This time, however, after a moment when no one spoke, Wilbur declared he liked the idea, then surprised Orville even more: Why not simplify the pilot’s job by connecting control of the rudder with those of the wing warping?
Work began on the change that same day.
Rather than a fixed rudder of 2-foot vertical fins, as it had been until now, the glider hereafter would have a single movable rudder 5 feet high, and the operator, stretched on his stomach, would operate both the rudder and the warping of the wings by means of a new wooden “hip cradle.” Thus no hands were needed, only movement of the hips, not coincidentally like the use of the hips in maneuvering a bicycle.
Two days later, the camp grew more crowded still. Octave Chanute and another of his associates, Augustus Herring, arrived, making six now at meals and even closer-packed sleeping accommodations aloft in the rafters. Further, they had brought a triplane hang glider of their own design they wished to test, which consumed far more time and attention than the brothers wished and proved a total failure. After Herring failed several times to get the cumbersome three-wing machine off the ground, Wilbur and Orville each gave it a try and did no better.
Chanute and Herring stayed a week. But Chanute, for all his disappointment in his own glider, understood the importance of what the brothers had achieved, and on his way back to Chicago, during a stopover in Washington, made a point of calling on Samuel Langley to report what he had seen at Kitty Hawk.
As head of the Smithsonian, Langley occupied a spacious office in the institution’s turreted “Castle” on the Mall. He and Chanute were close in age, Langley, sixty-eight, Chanute, seventy-two, more than thirty years older than the Wrights. They were two personages of high reputation and accomplishment, and with their white beards looked every bit the savants they were.
But where Chanute espoused an open exchange of knowledge and ideas among those involved in the quest for flight, Langley maintained extreme secrecy about his efforts. Every aspect of his heavily financed Smithsonian experiments remained confidential. In sharp contrast to the affable Chanute, Langley, a thorough Boston Brahmin, had what his friends kindly termed a “shell of hauteur.”
Since the launching of his pilotless, steam-powered aerodrome in 1896, Langley and his Smithsonian “team” had been at work on a far larger, and again well-financed, version of the same machine, except that this would be powered by a gasoline engine and carry a single operator. Almost no one, other than those directly involved, knew anything about it, just as Langley wished.
Until now Langley had paid little or no attention to the Wrights and their efforts, but hearing all Chanute had to report, he was suddenly quite interested and wrote at once to the brothers to say he would like to come to Kitty Hawk to see for himself. Wilbur and Orville politely declined, but for what reason is unknown.
Lorin, too, soon made his exit, and on October 17, with the help of Spratt, the brothers moved the remodeled glider to Kill Devil Hills to resume testing. The weather by now had turned cold enough that a fire had to be kept burning all night. Rations were down to little more than canned beans. None of this seemed to matter.
When Spratt’s turn came to depart, the brothers were on their own again, and as so often before, with help only from the faithful Bill Tate. In ten days of practice they made more glides than in all the preceding weeks, and increased their record for distance to more than 600 feet. Altogether in two months on the Outer Banks they had made nearly a thousand glides and resolved the last major control problem.
They were elated and would gladly have stayed another several weeks had Bill Tate not long since committed himself to taking charge of a boat and crew at the opening of the fishing season.
They broke camp at first light on October 28 in a cold, driving rain and walked the four miles to Kitty Hawk to start the journey home and in a frame of mind far different from what it had been at their departure the year before. All the time and effort given to the wind tunnel tests, the work designing and building their third machine, and the latest modifications made at Kill Devil Hills had proven entirely successful. They knew exactly the importance of what they had accomplished. They knew they had solved the problem of flight and more. They had acquired the knowledge and the skill to fly. They could soar, they could float, they could dive and rise, circle and glide and land, all with assurance.
Now they had only to build a motor.
Part II
CHAPTER FIVE
December 17, 1903
When we got up a wind of between 20 and 25 miles was blowing from the north. We got the machine out early and put up the signal for the men at the station.
ORVILLE WRIGHT’S DIARY, DECEMBER 17, 1903
I.
With the arrival of the New Year 1903, the outlook in Dayton was more promising than ever. The local population had reached nearly 100,000 and according to the Evening News, an equal number were now finding their way there to do business. It was no town for a pessimist, said the paper, “but if there is any hope for him, here he may breathe the glorious air of prosperity and imbibe the spirit of optimism and be cured.”
To Americans throughout most of the country, the future was full of promise. A New Year’s Day editorial in the Chicago Tribune said one would have to be of “dull comprehension” not to realize things were better than they had ever been and would be “better still when new science and new methods, and new educations have done their perfect work.” The tempo of popular tunes was appropriately upbeat. Pianists north and south were playing ragtime, people singing and dancing to hits like “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” and “In the Good Old Summer Time.”
Employment was up nearly everywhere. In the state of New York practically the entire labor force was working. Wages were rising, the national wealth increasing. Instead of a national debt, there was a surplus of $45 million. In Washington one sensed “a new velocity” under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt. The country was about to take on the building of the Panama Canal, picking up where the French had failed. No new year had “ever brought the people of the United States a more encouraging outlook,” said the Albuquerque Journal-Democrat. Further, as noted in numerous editorials, Sunday sermons, and at many a family dinner table, the world was at peace.
One of the few puzzling questions to be considered, said the Philadelphia Inquirer, was why, so far, after so much attention had been paid to “aerial navigation,” had there been so few results?
It was shortly before the New Year when the Wright brothers sent out letters to manufacturers of automobile engines in seven states asking if they could supply an off-the-shelf engine light enough in weight but with sufficient power for their purposes. There was only one response, and in that case the motor was much too heavy. So again they had some original work to do and they had had no experience building engines.
In time to come the brothers would be widely portrayed as a couple of clever, hometown bicycle mechanics who managed to succeed where so many others had failed because of their good old-fashioned American knack for solving seemingly impossible mechanical problems. This was true only in part.
For Charlie Taylor, however, the description applied almost perfectly, except that he was more than a clever mechanic, he was a brilliant mechanic and for the brothers a godsend. If sister Katharine found Charlie’s claim to know all the answers unbearable, Wilbur and Orville never lost sight of his ability and enormous value to their efforts. And he himself well understood how far beyond him they were in so many ways. As he later said, boasting about them, “Those two sure knew their physics. I guess that’s why they always knew what they were doing and hardly ever guessed at anything.” As for building the engine:
While the boys were handy with tools, they had never done much machine-work and anyway they were busy on the air frame. It was up to me. . . . We didn’t make any drawings. One of us would sketch out the part we were talking about on a piece of scratch paper and I’d spike the sketch over my bench.
; His only prior experience with a gasoline engine had been trying to repair one in an automobile a few years before. But that January, working in the back shop with the same metal lathe and drill press used for building bicycles, he went to work and six weeks later had it finished.
The motor had four cylinders with a 4-inch bore and a 4-inch stroke. It was intended to deliver 8 horsepower and weigh no more than 200 pounds, to carry a total of 675 pounds, the estimated combined weight of the flying machine and an operator. As it turned out, the motor Charlie built weighed only 152 pounds, for the reason that the engine block was of cast aluminum provided by the up-and-coming Aluminum Company of America based in Pittsburgh. Other materials came from Dayton manufacturers and suppliers, but the work of boring out the aluminum for the independent cylinders and making the cast iron piston rings was all done by one man with a drooping walrus mustache working in the back room at the bicycle shop.
The fuel system was simple [he would later explain]. A one gallon fuel tank was [to be] suspended from a wing strut, and the gasoline fed by gravity down a tube to the engine. . . . There was no carburetor. . . . The fuel was fed into a shallow chamber in the manifold. Raw gas blended with air in this chamber, which was next to the cylinders and heated up rather quickly, thus helping to vaporize the mixture. The engine was started by priming each cylinder with a few drops of raw gas.
Compared to later engines all was amazingly simple and crude. The ignition was of the “make-and-break type” in Charlie’s expression, probably meaning that if broken it could be quickly fixed. There were no spark plugs.
The spark was made by the opening and closing of two contact points inside the combustion chamber. These were operated by shafts and cams geared to the main camshaft. The ignition switch was an ordinary single-throw knife switch we bought at a hardware store.
The “little gas motor,” as Bishop Wright called it, was finished by mid-February, and when started up in the shop the first time the racket and clouds of smoke were nearly unbearable. When further tested the next day, the engine block cracked. Dripping gasoline had frozen the bearings, breaking the engine body and frame.
Another two months went by before a second block would be delivered from Pittsburgh. This engine worked fine and as a bonus delivered an unexpected 12 horsepower.
Meantime, the design of the propellers had become a still bigger challenge. “I think the hardest job Will and Orv had was with the propellers,” Charlie later said. “I don’t believe they ever were given enough credit for that development.”
The problem became more complex the more the brothers studied it. Much to their surprise, they could find no existing data on air propellers. They had assumed they could go by whatever rule-of-thumb marine engineers used for the propellers on boats, and accordingly drew on the resources of the Dayton library only to find that after a hundred years in use the exact action of a screw propeller was still obscure. Once more they were left no choice but to solve the problem themselves. “Our minds,” said Orville, “became so obsessed with it that we could do little other work.”
They began to see the propeller as an airplane wing traveling in a spiral course, and that if they could calculate the effect of a wing traveling a straight course, why could they not calculate the effect of one traveling in a spiral course?
But on further consideration [Orville would explain], it is hard to find even a point from which to make a start; for nothing about a propeller, or the medium in which it acts, stands still for a moment. The thrust depends upon the speed and the angle at which the blade strikes the air; the angle at which the blade strikes the air depends on the speed at which the propeller is turning, the speed the machine is traveling forward, and the speed at which the air is slipping backward; the slip of the air backward depends on the thrust exerted by the propeller, and the amount of air acted upon. When any one of these change, it changes all the rest, as they are all interdependent on one another.
After several months of study and discussion they had come to understand that the thrust generated by a standing propeller was no indication of the thrust when in motion, and that the only realistic way to test the efficiency of a propeller would be to try it out on the flying machine.
During these months their “discussions” became as intense as they had ever been. Heated words flew, filling hours of their days and nights, often at the tops of their voices. “If you don’t stop arguing, I’ll leave home,” a nearly hysterical Katharine cried out at one point.
According to Charlie Taylor, they were never really mad at each other. One morning after one of their “hottest” exchanges, he had only just opened the shop at seven o’clock as usual when Orville came in saying he “guessed he’d been wrong and they ought to do it Will’s way.” Shortly after, Wilbur arrived to announce he had been thinking it over and “perhaps Orv was right.” The point was, said Charlie, “when they were through . . . they knew where they were and could go ahead with the job.”
The new Flyer, as they called it, would have two propellers positioned between the two wings just to the rear of the operator. One would turn clockwise, the other, counterclockwise, so the spinning, or gyroscopic action, of the one would balance that of the other. Making the propellers with the proper diameter, pitch, and surface area proved no great problem.
Each had a diameter of 8 and a half feet and were made of three spruce laminations glued together and shaped by hand with a hatchet and spoke shaver, or “drawknife,” as used by wheelwrights. That they were different from any propellers ever built before was certain, and the last major problem had been resolved.
Again, the machine would ride on skids, not wheels. The operator would again lie prone at the controls in the middle of the lower wing. The motor and a radiator would be positioned directly beside him on the right. A little one-gallon gas tank hung overhead on a strut to his left. The drive chains for the propellers were specially made by the Indianapolis Chain Company, and Roebling wire would be used for the trusses between the wings—wire made by the Roeblings who built the Brooklyn Bridge.
On March 23, the brothers applied for a patent on their flying machine, its wing-warping system, and rudder.
In late April came a letter postmarked Paris from Octave Chanute, who, to help recover from the death of his wife, had been on an extended vacation in Europe. Their experiments were attracting much attention in Paris, he reported to the brothers, adding, “It seems very queer that after having ignored all this series of gliding experiments for several years, the French should now be over-enthusiastic about them.” While in Paris he had given several talks on the subject, including one at a formal dinner conference at the Aéro-Club de France.
What the genial Chanute did not relate was how, in these talks, he had portrayed his part in the experiments, referring repeatedly to the Wrights as his “devoted collaborators.” Perhaps it was his pride in les frères, or the glow he undoubtedly felt being a center of attention in his native France where interest in aviation was great. However, the impression he conveyed was that he was their teacher, and they, his daring pupils, were carrying “his” work to fulfillment.
This was not only untrue but grossly unfair. Great as had been Chanute’s interest and encouragement, the brothers had never in any way been his pupils or collaborators. All they had achieved was their own doing, gained by their own original study and effort. Exactly when and how they learned of what Chanute had said in Paris is unclear, but it was not something they were happy about or would forget.
Of far greater consequence, however, was Chanute’s admirable emphasis on the importance of their glider flights, all of which was a revelation for the French and “even a little disagreeable,” as said one of the Aéro-Club’s leaders, Comte Henri de La Vaulx. It was time for French aviation experimenters “to get seriously to work if they did not wish to be left behind.”
In his speech and in numerous conversations while in France, Chanute had also provided a great deal of information on the details of the W
right glider, and this would indeed have a profound impact on French aviation.
Chanute had agreed to write something for the influential publication L’Aérophile, he informed Wilbur, and would need pictures of him and Orville without delay. After allowing a few weeks to slip by, Wilbur replied good-naturedly that they did not know how to refuse when Chanute had put the matter so nicely, but on the other hand they had not the courage to face a camera.
By mid-May, Chanute was back home and wanted to set a date for Wilbur to come again to Chicago and again address the Western Society of Engineers. He also wished to visit the brothers in Dayton quite soon as he had information he wished to deliver in person. He arrived the morning of June 6 and returned to Chicago that same night. In the course of the day’s conversation he told the brothers he was giving up his own experiments. From here on, he said, it was all up to them.
Wilbur spoke before the gathering in Chicago the evening of June 24, and with considerably more confidence and spirit than he had two years earlier. He described in some detail the breakthrough he and Orville had achieved with the glider they tested at Kitty Hawk the previous fall. He said much about the part the study of birds had played in their work, and of the glides they were able to achieve, putting particular emphasis, as he had before, on the necessity of skill at the controls. More than machinery skill was needed.
“A thousand glides is equivalent to about four hours of steady practice,” he told the audience, and this was “far too little to give anyone a complete mastery of the art of flying.