The Bishop's Boys (38 page)

Taylor machined the crank from a single block of machine steel, using only a lathe and drill press. He drew the outline of the finished piece on the block, then drilled one hole after another until he could knock the surplus material off with a hammer. Once the part was roughed out, he turned it down to the required size on the lathe. The finished crank weighed nineteen pounds. “She balanced up perfectly, too,” Taylor said with pride in later years.
⁸

Satisfied that they were ready to fly a powered machine, the Wrights, assisted by machinist Charles Taylor, designed and built their own engine. It weighed 200 pounds fully fueled and ready for flight, and produced just over 12 horsepower.

Taylor made do with what he had. He bored the cylinders out of the aluminum block with the lathe, and turned down the cast-iron pistons himself. He purchased prefabricated parts whenever possible, including the magneto and valves. A rubber speaking-tube hose served as a fuel line.

The little engine ran for the first time on February 12, 1903, just six weeks after work had begun. It was undeniably crude. The cooling system was ineffective, so that the valve box grew red hot after only a few minutes in operation. On the second day of testing, dripping gasoline froze the bearings, shattering the crankcase. They had no choice but to pull out the patterns and return to the foundry for a new casting. Charlie had the rebuilt engine back in operation by May.

The Wrights kept their plans from Chanute, who was frankly curious. “I think you had better patent your improvements,” he wrote on December 9. “How far do you plan to carry your aeronautical work?” Just three days earlier he had sent them a copy of the French patent he had helped Louis-Pierre Mouillard to obtain in 1896.
⁹

He did not press the point, but Chanute hoped the Wrights would note a resemblance between Mouillard’s differential drag brakes and their wing-warping system. The Wrights did not see any connection, nor did they dream that Chanute believed their work was in any way related to Mouillard’s primitive steering apparatus.

Puzzled, Wilbur thanked Chanute for the patent and assured him they were applying for their own. As to their future plans, he simply said that they were building a machine “much larger and about twice as heavy” as the 1902 glider. “With it we will work out problems relating to starting and handling heavy weight machines, and if we find it under satisfactory control in flight, we will proceed to add a motor.”
¹⁰

The brothers filed their first patent application on March 23, 1903, with no mention of a power plant. They were patenting a flying machine, not a gasoline engine. The 1902 glider incorporated all of their basic principles—the wing-warping system, complete with rudder. That was what they sought to protect.

The response from the U.S. Patent Office was swift and disappointing. The Wrights were told that their drawings were inadequate and the written description of their machine “vague and indefinite.” The examiner noted that their claims had been anticipated by at least six other patents, and could not be allowed in any case because the device described was clearly “inoperative” and “incapable of performing its intended function.”
¹¹

They had run headlong into the first of many problems with the federal bureaucracy. For more than fifty years the Patent Office had received a stream of applications for flying machines. In the early 1890s, officials decided that such “nuisance” applications would be summarily dismissed unless the applicant could demonstrate that his machine had actually flown. The Wrights knew that they could fly; it did not occur to them that a harried bureaucrat might have difficulty recognizing that fact on the basis of a simple patent application.

Wilbur replied that they would be glad to correct any inadequacies in their application. He even sent a cardboard inner-tube box back to the Patent Office in an effort to “clarify” the section describing the wing-warping technique.

The claim was rejected a second time, the cardboard box dismissed as “of no assistance.” The examiner did offer the Wrights one useful bit of advice, suggesting that they “employ an attorney skilled in patent proceedings” if they wished to press their case. Puzzled and a bit worried, they decided to set the matter aside until they had flown the powered aircraft.
¹²

Chanute spent the spring of 1903 digging out from under the correspondence that had accumulated during his absence in Europe. One letter awaiting an answer was from an old acquaintance—Major Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell.

A career officer and brother of the founder of the Boy Scouts, Baden-Powell thought of himself as an inventor. In fact, his technical gifts were limited; his enthusiasm, however, was unbounded. He had joined the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1880. Founded sixteen years before by a group of gentlemen amateurs and professional engineers interested in flight, it was initially an active group, publishing the only English-language periodical devoted to aeronautics, and sponsoring key experiments, including the pioneer wind-tunnel studies of Francis Wenham and John Browning.
¹³

By the time Baden-Powell joined, the Aeronautical Society had fallen on hard times. The founders had passed from the scene and interest in flight was on the wane. Elected secretary in 1897, Baden-Powell poured all of his energy into reinvigorating the group. The grateful members elected him president during his absence on duty in South Africa. Now, in September 1902, he wrote to his old acquaintance, Octave Chanute, for help in preparing a belated presidential address.

Baden-Powell apologized for having been out of touch for so long, but stressed he was “keen as ever about aeronautics.” He asked to be brought up to date on events in America. In particular, he was curious about “a Mr. Wright” who, he had heard, was doing some “good work.”
¹⁴

Chanute responded immediately, enclosing a copy of Wilbur’s paper and a letter describing the 1902 season. “Wright is now doing … well,” Chanute concluded, “and I am changing my views as to the advisibility of adding a motor.”
¹⁵

Baden-Powell incorporated the contents into his address on December 4. He spoke of the “wonderful progress” that the Wrights had made, and suggested there was no reason why “such experts, having attained proficiency in the delicate art of balancing themselves … should not be able to soar away on the wings of the wind and remain indefinitely in mid air.”
¹⁶

The speech had a profound impact. The Wrights were not unknown in England, but Baden-Powell was the first to call attention to the triumph achieved at Kitty Hawk in 1902 and to identify them as leaders in the field. Listening closely that evening was Patrick Y. Alexander.

Alexander, the son of the manager of the Cammels steelworks in Sheffield, was brought up, according to a friend, “in an atmosphere of armaments, Naval programmes, and scientific developments generally.” A shadowy figure, he had been so heavily involved in Russian railway construction projects that the newspapers occasionally identified him as a Russian. Aeronautics was his passion. Alexander owned eight balloons before 1894, had made parachute jumps, and believed that balloons, airships, and airplanes would one day be abandoned in favor of pure levitation.
¹⁷

He was also impulsive. Three weeks and a day after attending Baden-Powell’s speech in London, he knocked on the door at 7 Hawthorn Street and introduced himself. He had first called on Chanute, a complete stranger, requesting a letter of introduction to the Wright brothers. Chanute, startled by this fellow who traveled across the Atlantic at the drop of a hat, provided the letter and sent him on to Dayton. “We both liked him very much,” Wilbur told Chanute after the visit, but that impression would not last. By 1907, Wilbur had become convinced that Alexander was a British spy.
¹⁸

There is nothing to indicate that Pat Alexander was ever a “spy” in any official sense. He was an aeronautical gadfly and enthusiast, determined to learn everything he could about the Wrights, and quite willing to pass what he knew along to acquaintances at Whitehall and friends in France. Over the next five years he would become a major source of information on the brothers.

On January 3, 1903, Chanute and his two daughters (his wife Annie had died the year before) boarded the steamer
Commonwealth
in Boston bound for Alexandria, Egypt, the first stop on a combined business and pleasure trip through Europe.

Officially, Chanute was acting on behalf of the St. Louis group planning the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Like the great fair in Chicago ten years before, the St. Louis Exposition would include a series of engineering congresses. His task was to promote the event, and to spread word of the Fair’s aeronautical program.

Chanute welcomed the trip as an opportunity to meet many of his correspondents for the first time. He told Wilbur eagerly that Ferdinand Ferber “has been trying experiments with a machine similar to yours.” The craft was a rough copy of the 1901 Wright glider. As Chanute noted, it was “rudely made by a common carpenter,” and had no lateral control system at all. Nevertheless, Ferber had made eight to ten glides, the best of which had covered a distance of 150 feet. “He says that he is much inclined to go to America,” Chanute added, “to take lessons from you.” Ferber also expressed an interest in purchasing both the 1902 Wright glider and the Lamson oscillating-wing machine.
¹⁹

Chanute was in Vienna on March 13, where he met Wilhelm Kress, an Austrian experimenter who had been heavily influenced by Alphonse Pénaud. Kress’s large tandem-wing flying boat had capsized and sunk in the Tullernach Reservoir in October 1901. Chanute went to see the rebuilt machine, and reported to the Wrights that “it might fly if a lighter motor than the present one [a 30-hp Daimler] can be obtained.”
²⁰

He was in Paris on April 4, and planned to “give several talks … and to promise to write something for publication.”
²¹
In fact, Chanute had given the most important address of his long and distinguished career just two days before, at a dinner-conference of the Aéro-Club de France. The talk would have untold consequences for Wilbur and Orville Wright.

The Aéro-Club de France, founded in 1898, was the meeting place for one of the wealthiest and most fashionable social sets in fin-de-siècle Paris—the balloonists. Ballooning, for over a century the province of the scientist, soldier, and showman, had become the passion of the wealthy dilettante. A voyage aloft, dangling beneath a gaily decorated bag of hydrogen, was just the thing for a jaded young man with time on his hands and money in the bank. Members of the old balloon-making families—Paul Lechambre, Gabriel Yon, the Godards—found their services in great demand. Stories of idyllic excursions over the French countryside aboard balloons laden with picnic baskets and bottles of champagne filled the society pages of the newspapers.

By 1900, some leading members of the Aéro-Club had begun to transform the organization into something more than a sportsman’s group. Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe was the leader of a faction encouraging new aeronautical technologies. For Deutsch de la Meurthe, the airplane was to be little more than a distant dream—the airship was the thing.

He had made his fortune in petroleum, and recognized that the industry’s future depended on the development of a lightweight gasoline engine. He wrote books on the subject, sponsored experiments with new types of power plants, and presented President Carnot with one of the first gasoline-powered automobiles constructed in France.

His interest in aeronautics arose naturally from his enthusiasm for the internal-combustion engine. In the fall of 1900, Deutsch de la Meurthe established a 100,000 franc prize for the first airship flight from the Aéro-Club’s Parc d’Aérostation at Saint-Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in half an hour or less.

Alberto Santos-Dumont, a wealthy Brazilian living in Paris, was everyone’s favorite candidate to win the Deutsch Prize. Twenty-three years old when he arrived in Paris to study engineering in the fall of 1897, he was the son of Henriques Dumont, a Brazilian planter who had made a fortune satisfying the American craving for good coffee.

Le Petite Santos weighed only fifty kilograms and stood five feet five inches tall in his shiny patent leather button boots fitted with lifts. Dark hair, parted sharply in the center and held in place with a thick coat of pomade, capped a cadaverous face. Those who knew him assure us that his faintly comic appearance was more than offset by a cold, patrician manner.
²²

Santos acquired his first balloon,
Brazil
, in 1898. Dissatisfied with the limitations of operating at the mercy of the winds, he built a small one-man airship later that fall. Six more airships followed over the next three years. The sight of the little Brazilian chugging along just above the rooftops epitomized the spirit of la Belle Epoque.

After several abortive attempts, Santos won the Deutsch Prize on October 19, 1901. In typically grand style, he donated 75,000 francs to the Paris poor and divided the remaining 25,000 francs among the members of his crew. Popular as he was, knowledgeable members of the Aéro-Club recognized that Santos-Dumont had contributed little to aeronautical technology. While popular attention in France focused on the Deutsch Prize, a man of much larger vision, Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, captured the real leadership in lighter-than-air technology for Germany.