starting from a 160-foot track, were not frequent, the Wrights had
to be in readiness to take advantage of occasional gusts of strong
wind. With their machine on the track, they waited until they could
“see” a flurry of wind coming--that is, until they could see weeds
being agitated by the wind in the distance. Then they would start the
motor and run the machine down the track to meet the wind gust when
it reached the end of the rail. In that way they sometimes succeeded
in making a start on a day generally calm. But one such start ended
disastrously, and Orville, who was piloting the machine, had one of
his narrowest escapes. When the machine first met the flurry of wind,
it rose rapidly, but a second later it was on the ground with the
wings pointing vertically into the air. It had dived at a steep angle,
throwing Orville forward to the ground. The upper wing spar came down
across the middle of his back. But luckily, a section about two feet
wide, just wide enough to miss hitting him, was broken out. No other
damage was done to the spar, and the Wrights could never account for
the seemingly miraculous breakage that provided a space for safety over
the very place where Orville lay on the ground. After that accident,
Charlie Taylor, who had seen other narrow escapes, gloomily told the
neighbors across the road that every time he saw one of the brothers
start on a flight he felt that he was seeing him alive for the last
time.
Early in July the Wrights made alterations in the machine which located
the center of gravity farther toward the rear than it had been before.
In the first trial after those alterations, the machine, after leaving
the track, kept turning up more and more and looked as if it were going
to loop the loop. The center of gravity was so far back that the front
elevator, even when turned to its limit, could not check the upward
turn. While pointing vertically upward, the machine came to a stop and
then began to slide backward. By the time it reached the ground it was
once more so nearly level that if the skids had had a slight upward
bend at their rear ends, the landing might have been made without
damage. As it was, the rear ends of the skids dug into the ground; but
the damage was slight.
Before their experiments had progressed far in 1904 the Wrights saw
that a better method of launching the machine was needed. They decided
that a derrick with a falling weight would be the simplest and cheapest
device. A 1,600-pound weight, falling a distance of 16½ feet, was so
geared with ropes and pulleys that it produced a 350-pound pull on the
machine through a distance of 49½ feet. By this arrangement the machine
could be put into the air after a run of only 50 feet, even in a dead
calm. Shifting the track was now seldom necessary.
Up to the time the derrick catapult was ready for its first trial on
September 7, less than forty starts had been made and many of them
failed for lack of speed. But now the length of the flights increased
rapidly. The shorter flights had been in almost a straight line, but
as the lengths of the flights increased it was necessary to make turns
to stay within the field. Then a new trouble--or rather an old one
that supposedly had been overcome at Kitty Hawk--began to bother the
Wrights. Often in making a short turn they suddenly found themselves in
a tail-spin which ended in a crash requiring days, or even weeks, for
repairs. They soon learned what it was in making the turn that caused
the tail-spin; but they found it difficult to avoid, because they had
no way of knowing at what angle the air was striking the machine. This
led to the “invention” of the first instrument for guidance of a pilot
in flying. They simply attached a short piece of string to the crossbar
beneath the front elevator. When the machine traveled directly forward
the string trailed straight backward; but when the machine slipped to
either side the string blew to one side or the other and indicated
approximately the amount of the side slip. By close observance of this
string it was possible to avoid entirely the danger of tail-spins, but
the pilot learning to fly had so many things to attend to, so it seemed
to him, that he sometimes neglected to watch the string closely enough.
After it was found that the derrick permitted the plane to be launched
at any time, the Wrights often let the machine stand on the track
during the day with the weights raised, ready to start at a moment’s
notice. One day in early November, while idly strolling in front of
the track, Orville thought he saw a slight movement of the plane on
the track. A more careful look did not confirm his first impression;
nevertheless he turned and leisurely walked towards the plane. When
within a few steps of it he saw that it actually _was_ in motion.
The wire that held it against the pull of the 1,600-pound weight was
attached to a stake driven into the soft ground several feet. That
stake was slowly coming out of the ground! By leaping upon one of the
skids, Orville reached the elevator control lever in time to prevent
the machine from rising as it rushed down the track. A strained
shoulder was the principal damage, though the machine suffered a few
slight breakages.
Not until the 51st flight in 1904, when the machine stayed in the air
one minute and one second, did the Wrights beat their best Kitty Hawk
record of 59 seconds. The first complete circle was not made until
September 20. But toward the end of the 1904 experiments, there were
two five-minute flights. In each of these the machine circled the field
four or five times without stopping.
The total flying time during 1904 was only 45 minutes. But the
knowledge and experience gained from that three quarters of an hour
were of almost inestimable importance.
Toward the end of May, 1905, the Wrights began assembling a machine
all new with the exception of the motor and the propeller-driving
mechanism. Strengthening of the structure at places where the previous
machine had been too weak in making landings added about 25 pounds more
weight. The principal changes, however, were in wing design, addition
of some new features not in the earlier machines, and in making the
wing-warping and operation of the tail rudder independent of each
other. The camber of the wings was changed from 1-25, used in 1904,
back to 1-20 as used in 1903 at Kitty Hawk. This change was to enable
the machine to get off at a slower speed.
The most radical change was the addition of two semi-circular vanes,
called “blinkers,” between the two surfaces of the front elevator. This
device was later patented by the Wrights. The purpose of the “blinkers”
was to assist the rear rudder in overcoming the unequal resistances
of the two wings when they were warped while making a turn. Gliding
experiments in 1902 had shown that the pressure on a fixed vane in the
rear of the wings tended to speed the higher wing when the machine
slipped in the direction of the lower wing, and caused a tail-spin. The
vane had to be made movable to relieve this pressure. It now occurred
to the Wrights that if a fixed vane were placed in front of the wings,
instead of behind them, its effect would be the reverse of that
when the vane was in the rear, and that there would be less need of
operating the rear rudder to overcome the unbalanced resistance of the
two wings. Moreover, when the machine slipped inward while “banking”
a turn, the speed of the low wing would be increased and a tail-spin
avoided. The operation of the rear rudder could now be made independent
of the wing-warp without danger.
It was found that the “blinkers” entirely removed the danger of tail
spinning but that they added to the difficulty of steering, both when
flying straight and when making turns. Consequently they were not used
in all the flights. (In modern planes the effect of the “blinkers” is
gained by extending the fuselage far out in front of the wings.)
Though tail-spins could be avoided without use of “blinkers,” by
carefully observing the little piece of string that indicated side
slip, yet they sometimes occurred. In one flight, in September,
1905, when the “blinkers” were not on the machine, Orville suddenly
discovered he was in a tail-spin and that he was about to come down
in the top of a forty-foot thorn tree. The thorns were several inches
long, and the idea of falling through them to the ground was not
alluring. Orville quickly turned the machine into an almost vertical
dive while turning in a circle 50 to 100 feet in diameter. The inner
wing of the machine hit a branch of the tree, imbedding a thorn in an
upright, and tore off the branch. In the dive, the higher wing, because
of much greater speed, soon passed the lower wing in the downward
plunge and itself became the low wing. The machine thus was in a steep
bank with the high side toward the tree, just the opposite from what
it had been before. When Orville turned the elevator to avoid striking
the ground, the machine turned suddenly and unexpectedly away from the
tree, because, in this steeply banked condition, the elevator exerted
more pressure laterally than it did vertically. (When an aeroplane is
banked to 45 degrees the elevator serves just as much for a rudder as
for an elevator, and the rudder just as much for an elevator as for a
rudder.) Though the machine lightly touched the ground, Orville flew
it on back to the hangar, where the branch of the tree was found still
clinging to the upright. It had been the practice of the Wrights to
dive the machine to recover speed in a stall; but this quick recovery
was from an entirely different cause--the great difference in the
speeds of the two wings.
An amusing flight by Orville in 1905 was made after some weeks of
inactivity in flying and after the machine had undergone a number of
changes since his last flight. When the machine left the starting rail
it began pitching like a bucking broncho. Orville wanted to stop, but
at every plunge the plane came down so steeply he did not dare attempt
a landing. As soon as he got control of the machine, after going three
or four hundred feet, he did land safely. Wilbur rushed up to inquire
why he had stopped just when he had really got going. Orville explained
that he would have landed even sooner, but had taken the first
opportunity to stop without smashing the machine to pieces.
Though the rudder and wing-warp were entirely independent of each other
in all the flights of 1905, the Wrights several years later resumed
having the two controls interconnected, to operate together, but with
an arrangement needed for modifying their relationship when making
turns.
Another change that improved control of the 1905 machine was in giving
the wings considerably less angle at the tips than in the central part.
By this arrangement, the tips stalled later than other parts of the
wings and some lateral control remained even after the central part of
the wings were in a stalled condition.
After the Wrights had made the blades of their propellers much
wider and thinner than the original ones, they discovered that the
performance of the propellers in flight did not agree closely with
their calculations, as in the earlier propellers. They could see only
one reason for this, and that was that the propeller blades twisted
from their normal shape under pressure in flight. To find out quickly
if this was the real reason, they fastened to each blade a small
surface, like an elevator, out behind the blades, set at an angle to
balance the pressures that were distorting the blades. They called the
surfaces “little jokers.” When they found that the “little jokers”
cured the trouble, they dispensed with them and began to give the
blades a backward sweep, which served the same purpose.
In the flying season of 1905, the control of the machine was much
improved by increasing the area of the front rudder from 50 to 85
square feet, and by moving it to nearly twice the distance from the
wings. This added distance made response to the movement of the rudder
slower, and control of the machine much easier.
The lateral control also was improved by enlarging the rear rudder from
20 to 34 square feet, and by moving it to a position three feet farther
back of the wings.
On account of frequent rains, the soggy condition of the field, and
other weather conditions, only nine attempts to fly were made in the
first two months of experiments in 1905, and only three of these lasted
for as much as ten seconds. But after the first of September progress
was rapid.
During all this time, the newspapers had continued to let the Wrights
alone. Indeed, the failure of the newspapers in Dayton and elsewhere
to say much about the history-making experiments at Huffman field was
often used as an argument to prove that there couldn’t be any truth in
the rumors that men had actually contrived a successful flying-machine.
“You couldn’t have kept a thing like that _secret_. Some reporter
surely would have _heard_ about it!”
Dan Kumler, who was city editor of James M. Cox’s _Daily News_, in
Dayton, during those early years of flying, recalled in 1940, not long
before his death, that many people who had been on interurban cars
passing the Huffman field and seen the Wrights in the air used to come
to the _Daily News_ office to inquire why there was nothing in the
paper about the flights.
“Such callers,” said Kumler, “got to be a nuisance.”
“And why wasn’t there anything in the paper?” Kumler was asked.
“We just didn’t believe it,” he said. “Of course you remember that the
Wrights at that time were terribly secretive.”
“You mean they were secretive about the fact that they were flying over
an open field?”
“I guess,” said Kumler, grinning, after a moment’s reflection, “the
truth is that we were just plain dumb.”
James M. Cox, owner of the _Daily News_, has likewise confessed that
“none of us believed the reports” of flights.
One fact that kept the earlier flights relatively inconspicuous was
that much of the time the plane was within 10 or 15 feet of the ground.
Only occasionally was it up as high as 50 feet. There were no flights
beyond the field itself, because if necessary to make a forced landing
elsewhere, dragging the machine back to its shed might not have been
easy.
The Wrights had aimed at first to avoid being in the air when an
interurban car was passing. But that precaution soon proved to be
unnecessary. Few people ever paid any attention to the flights. One
day, though, the general manager of the interurban line was on a
passing car when the plane was in the air and he ordered the car
stopped. He and the chief engineer of the line, who was with him, got
off and stayed a while to look at the incredible sight.
Across the Springfield pike from the field lived the Beard family,
tenants on the Torrence Huffman farm. Whenever the plane landed
abruptly Mrs. Beard was likely to dash across the road with a bottle of
arnica, feeling sure it would be needed, as sometimes it was. But there
were few other visitors.
Two somewhat mysterious visitors did come, however. The Wrights saw two
men wandering about near-by fields during most of one day and thought
they must be hunters, though there was not much game thereabouts. Again
the next day the two strangers were seen, and finally they came across
the field to where the Wrights were adjusting their machine. One of
them carried a camera. They asked if visitors were permitted.
“Yes, only we’d rather you didn’t take any pictures,” one of the
brothers courteously replied.
The man with the camera set it down off to one side, twenty feet away,
as if to make it plain that he was not trying to sneak any shots. Then
he inquired if it was all right to look into the shed. The brothers
told him to make himself right at home. Was he a newspaperman? No, he
said, he was not a newspaperman, though he sometimes did writing for
publication. That was as near as he came to introducing himself. After
the callers had gone, Charlie Taylor, the Wrights’ mechanic, said:
“That fellow’s no writer. At least he’s no ordinary writer. When he
looked at the different parts of the machine he called them all by
their right names.”
Later the Wrights learned the identity of the visitor. Orville
chanced to see a picture of him in a New York newspaper. His identity
was confirmed some time afterward when he and Orville were formally
introduced to each other--though neither referred to their previous
meeting. The man had been chief engineer for Professor Langley of the
Smithsonian Institution.
Toward the end of September, the Wrights were able greatly to increase
their distances. On September 26, there was an uninterrupted flight of
11⅛ miles in 18 minutes and 9 seconds; and on September 29, one of 12
miles in 19 minutes 55 seconds. Then, on October 3, there was a new
record of 15¼ miles in 25 minutes 5 seconds; another, on October 4,
of 20¾ miles in 33 minutes 17 seconds; and finally, on October 5, 24⅕
miles in 38 minutes 3 seconds.
The flights of October 3 and 4 would have been longer except that
certain bearings had become overheated. By October 5 the inventors had
added more grease cups where needed and also installed a larger gas
tank. But the tank was not full when that final test began and the
flight ended because the fuel was exhausted. It was the intention of
the Wrights to make one more test and put the record at more than an
hour; but now for the first time the miracle of flight actually began
to attract more spectators and the brothers decided it might be prudent
to quit for the season before details of the machine’s construction
became public knowledge. However, there was one more short flight--just
one circle of the field--on October 16.
After the close of the 1905 experiments, a test of the engine showed
that it produced more power than when first put into use. This gain
was attributed to the increased smoothness of the cylinders and pistons
produced by wear.
Looking back over their experiments, the Wrights noted that “in 1903,
62 pounds per horsepower were carried at a speed of 30 miles an hour;
in 1904, 53 pounds at 34 miles an hour; and in 1905, 46 pounds at 38
miles an hour.” Thus the weight carried per horsepower was in inverse
ratio to the speed--the smaller the weight carried per horsepower, the
higher the speed. That seems obvious enough now, but at the time the
Wrights were making these experiments many scientists still accepted
the “Langley Law,” that the greater the speed, the less horsepower
necessary.
The Wrights now knew that the airplane would have practical use--though
they did not foresee how safely trans-Atlantic flights would be
made--and not even in their wildest dreams did they think of anyone
ever flying at night.
IX
IT STILL WASN’T “NEWS”
Though Dayton newspapermen had not besieged the Huffman pasture for
details of the great news story lurking there during 1904-’05, one of
their number had occasionally been in contact with the Wrights. That
was Luther Beard--no kin to the other Beards mentioned--managing editor
of the Dayton _Journal_. Besides being a newspaper editor, Beard also
taught school at Fairfield, about two miles from the Huffman farm, and
went back and forth by the interurban car line that passed the field
where the Wrights were making history. It sometimes happened that on
the trip to Dayton he was on the same car with one or both of the
Wright brothers, returning from their flights.
“I used to chat with them in a friendly way and was always polite to
them,” Beard recalled, years afterward, chuckling over the joke on
himself, “because I sort of felt sorry for them. They seemed like
well-meaning, decent enough young men. Yet there they were, neglecting
their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous
flying-machine. I had an idea that it must worry their father.”
In these conversations, neither the Wrights nor Beard was likely to
bring up the subject of aviation. The Wrights showed no eagerness
to talk about what they were doing, and Beard kept to subjects he
considered more sensible. But one day, in the autumn of 1904, several
of the school children told him they had seen the Wrights flying all
around the field. Maybe, thought Beard, that might make a little local
item for the paper. When he next saw Orville Wright on the car, a day
or two afterward, Beard asked him if it was true that they had been
flying all the way around the field.
Oh, yes, Orville admitted, they often did that. Then Orville began to
talk about something else.
Evidently, Beard decided, the fact that an airplane could be flown
under perfect control in circles didn’t amount to anything after
all. Orville Wright himself didn’t seem to think it was unusual or
important. There was no use putting it in the paper. One more reason
perhaps for not printing much in the _Journal_ about what the poor,
misguided Wrights were doing was that such items were annoying to Frank
Tunison, another of the editors--the same Tunison who had turned down
the story of the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Having decided that the
Wrights were not news, he was naturally irritated to see any reference
to them, even on an inside page. “Why do we print such stuff?” he would
ask.
However, Beard said to Orville, as they rode along on the car: “If you
ever do something _unusual_ be sure and let us know.” From time to
time he went or telephoned to the Wright home to find out if by remote
chance the brothers had done anything worth mentioning.
“Done anything of special interest lately?” he asked Orville Wright one
evening.
“Oh, nothing much,” replied Orville. “Today one of us flew for nearly
five minutes.”
“Where did you go?” asked Beard.
“Around the field.”
“Oh! Just around the field. I see. Well, we’ll keep in touch with you.”
Doubtless, reflected the newspaperman, the Wrights’ circling of Mr.
Huffman’s pasture for five minutes was pretty good for two local
boys. But it was hardly a thing to take up space in the paper. Hadn’t
Santos-Dumont circled the Eiffel Tower, and flown all around Paris?
One more newspaper writer, like hundreds of others, had failed to
distinguish between an airship with a gas bag and a flying-machine
heavier than air. (At the time of the thirty-eight-minute flight in
1905, however, Luther Beard was among the spectators at the field.)
Another bright young newspaperman in that vicinity didn’t grasp quite
the full significance of what the Wrights were doing. The Dayton
_Journal_ had a branch office at Xenia, about eleven miles from where
the Wrights did their flying. The reporter in charge of that branch
office was an enterprising lad, just out of college, who answered
to the name of Fred C. Kelly. His eagle eye spotted an item about
the Wrights and their flying-machine in a country weekly, the Osborn
_Local_, published in a village a mile or two from the Huffman field.
Did he investigate the story? No, he didn’t need to investigate it to
feel sure it must be nonsense.
The fact of human flight was still unacceptable and ridiculous even
to professional humorists. The humorous weekly, _Puck_, in its issue
of October 19, 1904--nearly a month after that first circular
flight--published a joke, inspired presumably by absurd reports about
two young men at Dayton:
“When,” inquired the friend, “will you wing your first flight?”
“Just as soon,” replied the flying-machine inventor, “as I can get the
laws of gravitation repealed.”
The significance of the first complete circular flight, on September
20, 1904, was not overlooked, however, by one man who witnessed it.
That was A. I. Root, the Medina bee man. He had traveled by automobile
the day before to Xenia, where he had a relative, and then went to
the Huffman field, only a few miles away, to become better acquainted
with the Wrights. His trip of 175 miles from Medina without serious
difficulty with his machine was then almost a feat in itself. He had
not needed any repairs until he reached Xenia. (Incidentally, he had
remonstrated with the repair man he dealt with there, Mr. Baldner, for
his frequent use of profanity; and he was impressed by the fact that
no matter how puzzling or discouraging the problem, the Wrights never
uttered a profane word.) After going to Huffman field, Root became more
than ever interested in the Wrights and as he wished to see all he
could of their work for a few days, he arranged for board and lodging
at the Beard home across the road. (A little later he even offered
to pay the Wrights $100 for material he had obtained from them for
articles about their work--but they refused to accept any payment.)
Root knew that the circular flight he had just witnessed was of prime
importance, for it demonstrated that the airplane would have practical
use. He wrote an eye-witness account of what the Wrights had done for
the January 1 (1905) issue of his magazine, _Gleanings in Bee Culture_,
and sent a marked copy to the editor of the _Scientific American_, with
a letter telling the editor he was free to reprint the article. The
editor wrote back that he had not received the marked copy. So Root
sent another. But when the editor of the _Scientific American_ saw what
Root had printed he paid no attention to it.