Authors: Tom D. Crouch
Next, they must repair the damage that winter storms had done to the old building. And they set Dan Tate to work on a new building to house the glider and the powered machine. The Wrights would transform the old shelter into a real home.
They were not the only ones determined to fly a powered machine that fall. On October 14 the Wrights received a letter from George Feight, a Hawthorn Street neighbor, enclosing a newspaper report of Samuel Langley’s first trial of the Great Aerodrome.
After completing the successful steam Aerodrome trials of 1896, Langley had announced that he was withdrawing from aeronautics. Having demonstrated the possibility of heavier-than-air flight, he would step aside to allow some younger experimenter to take the final steps toward a manned machine.
But as early as June 1897, Langley was remarking to Chanute that “If anyone were to put at my disposal the considerable amount—fifty thousand dollars or more—for an aerodrome carrying a man or men with a capacity for some hours of flight, I feel that I could build it and should enjoy the work.”
11
His opportunity came in 1898. On the eve of the war with Spain, Langley’s friend Charles D. Walcott, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, convinced War Department officials that an experimental flying machine would be a wise investment.
The work began with a $50,000 allocation from the U.S. Army’s Board of Ordnance and Fortification. Langley’s approach to the problems of building a full-scale machine was relatively simple: so far as possible, he recreated the conditions that had led to success in 1896. The Great Aerodrome was a scaled-up version of the small Aerodromes. Like them, it would be launched from the roof of a houseboat anchored in the Potomac.
Langley spent much of his time and money developing a gasoline engine to power the new craft. In December 1898 he contracted with Stephen M. Balzer, a New York engine and automobile builder, for a 12-horsepower engine, together with the support structures for two propellers, transmission gears, drive shafts, and associated equipment. From the outset, Balzer’s performance was disappointing. In August 1900, Charles Matthews Manly, a young Cornell engineer who worked as Langley’s chief aerodromic assistant, canceled the original contract and transferred the incomplete engine to the Smithsonian, where he could personally oversee work on the power plant.
By 1903, Manly had completely rebuilt the engine, transforming it from a 6-horsepower rotary to a fixed-radial engine developing an incredible 52 horsepower. Langley was overjoyed. At last he was ready to send a human being aloft. Manly, the pilot, was less certain.
A number of questions must have occurred to Manly as he contemplated his future as the world’s first airplane pilot. There was the matter of the basic structural integrity of his new machine. A simple tug on any one of the main bracing wires deformed the entire airframe. What would happen when the structure was accelerated from a dead stop to 60 mph as it sped down the launch rail?
Assuming a successful launch, would he be able to control the machine in the air? There was no mechanism for lateral control. A giant, wedge-shaped rudder was located directly at the center where it would be least effective. The all-moving cruciform tail elevator was untried.
Should the launch and flight proceed smoothly, Manly would still face his most important problem—how to land the thing. Like its quarter-scale predecessors, the Great Aerodrome was designed to land on water. The pilot, housed in a frail, fabric-sided cockpit underneath, would be the first thing to strike the surface—at a speed of perhaps 50 miles per hour. If he survived the landing he could probably count on the small floats on the main airframe to keep the machine from sinking. Unfortunately, with the Aerodrome floating on the surface, the pilot would be completely submerged. The thought of actually attempting to fly the Great Aerodrome under ideal conditions was a daunting prospect. Should it stray over dry land … well, best not to think about that.
The first trial flight of the Great Aerodrome was conducted on October 7, 1903, near Widewater, Virginia, just south of the old Quantico anchorage where the steam aerodromes had been flown. As the Wrights learned from the newspaper clipping, it was all over in a few seconds. Langley was not present. Manly climbed into the cockpit through the confusion of bracing wires, ran up the engine, and ordered the release. The craft moved rapidly down the rail and dived straight into the water. Drenched but undaunted, Manly agreed with Langley’s assessment—it was all the fault of the launch mechanism. They immediately set to work preparing for a second trial before winter set in.
“I see that Langley has had his fling,” Wilbur commented to Chanute. “It seems to be our turn to throw now, and I wonder what our luck will be.”
12
At present Orville wrote to Katharine that even the elements seemed to be conspiring against them. Storm after storm swept across the Banks, forcing the brothers to venture out into the wind and rain to replace those portions of one building or another that seemed in immediate danger of being blown away.
13
Then there were the “labor problems.” Dan Tate, who signed on as a general handy man at the exorbitant rate of $7 per week, was so awkward around the machine that the brothers assigned him to outdoor duties. “Of course,” Orv noted, “he was soon spoiled, and even went so far as to complain when any work was wanted on the hill.”
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That work was very hard. There were only three of them, and climbing the steep sand slope with the dead weight of the glider on their shoulders was not easy. Even with enough wind to kite the machine, the climb back uphill was marked by slips and slides as they struggled to move through ankle-deep sand.
The last straw came on October 28, when Dan refused to cut firewood. It was ridiculous, he argued, when the Wrights could buy it already cut for only $3 a cord from Jesse Baum in the village. He walked out on them at three o’clock that afternoon.
Finally, they had to contend with bitter cold. The temperature dropped lower every night. On October 25, Orv and George Spratt, who had walked into camp two days before, turned a used carbide can into a makeshift stove. The thing belched a thick cloud of smoke the first time they fired it up. “Everything about the building was sooted up so thoroughly that for several days we couldn’t sit to eat without a whole lot of black soot dropping down on our plates,” Orville wrote.
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But they persevered—the “whopper flying machine” was “coming on fine,” finished and ready for ground testing by November 5. The trial did not go well. The sprockets resisted all efforts at tightening; the magneto failed to provide a sufficient spark; and vibrations from the rough-running engine damaged the propeller shafts. With no suitable shop facility available for miles around, they sent the shafts back to Dayton where Charlie could repair them.
Spratt left for home that afternoon, convinced that the Wrights were rushing toward disaster. He said as much to Chanute when they met accidentally at Manteo on November 6. Chanute, on his way to spend a few days with the Wrights, calmed Spratt down. He knew that his friends were not gamblers. It remained to be seen whether or not they would fly, but they would most certainly not risk their lives unnecessarily.
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Chanute had planned to come to camp with Patrick Alexander—the Wrights having finally given their approval—but the two men missed their connections in Washington. Rather than traveling hundreds of miles alone, Alexander joined Baden-Powell, who was in the United States as a delegate to the preliminary meetings on the St. Louis aeronautical program.
Chanute spent only six days in camp, November 6–12. The weather was bad. He saw little flying, but there was plenty of time for talk. For the Wrights, the conversation was discouraging. Chanute pointed out that the actual size, weight, and power of their machine almost exactly matched the calculated requirements for flight. There was no margin for error.
Orv commented to his father and sister that Chanute had “more hope of our machine going than any of the others,” yet he obviously thought they had little real chance of success. Chanute described his own recent attempts to purchase the remains of
Avion III
, a large, steam-powered, bat-wing machine that the French experimenter Clément Ader had attempted to fly on two occasions in 1897. Chanute hoped to rebuild the craft, and planned to hire the Wrights to test it, but the negotiations fell through. The old machine was destined for a French museum. As if this were not enough, Chanute asked the Wrights to demonstrate the old Chanute-Herring two-surface glider at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904.
The Wrights were dumbfounded. “He doesn’t seem to think our machines are so much superior as the manner in which we handle them,” Orv remarked. “We are of just the reverse opinion.”
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Having failed to interest the Wrights in his plans, Chanute arranged for W. S. Dough, of the Kill Devil Hills Lifesaving Station, to sail him back to Manteo. It was a decision he would soon regret. The man who had worked harder than any other to launch the air age simply walked away from the chance to witness the world’s first airplane flight.
Work on the powered machine stood still until Charlie shipped the repaired propeller shafts back to Kitty Hawk. Nor could the 1902 glider be flown—the carbide can stove that kept the hangar comfortable had so dried the wood and fabric of the machine that it was no longer safe to use.
There was plenty of time to sit, to go over the calculations once again—and to worry. As Chanute had suggested, it would be a near thing. Everything depended on the amount of thrust delivered by the propellers. The problem was simple: the propellers were designed to produce 90 pounds of thrust at 330 revolutions per minute. That thrust would propel a 630-pound machine (the original estimated weight) at an airspeed of 24 miles per hour.
But when the finished machine was first weighed at Kitty Hawk, it exceeded their estimate by more than seventy pounds. To achieve flying speed with so much additional weight, the propellers would have to deliver an extra ten pounds of thrust. It scarcely seemed possible. Chanute estimated that they could expect a 25 to 30 percent loss of power in transmission. If he was correct, not even the addition of 4 extra horsepower over the performance originally calculated for the engine would be enough to get them aloft.
There were no loopholes. They could not reduce the weight of the aircraft, increase the horsepower of the engine, or change the fixed-gear ratio of the transmission. They could only hope that either Chanute’s estimate of the loss of power in transmission was wrong, or the propellers would produce greater thrust than calculated. There was nothing to do but wait for the return of the shafts—and the ground tests that would tell them whether or not they would fly that year.
Orv noted in his diary that the value of the “flying machine stock” rose and fell in response to the mood of the moment. The long idle hours proved so frustrating and demoralizing that he took up the study of German and French, just to keep his mind off the airplane.
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The shafts finally arrived on November 20, and the Wrights ran their first serious tests the following day. The engine was still running rough, “jerking the chains and shaking the machine terribly.” The sprockets on the propeller shafts refused to stay tight. A liberal dollop of Arnstein’s Hard Cement, used to hold bicycle tires onto their rims, solved that problem. As Orv said, the stuff would fix anything from a stopwatch to a threshing machine.
The first test was a severe disappointment—only 306 revolutions per minute. The figure rose to 333 rpm after some tinkering with the engine and continued to climb during subsequent tests. In order to gauge the thrust, they placed the machine on a section of rail and attached it to a rope running over a pulley to a fifty-pound box of sand. With the engine running, they allowed the craft to inch forward. It lifted the sand and exerted an additional pull of sixteen to eighteen pounds. A few seconds of calculation revealed that the propellers were producing 132 to 136 pounds of thrust at 350 rpm. Chanute had been wrong—the machine should fly.
Wilbur and Orville spent the next week tinkering with the engine and transmission system, making run after run until they were achieving propeller speeds of up to 359 revolutions per minute. Then, following a series of six to seven runs of two to three minutes each on November 28, they detected a problem. A close inspection revealed a crack in one propeller shaft. Once again, all work stopped. This time, Orv would return to Dayton to prepare a special set of spring steel shafts.
Predictably, the weather turned mild and clear—perfect for flying—after Orville’s departure. Will knew it would not last. Rather than sit and fret, he spent the long days pulling stumps and laying in a fresh supply of wood for the stove. Orv finished work on the new shafts on December 8 and boarded a train for the return trip to Kitty Hawk the next day.
Five hundred miles to the east, Samuel Pierpont Langley had completed preparations for what he hoped would be the first airplane flight. At two-thirty in the afternoon on Tuesday, December 8, the steam tugs
Bartholdi
and
Joe Blackburn
pulled away from a wharf at the foot of Eighth Street in southwest Washington, D.C., with a large houseboat in tow. The two vessels moved downstream through blocks of floating ice to an anchorage at Arsenal Point, near the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. A midday calm had given way to winds gusting up to 20 miles per hour—hardly ideal conditions for the workmen struggling to bolt a cruciform tail and four large wings to a steel-tube fuselage mounted on a catapult on the roof of the houseboat.
Charles Manly was in charge. He took particular care with these final preparations, for he was about to risk his life a second time aboard the ungainly craft taking shape on the launcher.
At about four-thirty, Manly went into conference with Langley, who had come out to the houseboat with a small party of friends and Smithsonian employees. The winter sky was darkening rapidly, and the gusts were so severe that it was impossible to keep the houseboat pointed into the wind. Both men were aware that the test could not be postponed—funds were gone, and the entire team had become something of a laughingstock. Conditions were far from perfect, but they were ready to go.