Unlocking the Sky (5 page)

The idea that Orville would send spies to the Curtiss camp seems at odds with the Wright brothers we normally remember—the earnest, young bicycle builders who attacked an age-old technological problem with fresh, ingenious thinking and dedication. And yet, secrecy and even spying are themes that echo throughout the Wright brothers’ careers.

As soon as they got their powered airplane aloft on the winter sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903, their intense ambivalence about sharing word of their success is clear. On the eve of their famous flight, the telegram home to their father and sister says it all when the brothers write: “success assured keep quiet.” As we now know, word in the press only broke about their initial flights when a subsequent private telegram home was, in the brothers’ words, “dishonestly communicated to the newspapermen at the Norfolk office” and disseminated by the Associated Press.

If not for that leak to the press, in fact, it is unclear when the Wrights would have made their invention public. Despite one well-known telegram home that encourages their father to “notify press,” the Wrights offered no picture or even many details that might satisfy skeptical reporters of the truth of their claims. As it was, the timetable of the Wrights’ activities speaks for itself. They flew successfully in December 1903. After a lengthy process, their key U.S. patent on their invention was granted on May 22, 1906. Yet, even then, the Wrights did not publicly demonstrate their airplane until the summer of 1908.

The timing says so much about the Wrights. They crossed one of the most momentous technological thresholds of all time—the centuries-old dream of skyward-looking inventors—but they showed their invention to practically no one
for four and a half years.
During that lengthy period, as the Wrights worked secretly
on their airplane, they groped for how best to retain control of it. Like many inventors, they tried to garner the broadest ownership rights they could through the patenting process. Yet, even after their sweepingly broad patent was issued, the Wrights declined to publicly display their airplane for two more years while they worked actively behind the scenes to close licensing deals with many of the world’s largest governments.

Enamored of the Wrights’ technological achievements, most of their biographers are generous in accounting for these four and a half years of secrecy between Kitty Hawk and the Wrights’ first public demonstrations of their airplane in France and for the U.S. Army in the summer of 1908. Some, for instance, citing the public backlash against Langley, argue that the press and the public were simply not receptive to news of the Wrights’ accomplishment—undoubtedly a factor that may have contributed to their silence.

But no matter what the interpretation, it is safe to say that the Wrights’ secrecy shaped—and retarded—the development of aviation in the United States and abroad. Of course, the Wrights had to work hard to keep such a big secret for so long. And in fact, there is compelling evidence that their secrecy was carefully calculated to maximize their control over their invention as well as their profit from it.

For instance, to perfect their design, the Wrights flew throughout 1904 on an open field at Simms Station outside Dayton. They would later claim in court that scores of passersby witnessed their machine in flight. But the statement is highly misleading. Throughout the earliest years of the airplane, the Wrights kept extraordinarily tight control over who they allowed to see their invention.

Presumably because they knew that witnesses might be helpful at some later point to attest to their accomplishments, the Wrights did allow a select handful of influential and discreet local friends and busi
ness associates to view their airplane. But, more notable are the great pains the Wrights took to deflect the attention of the press, even pretending their airplane wouldn’t work when reporters showed up. Years after the fact, Wilbur alludes to their strategy in a letter to his brother while he was trying to drum up business in France: “No doubt an attempt will be made to spy upon us while we are making the trial flight,” he wrote. “But we have already thought out a plan which we are certain will baffle such efforts as neatly as we fooled the newspapers during the two seasons we were experimenting at Simms.”

Given the Wrights’ obsession with keeping their airplane secret in its earliest years of existence, the first eyewitness press account of the Wrights in flight is also noteworthy. The article, a marvelously quirky description by Amos Root, appeared in January 1905 in an obscure newsletter called
Gleanings in Bee Culture.

“I was right in front of it,” Root recounts, “and I said then, and I believe still, it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life. Imagine a locomotive that has left its track, and is climbing up in the air right toward you—a locomotive without any wheels, we will say, but with white wings instead….”

Despite the fact that many of the largest newspapers and magazines were keenly interested in the rumors circulating about the Wright brothers’ invention, offering all sorts of deals for exclusive stories, the Wrights flatly turned these down. Somehow, though, Amos Root—ace reporter and beekeeper—managed to drive some two hundred miles on his own by automobile to Dayton and land the scoop of the century. The provenance of Root’s reporting has never been proven but, as several historians suggest, it seems quite likely that his account was made at the clever invitation of the Wrights so that an early, independent published account of their airplane in flight would be available as proof of their ability to fly,
but in such an obscure publication that it would never draw the attention of the press or the broader public.

The interpretation is given added credence in light of an incident that occurred in October 1905, when two trolleys happened to pass the prairie while Wilbur was airborne. Hearing the news, Luther Beard, managing editor of the
Dayton Journal,
ventured out to Simms Station to get the story. The Dayton paper did report the news on October 5 but, according to several accounts, the brothers bought out all the available copies they could. Then, with the help of several influential friends, they managed to suppress the story by keeping it from going out over the news wires.

The Wrights’ approach, secretive and proprietary throughout, is even illustrated in their airplane itself. The brothers painted their early
Wright Flyer
gray so it would be harder for potential competitors—or “spies”—to photograph. In contrast, Curtiss and his crew went out of their way to gain public recognition. From the first, Curtiss and his team painted their aircraft bright colors. One of the first planes he flew, the
Gold Bug,
for instance was coated with yellow varnish expressly to help it show up more clearly for spectators and photographers alike.

As historian Robert Wohl notes in his work
A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1906–1918,
the Wrights “operated on the assumption that, if they sat tight and guarded their secrets, governments would eventually be forced to come to them and accept their terms.” Throughout 1906, this account continues, “Wilbur believed that there was not one chance in a hundred that anyone would produce a machine ‘of the least practicing usefulness’ within the next five years.” Unfortunately for the Wrights, they badly underestimated their competition, especially a team including Glenn Curtiss.

Perhaps even more sadly, the Wrights’ proprietary strategy would take a personal toll, setting them at odds with some of their oldest and dearest colleagues. For instance, when the Wright brothers started out as a team of earnest young bicycle builders interested in the prospects of flight, they wrote to Samuel Langley at the Smithsonian, who gladly sent them reprints and citations of pertinent aeronautical research.

They also wrote to Octave Chanute.

Chanute, an eminent engineer of the period, who had made his reputation building railroad bridges throughout the country, was one of the nation’s foremost experts on aviation in the late nineteenth century, a rare member of the scientific and engineering establishment at that time who was willing to devote himself in earnest to the then-heretical matter of human flight. Ultimately, Chanute would become a mentor to the Wright brothers and, like Langley, a central figure in the fledgling field of aviation. He corresponded widely and frequently with members of the small community and, in 1894, penned the influential
Progress in Flying Machines
—a book that greatly influenced the Wrights and many others seeking to unlock the mysteries of flight.

When they first solicited Chanute’s help, in a letter dated May 13, 1900, Wilbur Wright had written: “I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine, and that only those who are willing to give as well as to receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery. The problem is too great for one man alone and unaided to solve in secret.”

Wilbur’s magnanimous remarks perfectly described Chanute’s role among his early generation of aviators; Chanute corresponded so widely within the field that he served as a one-man clearinghouse, constantly linking practitioners up with one another, alert
ing them to new research, and even underwriting the efforts of some experimenters. In characteristic fashion, Chanute replied to the Wrights’ letter immediately and gave freely of his accumulated wisdom about aeronautics. He supplied the Wrights with the latest technical literature, advised them each step of the way, and even helped them pick the location of Kitty Hawk, suggesting the mid-Atlantic coast for its steady winds and forgiving sand dunes.

But immediately following their first success at Kitty Hawk, Chanute began to notice a change in the Wrights’ thinking. “We are giving no pictures nor descriptions of machine or methods at present,” came the impersonal telegram in response to Chanute’s eager inquiries about their experiments in December 1903.

By 1909, even Chanute, perhaps the Wrights’ closest ally and mentor, broke off relations with them, charging publicly that their legal claims were overblown, greedy, and harmful to the nascent field. As Chanute explained it to a reporter from the
New York World:

In biting letters early in 1910, Chanute was more pointed still. Even if they won in court, Chanute said, the strategy was a mistake. “I am afraid, my friend,” Chanute wrote to Wilbur, “that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth.” The breach in their relationship would never be mended. In November of that year, at age seventy-eight, Chanute died unreconciled with the Wrights.

Orville’s intransigence would become increasingly pronounced over the course of his life. The breach with Chanute would later be repeated in Orville’s closest relationship of all—in a rift with his older sister Katharine. Throughout his life, Katharine had been a surrogate mother to Orville; their own mother had died when Orville was still a boy. Katharine had nurtured Wilbur and Orville’s experiments at Kitty Hawk and helped in every facet of their work. She and Orville shared a house for the majority of their lives. But in 1926, at age fifty-two, Katharine fell in love and married a friend from her student days at Oberlin College, who had become an editor of a Kansas City newspaper. Feeling deserted and betrayed, Orville never forgave his sister for leaving him. After her marriage, he barely spoke to her again before she died just three years later in 1929.

In their dealings with others, even those closest to them, the Wright brothers—and Orville especially—could never be called magnanimous or generous of spirit. But, as the biblical saw goes, you reap what you sow. Orville’s lengthy list of perceived wrongs and injustices painted him as a truly tragic figure toward the end of his life. In a detailed profile in 1930, a reporter from the
New Yorker
depicts him as “a gray man now, dressed in gray clothes. Not only have his hair and his moustache taken on that tone, but his curiously flat face…. [a] man whose misery at meeting you is obvi
ously so keen that, in common decency you leave as soon as you can.”

Personal animosities aside, the legal battle Orville Wright waged to uphold his exclusive control over the airplane in its first decade would also take on a life of its own. As Fred Howard, one of the Wrights’ biographers, put it many years later, the bitter legal battle between Curtiss and the Wrights gathered size and momentum “like a large snowball rolled down a snowy hillside, leaving exposed in its wake…a sordid trail of hatred, invective, and lies that muddy the pages of aeronautical history to this day.”

Ultimately, the case would cripple the development of the youthful aviation industry, especially in the United States. The effects are obvious in retrospect. The field was torn into rival factions. Experimentation was discouraged; investment tied up and, most notably, as the Wrights waged a total of nearly three dozen lawsuits, the legal wrangling siphoned energy away from building airplanes and tangled the field in knots of accusations and uncertainty. Many of these effects were felt at the time. As an editorial in the
Boston Transcript
newspaper put it after Orville Wright’s assertion of “absolute control” over the industry: “The effect of the Wright decree will beyond question numb what little life remains today in aviation in America.”