The Bishop's Boys (30 page)

When the Wrights came to Kitty Hawk in the first year of the new century, they found an area in the throes of change. Local fishermen still paid tribute to “Mad Mabe,” the witch of Nags Head Woods, to ensure fair weather and a good catch. Orville’s gasoline cooking stove was a curiosity in the neighborhood “more feared than those! ‘bars’ up on North River, where Israel Perry wouldn’t land ‘for a thousand dollars.’”
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Bill Tate, whom Orville described as “postmaster, farmer, fisherman, and political boss of Kitty Hawk,” was particularly intrigued by the Wright camp:

Dr. Cogswell, Tate’s brother-in-law, warned Orville that Captain Bill would “be dead before Christmas from excitement if we don’t get out.”

The locals were never completely certain what to make of the brothers. They created an enormous splash in the little community. “We need no introduction in Kitty Hawk,” Orville remarked. “Every place we go we are called Mr. Wright. Our fame has spread far and wide up and down the beach.”
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They were likable enough, friendly, invariably well dressed—and polite to a fault. Yet the down-to-earth fishermen of the Outer Banks remained dubious of these two Yankees who arrived at the very onset of the winter storm season and spent their time skimming down the dunes on enormous white-winged contraptions. After all, the Bankers were a “practical, hard-headed lot who believed in a good God … a hot hell … and, more than anything else, that the same good God did not intend that man should ever fly!”
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The Wrights were back in the air with the repaired glider/kite just three days after their accident. They had learned some important lessons. Never again would they attempt to fly the craft from a tower; Chanute had been correct in that regard. Nor would they ever again rig the lower wing at a dihedral angle, as they had, experimentally, during the early trials. Side gusts catching the upturned tips were too much of a problem. From now on the wings would be rigged level, or, as in 1903, with a cathedral, or slight down arch.

They spent the afternoon of October 17 testing the performance of the craft over a wide range of wind and load conditions. Dan Tate, Bill’s half brother, pitched in to assist with the trials. They flew the machine empty (fifty pounds), and loaded with twenty-five and fifty pounds of chain.

There was no question of repeating Wilbur’s kite ascent of the first day. The machine would not leave the ground under these conditions in anything less than a 25-mile per hour wind. Fortunately, young Tom Tate, Dan’s son, was more than willing to take an occasional ride on the kite. The ascents were not made for Tom’s amusement: while he weighed forty pounds less than either of the brothers, he presented almost the same surface area to the resistance of the air as did an adult—one more bit of information to be recorded in the notebooks.

The Wrights flew the 1900 glider as a kite.

The Wrights finished the day with a clear idea of what their machine could and could not do. The result was a puzzling mix of satisfaction and confusion. The overwhelming disappointment was that the machine simply did not generate the amount of lift predicted by Wilbur’s calculations. When flown as a kite, the empty craft would not fly in a wind of less than 22 miles per hour. This was 4.5 miles per hour (20 percent) higher than the predicted lift of even the reduced wing. As Wilbur noted, “either the curvature or the area should have been greater.”
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The problem might indeed be found in the fact that the Wrights were flying with an airfoil camber of only 1 in 23, as opposed to the 1 in 12 favored by Lilienthal and Chanute. Moreover, the camber had grown even flatter as the Wrights’ steam-bent ribs gradually straightened out with time. It was a point to be considered in the design of their next machine. For the moment, airfoil design would remain a matter of guesswork. The only sure means of making longer flights in lighter winds was to substantially increase the wing area.

The unmanned tests also gave them an opportunity to explore the control responses of a full-scale machine. Here again, there were problems. Forced to operate the controls from the ground, they discovered
that it was very difficult to manipulate the wing-warping and rudder mechanisms simultaneously.

The wing-warping system for lateral control seemed satisfactory, but there were problems with the elevator. “We tried it with the tail [elevator] in front, behind, and every other way,” Orville told Katharine. “When we got through, Will was so mixed up that he couldn’t even theorize. It has been with considerable effort that I have succeeded in keeping him in the flying business at all. He likes to chase buzzards, thinking they are eagles, and chicken hawks, much better.”
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Convinced that the mysteries of pitch control would remain unsolved so long as they were restricted to kiting, the brothers were forced to try making free glides. The additional lift generated by a craft moving forward into the wind would be enough to support an adult in flight.

The following day, October 18, they set out for the sand hills a mile or so south of camp, only to find that the wind had died before they arrived. Undaunted, they began tossing their unmanned machine off the brow of a dune to see what would happen. “We were greatly pleased with the results,” Orv told Katharine, “excepting a few little accidents to the machine.”

The experience of simply tossing the machine loose into the air, watching it fly after a fashion and return to earth without catastrophic damage gave them confidence in its strength, resilience, and basic airworthiness. The next day was perfect for gliding. The technique was the same one used to get Will aloft on the kite the first time. The wing-warping control remained tied off throughout the tests. The two men at the wingtips continued running with the machine as long as possible, depressing a wingtip by hand when necessary. When the machine outran the men at the tips, Wilbur—who made most, if not all, of the flights—landed.

They had originally planned for the pilot to pull himself back into
a sitting position for landing. In practice, it proved unnecessary. The prone position looked dangerous but was perfectly safe, except for the occasional mouthful of sand.

The problems with the elevator seemed to vanish completely. Wilbur could bring the craft back to earth with such precision that two thin lines, the tracks of the skids, extended back twenty or thirty feet from the point where the machine finally came to rest.

By the end of the day, glides of three to four hundred feet, lasting as long as fifteen seconds, were commonplace. Wilbur finished the day with a grand total of perhaps two minutes flying time.

But the facts and figures on paper mask the excitement of the moment. The exhilaration was incredible. Racing down the slope, holding his machine within five feet of the surface, Wilbur was traveling twice as fast at the end of a flight as at the beginning. He was flying—experiencing sensations known to only a handful of human beings.

Light winds returned the following day. There would be no more manned glides before they broke camp for the return to Dayton on October 23. The 1900 Wright glider, the machine on which they had first taken to the air, was no longer of any use to them. But the $15 that went into its construction had been money well spent. Repaired many times, the machine was held together by a collection of splints and splices, its once-glistening French sateen fabric patched and grimy.

Just before they boarded Perry’s boat for the trip across the Sound, the brothers carried the machine back down the trail going south out of town and gave it one last toss from the top of a dune. It came to rest in a sand hollow. Some weeks later Bill Tate’s wife trudged out to the spot with a pair of shears and removed the sateen. She gave it a good wash and fashioned it into two new dresses for the Tate girls.

When the Wrights returned in the fall of 1901, the skeletal remains of one wing could still be seen protruding from the sand. That last piece of the original Wright glider disappeared forever in a 93-mile per hour gale that swept over the Banks on July 25, 1901.

T
he news that Wilbur had actually flown at Kitty Hawk surprised Octave Chanute. He had received the first letter from Dayton only six months before. The new correspondent seemed promising enough, a practical man who tempered his enthusiasm with the kind of down-to-earth common sense that appealed to a working engineer. He was particularly impressed by the reduction in drag achieved through the use of the prone pilot position. “This is a magnificent showing,” he wrote to Wilbur, “providing you do not plow the ground with your noses.”
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Chanute hoped that the Wrights would pay attention to his gentle warning. These young men were entirely too daring, stretching themselves out on the lower wing of their machine and flying with a control system that was positively dangerous. Anything other than automatic stability was, he thought, an invitation to disaster.

Then there was this wing-twisting business. Chanute coined the term “wing warping” to describe the Wright technique, but he did not grasp the basic principle. He never would. Whereas Wilbur’s experience with cycling had stretched his imagination and focused his attention on the need for active control in all three axes of motion, Chanute’s career had limited his thinking.

Safety, strength, and stability were the watchwords on which Chanute had built his distinguished reputation. He had devoted his life to laying thousands of miles of steel rails and had constructed enormous stationary structures—bridges and stockyards. It was not the sort of
work that prepared a man to solve the problems of controlling a machine balanced on the head of a pin in the sky.

Some men might have overcome the limitations of personal experience and tradition. Chanute was not one of them. He could conceive the problem of flight control in only two dimensions. The idea of a roll axis did not even occur to him when Wilbur described his notion of twisting the wings to raise or lower the tips. Chanute was convinced that wing warping was nothing more than a means of turning (yawing) a machine in the air by increasing the drag on one side. There was nothing new in that. Louis-Pierre Mouillard, the French experimenter, had employed precisely the same principle in a glider constructed in Egypt in 1896–97. Chanute himself had paid for its construction.
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Chanute had no intention of alienating the Wrights. They were so certain that their approach to control was correct, he decided to refrain from comment, avoid potential areas of disagreement, and do what he could to assist them. In time, they would come round to his way of thinking.

The Wrights were puzzled by Chanute’s attitude. Had they been in his place, there would have been a thousand questions. How did the pilot actually operate the controls? How were the cables arranged to accomplish the twisting action? How much pressure was required to twist the wings or flex the elevator? What was the reasoning behind that forward elevator?

Chanute had not asked about any of those things, nor had he made any special reference to the problems of balance and control. Apparently he was content to remain in the dark about the most important aspects of the Wright machine.

The brothers took Chanute’s measure very early on. Technically, they had already gone beyond him. Sure of their position, they were ready to move on to the next step—the construction of a new, improved glider. The last thing Milton Wright’s sons needed was a pat on the back from established authority.

Why then, did the Chanute correspondence remain so important to the Wrights? That it was important—to both parties—can scarcely be doubted. From the time of Wilbur’s first note of May 13, 1900, to Chanute’s last on May 14, 1910, a total of 435 letters would pass between them. The sheer bulk of the exchange was extraordinary, averaging one letter every eight or nine days over an entire decade.

Consciously or unconsciously, the Wrights used Chanute as a means of sharpening their own thinking. What had really occurred?
Why? In what direction would they move in the future? Why? The need to get it all down on paper, to explain their ideas in terms that were clear enough for another person to understand, became so important that the hours spent at Katharine’s desk in the parlor preparing another letter to Chicago were an integral part of the process of invention.