The Bishop's Boys (45 page)

By November 16, 1904, when this photograph was taken, the brothers had begun to get a feel for the new machine—and the problems still to be solved.

But their performance was not consistent. The exceptional long flights were widely separated by a great many shorter hops of thirty seconds to a minute. They were really flying for the first time, and their experience in the air was growing, but accidents remained a daily occurrence and voluntary safe landings rare. The airplane was frequently operating out of control. Even during simple straight-line flights down the length of the field it would begin to undulate until it was impossible to keep it in the air.

The Wrights tried altering the center of gravity by moving the pilot position and engine slightly to the rear. Far from correcting the problem, the shift increased the undulations, making the machine impossible to control in pitch.

Puzzled, they took steps in the opposite direction, loading twenty pounds of ballast beneath the forward elevator. This increased the period of the oscillations, and helped to counter the sensitivity of the elevator. The machine was controllable, but only marginally so. The basic resolution of the pitch and elevator problems would have to wait until 1905.

B
revet Lieutenant Colonel John Edward Capper, Royal Engineers, a senior officer of the British military balloon establishment, arrived in Dayton to meet with the Wrights on October 24, 1904. An official representative of His Majesty’s Government, he was their first potential customer.

The serious history of British military aeronautics begins with the Boer War. The handful of men who successfully pioneered reconnaissance ballooning with the Royal Engineers returned from the South African campaign with War Office approval for an expanded program of aeronautical research. The prestigious Committee on Military Ballooning authorized work on free balloons, development of a powered airship, and experiments with man-lifting kites.
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Strategic thinkers in England were also examining the possibility of a future war in the air. Late in January 1904, only a month after the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk, Halford Mackinder, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, gave a lecture on “The Geographic Pivot of History” at the Royal Geographical Society in which he argued that the next great threat to Britain’s security would come not by sea, as in the past, but from the Eurasian heart-land.
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The Royal Navy would be of little value when the nations controlling the vast spaces between the Elbe and Vladivostok developed an industrial capacity and a network of railway links.

In the comment session afterwards, L. S. Amery, a rising young politician and journalist, suggested that control of the air might be the only way to counter the prospect of Eurasian hordes pouring toward the Channel. “Both the sea and the railway are going in the future … to be supplanted by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that … the successful powers will be those that have the greatest industrial basis … those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.”
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Aware that they were starting from behind, the leaders of the embryonic aeronautical program were eager to keep up to date on the latest foreign developments. Thus, in June 1904, the War Office ordered Lieutenant Colonel Capper to attend the aeronautical display and airship competition at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in St. Louis.

Thanks in part to the work of Octave Chanute, the aeronautical program planned for the St. Louis Fair was shaping up nicely. There would be exhibits of balloons, airships, engines, and other aeronautical paraphernalia, as well as a schedule of lectures—topped off by the excitement of aerial competition.

The American exhibition balloonist Carl Myers, superintendent of the races, offered a total of $150,000 in prizes to the aeronauts who piloted their balloons and airships higher, faster, and farther than their competitors. A grand prize would go to the pilot achieving the best average speed during three runs over a fifteen-mile course. The rules were stiff, including a requirement for a winning speed of at least 20 miles per hour, but some of the world’s best-known aeronauts, including Santos-Dumont himself, were there to try their luck.

Santos’s plans to sweep the field were scotched when his airship was destroyed by vandals. Tom Baldwin had better luck. Baldwin, a daredevil American balloonist and parachute jumper, came to the fair with the
California Arrow
, a one-man airship that refused to leave the ground with its 210-pound designer on board. Fortunately, a substitute pilot was at hand. Young A. Roy Knabenshue operated a pair of tattered captive balloons used to give visitors a bird’s-eye view of the Fair. He had already captured press attention with a spectacular 200-foot hand slide down the balloon tether cable.

Knabenshue created yet another sensation when he flew the
California Arrow
for the first time on October 25, negotiating a figure-S over the fairgrounds. He earned substantial prize money but, like everyone else, failed to win the grand prize.

Of course Chanute was there. He hired Bill Avery, who had flown with him on the Indiana Dunes ten years before, to demonstrate a new version of the two-surface glider. As there were no suitable hills, Avery devised a motorized winch to tow him into the air. Everything went fine until a twisted ankle forced his withdrawal as the only entry in the heavier-than-air competition.

Colonel Capper was disappointed with the Americans and their fair. “It is of no use whatever,” he wrote, “pointing anything out to an ordinary American; they are all so damned certain they know everything and so absolutely ignorant of the theory of aeronautics that they only resent it.”
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He did admire the “beautifully made” Chanute glider, and traveled to Chicago for a long meeting with its designer. Then it was on to Dayton to make the acquaintance of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Before his departure, Capper had asked Patrick Alexander, Baden-Powell, and others for advice on whom he should meet in America. Everyone insisted that he include the Wright brothers. Their names were well known in England now. Alexander had met them; Baden-Powell and a handful of others had corresponded with them. No one, however, had the slightest idea what they had been up to since the flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Capper hoped to take their measure for himself.

Sure enough, Dayton proved to be the most interesting stop on Capper’s American tour. The Wrights liked him, though not well enough to show him the airplane. They let him see some photographs of the machine in flight, something they would not do for subsequent visitors, and explained the basics of their technology. Capper was impressed, and said so in his official report: “Both these gentlemen impressed me favorably; they have worked up step by step, they are in themselves well-educated men and capable mechanics, and I do not think them likely to claim more than they can perform.”
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Capper was not authorized to negotiate with the Wrights, but encouraged them to tender a proposal for the sale of an airplane to the War Office. “We told him,” Orv later recalled, “that we were not yet ready to talk business.”
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Capper’s visit, closely followed by the long flights at the close of the 1904 season, convinced the Wrights that they were in fact, ready to talk business by January 1905. But as Wilbur admitted to Chanute, “we would be ashamed of ourselves if we offered our machine to a foreign government without giving our own country a chance at it….”
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Uncertain how to proceed, Wilbur called on his local congressman, Robert M. Nevin, at his Dayton home on the evening of January 3. Nevin advised him to describe his machine’s performance and the terms for its sale in a letter that he would present to Secretary of War William Howard Taft. Their consciences soothed, the brothers decided to forge ahead on two fronts simultaneously.

Wilbur wrote to Colonel Capper on January 10. He outlined their successes during the final weeks of the 1904 season, adding that although “no spectacular performances were attempted, the … results were so satisfactory that we now regard the practicability of flying as fully established.” Which brought him to his main point: “There is no question, but that the government in possession of such a machine as we can furnish, and the scientific and practical knowledge and instruction that we are in a position to impart, could secure a lead of several years over governments which waited to buy perfected machines before making a start in this line.”
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If the British government was interested in the purchase of a machine to carry two men through the air at a speed of 30 miles per hour, the Wrights could supply one. Eight days later, the brothers wrote to Congressman Nevin, describing their craft as a machine that “not only flies through the air at high speed, but lands without being wrecked.”

They offered either to sell an aircraft capable of meeting government performance requirements, or to furnish “all the scientific and practical information we have accumulated in these years of experimenting, together with a license to use our patents; thus putting the government in a position to operate on its own account.”
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Nevin was ill when the letter arrived. Unaware of his promise to take the matter up personally, a clerk forwarded the letter directly to the U.S. Army Board of Ordnance and Fortification for comment. Major General G. L. Gillispie, president of the Board, replied through Nevin’s office on January 26:

Wilbur and Orville took Gillispie’s letter as a personal affront. They had told him that their machine was “fitted for practical use” and described its performance. The sons of Milton Wright did not intend to deal with those unwilling to accept their word as honest men. “It is no pleasant thought to us that any foreign country should take from America any share of the glory of having conquered the flying problem,” Will told Chanute on June 1,

War Department officials have often been portrayed as short-sighted and conservative in their early dealings with the Wright brothers. That was not the case. If anything, the Army had rushed too quickly into the airplane business. The members of the Board were still experiencing serious difficulties arising out of their support for the Langley Aerodrome project. The action of the Board in granting $50,000 for the Aerodrome had been a courageous and far-sighted decision. In 1898, Langley’s program seemed enormously promising, but the spectacular demise of the craft in December 1903 set the Board up as a target for congressional inquiry and censure.

Representative Hitchcock led the attack, castigating the Board for “permitting an expenditure for scientific purposes of thousands in a vain attempt to breathe life into an air-ship project which never had a substantial basis. You can tell Langley for me,” Robinson added, “that the only thing he ever made fly was Government money.”
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The Aerodrome episode became the focal point for a general congressional attack on government-funded research. The Board survived the onslaught, but it was badly burned. The career officers involved would handle the question of mechanical flight very gingerly in the future.

To make matters worse, the Langley publicity generated a flood of crank proposals from would-be aviators with surefire schemes for mechanical flight. Yet another letter, this one from two “inventors” who claimed to have solved the problem of the ages in the back room of a bicycle shop, was not calculated to impress.

The Wrights had not included any photos of their gliders or powered machines in the air, nor provided letters from eyewitnesses. In fact, they offered no proof at all, only the bald assertion that their machine worked. To expect a positive response from the War Department on that basis indicates Wilbur and Orville’s inability to understand and deal effectively with a government bureaucracy.