Authors: Tom D. Crouch
The Bishop's Boys (62 page)
The reception committee arrived on the heels of the reporters. A. Holland Forbes, president of the Aero Club of America, led the conquering heroes to a taxi that whisked them off to the Willard Hotel, where another crowd waited. Katharine was escorted up to the suite of rooms reserved on the fifth floor, while her brothers remained in the lobby, shaking hands and accepting the congratulations of well-wishers. As at the station, everyone seemed to recognize Orville immediately. Wilbur’s face was less familiar to Washingtonians. To his
great delight, Holland Forbes was mistaken for the elder Wright brother several times that morning.
Rested and refreshed, Katharine left for a small reception at the home of Mrs. C. J. Bell, wife of the treasurer of the Aero Club of Washington. Squier and Lahm walked the brothers one block west along Fourteenth Street for an appointment with their superior, Brigadier General James Allen, Chief Signal Officer of the U.S. Army.
They left the War Department at noon, accompanied by Squier, Lahm, and Allen, and walked a long block past the White House, turning up Madison Place to the Cosmos Club, where a gala luncheon was scheduled in their honor. A bastion of masculine conservatism, the club suspended a cardinal rule on June 10, 1909. In Katharine’s honor, ladies were admitted to the luncheon. Wilbur and Orville found their sister, herself a career woman with moderately feminist views, already on the scene and very pleased. The 159 guests included some of the best known and most powerful figures in the city, from the aging Alexander Graham Bell to the leaders of the House and Senate.
Promptly at 2:15
P.M.
, the entire party walked across Lafayette Square to the White House, where they joined other dignitaries assembled in the East Room. The great double doors to the central hallway were thrown open at 2:40. Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine Wright were escorted in, accompanied by Holland Forbes and Representative Herbert Parsons of New York.
After a round of applause, Forbes offered some remarks on behalf of the Aero Club of America. President Taft’s speech was brief and laced with humor. He assured the audience that, while his own girth would keep him on the ground, he shared the universal interest in flight. The work of the Wright brothers was something in which all Americans could take pride. “You made this discovery by a course that we of America feel is distinctly American, by keeping your nose right at the job until you had accomplished what you had determined to do.”
25
Back in Dayton, every member of the family was caught up in the final preparations for the Wright Brothers’ Home Days Celebration on June 17–18. “You must be pretty well satiated with glory,” Chanute remarked on June 16. “The harvesting of prizes, the receiving of unstinting praise, the reception of numerous medals” would now be capped by acclaim at the carnival.
26
The Wrights were universally admired as the first real heroes of the new century. The great Homecoming Celebration staged by the citizens of Dayton on June 18, 1909, included a “living flag” composed of local grade schoolchildren.
Aware that the Wrights regarded all this as a waste of precious time, Chanute advised them to accept the inevitable. “I know that the reception of such honors becomes oppressive to modest men … but in this case you have brought the trouble upon yourselves by your completing the solution of a world-old problem, accomplished with great ingenuity and patience at much risk of personal injury to yourselves.”
27
The great carnival included receptions, spectacular parades, band concerts, and fireworks featuring pyrotechnic portraits of Wilbur and Orville, intertwined with the flag, eight feet tall. Bishop Wright delivered the invocation at the ceremony on June 18. His sons, clad in morning coats and top hats, received a gold Congressional Medal from General Allen, a state gold medal from Governor Judson Harmon, and a City of Dayton medal from Mayor Burkhardt. A gigantic “living flag,” composed of schoolchildren dressed in red, white, and blue, topped off the festivities with a serenade. That evening the entire family gathered at the grandstand on the corner of Monument and 1st as guests of honor at a spectacular automobile parade and the closing ceremony.
Wilbur and Orville left the reviewing stand as early as possible that evening. A telegram from Washington had informed them that the crates containing the airplane had reached Fort Myer. They would be up early the next morning, off to catch the familiar ten o’clock train for the nation’s capital.
June 1909~November 1909
D
espite the celebrations, Wilbur and Orville had accomplished a great deal in Dayton. Wilbur knew now that the accident last September had not been his brother’s fault. During the past month they had spent as much time as possible in Lorin’s barn, testing a replica of the failed 1908 propeller. They cracked the first test blade after less than two minutes’ running time. Obviously, the new propeller design had a weak spot on the concave side that allowed the blade to flatten and split. The problem was easily solved by strengthening the blade at that point.
“I am glad it was no carelessness of Orville that brought about the catastrophe,” Wilbur told Chanute. “It is so easy to overlook some trifling detail when setting up a machine under the conditions which existed at Fort Myer, that I feared he might have failed to properly secure a nut somewhere.”
1
They were determined that nothing would go wrong this time. Nor would there be any distractions. Newsmen and everyone else were kept at arm’s length. By June 24 the airplane appeared to be ready for testing. The newspapers expected that the Wrights would fly immediately, but they remained indoors for two more days, tuning the engine. The entire Senate trooped across the river on June 26 to witness the first flight of the season, but the Wrights still refused to fly. It was too windy. The newspapers charged that they were “No Diplomats” and had “Snubbed Congressmen.”
2
Critics took advantage of the situation. Carl Dienstbach, an antagonist
of long standing, was a music critic turned aeronautical enthusiast who had attacked the Wrights in the German press as early as 1905. Since then he had published a series of articles in American magazines extolling Augustus Herring. The delay in flying at Fort Myer provided material for a vicious attack in
American Aeronaut:
we had the tragi-comic spectacle of the “kings of the air,” their brows fresh with the laurels of Dayton’s great celebration, wearing the halo of surpassing records on two continents and strong in their renewed cooperation, doing—nothing, or, what was worse in the popular estimation, tinkering at a machine as if it had been the crudest experimental make shift, and frightened by the lightest breath of air….
3
Their friends were as impatient as their enemies. “They tinkered and fussed and muttered to themselves from dawn to dusk,” Benny Foulois remarked. “It seemed as if they would never say they were ready to go.” Foulois found Orville the more talkative of the two.
When you spoke to the two of them, it would be Orville who would answer, and Wilbur would either nod assent or add an incomplete sentence as his way of corroborating what his younger brother had said. At no time did I ever hear either of them render a hasty or ill-considered answer to any question I asked, and sometimes they took so long to reply that I wondered if they had heard me.
4
As a matter of principle, Orville would do all of the flying at Fort Myer. He finally took to the air on June 29, beginning with four cautious flights, the longest lasting only forty seconds. It would take a while for him to feel easy at the controls again. The wing-warping handle now featured a “bent wrist” control for the rudder. The pilot simply turned his wrist to activate the rudder, while moving the entire lever to the front or rear to warp right or left. There was also a spark-retarding pedal on the footbar for throttling the engine.
The trials got off to a rocky start: Orv smashed a skid in landing on the second day. Then, on July 2, the engine stopped cold while he was in the air, forcing him to glide in for a landing—straight into a small thorn tree.
He was badly shaken but uninjured. The airplane, however, had suffered two broken skids, a large section of torn fabric, and several cracked ribs. Spectators broke through the cordon of troops and ran toward the crash. When Will reached the scene he found them stripping the tree of souvenir branches; worse, a photographer stood taking pictures of the damaged craft. Without thinking, Wilbur grabbed
a piece of wood from the ground and threw it at the fellow, then demanded the exposed photographic plate.
5
The brothers returned to Fort Myer to complete the Army acceptance trials in 1909. Orville did all the flying, while Wilbur (in the derby) supervised preparations on the ground.
He had done the same thing once in France. On the second day of flying at Les Hunaudières, Wilbur noticed a French officer in the grandstand taking photos of the Flyer as it was being wheeled out for takeoff. He leaped over a low fence and confronted the photographer, refusing to move until he had obtained the plate. The situation at Fort Myer proved to be a bit more embarrassing. The photographer, an official representative of the War Department, finally received an apology.
6
The damage could be repaired in a few hours; the torn fabric was more serious. Orville had to return to Dayton to prepare a new wing covering. Back in Washington on July 7, he flew again on July 12. The serious problems were behind them now. He set a new duration record of 1 hour, 20 minutes on July 20, and a new record of 1 hour, 12 minutes for flight with a passenger, Lieutenant Lahm, on July 27. That flight also satisfied the Army requirement for a one-hour minimum time aloft with an observer.
One final demonstration remained. The all-important speed trial on which the purchase price of the Flyer would be based was scheduled for July 30. The Wrights chose Benny Foulois as the passenger for this flight. They would take off from the parade ground and fly to Shooter’s Hill in Alexandria and back for a ten-mile round trip. Foulois had arranged for a balloon to be tethered as a navigational aid at the turning point.
There were perhaps seven thousand people at Fort Myer that day, a smaller crowd than usual. It had rained earlier, and everyone knew that the Wrights refused to fly when the weather was less than ideal. By four o’clock the sky was clearing and the wind had fallen off. Orville announced that he would take off in an hour and a half. Major Charles Saltzman and Lieutenant George Sweet, the U.S. Navy observer, left for Shooter’s Hill with a field telephone.
Foulois climbed aboard the machine fully equipped for his adventure—two stopwatches dangled from his neck, a box compass was strapped to his left thigh, an aneroid barometer to his right, and a map of northern Virginia stuck in his belt. Orville ran up the engine, then leaned over and shouted in his ear: “If I have any trouble, I’ll land in a field or the thickest clump of trees I can find.”
7
As usual, Orville kept the machine close to earth after leaving the rail, pulling into a slow climbing turn as he picked up speed. They flew two rounds of the parade ground to gain altitude, then swung toward the starting line. Foulois clicked the first stopwatch and they were on their way.
“All twenty-five horses in the engine were functioning perfectly as we skimmed over the treetops toward the balloon,” Foulois recalled. “The air was bumpy, and I had the feeling that there were moments when Orville didn’t have full control of the machine as we dipped groundward. It was as if someone on the ground had a string attached to us and would pull it occasionally as they would a kite. But each time Orville would raise the elevators slightly, and we would gain back the lost altitude.”
8
Foulois started his second stopwatch as they banked around the balloon at Shooter’s Hill. Looking down, he saw that the small crowd of spectators gathered near the cornerstone of the great Masonic Temple being constructed on the crest were waving hats, handkerchiefs, and umbrellas in salute. Orville began a steady climb as they headed back toward the Fort. Within a few minutes he achieved a record altitude of 400 feet. With the parade ground in sight, he nosed down to pick up speed and raced toward the finish line. Foulois gave both of his stopwatches a final click as they flashed past the starting derrick. Orville pulled up, circled Arlington Cemetery once, and came in for a landing.