The Bishop's Boys (47 page)

Wilbur Wright flew thirty circles over the field on that October afternoon, landing only when his fuel was exhausted. He kept the machine in the air for 39 minutes, 23
4
/
5
seconds, covering a total distance of 24
1
/
5
miles in the process. This was not only the longest flight made to date, it was longer than the total of all 109 flights the Wrights had made in 1903 and 1904 put together.

They had done it. The 1905 Wright airplane was one of the most extraordinary machines in the history of technology. Capable of rising into the air, flying for an extended period under the complete control of the operator, and landing safely, it was the world’s first practical airplane. Nine years of trial and error, discouragement and hope, risk to life and limb, and brilliant engineering effort had culminated in the air over this Ohio cow pasture.

With so many witnesses to an accomplishment this spectacular, newsmen at last took notice. The first press inquiries came on the evening of October 5. The next day Luther Beard of the Dayton
Journal
was on hand at the Prairie. The
Daily News
carried the story on the morning of October 6. The Cincinnati
Post
picked it up the following day. Henry Webbert told the boys that John Tomlinson at the Dayton
Journal
had offered him $50 for advance notice of the next flight.
²⁶

Wilbur and Orville were not eager to end the season. Chanute had not seen any of the great flights of 1904 or 1905—a witness with his credibility might be very useful to them in the weeks and months to come. They urged him to make the trip to Dayton. He arrived on November 1, but a rainstorm set in and no flights were possible.

Chanute had missed his chance to see the world’s first airplane fly. He would not have another for a very long time. The brothers had reached a firm decision. They had invested an enormous amount of time and energy in solving a problem that had baffled the world’s great minds for centuries. The airplane was not their gift to the world, but a product for sale.

The value of their product was not in the wood, wire, and fabric of the machine, but in the knowledge that lay behind it. Under the best of circumstances, that knowledge would be hard to protect—and circumstances were not ideal. Toulmin had finally applied for their patent, but it would not be granted until 1906. Premature disclosure of the details would seriously complicate, perhaps destroy, their legal position. Chanute might already have accomplished that in nations like Germany, which had very strict rules regarding prior disclosure.

Even the patent would not guarantee protection. The Wrights knew that patents had proved of little value in defending other inventors against infringement. A far wiser course was to reveal as little about the airplane as possible until they had a signed contract for its sale in hand. Until that day arrived, there would be no more flying.

T
he years 1900–05 were the happiest Wilbur and Orville would ever know. No longer drifting, they found direction and purpose in the process of invention. Both men pushed themselves to the limit, courting danger, tasting disappointment, and savoring triumph. Orv distilled the sheer joy of it into that one line of a letter to George Spratt: “Isn’t it astonishing that all of these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so that we could discover them!”
¹

And now it was over. The new challenge, one they did not relish, was to sell their invention. Wilbur had doubted whether they were “especially fitted for success in any commercial pursuit.” All of the Wright boys, he thought, lacked the “determination and push” required in business. He was wrong. They had those things in abundance, and other personal qualities—self-assurance, perseverance, and determination—that suited them for their new role as salesmen.

But the Wrights proved to be almost as bad at business as they were good at invention. Their ultimate success owed far more to the quality of their product than to their marketing skills.

There have been many explanations for their difficulties during 1905–08. Most biographers place the blame on government officials in Europe and America. It is easier to portray turn-of-the-century bureaucrats as unimaginative dolts than to suggest a flaw in the Wright legend.

A handful of writers have been more critical of the Wrights. Octave Chanute thought that their “usually sound judgment” was “warped by the desire for great wealth.”
²
As Wilbur noted in disgust: “You are the only person acquainted with us who has ever made such an accusation.”

The historian/engineer Percy Walker, who chronicled the Wright negotiations in England, found his explanation for their business problems in the depths of the elder brother’s subconscious. Wilbur, he concluded, suffered from “a deep-rooted psychological resistance to anyone possessing his precious aeroplane, [or] even having a look at it.” Struggling with delusions “of paranoiac proportions,” he worked on the one hand to sell the airplane and on the other to keep it a secret from the world.
³

The talk of mental aberration is absurd, but Walker’s search for the psychological roots of the Wrights’ business difficulties is worth pursuing. Any attempt to explain the career of Wilbur and Orville Wright during the difficult years after 1905 must begin with an understanding of their basic assumptions about the world. Just as their approach to the problems of flight had been conditioned by their experience with cycle technology, so they took up the challenge of selling the airplane with the memory of their father’s church struggles fresh in their minds.

Milton’s long battle over the Keiter issue ended in the spring of 1905. The delegates to the General Conference held at Grand Rapids, Michigan, upheld the bishop by a two-thirds majority. But the church had paid an enormous price to satisfy his righteousness. Milton, at seventy-seven, was first vindicated, then retired from all duties. An era in the history of the church, and the family, came to an end.

Wilbur and Orville were shaped in the crucible of their father’s experience. They fully expected their moral fiber to be tested, as had their father’s, by unscrupulous men and women. And so far they had not been disappointed. Herring had attempted to steal a share of the glory and financial reward due the inventors of the airplane. They had not heard the last of him, nor of others like him. Even Chanute and Spratt, whom they regarded as friends, failed to appreciate the scope of their achievement. Like Milton, the brothers faced a hostile world.

Chanute urged them to fly their machine at once, before the largest crowd they could find. The impact of such a spectacle would bring instant fame, he argued, and force the governments of the world to come calling on them.

Perhaps he was right. The Wrights had rejected his suggestions in 1903 and 1904 because they were unable to provide an impressive performance. In the wake of the long flights of 1905, however, they could stage a demonstration that would stun the entire world. They might have grown rich, as Chanute predicted, and avoided many of the problems that plagued them over the next five years.

But Wilbur and Orville had too little faith in the ways of the world or the motives of their fellow human beings to take the chance. Why should they demonstrate their machine in public, trusting that the world’s governments, inspired by a sense of fair play, would rush forward to repay them for their efforts? Far more likely that an unscrupulous rival would copy their technology and undersell them, stealing both the money and the credit.

It was a matter of principle. The Wrights saw no good reason to swallow their pride and put themselves and their machine on public display, “making Roman holidays for accident loving crowds.” They might make money that way, but it would reduce them to the level of aerial showmen such as Santos-Dumont, Tom Baldwin, and Roy Knabenshue.

“You apparently concede to us no right to compensation for the solution of a problem ages old, except such as is granted to persons who had no part in producing the invention,” Wilbur explained to Chanute. “That is to say, we may compete with montebanks for the chance to make money in the montebank business, but are entitled to nothing whatever for past work as inventors. We honestly think that our work of 1900–1906 has been and will be of value to the world, and that the world owes us something as inventors.”
⁴

They would chart their own course, doing business directly, and on their own terms. The Wrights offered to provide a machine capable of meeting a set of performance criteria, including a minimum speed, range, and carrying capacity. Within narrow limits, the price was negotiable; other important conditions were not.

They would not allow anyone, even a potential buyer, to witness a flight or even
see
the machine, until a contract was signed. Nor would they provide interested parties with photographs, drawings, or technical descriptions of any kind before closing the deal. There were no financial risks for the buyer. No payments would be required until the Wrights had demonstrated their machine to the customer’s satisfaction.

Wilbur and Orville thought it a fair arrangement that protected the interest of the buyer while preventing unscrupulous “window shoppers” from glimpsing technological details. They failed to recognize that a government functionary might take a different view. Above all, the average bureaucrat seeks to avoid looking foolish. The Wrights, intent on protecting their technology, made such men very nervous. If these fellows from Dayton could fly, why did they not do so? If they had photographs of their machines in the air, why did they not show them? Suppose they could not really fly at all—how would the contracting officer look then?

The Wrights did not regard those as valid concerns. They expected to be taken at their word. They had always done business with a handshake. What was good enough for the corner grocer was good enough for Whitehall, the Quai d’Orsay, and the U.S. War Department.

They set out in the fall of 1905 determined to sell the airplane in the same way they had invented it—on their own. The first step was to reopen contacts in Washington and London. Unable to believe that their own government could be so shortsighted as to completely reject them, they wrote directly to Secretary of War William Howard Taft on October 9, explaining that their initial proposal had received “scant attention” from the Board of Ordnance and Fortification but that they did not want to seek a buyer abroad “unless we find it necessary to do so.” Their initial offer stood. They would provide a series of demonstration flights totaling one hundred miles, the price to be established on a sliding scale governed by performance.
⁵

Ten days later, Orville wrote to the War Office in London to say that they were still waiting to hear from Colonel Foster, the military attaché in Washington. In addition, they were now prepared to offer immediate trial flights of up to fifty miles.

The response from the U.S. War Department was swift and predictable. Major General J. C. Bates, the new president of the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, said the Board would not consider the matter until the Wrights provided detailed drawings and descriptions of their machine, “to enable its construction to be understood.”
⁶

That was precisely what they would not do. Wilbur asked what sort of performance the Board would expect of a flying machine. Bates wrote back on October 24, explaining that the Board would not formulate any such requirements or take any further action on the subject “until a machine is produced which, by actual operation, is shown to be able to produce horizontal flight and to carry an operator.”
⁷

It would not have taken much to erase the doubts. A personal visit to Washington with a handful of the astonishing photos of the long flights of 1904–05, accompanied by affidavits from the Huffman Prairie witnesses, would surely have convinced the Board. Secret flight trials could have been arranged at a secluded Army base. The course of world history would hardly have been significantly altered had the first airplane been sold in 1906 rather than 1908, but the Wrights would have been spared a great deal of frustration.

Yet they refused to make the effort. If their word was not good enough, they would take their business elsewhere. For the moment, the matter was closed.

The British response was more promising. The War Office had not forgotten them. By mid-October 1905, even before the arrival of Orville’s reminder, a clerk noticed that Colonel Foster’s report on his visit to Dayton was long overdue. A bit of checking revealed that the attaché was in Mexico City and had not yet contacted the Wrights. Foster wrote on November 18, immediately upon his return, asking when and where he could witness the promised flight. Wilbur replied that a demonstration was now out of the question, but if Foster would come to Dayton, they would be happy to introduce him to prominent local citizens who had seen them fly. They could then negotiate a contract. With that out of the way, the Wrights would reassemble and fly the 1905 machine.
⁸

Bewildered, Foster explained that he was not empowered to interrogate witnesses or negotiate a contract. His instructions limited him to observing a flight and reporting back to London. He understood that the demonstration was a prerequisite for opening discussions, not something that would occur after the deal was closed.

The Wrights continued to correspond with Foster, and with his superiors in England, but they had reached an impasse. Foster summed the situation up on December 8: “The fact seems to me that the War Office cannot commit itself to negotiations with a view to purchasing unless sure that your invention gives the flight it claims, while you do not wish to show its flight until the War Office has made some arrangement with you. Thus there is a deadlock.”
⁹

Even so, British officials were reluctant to drop the issue. Realizing that the Wrights were firm in their refusal to fly without a contract, the issue was passed back up the chain of command to the Royal Engineer Committee for a final review. Official enthusiasm for flight was now working against the Wrights. Capper, for example, while reemphasizing his belief in their claims, argued against pursuing a contract based on the mileage flown during official trials. It would be much cheaper, he suggested, to waive the demonstration flight and insist on a fixed purchase price.