five times. That was a clear step forward.