Riding a Craze

Dayton, Ohio, was founded in 1805 where three creeks flowed into the Miami River. The “city of a thousand factories” teemed with machinists and carpenters, carriage-makers and wood-benders, artisans and engineers, engravers and glass-makers, says Tobin. The stuff of the 19th century was made in Dayton, he says. Motors and medicine and metal castings. Steam pumps and stoves and farm machinery. Particularly cash registers, the main export. By 1900, the city had more patents per capita than any other. “Its 60,000 people knew machines,” Tobin says. “They were perhaps particularly susceptible to the charms of the bicycle.” And so was the rest of 1890s America. Says Crouch, “The sheer exhilaration of cycling captured a generation of Americans accustomed to the restraint of high, tight collars, ankle-length skirts, and corsets. Nothing in their experience could compare with the thrill of racing down a steep hill into the wind, and the newfound sense of personal independence was irresistible.”

The brothers rode the craze from mechanics to makers of their own line–fleet-wheeled BMWs of their day–crafted in a machine shop complete with drill press, turret lathe, and tube cutter driven by a one-cylinder engine of Wright design. “They had no intention of mass-producing bicycles after the fashion of the large manufacturers,” says Crouch. “Each of their machines was a hand-built original, made to order.”

This secured their financial future.

The Wrights had the business sense to see a niche and fill it. But money didn’t drive Wilbur. He glimpsed a new niche to fill. “Up to that point, he probably thought his life was insignificant,” says Darrell Collins, historian at Wright Brothers National Memorial, in the documentary Kitty Hawk: The Wright Brothers’ Journey of Invention. “I think Wilbur knew that if they could add to [the discourse] or even invent the airplane, they would achieve immortality.” In a letter to his father Will said: “It is my belief that flight is possible, and, while I am taking up the investigation for pleasure rather than profit, I think there is a slight possibility of achieving fame and fortune from it. It is almost the only great problem which has not been pursued by a multitude of investigators . . .”

Multitudes, no, but a formidable rival, Samuel Pierpoint Langley, head of the Smithsonian and informal chief scientist of the United States. Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1834, Langley–a renowned astrophysicist–was, like Will, an autodidact sans college degree. As a young man he read his way through the Boston libraries, absorbing through apprenticeships with engineers and architects.

Langley was bitten with the flight bug. In 1896, he grabbed global headlines when his small unpiloted craft, powered by steam engine, took to the air over the Potomac. President McKinley, seeing a weapon in the brewing war with Spain, approved $50,000 in funds for the project from the War Department. The Smithsonian’s resources at his command, Langley saw success just over the horizon. “Everything connected with the work was expedited as much as possible,” he wrote, “with the expectation of being able to have the first trial flight before the close of 1899.”

After a letter from Will, the Smithsonian sent pamphlets and a list of reading matter. The brothers hit the books, immersed in a methodical course of study. They digested Langley’s Experiments in Aerodynamics and Story of Experiments in Mechanical Flight Progress. They read Progress in Flying Machines by Octave Chanute, the grand old man of aeronautics. And they were inspired by the zesty accounts of gliding in The Problem of Flying and Practical Experiments in Soaring, whose author, noted aerialist Otto Lilienthal, had plunged to his death a few years before. The Empire of the Air, by French flight enthusiast Louis Pierre Mouillard, sounded a cautionary note: “If there be a domineering, tyrant thought, it is the conception that the problem of flight may be solved by man. When once this idea has invaded the brain it possesses it exclusively.”

The more the Wrights read, the more they saw how little was known. Will concluded that there was no flying art, “only a flying problem.” It was an open playing field.

Sometimes Will pedalled to a place called the Pinnacles, eerie outcrops where buzzards and hawks dove and darted in the heights above the Miami River. Now, thanks to a growing aeronautic vocabulary, his observations took on a new cast. Birds distributed their weight on a “center of gravity,” upward forces focused on a “center of pressure,” balance controlled by keeping the two roughly in line.

Will saw that, hit by a gust, birds reasserted their balance with a slight twist of the wingtips. One day in late July 1899, a customer came in to buy an inner tube. As they chatted, Will idly twisted the long, empty inner tube box. When the customer left, he tore the ends off. He saw a pair of wings.

That night Will was aflutter with ideas for twisting the wings with pulleys and ropes. Orv got it instantly. They immediately set to work on an airplane.

The Wrights determined to dodge Lilienthal’s fate, testing a kite first. It had biplane wings (an idea from Chanute), each five feet long by thirteen inches wide, plus a horizontal tail to stabilize front and rear. Will took it for a spin in a field just outside Dayton, letting it out with cords attached to the wings–a set per side–which let him twist the tips in the wind. It was an immediate success.

Emboldened, Will wrote to Chanute. “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man,” he said. “My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money, if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.”

Will sought advice on “a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about 15 miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather.” Chanute embraced his fellow enthusiast with a prompt response. He said he “preferred preliminary learning on a sand hill and trying ambitious feats over water.” A spot on the South Carolina or Georgia coast might have the right mix of wind and sand, he wrote.