Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (17 page)

Frank
Lloyd Wright was also experimenting with urban structures. Judging by the photographs – which is all that remains since the edifice was torn down in 1950 – his Larkin Building in Buffalo, on the Canadian border, completed in 1904, was at once exhilarating, menacing, and ominous.
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(John Larkin built the Empire State Building in New York, the first to have more than 100 floors.) An immense office space enclosed by ‘a simple cliff of brick,’ its furnishings symmetrical down to the last detail and filled with clerks at work on their long desks, it looks more like a setting for automatons than, as Wright himself said, ‘one great official family at work in day-lit, clean and airy quarters, day-lit and officered from a central court.’
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It was a work with many ‘firsts’ that are now found worldwide. It was air-conditioned and fully fireproofed; the furniture – including desks and chairs and filing cabinets – was made of steel and magnesite; its doors were glass, the windows double-glazed. Wright was fascinated by materials and the machines that made them in a way that Sullivan was not. He built for the ‘machine age,’ for standardisation. He became very interested also in the properties of ferro-concrete, a completely new building material that revolutionised design. Steel was pioneered in Britain as early as 1851 in the Crystal Palace, a precursor of the steel-and-glass building, and reinforced concrete (
béton arme)
was invented in France in the same year, by François Hennebique. But it was only in the United States, with the building of skyscrapers, that these materials were exploited to the full. In 1956 Wright proposed a
mile-high
skyscraper for Chicago.
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Further down the eastern seaboard of the United States, 685 miles away to be exact, lies
Kill Devil Hill,
near the ocean banks of North Carolina. In 1903 it was as desolate as Manhattan was crowded. A blustery place, with strong winds gusting in from the sea, it was conspicuous by the absence of the umbrella pine trees that populate so much of the state. This was why it had been chosen for an experiment that was to be carried out on 17 December that year – one of the most exciting ventures of the century, destined to have an enormous impact
on the lives of many people. The skyscraper was one way of leaving the ground; this was another, and far more radical.

At about half past ten that morning, four men from the nearby lifesaving station and a boy of seventeen stood on the hill, gazed down to the field which lay alongside, and waited. A pre-arranged signal, a yellow flag, had been hoisted nearby, at the village of Kitty Hawk, to alert the local coastguards and others that something unusual might be about to happen. If what was supposed to occur did occur, the men and the boy were there to serve as witnesses. To say that the sea wind was fresh was putting it mildly. Every so often the Wright brothers – Wilbur and Orville, the object of the observers’ attention – would disappear into their shed so they could cup their freezing fingers over the stove and get some feeling back into them.
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Earlier that morning, Orville and Wilbur had tossed a coin to see who would be the first to try the experiment, and Orville had won. Like his brother, he was dressed in a three-piece suit, right down to a starched white collar and tie. To the observers, Orville appeared reluctant to start the experiment. At last he shook hands with his brother, and then, according to one bystander, ‘We couldn’t help notice how they held on to each other’s hand, sort o’ like they hated to let go; like two folks parting who weren’t sure they’d ever see each other again.’
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Just after the half-hour, Orville finally let go of Wilbur, walked across to the machine, stepped on to the bottom wing, and lay flat, wedging himself into a hip cradle. Immediately he grasped the controls of a weird contraption that, to observers in the field, seemed to consist of wires, wooden struts, and huge, linen-covered wings. This entire mechanism was mounted on to a fragile-looking wooden monorail, pointing into the wind. A little trolley, with a cross-beam nailed to it, was affixed to the monorail, and the elaborate construction of wood, wires and linen squatted on that. The trolley travelled on two specially adapted bicycle hubs.

Orville studied his instruments. There was an anemometer fixed to the strut nearest him. This was connected to a rotating cylinder that recorded the distance the contraption would travel. A second instrument was a stopwatch, so they would be able to calculate the speed of travel. Third was an engine revolution counter, giving a record of propeller turns. That would show how efficient the contraption was and how much fuel it used, and also help calculate the distance travelled through the air.
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While the contraption was held back by a wire, its engine – a four-cylinder, eight-to-twelve-horsepower gasoline motor, lying on its side – was opened up to full throttle. The engine power was transmitted by chains in tubes and was connected to two airscrews, or propellers, mounted on the wooden struts between the two layers of linen. The wind, gusting at times to thirty miles per hour, howled between the struts and wires. The brothers knew they were taking a risk, having abandoned their safety policy of test-flying all their machines as gliders before they tried powered flight. But it was too late to turn back now. Wilbur stood by the right wingtip and shouted to the witnesses ‘not to look sad, but to laugh and hollo and clap [their] hands and try to cheer Orville up when he started.’
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As best they could, amid the
howling of the wind and the distant roar of the ocean, the onlookers cheered and shouted.

With the engine turning over at full throttle, the restraining wire was suddenly slipped, and the contraption, known to her inventors as
Flyer,
trundled forward. The machine gathered speed along the monorail. Wilbur Wright ran alongside
Flyer
for part of the way, but could not keep up as it achieved a speed of thirty miles per hour, lifted from the trolley and rose into the air. Wilbur, together with the startled witnesses, watched as the
Flyer
careered through space for a while before sweeping down and ploughing into the soft sand. Because of the wind speed,
Flyer
had covered 600 feet of air space, but 120 over the ground. ‘This flight only lasted twelve seconds,’ Orville wrote later, ‘but it was, nevertheless, the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it had started.’ Later that day Wilbur, who was a better pilot than Orville, managed a ‘journey’ of 852 feet, lasting 59 seconds. The brothers had made their point: their flights were
powered, sustained,
and
controlled,
the three notions that define proper heavier-than-air flight in a powered aircraft.
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Men had dreamed of flying from the earliest times. Persian legends had their kings borne aloft by flocks of birds, and Leonardo da Vinci conceived designs for both a parachute and a helicopter.
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Several times in history ballooning has verged on a mania. In the nineteenth century, however, countless inventors had either killed themselves or made fools of themselves attempting to fly contraptions that, as often as not, refused to budge.
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The Wright brothers were different. Practical to a fault, they flew only four years after becoming interested in the problem.

It was Wilbur who wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., on 30 May 1899 to ask for advice on books to read about flying, describing himself as ‘an enthusiast but not a crank.’
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Born in 1867, thus just thirty-two at the time, Wilbur was four years older than Orville. Though they were always a true brother-brother team, Wilbur usually took the lead, especially in the early years. The sons of a United Brethren minister (and later a bishop) in Dayton, Ohio, the Wright brothers were brought up to be resourceful, pertinacious, and methodical. Both had good brains and a mechanical aptitude. They had been printers and bicycle manufacturers and repairers. It was the bicycle business that gave them a living and provided modest funds for their aviation; they were never financed by anyone.
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Their interest in flying was kindled in the 1890s, but it appears that it was not until
Otto Lilienthal,
the great German pioneer of gliding, was killed in 1896 that they actually did anything about their new passion. (Lilienthal’s last words were, ‘Sacrifices must be made.’)
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The Wrights received a reply from the Smithsonian rather sooner than they would now, just three days after Wilbur had written to them: records show that the reading list was despatched on 2 June 1899. The brothers set about studying the problem of flight in their usual methodical way. They immediately grasped that it wasn’t enough to read books and watch birds – they had to get up into
the air themselves. Therefore they started their practical researches by building a glider. It was ready by September 1900, and they took it to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the nearest place to their home that had constant and satisfactory winds. In all, they built three gliders between 1900 and 1902, a sound commercial move that enabled them to perfect wing shape and to develop the rear rudder, another of their contributions to aeronautical technology.
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In fact, they made such good progress that by the beginning of 1903 they thought they were ready to try powered flight. As a source of power, there was only one option: the internal combustion engine. This had been invented in the late 1880s, yet by 1903 the brothers could find no engine light enough to fit onto an aircraft. They had no choice but to design their own. On 23 September 1903, they set off for Kitty Hawk with their new aircraft in crates. Because of unanticipated delays – broken propeller shafts and repeated weather problems (rain, storms, biting winds) – they were not ready to fly until 11 December. But then the wind wasn’t right until the fourteenth. A coin was tossed to see who was to make the first flight, and Wilbur won. On this first occasion, the
Flyer
climbed too steeply, stalled, and crashed into the sand. On the seventeenth, after Orville’s triumph, the landings were much gentler, enabling three more flights to be made that day.
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It was a truly historic moment, and given the flying revolution that we now take so much for granted, one might have expected the Wrights’ triumph to be front-page news. Far from it. There had been so many crackpot schemes that newspapers and the public were thoroughly sceptical about flying machines. In 1904, even though the Wrights made 105 flights, they spent only forty-five minutes in the air and made only two five-minute flights. The U.S. government turned down three offers of an aircraft from the Wrights without making any effort to verify the brothers’ claims. In 1906 no airplanes were constructed, and neither Wilbur nor Orville left the ground even once. In 1907 they tried to sell their invention in Britain, France, and Germany. All attempts failed. It was not until 1908 that the U.S. War Department at last accepted a bid from the Wrights; in the same year, a contract was signed for the formation of a French company.
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It had taken four and a half years to sell this revolutionary concept.

The principles of flight could have been discovered in Europe. But the Wright brothers were raised in that practical culture described by Richard Hofstadter, which played a part in their success. In a similar vein a group of painters later called the Ashcan school, on account of their down-to-earth subject matter, shared a similar pragmatic and reportorial approach to their art. Whereas the cubists, Fauves, and abstractionists concerned themselves with theories of beauty or the fundamentals of reality and matter, the Ashcan school painted the new landscape around them in vivid detail, accurately portraying what was often an ugly world. Their vision (they didn’t really share a style) was laid out at a groundbreaking exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York.
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The leader of the Ashcan school was Robert Henri (1865–1929), descended from French Huguenots who had escaped to Holland during the Catholic massacres of the late sixteenth century.
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Worldly, a little wild, Henri, who
visited Paris in 1888, became a natural magnet for other artists in Philadelphia, many of whom worked for the local press:
John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks.
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Hard-drinking, poker playing, they had the newspaperman’s eye for detail and a sympathy – sometimes a sentimentality – for the underdog. They met so often they called themselves Henri’s Stock Company.
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Henri later moved to the New York School of Art, where he taught George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Man Ray, and Leon Trotsky. His influence was huge, and his approach embodied the view that the American people should ‘learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time and in their own land.’
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The most typical Ashcan school art was produced by John Sloan (1871–1951), George Luks (1867–1933), and George Bellows (1882–1925). An illustrator for the
Masses,
a left-wing periodical of social commentary that included John Reed among its contributors, Sloan sought what he called ‘bits of joy’ in New York life, colour plucked from the grim days of the working class: a few moments of rest on a ferry, a girl stretching at the window of a tenement, another woman smelling the washing on the line – all the myriad ways that ordinary people seek to blunt, or even warm, the sharp, cold life at the bottom of the pile.
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