— Books, Non-Fiction, Highlights — 9 min read
Wilbur learned that the great minds of the country were working on the problem of flight. Many were eminent scientists, with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison heading the list. They all had money and resources that Wilbur Wright could not possibly hope to possess. Another possible inventor, Hiram Maxim, had sunk a cool $100,000 into developing a flying machine that crashed on takeoff. It is worth noting here that the lack of money will be Wilbur's greatest advantage. It brought caution, methodology, and the slow cracking of the nascent science of aeronautics. There could be no frippery, because Wilbur couldn't afford any. Efficiency was uppermost. He had to isolate the central problem of flight before attacking the whole. This was the machine age, and men believed that a powerful engine could solve all problems. They went right past the central problem of lift.
A bird sailing quartering to the wind seems to always present its wings at a positive angle, although propulsion in such positions unaccountable. No bird soars in calm. The object of the tail is to increase the spread of surface in the rear when the wings are moved forward in light winds and thus center of pressure at about the same preserve the spot. It seems to be used as a rudder a very little. In high winds it is folded up very narrow. Hawks are better soarers than buzzards but more often resort to flapping because they wish greater speed. A damp day is unfavorable for soaring unless there is a high wind.
long before those words were probably introduced.
He had just written Bishop Wright a letter that he wanted to give to Tate to post. "I have my machine nearly finished. It is not to have a motor and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word. My idea is merely to experiment and practice with a view to solving the problem of equilibrium." Wilbur had already decided that control was everything. While Langley believed in the intrinsic power of the engine to loft a man into the air, Wilbur believed power was secondary: "When once a machine is under proper control under all conditions, the motor problem will quickly be solved. A failure of motor will then mean simply a slow descent and safe landing instead of a disastrous fall."
How did this happen when a relatively unknown bicycle mechanic had gone down to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for some glider experiments? The answer was that no one else was taking the methodical approach to flying that would solve the problem of controlled flight. Wilbur proceeded to explain that it was one thing to theorize how bird flew but quite another to become that bird. He basically gave a speech on empiricism. He pointed out that a steamship would glide in the water once power was stopped to the propeller, but a plane would drop if power was cut. and many workers believe that success will first come "However, there is another way of flying which requires no artificial motor by this road. I refer to the soaring flight, by which the machine is permanently sustained in the air by the same means that are employed by soaring birds."
Wilbur turned, stared out the window, and heard the wind whistling through the boards. Sand. Yes, the sands of time would cover it all. He turned and stared out to the dunes, where he saw a skeleton poking out of the sand. He walked outside and struggled over to the small dune. It was the wing of the 1902 flyer. They had flown it one last time and just left it there, and time had buried it until this one bit of wing was the only marker of all that effort. Wilbur touched the rotted fabric, the pine struts that he had cut and bent. This was one of his babies. Of course he would never have children and lately he couldn't escape the feeling that his time was limited. His health had not been good, with the stress of the patent wars and the impending suits with Glenn Curtiss. Wilbur turned back to the building they had built in 1900. It was small against the giant dunes. A few cans were on the ground. A few boards of better times. The wind. It never stopped. It was always blowing. That's why he came here. This place, this magical outpost in the middle of nowhere, had wind for lift and sand for a soft landing. It had the isolation he craved. The great silence to think into. Like any artist, he needed solitude to create, and he had found it when he had arrived at Kitty Hawk. He turned again and stared where it had happened. Yes, the first flight had happened in a 25 mph wind five years before. December. It was cold. There was ice on the dunes. Christmas was just eight days away, and it was now or never. If they didn't fly on that day, then who knows what would have happened. He had won the toss, and then it was Orville's turn. Wilbur felt his eyes water. It was 1903.
A fog rolled in, and Curtiss took off the next day for Grant's Tomb, but no one saw him make his flight. Loening, among others, said he was lying about having made the flight to Grant's Tomb and back. "Curtis never got off the ground, he later wrote. "The required run into the wind would have brought him right by where I stood. Also Curtiss never could, in my opinion in that morning fog, again have located the landing area on the island." The press didn't pick up on it, but Curtiss had wheeled his plane back to the hangar and left for his hotel. Wilbur saw an opportunity and took off. He flew around Long Island to test the winds, then flew the Statue of Liberty and circled the beacon of liberty, then banked over the and foghorns echoed off the giant ocean liner Lusitania as thousands cheered skyscrapers. Wilbur then made another flight up the Hudson River and then shot back to Governors Island. There are many famous photographs of his flight, and they are the earliest pictures of : plane over a major American city. People in New York stared up in wonder at the plane that had a canoe tied underneath. The canoe was there in case Wilbur was forced to land on water. For the first time, the publicity-hungry Curtiss was pushed off the papers and Wilbur was declared the king of aviation.
Orville would later say that Wilbur groused on the train, "man would I the not fly for thousand years." Actually, he said fifty years. Either Fred Kelly changed it or Orville exaggerated. So why would Wilbur say such a thing, but others did not? The answer is he alone was flying. He alone knew how far he had come and how far he had to go. He was risking his life, and what he felt up in the air was the total lack of control, which had to send shivers down his spine. Flying without control was not flying: "That was the heart of the control problem; How to govern Half the movement of pressure around the center of gravity?”
This was at a time when ingenuity was prized because it was necessary. There were no paths to follow. There was no corporate state to plug into. People had to make it up as they went, and building an engine no one else had ever built before went with building a plane no one else had ever built before. It was a way of looking at the world that is largely the purview of entrepreneurs now, but in 1903 it was the dominant thinking. Risk was not risk but a way of living. There were no road maps, and people like Wilbur Wright and Charlie Taylor had more in common with the pioneers than with the people sitting in the room. But Wilbur kept that to himself, as he did the particulars of his control system with the breakthrough of connecting the hinged rudder to the wing warping and the vertical control of the elevator.
Millions of bikes began pouring out of American factories in 1895. People could now pedal to work or go out for long rides in the country. The technology that was used for bikes would later be used in cars and then planes. It was a craze, with the church and moralists warning against the degradation that would follow bicycles. Strangely, the biggest moralist of them all -Bishop Wright would have no objection to his son’s business. Now children could leave their neighborhood out of the view of their parents. Children were going for a bike ride when they should be reading their books. In fifteen minutes, children could be over a mile away from their Later, cars would be attacked for the very same reason. Mobility was equated to moral decay, and at the very least it meant sex. Nobody cared about the outrage, though, and bicycles swept the country and swept up the Wright brothers. In a prescient article published by the editor of the Binghamton, New York, Republican on June 4, 1896, he predicted that the flying machine would probably be invented by bicycle manufacturers: "The be in the same shape or at all in the style flying machine will not of the numerous kinds of cycles, but the study to produce a light, swift machine is likely to lead to an evolution in which wings will play a conspicuous part. ° flying were dominating the That summer, bicycling and news. Swift, balanced, rolling on air-inflated tires, people did feel like they were flying. Others saw a more direct relation. James Howard Means wrote in the Aeronautical Annual, "it is not uncommon for the cyclist, in the first flash of enthusiasm which quickly follows the unpleasantness of taming the steel steed to remark: “Wheeling is just like flying! “ Wilbur and Orville purchased bikes and went for long rides on the roads outside of Dayton. One can see Wilbur taking Means's next words to heart when he would later write, "to learn to wheel one must learn to balance." He would equate the control of the bicycle with the control of an airplane.
Milton was a covetous old sinner in that he was psychologically castrating his children. He would record in his diary, "there is much in the papers about the Wright brothers. They have fame but not wealth yet. Both these things, aspired after by so many, are vain. “ Neither Orville, Wilbur, nor Katherine would have a family life outside of Milton's orbit. When Katherine did attempt to do so later in life, she was cast out by Orville in the vein of the father. Bishop Wright was the star of the household, and even the invention of manned flight could be seen as frippery. He was a one-man wrecking ball against perceived depravity and would even split with his own church and throw in with the old conservative faction against the more progressive elements.
Susan Koerner, born in Virginia, was brought West by her father, who was a German wagon maker. If her sons were mechanical, then it was because of Susan Wright. She was mechanically inclined and could create toys out of things around the house and treasured anything her boys made. When she met Milton Wright, she required him to wait three years before accepting his proposal of marriage. She was a woman who wanted to be sure. Her pictures are dour. She is the bishop's wife, the woman who must endure. Smart and painfully shy, she would give these traits to her son.
Orville would risk nothing to chance and, like the situation where the bombs rained down on the Flyer during the blitz of London, the truth would be buried deep underground. The Wright brothers were two fascinating, talented men. They did have an idiosyncratic family whose lifestyle raised more questions than it provided answers. They did have a hostile view of the outside world. They were both mechanically inclined to a very high degree. They both were remarkably inventive, determined, and resourceful. But Orville Wright operated on a linear plane, whereas Wilbur saw beyond it to the existential moment he discovered while in a dark journey that was brought on by a freak accident and the death of his mother. Somewhere wedded along the way, he had a vision that him to solving the problem of manned flight. His brother would come along for the ride, quite literally, on that brother would write their history. December 17, 1903, and eventually The Wright brothers were similar in many respects, but it is the difference between the pilot and the mechanic, the visionary and the assistant, the poet and the scribe, that sets them apart. And that is all the difference in the world.