The Bishop's Boys (23 page)

Coming in the wake of the Chicago conference, the publication of
Progress in Flying Machines
in 1894 marked Octave Chanute as the international authority on the history, theory, and current status of aeronautical studies. The book was an updated version of a series of articles he had published in the
American Engineer and Railroad Journal
since 1891. Covering virtually everything that had been accomplished in the field since the time of Leonardo da Vinci, it quickly became the basic text for all would-be aviators.
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At this point Chanute was anxious to move beyond the lectern and the printed page and conduct flying-machine tests of his own. As an engineer, he was accustomed to investigating a project on paper, then transforming theory into practice. It would have been out of character for him to have devoted twenty years of spare-time research to aeronautics without applying the results to an actual flying machine.

An admirer of Lilienthal, Chanute agreed that the manned glider offered the most direct approach to solving the problems of successful powered flight. The actual business of constructing a glider was quite beyond him, however; he was not at all handy and had no skill in carpentry or metalworking. As a railroad chief engineer and a bridge builder, he was accustomed to developing a general plan, then supervising the work of the assistants who would carry it through.

Chanute had always recognized the importance of encouraging younger men. In the 1880s and early 90s he had offered help to several men, including Edward Huffaker, who later served as Langley’s aeronautical assistant at the Smithsonian, and John Montgomery, a Californian who had made the first glider flight in the United States in 1885. Chanute had provided a forum for these experimenters to present their work at AAAS meetings, and at the conference in Chicago.

Even this limited experience had taught him a lesson. Young fellows like Huffaker and Montgomery who insisted on becoming involved with flying machines were apt to be difficult, opinionated, and far more eager to pursue their own ideas than to take instructions or advice from Chanute. Still, he recognized that by hiring talented young newcomers to build and test gliders for him, he was not only adding to the store of aeronautical knowledge but supporting engineers who might someday play a major role in solving the problem of flight.

Chanute began his own glider design program in 1895, with the construction of some small flying models. He chose Augustus Moore Herring as his assistant. Herring was no newcomer to flight studies. Born into a wealthy Georgia family in 1865, he had studied engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, but did not graduate. He worked at a variety of jobs following the collapse of his consulting firm in the panic of 1893, but his real love was aeronautics.
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During the early 1890s Herring had constructed several unsuccessful gliders, as well as one very interesting biplane flying model powered by rubber strands. In the spring of 1894 he began work on the first of three successful gliders based on original Lilienthal plans obtained from Germany. Short flights made with these machines came to Chanute’s attention as a result of an article on the subject in the New York press. The initial involvement of the two men was short-lived. Herring left Chanute’s employ in May 1895 for Langley’s more lucrative Aerodrome program at the Smithsonian.

A talented egotist, Herring found it impossible to remain with Langley. The secretary insisted on being informed of every detail, and refused to allow the young engineer the free hand he believed was essential if they were to make progress with the Aerodromes. Langley, for his part, came to regard Herring as an ingrate who made few substantial contributions to the program. In fact, a comparison of the Langley models before and after Herring’s short tenure in Washington suggests that he was most responsible for the major changes that led to the successful flights of May 1896.

Herring and Langley reached a parting of the ways in December 1895. Chanute cabled his old assistant as soon as he heard the news, inviting him to join a crew of workmen in Chicago who were constructing a series of gliders that would be tested in the Indiana Dunes that summer. Herring accepted, and agreed to bring the remains of his last Lilienthal glider with him.

Chanute had developed a multiwing design. The workmen dubbed the craft the “Katydid.” Even Chanute had to admit that the profusion of wings, struts, and wires gave it a distinctly insectlike appearance. The machine featured twelve wings—each six feet long by three feet wide—set on either side of the fuselage. The original plan called for positioning eight wings in front, and four wings at the rear.

William Avery, a carpenter in Chanute’s neighborhood, had constructed the Katydid and decided to stay on to fly the craft. William Paul Butusov, an emigrant Russian seaman who had come to Chanute
in the summer of 1895 claiming to have made fabulously successful secret glider flights in the wooded hills near Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, was the third member of the team.

They were comfortably ensconced in a camp pitched deep in the dunes by late afternoon on June 22, 1896. Herring assembled, rigged, and made a first short tentative flight with his Lilienthal before dusk. Chanute’s hopes of keeping their activity a secret were dashed when an observant stationmaster at Miller wired news of their arrival to the Chicago
Tribune
. A reporter showed up in camp the next morning. Before the week was out, Chanute had joined Langley on the front pages of American newspapers.

Chanute, at sixty-four, did not glide at all. Herring made most of the early flights, with Avery and Butusov taking over the piloting on occasion. The performance of the two gliders was disappointing. The Lilienthal proved to be awkward, dangerous, and difficult to control. The Katydid was no better: the best flights obtained during the first period on the dunes were under one hundred feet in length.

The party returned to Chicago on the Fourth of July, disappointed by bad weather, the poor performance of the gliders, and the plague of reporters that had descended on the camp. They remained in the city for a month and a half. Avery repaired the multiplane, while Butusov constructed a glider of his own—the Albatross. Herring spent his time building what would prove to be the most important and influential hang glider of all time.

During his spare time on the dunes, Herring had flown a small monoplane kite with a flexible cruciform tail that had much impressed Chanute. As the older man later recalled, he had discussed with Herring the possibility of building another glider loosely based on the kite. They had agreed that the craft would also feature another idea that Herring had been toying with—a cruciform tail, free to move in any direction so as to maintain stability. Chanute provided some simple sketches and asked Herring to work out the details.

That was not the way Herring remembered it. He pointed to the striking resemblance between the 1896 “two-surface” glider and some models that he had flown in New York in 1892, and three years later at the Smithsonian. Albert Zahm, who was teaching physics at Catholic University in 1895, had seen those models, and agreed with Herring. In 1908 he went so far as to comment: “It is sometimes said that the best French airplanes are copied from the Americans … Farman’s airplane resembles the Wright brothers; theirs resembles Chanute’s glider of 1896, and this in turn resembles Herring’s rubber driven model….”
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Chanute and his young assistants tested a variety of machines on the Dunes. Augustus Moore Herring is shown here with the famous “two-surface” design. The dogs were Chanute family pets, Rags and Tatters.

It is clear that Herring played a more important role than was generally recognized at the time. He was responsible for the cruciform tail unit, and may well have suggested the general configuration. Chanute financed construction; contributed to the general design; and provided the all-important Pratt truss system, a combination of solid struts and flexible wires that transformed the structure into a single beam that would resist bending or torsion.

It was a simple, elegant design, quite unlike the studied complexity of the Katydid, or Butusov’s enormous Albatross, which resembled a cross between a gigantic bird and a sailing schooner. All three craft were shipped back to the lakeshore by boat in mid-August. This time
the camp was established five miles farther down the beach in the hope of avoiding reporters.

Flight testing, which began on August 29, convinced the group that the triplane wings of the new glider provided too much lift at the front of the structure. In the wake of Lilienthal’s death in Germany only three weeks before, this was cause for serious concern. Avery suggested removing the bottom wing to produce the final “two-surface” configuration.

With that accomplished, longer flights of over 150 feet became commonplace within a day or two. Eventually, the distance through the air grew to 359 feet, with the machine remaining aloft for up to 14 seconds. While the Katydid and the Albatross, which was to be launched into the air from a huge ski-jump ramp, proved less than successful, the little group was overjoyed with the performance of the small biplane. Their craft was much superior to the famed gliders constructed by Lilienthal. They had taken a major step forward.
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Flights continued until the rough weather set in that September. The Chicago newsmen located the second camp as easily as they had the first, and were soon spreading word of the new glider. Octave Chanute, long famous among the small circle of international aeronautical enthusiasts, now became a public celebrity. The invention of the airplane, no longer a subject of jest, seemed to be just around the corner.
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T
he typhoid struck suddenly late in August 1896. Katharine, preparing to leave for her junior year at Oberlin, was convinced that Orville had contracted the illness from a tainted well just inside the rear door of the bicycle shop. His condition deteriorated rapidly. By the end of the month Orville hovered near death. His temperature reached a peak of 105.5 degrees, then fell, finally stabilizing at 103. Dr. Spitler offered little encouragement. The infection would have to run its course.

Bishop Wright was, as usual, absent from home on a church trip. He had actually packed his bags and left for the station when he received Katharine’s wire, then thought better of it. There was very little he could do. He instructed Katharine and Wilbur to seal the suspect pump, and to first boil, then chill any water consumed at home. They were to move Orville to the best room in the house and sponge him “gently and quickly with least exposure, followed by rapid friction.”
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Orville spent September deep in delirium. Katharine and Wilbur took turns sitting by his bed, feeding him a steady diet of milk and beef broth. Milton, who returned home on September 4, divided his time between assisting with Orville’s care and catching up on church and family business.

Whenever possible, he spent his evenings “with Lorin’s.” Young Milton, Lorin’s eldest and his grandfather’s favorite, excited by the festivities being staged to mark Dayton’s centennial anniversary,
marched back and forth for the bishop, demonstrating “how the drum major keeps time and how the soldiers drill.”

Daytonians were feeling very proud of themselves. Folks in the East could no longer look down their noses at the citizens of a state that had dominated the national political scene for the past quarter of a century, contributing five of the seven Presidents elected between 1868 and 1900.

Still, honest Daytonians had to admit that their own Gem City was the very definition of an average American place. The precise center of U.S. population in 1870, Dayton remained at the statistical center of the top one hundred American municipalities surveyed in the Census of 1900: the fifth largest city in the state, the forty-fifth largest in the nation.

After one hundred years, this most typical of American cities seemed poised on the brink of unprecedented expansion and prosperity. The population had doubled between 1870 and 1880, then increased by another 60 percent to reach 80,000 in 1896. Most Daytonians were employed in the one thousand factories, machine shops, and foundries that dotted the city. Dayton was a national center for the production of farm implements, bicycles, metal castings, and railroad cars.

By the 1890s, however, the National Cash Register Company—“the Cash”—dwarfed all other Dayton employers. The cash register was born in the Empire Restaurant at 10 South Main in 1878. Discouraged by slow sales, inventor James Ritty sold his patents to local businessman John H. Patterson in 1883. A marketing genius, Patterson created a sales team, armed them with a spiel that no merchant could resist, and turned them loose on an unsuspecting world. The firm was selling 13,500 registers a year by 1890. Patterson was well on his way to becoming a legend, and Dayton had acquired a new economic backbone.

Change was sweeping over the city. Dayton boasted twelve miles of paved streets; municipal water, gas, and sewer lines extending into every corner of the city; and a skyscraper, the eleven-story Riebold Building. A complex web of telephone and electric power lines had been spun above the streets. You could board a streetcar on the West Side, transfer to an interurban train, and travel to every corner of the state—and beyond—in record time.