The Bishop's Boys (28 page)
Authors: Tom D. Crouch
Unable to find long pieces of spruce for the main wing spars and elevator support at a local lumberyard, Wilbur asked Chanute for advice. He recommended a Chicago lumberyard, but suggested that the material could surely be obtained in Cincinnati.
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Rather than continuing the search at home, Wilbur decided to take a chance on being able to purchase the spars cut to size in Norfolk, Virginia, the largest city on his route to the Outer Banks.
Wilbur could no longer avoid breaking the news to Milton. The
bishop was aware of his son’s interest in flight, but he had no idea that Wilbur planned to take to the air himself. “I am intending to start in a few days for a trip to the coast of North Carolina in the vicinity of Roanoke Island, for the purpose of making some experiments with a flying machine,” Wilbur admitted on September 3.
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, and therefore carried to a point where further progress is very difficult. I am certain I can reach a point much in advance of any previous workers in the field even if complete success is not attained just at present. At any rate, I shall have an outing of several weeks and see a part of the world I have never before visited.
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We have no way of knowing how Milton, always so concerned about the physical welfare of his children, reacted to the news. Katharine tried to soften the blow, following Will’s letter with one of her own two days later. “We are in an uproar getting Will off,” she noted. “The trip will do him good. I don’t think he will be reckless. If they can arrange it, Orv will go down as soon as Will gets the machine ready.”
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Wilbur boarded a Big Four train at Union Station at six-thirty on the evening of Thursday, September 6. He was setting off on the great adventure of his life. Other than the trip to the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he had ventured no farther than a bicycle ride from Dayton in the past decade. Now he was traveling southeast through the night toward the most remote and isolated spot on the East Coast of the United States.
Arriving at Old Point Comfort at six o’clock the following evening, he loaded his gear onto the steamer
Pennsylvania
for the short trip across historic Hampton Roads, where the James and York rivers flow across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay into the Atlantic. Saturday morning was spent in a futile search for the spruce wing spars. He had no more luck in Norfolk than in Dayton. Close to collapse in the humid, 100-degree heat of Indian summer on the Virginia peninsula, Wilbur finally settled for white pine spars. Even so, he could only find the substitute material in sixteen-foot lengths, two feet shorter than required for a wing designed to fly in a 12-mile per hour wind. He would simply have to wait for a wind above 15 miles per hour.
Wilbur had studied his maps, and knew that here in Norfolk he was within sixty miles of his destination. Kitty Hawk lay midway down the
first leg of a long ribbon of sand that began at the southern edge of the city and ran south in a great arc paralleling the coast of North Carolina. These were the fabled Outer Banks, a thin chain of barrier sand islands ranging from a few hundred feet at the narrowest point to perhaps three or four miles at the widest, broken by a series of channels or inlets that connected the wild Atlantic to the shallow inland sounds separating the back of the Banks from the swampy wilderness of mainland Carolina.
But there was no way for a traveler to make his way down the length of the Banks; there were no roads, and no bridges across the inlets or the sounds. Wilbur boarded another train that carried him south to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, a few miles above the spot where the Pasquotank River entered Albermarle Sound.
Arriving at four-thirty on the afternoon of September 8, he checked into the Arlington Hotel and visited the city docks to find out the price of transport to Kitty Hawk. Wilbur was startled to discover that “no one seemed to know anything about the place, or how to get there.” Not until Tuesday, the 11th, was he able to find a boatman, Israel Perry, willing to ferry him down the Sound and across the head of Roanoke Island to the Outer Banks. Perry explained that his boat, a flat-bottomed fishing schooner, was anchored three miles down the Pasquotank, in the relatively deep water mid-channel just inside the entrance to the Sound.
“We started in his skiff,” Wilbur recalled,
which was loaded to the gunwale with three men, my heavy trunk and lumber. The boat leaked very badly and frequently dipped water, but by constant bailing we managed to reach the schooner in safety. The weather was very fine with a light west wind blowing. When I mounted the deck of the larger boat I discovered at a glance that it was in worse condition if possible than the skiff. The sails were rotten, the ropes badly worn and the rudder post half rotted off, and the cabin so dirty and vermin-infested that I kept out of it from first to last.
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They started down the Pasquotank immediately after dinner in a wind so light that it was nearly dark by the time they entered the Sound and turned east toward the Banks. “The water was much rougher than the light wind would have led us to expect,” Wilbur noted. “Israel spoke of it several times and seemed a little uneasy.” The reason for the skipper’s unease became apparent when the wind shifted to the south and east and began to grow stronger. Even a landlubber like Wilbur could see that Perry’s flat-bottomed scow, with
its large deck cabin and light load, was ill-equipped to make its way against the growing headwind. “The waves which were now running quite high struck the boat from below with a heavy shock and threw it back about as fast as it went forward. The leeway was greater than the headway. The strain of rolling and pitching sprang a leak and this, together with what water came over the bow at times, made it necessary to bail frequently.”
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By eleven o’clock that night high winds were driving the boat dangerously close to the north shore. Perry was struggling to make his way past the North Point light so that he could swing up into the channel of the North River and take shelter behind the point. Just as they drew abreast of the river, a gust blew the foresail loose from the boom with a “terrible roar.” “The boy and I finally succeeded in taking it in,” Wilbur reported in his journal,
… though it was rather dangerous work in the dark with the boat rolling so badly. By the time we had reached a point even with the end of the point it became doubtful whether we would be able to round the light, which lay at the end of a bar extending out a quarter of a mile from the shore. The suspense was ended by another roaring of the canvass as the mainsail also tore loose from the boom, and shook fiercely in the gale. The only chance was to make a straight run over the bar under nothing but a jib, so we took in the mainsail and let the boat swing round stern to the wind. This was a very dangerous maneuver in such a sea but was in some way accomplished without capsizing. The waves were very high on the bar and broke over the stern very badly.
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The condition of Perry’s schooner belied his seamanship. Stern to the wind, he worked the craft around and back up into the safety of the river channel. The three men—skipper, deck hand, and passenger—collapsed on the deck, drenched by the waves, exhausted but relieved. Through it all, Wilbur maintained his sense of humor. “Israel,” he noted, “had been so long a stranger to the touch of water upon his skin that it affects him very much.”
They remained at anchor in the North River making repairs until mid-afternoon of the following day. Wilbur, unwilling to touch any of the food aboard the schooner, subsisted on a single jar of jam that Katharine had tucked into his bag.
Looking across the choppy waters in the fading afternoon light of September 12, Wilbur could just make out the dark line of trees that marked the Outer Banks. It was nine o’clock when they tied up at the dock in Kitty Hawk Bay. Venturing ashore for the first time in two
days early the next morning, he met a young man who guided him up a sandy lane to the Tates’ home, a two-story frame house, sided with unplaned lumber weathered by the elements to a splotchy slate gray.
Wilbur and Orville chose the fastness of the North Carolina Dunes for their glider trials. Their hosts, the William Tates, posed for Orville on the front porch of their home in the fall of 1900. Mrs. Tate would manufacture new dresses for her youngest daughters from the wing fabric of the discarded 1900 glider.
Wilbur received a warm welcome. He arranged to lodge and board with the Tates, at least temporarily. There was only one request. Having inspected the shallow open well in the yard, Wilbur asked for a pitcher of boiled water each morning, the danger of typhoid never far from his mind.
He set to work immediately, assembling the glider beneath a canvas shelter erected in the Tates’ front yard. The woodwork and rigging went quickly enough. Mrs. Tate donated her sewing machine so that Wilbur could cut down the larger panels of wing fabric presewn in Dayton. “I have my machine nearly finished,” he reported to Milton
on September 23, taking care to assure his father that there was nothing to fear.
In my experiments I do not to expect to rise many feet from the ground, and in case I am upset there is nothing but soft sand to strike on. I do not intend to take dangerous chances, both because I have no wish to get hurt and because a fall would stop my experimenting, which I would not like at all. The man who wishes to keep at the problem long enough to really learn something positively must not take dangerous risks. Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.
The letter indicates how little Milton knew of his son’s plan. Wilbur had to explain that his machine was a glider—“It is not to have a motor, and is not expected to fly in any true sense of the word.”
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Orv appeared at the Tates’ door on Friday, September 28, equipped with a tent and cots, as well as coffee, tea, sugar, and a few other items unavailable in Kitty Hawk. He had talked a young man named Dillon into watching the shop. Cord Ruse would come in periodically to take care of the repair work; Katharine reported with some pride that she and Lorin were “managers.”
Orville shared his brother’s room at the Tates for a few days, while they were putting the finishing touches on the machine. When complete, the craft had a span of 17 feet 5 inches, with a 5-foot chord and a total surface area of roughly 177 feet, including 12 square feet of forward rudder. The total weight, without a pilot, was just under fifty pounds. The pilot would lay prone in a cutout section of the lower wing, with his feet resting on the T-bar controlling the wing warping. The elevator was fixed at the leading edge. The rear could be flexed up or down with a hand control to govern pitch.
The Wrights moved out of the Tate house on October 4, pitching their tent half a mile away. The weeks and months of dreaming were over. The time had come to test their theories in the laboratory of the sky.
Flight was still a hobby, scarcely more than an excuse for the brothers to take a vacation in a remote place. Perhaps that is why their records of the 1900 experiments are so scanty. Neither of them ever mentioned the day they first left the ground.
It was probably Wednesday, October 3—the day before they set up their camp at the edge of the dunes. On October 14, Orville informed Katharine that they were “having a fine time” and had tried the glider on three different days. He described a crash on the third day, October
10, that had prevented any further flying since that time. He also mentioned that on Tuesday, October 9, the wind was blowing at 36 miles per hour, surely too high for an attempted flight. October 7 was a Sunday, a day of rest when the brothers always refused to fly in deference to their father.
With work on the 1900 glider complete, the Wrights pitched a tent on the dunes.
Joe Dosher’s daily weather log indicates that the winds were “light” from Thursday (October 4) through Monday (October 8). Wilbur went aloft on the kite during the first day of testing, and experience would show that a wind of at least 25 miles per hour was required to get the machine into the air with so much weight aboard. Dosher would not regard a 25-mile per hour wind as “light.” On Wednesday, October 3, he reported that a “fresh” wind was blowing from the northeast. It was the only possible day in the first two weeks of October when Wilbur could have flown aboard the kite.
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