Authors: Tom D. Crouch
“When we left Kitty Hawk at the end of 1901,” Wilbur recalled a decade later,
… we doubted that we would ever resume our experiments. Although we had broken the record for distance in gliding, and although Mr. Chanute, who was present at that time, assured us that our results were better than had ever before been attained, yet when we looked at the time and money which we had expended, and considered the progress made and the distance yet to go, we considered our experiments a failure. At this time I made the prediction that men would sometime fly, but that it would not be within our lifetime.
30
A more colorful phrase stuck in Orville’s mind. On the train going home, he recalled, his brother had remarked that “Not within a thousand years would man ever fly!”
31
W
ilbur and Orville walked through the door of 7 Hawthorn Street unexpectedly on the afternoon of Thursday, August 22. “[They] haven’t had much to say about flying,” Katharine wrote her father. “They can only talk about how disagreeable Mr. Huffaker was.”
1
Wilbur wrote to Chanute just a week after they were back, admitting his confusion. Would it be possible to locate one of the old 1896–97 Chanute-Herring two-surface machines? “I cannot think of any experiment that would be of greater value in the present muddled state of affairs than an actual measurement, both as a kite and in glides under specially chosen conditions, of some other machine than our 1901 model.”
2
Wilbur, always nervous in the face of uncertainty, suddenly found what he had assumed to be solid ground turning shaky. A substantial error had crept into the lift data accumulated since Smeaton’s time. The Wrights had trusted that information, assuming that the success of Lilienthal, Chanute, Langley, Pilcher, was proof of its accuracy. Now it appeared that the machines flown by those men had generated far less lift than had been assumed. The Wright brothers, the first to measure the lift of their machines, were also the first to discover the problem. The performance of their two gliders indicated that the error was in excess of 20 percent. Had they known at the outset that such discrepancies lurked in the data, they would never have begun.
The wing-warping problem had popped up out of nowhere, and was even more disturbing. Wilbur had been certain that the control issue was solved. Suddenly, there was that little “hint of instability,” and a profound sense of danger. Wilbur was exasperated. For the first and only time, he doubted—why should he succeed when so many others, better prepared, had failed?
In view of our own experience and the experience of men like Langley, Lilienthal, Maxim, Chanute and Ader, men almost ideally fitted in mental equipment and training for such work, and having at their command hundreds of thousands of dollars, all of whom, like ourselves, had found the results obtained too small for the effort and money expended, and who had, one by one, abandoned the task before we had taken it up, we felt that similar conditions would probably prevail for a long time, as the problem of stability which had caused all these men to drop the problem, was yet seemingly untouched, so far as a practical solution was concerned.
3
His self-confidence draining away, Wilbur wondered whether two years of time, money, and effort had been wasted. More to the point, if they decided to continue the work, what should they do next? They were willing to accept an error in the lift tables, but how were they to correct it? And how overcome the difficulty with the lateral control system?
It was time to get their feet back on the ground. Orville would catch up at the bicycle shop, installing some new machine tools and laying in parts and materials for next year’s line of bicycles. Wilbur set out to do battle on his father’s behalf once again.
For the second time in his career, seventy-two-year-old Milton Wright was moving toward a direct confrontation with most of the other members of his church. The Old Constitution Brethren could scarcely believe it—for them, one schism in a lifetime was enough. But Milton refused to consider the issue in those terms.
The problem was rooted in the years just after the founding of the Old Constitution branch. Milton served as publishing agent from 1889 to 1893, when the press of business relating to the growing number of lawsuits forced him to relinquish that office to concentrate on legal matters. He tried to keep the publishing enterprise within the family, however, proposing his son Wilbur as his successor in the post.
Wilbur lost the election to Millard F. Keiter, a preacher and rising church politician. Perhaps the Brethren, with Milton as their leading bishop and chief legal officer, were reluctant to offer the most important nonclerical position in the church to another Wright. In later years, Keiter remarked that Bishop Wright’s “unrelenting persecution” of him was a result of that defeat.
Keiter served two terms in office, 1893–1901, and was confident of being reelected at the General Conference of 1901. Just a month before the meeting, in April 1901, George D. Crane, a Fort Wayne accountant, appeared at Keiter’s door with an order for a complete audit of the printing establishment books.
Milton was behind the move. For some months he had been nervous about Keiter’s handling of the publication funds, one of the most important sources of church revenue. Rumors had circulated that the publishing agent was dipping into the till to meet his personal needs.
Crane’s report confirmed the bishop’s worst fears, indicating a shortage of some $6,800 in the accounts. The publishing board immediately filed a summons with the clerk of the Huntington County, Indiana, court on April 27, asking that a receiver be appointed to take charge of all monies and account books until the matter could be sorted out. The court refused to act, noting that it was up to the General Conference to arbitrate the matter.
The publishing board controversy threw the conference into turmoil. Keiter was removed from office and the board was instructed to obtain an official written report from Crane, after which a hearing would be arranged for Keiter. At the hearing, held in February 1902, Keiter convinced four board members that the accountant had been in error, and that any remaining discrepancies were the result of simple carelessness rather than deliberate fraud. Three other members, led by Milton Wright, refused to accept the explanation.
Milton asked Wilbur to take a look at the books. While not a trained accountant, Will had a meticulous eye and considerable bookkeeping experience. He went beyond a strict accounting, comparing Keiter’s published accounts in the annual reports of the printing firm with the actual books. There were failures to report receipts, deliberate falsifications, and repeated overcharges against church accounts. He discovered that Keiter had used church funds to pay his own insurance premiums, to purchase personal clothing, and to pay for stone that went into the construction of his home.
True to form, Milton launched a pamphlet war against Keiter and his defenders. In 1902 he issued three tracts aimed at winning a majority of church members to his point of view. Wilbur was closely involved in the preparation of all three—the first included his long and detailed signed report on the publishing firm’s books.
Acting without the approval of church officials, Milton also petitioned local authorities to take criminal action against Keiter, who was brought to trial for the forgery of a bequest note in the circuit court of Huntington County on April 30, 1902. The case was dismissed a week later. Not only had the Statute of Limitations expired, but there was no reference to the forgery of bequest notes in the Indiana statutes. The decision in a second case also went in Keiter’s favor.
Sentiment within the church ran heavily against Bishop Wright. Keiter was not an especially appealing or believable character and few of the Brethren doubted that he was guilty. They were not, however, anxious to admit that one of their chief financial officers had defrauded the church. They had dismissed Keiter from office; any additional steps would only call undue attention to the problem and discourage future gifts. Milton forged ahead, confident that his own judgment was superior to that of the majority.
This time he had gone too far. He admitted to Katharine that old friends spoke of him behind his back as “the egotist,” and the “Wise Bishop.” In May 1902, Keiter, sensing a backlash against his “persecutor,” leveled formal disciplinary charges, accusing Bishop Wright of libel, insubordination, and a breach of the
Discipline
, which urged good Brethren to settle their differences out of court.
4
The presiding elders of Milton’s own Fairmont Circuit appointed a special commission to investigate his conduct. A hearing was scheduled for the annual conference meeting on August 28. Milton, as bishop of the conference, issued a notice postponing the meeting until October, pleading the press of other business. The notice was ignored. Bishops Barnaby and Floyd presided over the hearing in his absence, and approved a verdict of guilty on all three charges. He was ordered to confess his error and apologize to the members of the conference and to the “offended parties” within sixty days—or face indefinite suspension.
Bishop Wright ignored the order, remarking that the session was “so startingly [sic] out of conformity to all legality and justice that it was not to be regarded as an attempt to carry out law in the church and do justice, but to close the mouth and silence the tongue of a bishop in this church.”
There was no effective mechanism for dealing with the problem until the General Conference met once again in 1905. Milton simply continued as though nothing had happened. With two exceptions, he presided over the quarterly and annual meetings of each of the local conferences under his jurisdiction in 1902, 1903, and 1904. His own White River Conference, which officially expelled him from membership in 1903, was one of those exceptions.
As always, Wilbur accepted his father’s fight as his own. Through the spring and summer of 1902 he devoted considerable time and energy to the project, conducting the audit of Keiter’s books, preparing a long and detailed report, and writing pamphlets. In addition, he made several trips to the administrative center of the White River Conference at Huntington on his father’s behalf.
Had the timing of the church crisis been slightly different, the affair might have had a major historical impact. If Wilbur had been drawn away to conduct the audit in the fall of 1901, just after his return from Kitty Hawk, when his energies and enthusiasm were at an ebb, he could have given up on aeronautics. By the spring of 1902, his commitment to the flying-machine puzzle was stronger than ever. He found the time both to assist his father and to move his own work forward.
Octave Chanute deserves the credit for keeping the brothers going after the discouraging season of 1901. His most important contribution was a simple invitation on August 29 for Wilbur to address one of the most distinguished engineering groups in the nation, the Western Society of Engineers.
Wilbur’s spirits were low when the invitation arrived. He was inclined to refuse the offer until Katharine “nagged him into going.” Chanute sensed Will’s waning enthusiasm, and saw the lecture as an opportunity to provide some recognition for his younger friend. Katharine agreed that the opportunity to speak to such a distinguished group would be a tonic for him—“He will get acquainted with some scientific men, and it may do him a lot of good.”
5
Indeed it did. In preparing the speech Wilbur was forced to think through everything that had occurred, going back over the basics and addressing the problems that had seemed so overwhelming after the return from Kitty Hawk. It was an excuse to cover old ground, considering the successes and failures of the past two years. If nothing else, he was determined to leave an accurate record of their efforts. If they did not return to the field, their work might have some value for those who followed.
Chanute added a new wrinkle on September 5—would Wilbur mind if the meeting was designated “ladies night”? “As to the presence of ladies,” the speaker responded, “it is not my province to dictate, moreover, I will already be as badly scared as it is possible for a man to be, so that the presence of ladies will make little difference to me, provided I am not expected to appear in full dress, &c.”
6
When Katharine asked Will if his speech was to be “witty or scientific,” he replied that “he thought it would be pathetic before he got through with it!” She had a “picnic” getting him off to Chicago on the evening of September 17, dressed in finery borrowed from Orv. “Clothes do make the man,” she decided. In his brother’s top coat, shirt, collar, cuffs, and cufflinks, “you never saw Will look so swell.”
7
The speech was all that Chanute had hoped. Wilbur spoke to an appreciative crowd of some seventy members and their wives, first outlining the problem, then calling for the lights to be lowered and launching into a description of his experiments illustrated by lantern slides of the 1900 and 1901 machines in the air, and charts showing the process of design. A stenographer was present—Wilbur’s corrected version of the text would appear in the
Journal of the Western Society of Engineers
.
Did Wilbur and Chanute pay attention to each other that evening? Their remarks indicate that they were far apart. In introducing Wilbur, Chanute noted that lack of a suitable aeronautical power plant was “the great obstacle in the way….” Wilbur bluntly contradicted him, arguing that when compared to the problems of stability and control, “all other difficulties are of minor importance.”
8
Chanute did take careful note of Wilbur’s suggestion that the Lilienthal lift and drag tables were wrong. They had been skirting around this issue for some time. Wilbur finally brought it out into the open for the first time after returning to Chanute’s home that evening. Writing to Spratt two days later, he remarked that Chanute’s “faith in the Lilienthal tables is beginning to waver though it dies hard.”
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