The Bishop's Boys (22 page)

The weight of the machine was reduced with each step as he ran downhill into the wind until, suddenly, he was airborne. “I was sliding down the aerial incline a foot or two from the ground. The apparatus dipped from side to side a great deal…. The feeling is most delightful
and wholly indescribable. The body being supported from above, with no weight or strain on the legs, the feeling is as if gravitation had been annihilated….”
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Wood left the Rhinow Hills that evening prepared to write the finest account of Lilienthal’s personality and experiments available in English. But there would be no opportunity for follow-up interviews. The following Sunday, August 9, Otto Lilienthal stalled and fell from an altitude of fifty feet while flying a standard monoplane glider. He died the next day in a Berlin hospital.

News of Lilienthal’s death, coming in the wake of the extended coverage of Langley’s successful flights over the Potomac, drew wide attention in the American press. The German experimenter was portrayed not as a fool who had tossed his life away to no purpose but as a martyr to science. The newspaper reading public was treated to its second aeronautical hero of the summer of 1896. A third was still to come.

W
hen Octave Chanute arrived in Miller, Indiana, aboard the eight o’clock train from Chicago on June 22, 1896, Samuel Langley’s triumph over the Potomac was still very much in the news. Otto Lilienthal had less than two months to live.

Chanute supervised four young assistants as they loaded an assortment of boxes and crates filled with camping gear and the parts of two disassembled gliders into a wagon bound for the wild dune country bordering the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

He was sixty-four years old. With his short, stocky figure, decided paunch, fringe of gray hair, and neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard, he bore a remarkable resemblance to William Shakespeare—or so Wilbur always thought.

A native of Paris, born on February 18, 1832, Octave was the eldest of Joseph and Elise Sophie Debonnaire Chanut’s three sons. In 1838, Joseph accepted a position as vice-president of newly established Jefferson College in New Orleans. Six-year-old Octave went with him. He would not see his native France again for forty years. Sophie, now separated from her husband, remained behind with her two youngest sons.

Joseph was extraordinarily protective, refusing to allow his son to mix with American playmates. Tutored at home, the boy did not learn English until he was eleven. This sheltered upbringing deprived Octave of much of the normal cultural baggage picked up by most boys of his generation. He was an undeniably prudish adult, who did not
drink, smoke, dance, or swear. In later years, his two daughters enjoyed poking fun at their father’s ignorance of such common slang expressions as “fourflusher” and “ace in the hole.” Card games and colloquial English were lifelong mysteries to him.

Octave Chanute, a leading American civil engineer, led a group of young glider enthusiasts into the Indiana Dunes in 1896.

Joseph and Octave remained in New Orleans until 1844, when the father resigned his college position, packed up, and caught a train for New York. There Octave finally entered school. It must have been a difficult time for a sheltered boy with a thick French accent. There is evidence of that even in his name—when schoolmates insisted on
dubbing him the “naked cat” (
chat nu
), he changed the spelling to Chanute, suggesting the correct pronunciation.
¹

In 1849, having decided on a career in engineering, the ambitious seventeen year old traveled to Sing Sing, New York, and presented himself to Henry Gardner, the chief engineer of the Hudson River Railroad. Told that there were no jobs available, Chanute offered to work for nothing. Impressed, Gardner put the young volunteer to work as a chainman, the lowest-ranking member of a surveying team.

Chanute rose rapidly in the profession. Before and after the Civil War he moved through positions of increasing responsibility with one Western railroad after another. Like most of his colleagues, he was not a company man, but was employed to perform a specific job, usually the extension of a rail line farther west. When the task was complete, there was always another railroad ready to bid for his services.

In 1867—the year in which Wilbur Wright was born—Chanute moved his growing family west to Kansas City, where, in addition to continuing work on his current railroad contract, he supervised the construction of the first bridge across the Missouri River. Its completion in 1869 firmly established the thirty-seven-year-old Chanute as an engineer with a national reputation.

Other major railroad and construction contracts were to follow. Chanute served as chief engineer and superintendent of the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Railroad Company during the early 1870s. In addition, he designed and supervised construction of the Union Stockyards in Kansas City in 1871, and offered essential advice on water, sewer, gas, and transit problems to growing Midwestern cities. His contributions to the urbanization of the West were substantial. It seemed only fitting that one of those towns—Chanute, Kansas—was named in his honor.

Chanute reached the pinnacle of his career in 1873, when he was named chief engineer of the reorganized Erie Railroad. At the time, Western newspapers were filled with tributes to his character and achievements. The Leavenworth
Daily Tribune
praised him as “a gentleman in every respect,” while the
Parsons
[Kansas]
Sun
protested “against New York taking from us one of the ablest and best brain men in the state.” One Illinois journal termed him the “ablest as well as one of the most popular men in the West.”
²

He spent ten difficult years working for the Erie. The railroad had
suffered during the previous decade under the management of the most outrageous band of stock manipulators in American history—“Uncle Dan’l” Drew, “Jubilee Jim” Fiske, and Jay Gould. By the time Chanute arrived, the road was bankrupt and in receivership. Nevertheless, as chief engineer Chanute was able to complete several important modernization programs, including a double tracking of the entire line.

He was also heavily involved in the work of professional societies during this period, serving as president of both the revitalized American Society of Civil Engineers and the engineering section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as chairing important ASCE technical committees.

In 1875, close to collapse, Chanute treated his family to a four-month vacation in France. He returned to America refreshed and relaxed—and interested in aeronautics. During the course of his European trip he apparently read a few articles on the subject in European journals. He found the work of the English engineer Francis Herbert Wenham particularly interesting. In 1871, Wenham and a colleague, John Browning, had conducted the first experiments with a “wind tunnel”—a device that enabled them to study the reaction of a series of small test surfaces placed in an artificially induced flow of air inside the wooden tunnel.

Chanute recognized that this was solid engineering research at its best. Quite apart from any bearing on the flying-machine problem, these studies could be of extraordinary value to a working engineer. Chanute himself had long been puzzled by the way in which certain roof designs were susceptible to destruction in high winds. A better understanding of the impact of gusting winds on suspension bridges might prevent tragedies such as the catastrophic loss of Charles Ellet’s Wheeling, West Virginia, bridge in 1854. The study of air resistance might also lead to more efficient locomotive design.

But there was little time in his life for anything as frivolous as aeronautics. Always the practical man of business, he would keep his growing interest in the flying machine a careful secret for another decade. At a Kansas City dinner party in the 1880s, a friend asked Chanute how he spent his leisure time. “Wait until your children are not present,” he replied, “for they would laugh at me.”
³

He finally retired from the Erie in 1885. Rejecting lucrative contracts for work in Latin America and Asia, he established himself as a consulting engineer in Kansas City. From 1880 to 1885 he had
chaired an ASCE committee on the problems of wood preservation, a major concern in view of the nation’s increasing dependence on railroad ties and telegraph and telephone poles. By 1890 Chanute’s reputation in the new field was so well established that he settled permanently in Chicago and founded a firm specializing in wood preservation. Within five years, with his business running smoothly, he could relax and spend some time on the problem that had intrigued him for twenty years.

Chanute began to gather information on aeronautics in about 1884. He scoured bookshops and libraries, subscribed to newspaper clipping services, and launched into correspondence with virtually every major flying-machine experimenter in the world. Twice, at Buffalo in 1886 and at Toronto in 1889, Chanute sponsored major aeronautics sessions at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. While controversial, the Buffalo meeting was responsible for drawing Samuel Langley to the subject. On both occasions Chanute was careful to maintain the discussion on a high professional level, and to avoid any appearance of “enthusiasm.”

In 1893, encouraged by the professional response to the Toronto session, Chanute agreed to organize an International Conference on Aerial Navigation, to be held at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For the first time he would be going beyond a professional society and speaking to a larger public.

Beginning with London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, the history of the nineteenth century had been punctuated by a series of great international fairs. Vienna, New York, Philadelphia, and Paris—each in turn had mounted a stunning display of the scientific, mechanical, and artistic wonders of the age. In honor of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, Chicago planned a fete that would dwarf all predecessors.

A great “White City”—a collection of neoclassical buildings, broad avenues, and canals—rose from 686 acres of reclaimed marshland fronting Lake Michigan. From the top of the enormous wheel that would immortalize the name of its designer, George Ferris, to the midway dive where Little Egypt captured the hearts of a generation of American males with her “hootchy-kootchy dance,” the World’s Columbian Exposition was a marvel.

Milton Wright was passing through Chicago on October 20, 1892, and witnessed the great Columbian Exposition Parade that marked the opening of the fair. Wilbur and Orville made the trip to Chicago
to “do” the fair in the spring of 1893. Neither of them left an account other than to remark to friends that they had enjoyed the bicycle exhibits. It was the first time either brother had ever been away from home, and they probably saw as much of the fair as Milton did when he returned on October 24 for a complete three-day tour.

The bishop visited twenty-seven of the state exhibit buildings, sixteen of the foreign pavilions, the Art Gallery, the government fisheries display, and the Electrical Department. He rode the Intramural Railway for an hour; admired a giant Redwood plank and the exhibition of polished woods in the Forestry Building; saw a live gorilla; and visited the “aboriginal villages.” In all likelihood, he passed up Little Egypt.

The opportunity to attend a session of the Congress of Religions was the high point of Milton’s visit. This was only one of a number of congresses designed to add a touch of intellectual class to the great fair. Leaders in a variety of fields—scientists, writers, artists, philosophers, engineers, and theologians—were invited to hold international meetings on the Exposition grounds. The object was to explore the state of the art in their disciplines, and lay a foundation for future work.
⁴

The most newsworthy of these congresses was officially known as the International Conference on Aerial Navigation. Held on August 1–4, 1893, the meeting was the work of Octave Chanute and a colleague, Albert Francis Zahm, a young Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in physics who was teaching at Notre Dame. Zahm had conceived the notion of a congress devoted to aeronautics and worked to overcome Chanute’s initial reluctance to take part. Ever conscious of his reputation, the older engineer agreed to cooperate only if fair officials promised to assist him in avoiding “publicity and cranks … by all possible means.”
⁵

It was an overwhelming success. Chanute was able to convince some of the nation’s leading engineers, men whom he knew to be interested but hesitant to write on the subject, to offer papers. Moreover, it provided an opportunity for him to introduce a number of the young engineers who had conducted experiments to a wider professional audience.

To Chanute’s surprise, the public was equally enthusiastic. The Pittsburgh
Dispatch’
s, response was typical: “The Chicago Conference undoubtedly marks a new era in aeronautics. It brought together many scientists and engineers who have been engaged seriously on
the problem of flight. The subject, it was shown, is one for the study of men of broad knowledge, and accurate training, and is no longer to be considered the hobby of mere cranks.”
⁶