The Bishop's Boys (57 page)

Orville traveled from Kitty Hawk to Washington in early May to inspect the proposed airplane test ground at Fort Myer, Virginia. The drill field just inside the main gate, was much smaller than Huffman Prairie, but it would do.

Fortunately, the Wrights already had a friend on the scene. Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, Jr., back from Paris, had been detailed to take part in the trials; he could promise Orv a crew of eight or ten experienced soldiers. The Wright tests would cap a busy season. Captain Tom Baldwin and Glenn Curtiss would be on the site sometime late that summer. The Army would also be purchasing the SC-1, a Baldwin-built dirigible balloon powered by a Curtiss engine, providing that it passed the operational tests. Presumably, Herring would be there with something to test-fly, although Lahm did not seem to be taking him very seriously.

Orville finally returned home to Dayton on May 23, and immediately set to work on the Army machine. “I have had all the lumber sawed up into front framing & spars,” he told Wilbur. “We will be in pretty good shape as far as engines are concerned. We have the two extra bodies, with cylinders, pistons, valves, camshafts, etc. complete. About the only things lacking are the cranks.”
⁴

Orv also kept busy writing. It was a task he hated, but the Wrights were about to fly in public for the first time, and it was important to build up enthusiasm while at the same time underscoring what they had already achieved.

He first sent copies of a detailed letter describing the recent activity
at Kitty Hawk to
Scientific American, Aeronautics
, the Aero Club of America,
L’Aérophile
, and
Mitteilungen
. But the piece for
Century
, “The Wright Brothers’ Aeroplane,” was his triumph. Wilbur wrote on June 28 offering a string of suggestions—Orville must be certain to mention that the “Flying Man” story published in
The Independent
had been a hoax. He should also stress that serious European interest in aeronautics dated from Chanute’s lecture of 1903, and that the machines flown by Voisin, Farman, Delagrange, and others “trace their ancestry” to the drawings of the 1902 glider subsequently published in
L’Aérophile
.
⁵

The advice came too late—Orville had sent his finished article to the
Century
six days before. It was not cluttered with the sort of details Wilbur requested, nor burdened with partisan claims. Step by step, Orville walked the reader through the process of invention from that day in 1878 when their father had given them the little toy helicopter to the present.

He was uncertain about its quality and offered to return part of the $500 fee paid by the
Century
. He need not have worried. The article was so well written that it remains one of the best short descriptions of the birth of powered flight.

They would need that sort of publicity. The situation in France, Wilbur remarked to Orv, was similar to how an old-time circuit rider had found religion in his district, “in other words, flat on its back.” Weiller, the taxicab entrepreneur who was to head up the Wright syndicate in France, was “about scared out,” and the other potential members of the group, including Deutsch de la Meurthe, were less than enthusiastic “on account of the excitement over recent flights of Farman & Delagrange.”
⁶

Delagrange made forty takeoffs from Paris, Rome, Milan, and Turin between January 20 and July 10. By the end of June he had remained in the air for as long as 18 minutes, 30 seconds on a single flight. Farman had won the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize; flown in France, Belgium, and America; carried passengers; and captured the European record for time aloft—20 minutes, 20 seconds.

In America, the members of the Aerial Experiment Association, determined not to be left behind, were now at work on their third powered machine, dubbed the
June Bug
by Alexander Graham Bell to commemorate a plague of small insects infesting Hammondsport that spring.

Curtiss made the first three successful flights with the new craft
on June 21. By June 25 he was covering distances of up to 725 yards; two days later he raised his own record to 1,040 yards. The members of the AEA told Aero Club of America officials that they would try for the Scientific American Trophy on July 4.

The trophy was the American answer to the series of rich prizes available to French airmen. Donated to the Aero Club of America in September 1907, it was a silver sculpture, valued at $2,500, to be awarded annually in recognition of a significant achievement in mechanical flight. The first person to win the trophy three times would gain permanent possession; until then, it would stay with the Aero Club of America, which would establish the criteria for the prize and supervise each year’s competition.

When the trophy was unveiled in the fall of 1907, Aero Club officials announced that the initial award would be made to the first individual to complete a straight-line flight of one kilometer in the presence of designated witnesses. The requirements for subsequent years would be devised to keep pace with the advance of aeronautics.

The AEA request for official witnesses to be present at Hammondsport on July 4 caught Augustus Post, secretary of the Aero Club, by surprise. Like everyone else, he had assumed that the Wrights would be the first to apply.

Post discussed the situation with Charles Munn, publisher of
Scientific American
and donor of the trophy. Munn immediately contacted Orville, offering to postpone the AEA attempt if the brothers would agree to take part in the competition. Orv refused, citing a competition rule requiring all entries to make an unassisted takeoff. There would not be time to add wheels to their machine.

Obviously, the Wrights could easily have won the trophy, just as they could have won all the prizes being offered in Europe. It would have been a simple matter to put wheels on their machine and choose a flying field large enough so that they could dispense with the weight and derrick launch system. The truth was that the Wrights were simply not interested in competing with latecomers who were infringing on their patents.

The Fourth of July, 1908, was a triumph for the AEA. Twenty-two members of the Aero Club, including president Allan Hawley, who had given Will his balloon ride in Paris the year before, were present. Charles Manly and Herring were there, along with a small army of newsmen and photographers. Whatever the outcome of the trial, it would be officially witnessed and well recorded.

High winds and rain prevented a takeoff until seven o’clock in the evening. Manly, who would function as the Aero Club starter, measured off the course, while Curtiss and his crew rolled the
June Bug
out of its tent-hangar, attached the tail assembly, and ran up the engine. Curtiss took off, rose to an altitude of forty feet, and immediately set the machine back down again. The tail was at a slightly negative angle, making it impossible for the pilot to hold the nose up.

With the problem corrected, Curtiss took off once again. Trailing a thick plume of exhaust smoke, he flew 5,360 feet in 1 minute, 40 seconds, winning the prize with ease. Glenn Hammond Curtiss had joined Santos-Dumont, Gabriel Voisin, and Henri Farman in the headlines.

Wilbur and Orville did not share the general enthusiasm. Orv wrote to Curtiss on July 20, citing the assistance he and his brother had given the AEA and noting that all of the key elements of the
June Bug
were covered in the Wright patent. So long as AEA members confined their activities to research and experimentation, the Wrights were pleased to allow them free use of any features of their patent. “We did not intend,” Orv warned, “to give permission to use the patented features of our machines for exhibitions or in a commercial way.”
⁷

Wilbur meanwhile had arrived in Paris on May 29. He first checked on the progress at Bariquand et Marre; far from completing any new engines, the workmen had not even assembled the sample engine that Orv had shipped out. Company officials promised to have two complete engines ready for inspection within two weeks. Ten days later Will found that the workmen had damaged the original motor in their efforts to get it started. “They are such Idiots! and fool with things that should be left alone,” he complained in his diary on June 9. “I get very angry every time I go down there.”
⁸

The disheartening visits to Bariquand et Marre were punctuated by a series of drives into the French countryside in search of a suitable flying field. Anxious to escape the newsmen dogging his every step, Wilbur decided against using Issy or any of the other local areas favored by the French airmen.

He settled on the Hunaudières race course, near Le Mans, a hundred miles from Paris, where he would find a measure of isolation. In addition, Léon Bollée, a Le Mans automobile manufacturer, offered him factory workspace and a team of mechanics. There were, in fact, few things Bollée would not have done for Wilbur. A sport balloonist
and president of the Aéro-Club de la Sarthe, he would become the Wrights’ closest friend in France.

Wilbur was in need of friends. Alone and operating under a great deal of pressure, his temper and patience grew short. Forgetting how he had felt in 1907 when his brother bombarded him with criticism from a distance, Wilbur made the same mistake.

“I am a little surprised that I have no letter from you yet,” he wrote on June 3. “The fact that the newspapers say nothing of a visit to Washington leads me to fear you did not stop there in returning home. It is a great mistake to leave a personal inspection of the grounds go till the last minute.”
⁹
Orv understood, and sent off a detailed description of the field at Fort Myer, along with a map, in his next letter.

Wilbur then launched into a new complaint. The crates containing the airplane arrived at the Bollée factory on June 16—“I opened the boxes yesterday, and have been puzzled ever since to know how you could have wasted two whole days packing them.”
¹⁰

The crates were filled with an indiscriminate mass of wood, wire, and fabric. “The cloth is torn in numerous places, and the aluminum [paint] has rubbed off of the skid sticks and dirtied the cloth very badly.” That was only the beginning. The list of damage included smashed oil caps, torn magneto coils, crushed propeller supports, “badly mashed” radiators, broken seats, bent axles, and broken ribs. “I am sure that with a scoop shovel I could have put things in within two or three minutes and made fully as good a job of it. I never saw such evidence of idiocy in my life.”
¹¹

Orville realized what must have happened—overzealous customs inspectors had opened the crates and done a catastrophically poor job of repacking. Aware that Will was wound as tight as a watch spring, he did not press the issue.

Six weeks of effort were required to assemble the airframe from the broken bits and pieces Wilbur pulled from the crates—twice the length of time he had allowed for the task. Bollée’s mechanics did their best but the language barrier was a constant problem. As Will’s French was rudimentary, he had to perform the most difficult tasks, like wing assembly, himself. “I was the only one strong enough in the fingers to pull the wires together tight, so I had all the sewing to do myself … my hands were about raw when I was not half done.”
¹²

The engine remained a problem. With the new French-built power plant still incomplete, Bariquand et Marre shipped the original American engine to the Bollée factory late in June. Will, his fingers still raw,
spent two additional days fiddling with it on the test block, working out the problems introduced by the French crew. He was hard at work on July 4 when a radiator hose tore loose, spraying his left side with boiling water.

Bollée, who was standing behind watching, eased him to the floor and ran to fetch a vial of picric acid for the burns. Wilbur suffered an injured arm, a fist-sized blister on his side, and an even larger blister on his left forearm. The pain did nothing to improve his disposition. “I would really save time by getting into bed and staying there till entirely well,” he wrote to Orville on July 9, “as nothing is done down at the shop except irritate my arm and nerves. If you had permitted me to have any anticipation of the state in which you had shipped things over here, it would have saved three weeks’ time probably. I would have made preparations to build a machine instead of trying to get along with no assistance and no tools. If you have any conscience it ought to be pretty sore.”
¹³

At last, on the evening of August 4, they carted the airplane from the Bollée factory to Les Hunaudières. As at Kitty Hawk, Wilbur intended to set up housekeeping in the simple wooden shed that housed the machine. The hangar was provided with “a little outfit of cooking,” and a larder stocked with “the finest sardines, anchovies, asparagus &c, &c,” compliments of M. Pellier, “the richest man in Le Mans … and … one of the largest manufacturers of canned goods in France.” There was a small restaurant near the race course, and a farmhouse within a hundred yards of the shed where he could obtain fresh milk and water.
¹⁴

Having waited almost three years for this moment, Wilbur was anxious to fly as soon as possible, but a hard rain set in on the morning of August 5 and kept him inside for two more days. Saturday, August 8, dawned clear and windless. It was, he told his brother, “the finest for a first trial we have had for several weeks. I thought it would be a good thing to do a little something.”
¹⁵

He took off at about six o’clock that evening and flew two rounds of the field. The whole thing was over in less than two minutes. There was a sparse crowd in the grandstand. The general feeling that the Wrights were a pair of
bluffeurs
had been growing for the past year as more and more Frenchmen left the ground. A number of French airmen had come each day, however, rain or shine. Blériot was there that evening, and Archdeacon. They knew precisely what they had seen—and they were stunned. Wilbur swept through four great
curves, each time banking deeply into the turn. Here was a man who could control his machine to a degree that they had only dreamed of. Truly, as the publicist François Peyrey wrote, Wilbur and Orville were “
Les Premiers Hommes-oiseaux
.”