The Bishop's Boys (49 page)

Two years after Wright negotiations collapsed, on October 16,1908, S. F. Cody, an expatriate American showman employed at the Balloon Factory, made the first sustained heavier-than-air flight in Great Britain. His machine, a biplane with a canard elevator and a rear rudder, was powered by twin propellers driven through chains. While not superior to the Wright craft, it was certainly built on much the same lines. The flight came only two months after Wilbur first flew in public at Le Mans, France.

To counteract the frustrations of the spring and summer of 1906, the Wrights’ patents were in place. Belgium, France, and Great Britain had approved their application in 1904. The United States finally granted patent No. 821,393 (Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright, of Dayton, Ohio. Flying Machine) on May 23, 1906. Austria, Germany, and Italy followed suit that fall. At last they had achieved a measure of official recognition that could be protected in a court of law.

They were also making headway against the skeptics. A new organization, the Aero Club of America, had been formed in the summer of 1905 after a speech by Charles Manly to the Automobile Club of America. Inspired by Manly’s vision of mankind’s future in the air, the wealthy automobile enthusiasts organized a club patterned after the Aéro-Club de France, with the vague objective of promoting the “development of aerial navigation.” Manly gave a second talk that fall, this time to the charter members of the new Aero Club. He expressed full confidence in the truth of the Wright claims.

In January 1906, the club organized the first large American exhibition illustrating the history, present status, and future prospects of the flying machine. The show, staged as part of the Annual Automobile Club exhibition at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, was a great success. Langley, Herring, Chanute, and others contributed engines, models, and full-scale gliders. The walls were crowded with photos of balloons, airships, and flying machines. The Wrights provided the crankshaft and flywheel of the 1903 engine, along with some photographs of the 1900–02 gliders and the 1903 machine—all of which disappeared at the conclusion of the exhibition.

Critics who attended paid little attention to the Wright contribution. In describing the show for
Scientific American
, balloonist Carl Myers remarked that the efforts of Augustus Herring were “superior to the enlarged and successful machines of the Wright brothers.” A few weeks later, the magazine published a critical editorial questioning the flights of 1903–05.

Something had to be done. On March 2, following a visit to Dayton by William J. Hammer, a leading member of the new club, the Wrights sent off an official account of the experiments of 1904 and 1905. It was the first public announcement in America that the Wrights had flown for distances of up to twenty-five miles.

Eight days after receiving the report, the club members adopted a resolution congratulating Wilbur and Orville for “devising, constructing and operating a successful, man-carrying dynamic flying machine.” The secretary, Augustus Post, included the report and the resolution in a press release issued on March 17. Journalists descended on the Wrights, who were happy to confirm the facts contained in the release.

Even
Scientific American
now took a second look. The magazine dispatched questionnaires to seventeen Daytonians who had witnessed the flights at Huffman Prairie. The results, published in a second article entitled “The Wright Aeroplane and Its Performances” on April 7, reversed the earlier position: “There is no doubt whatever that these able experimenters deserve the highest credit for having perfected the first flying machine of the heavier-than-air type which has ever flown successfully and at the same time carried a man.” The editor hoped that “they will soon see their way clear to give to the world … some of the immense amount of valuable data which they have undoubtedly obtained while delving into the rapidly developing science of aerial navigation.”
²¹

With notoriety came new acquaintances. On May 16, five weeks after the appearance of the
Scientific American
article, the Wrights received a letter from a young engine builder named Glenn Hammond Curtiss.
²²
He described his factory, noted that Captain Tom Baldwin was operating his famous airship with a Curtiss power plant, and asked if the brothers would be interested in discussing their engine needs.

The Wrights and Curtiss had a great deal in common. He was about Orville’s age, born on May 21, 1878, at Hammondsport, New York. An exuberant lad, he dropped out of school at fifteen, worked as a Western Union delivery boy, and earned a reputation as a bicycle and motorcycle racer. He began building motorcycles in 1900. Four years later, the G. H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company was a going concern with a stock issue of $40,000. By 1907 he was producing five hundred motorcycles annually and operating a chain of cycle shops.

Tom Baldwin drew Curtiss into aeronautics. Attracted by the reliability of the lightweight Curtiss motorcycle engines, Baldwin wrote to the young man outlining his requirements for an airship power plant. He found Curtiss a no-nonsense fellow, not eager to become involved with the flying-machine crowd.

Baldwin persevered, and became a steady customer. Following the destruction of his airship shed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, he shifted his entire operation to Hammondsport, convincing Curtiss that the small market for aeronautical engines might be worth cultivating after all. Wilbur and Orville were high on his list of potential customers.

Four days after receiving his first letter, the Wrights were startled to get a telephone call from Curtiss. He was in Columbus, Ohio, on business, and wanted to set up an appointment. Hard at work on a new engine design of their own, the brothers were not interested.

They met five months later, when Baldwin summoned Curtiss to Dayton to repair the engine of an airship he was operating at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. The Wrights went out to take a look at the gasbag on September 5. Introduced to Baldwin and Curtiss, they invited them back to the bike shop for a chat.

The meeting was pleasant. Baldwin later recalled that the Wrights were friendly, exhibiting “the frankness of schoolboys in it all, and had a rare confidence in us.” They even pulled out the photographs of the 1903, 1904, and 1905 machines in the air. Fascinated, Curtiss plied the brothers with questions. After they left, Baldwin chided him for being so inquisitive.
²³

The year 1906 had brought mixed blessings. The Wrights had received patent protection, succeeded in reducing skepticism in the United States, and won the recognition of the Aero Club of America. Yet they were at an impasse. A year had passed since their last flight. Negotiations with the British, French, and American governments had collapsed, and there were no new avenues left to explore.

As long as the Wrights were flying, even in secret, stories had leaked to the press—there were results to announce when it was useful. Determined neither to fly nor to release additional photographs, they had run out of ammunition with which to counter the skeptics.

The problem was especially acute in Europe. When Frank Lahm published the full text of the letter from Henry Weaver in the Paris edition of the
New York Herald
on February 10, 1906, the paper responded with an editorial of its own. Headlined “Fliers or Liars,” it summed up the doubts that were growing among the members of the Aéro-Club de France. “The Wrights have flown or they have not flown. They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It is easy to say, ‘We have flown.’”
²⁴

The Wrights were frustrated but not particularly concerned. They were patient men, convinced that they would find a buyer willing to accept their terms. It was only a matter of time.

B
y the fall of 1906, Octave Chanute was convinced that the Wrights should unveil their machine at once. “The important fact,” he cautioned Wilbur, “is that light motors have been developed. The danger is that others may achieve success.” Would it not be wise to reduce their asking price and fly in public before a potential rival joined them in the air?
¹

“Our friends,” Wilbur responded, “do not seem to exactly understand our position in the matter of supposed delay. If it were true that others would be flying within a year or two, there would be reason in selling at any price, but we are convinced that no one will be able to develop a practical flyer within five years.”
²

Wilbur’s estimate of a five-year lead over all other experimenters was based on “cold calculation.” “It takes into consideration practical and scientific difficulties whose existence is unknown to all but ourselves. Even you, Mr. Chanute, have little idea how difficult the flying problem really is. When we see men laboring year after year on points we overcame in a few weeks, without ever going far enough along to meet the worse points beyond, we know that their rivalry and competition are not to be feared for many years.”
³

Chanute agreed that he did not really understand the problem, but wondered whether the Wrights were not too “cocksure” that theirs was “the only secret worth knowing.” Others might hit upon the solution in less than “many times five years.” “As there are many shapes of birds, each flying after a system of its own, so there may be several forms of apparatus by which man may compass flight.”
⁴

On November 1, Chanute received the latest issue of the
Aeronautical Journal
, which announced that Santos-Dumont had made a short hop in Paris on September 13 in an aircraft known as
14-bis
. On October 23, he flew the same craft a distance of one kilometer, winning both the Archdeacon Cup and an Aéro-Club de France prize. “I fancy,” Chanute noted with some satisfaction, “that he is now very nearly where you were in 1904.”
⁵

Wilbur and Orville were not concerned. “From our knowledge of the degree of progress that Santos has attained we predict that his flight covered less than
1
/
10
of [a] kilometer,” Wilbur replied. “If he has gone more than 300 feet, he has really done something; less than this is nothing.”
⁶

In fact, Santos had covered a distance of 726 feet in 21
3
/
5
seconds. The French were ecstatic, hailing this as the world’s first public flight of an airplane. Strictly defined, that was precisely what it was.

Between the time of Santos’s short hop in the fall of 1906 and the first public flights of a Wright airplane in the high summer of 1908, a handful of European and American pioneers struggled into the air. Their aircraft were far more primitive than the Wright machine and the distances covered much shorter than those the Wrights could fly. Their activity was inspired by stories of the Wright success, and their machines were based on a sketchy understanding of Wright technology. None of that mattered. They had flown, and the whole world knew it.

The brothers took a strangely detached view—the European machines were much inferior to their aircraft; few of them incorporated any means of lateral control. None, by their definition, was a practical flying machine.

They were correct. Yet they lost something intangible by not making the first public flights. However superior their machine, Europeans saw their own colleagues fly at a time when the Wrights were still regarded as
bluffeurs
.

The Wrights had not envisaged that someone sufficiently daring might fly a considerable distance in a machine that could scarcely be controlled. That, in fact, was what occurred.

The ideas planted by Ferber, Archdeacon, and Deutsch de la Meurthe had begun to sprout in the spring of 1904. In March, the editor of
L’Aérophile
commented on the number of aeronautical projects under way in France. Stefan Drzewiecki was at work on a glider “of the Wright type,” only “a little different from that of M. Archdeacon.” M. Solirène was towed aloft clinging to a frail, birdlike machine; while M. Lavezarri, a talented young painter, conducted tests with a delta-wing hang-glider kite. Léon Levavaseur, an engineer who would emerge as one of the most talented of these first-generation designer-builders, had constructed his first unsuccessful monoplane in 1903. With so many diverse projects emerging, the skies of France would soon be dotted with flying machines.
⁷

This aeronautical renaissance was rooted in Octave Chanute’s account of the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Since his address to the Aéro-Club in 1903, Chanute had either written or provided the material for a dozen major articles published in France, England, and Germany, illustrated with the photographs taken during his visits to Kitty Hawk. He even helped the staff of
L’Aérophile
to prepare a set of detailed general-arrangement drawings of the 1902 Wright glider.

Paradoxically, the articles that inspired the first generation of European flying-machine builders also misled them. Chanute made it clear that the Wrights had achieved very impressive results, and showed the world what their machines looked like. But he could not explain the underlying principles: he did not fully understand the basics of the Wright technology himself, and what he did understand he had promised not to reveal.

The general-arrangement drawings of the 1902 glider were a case in point. Chanute gave the wing camber as
1
/
20
, for example, rather than the correct
1
/
25
. Problems were even more apparent in the area of control. Wilbur provided a general description of wing warping in his 1901 paper, which was readily available in France. Chanute had slipped once or twice, revealing that the operation of the rudder was linked to the wing-warping mechanism. He had been scrupulously careful not to reveal anything in the
L’Aérophile
drawings, however. All of the trussing wires were shown, but none of the all-important control cables.