The Bishop's Boys (46 page)

Whitehall’s reaction was strikingly different. The War Office listened to Colonel Capper, and Capper knew the Wrights. He forwarded Wilbur’s letter to his immediate superiors in the Aldershot engineering command with a covering note calling “very special attention” to the proposal. “I have every confidence in their uprightness,” he added, “and in the correctness of their statements. Taking their letter for granted, it is a fact that they have flown and operated a flying machine for a distance of over three miles at a speed of thirty miles an hour.”
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Capper restated the details, pointing out that the machine was entirely heavier-than-air, and closing with a strong personal appeal:

Capper’s personal assurances worked. Although the matter of the Wright airplane was withdrawn from his hands and passed to higher authority, enthusiasm for the project took root. On February 11, Capper’s immediate superior, Richard Ruck, wrote to the Wrights, inviting them to provide a description of their machine’s performance and a statement of terms.
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They replied with a long letter on March 1, offering to provide a machine carrying two men for a distance of from ten to fifty miles through the air at a speed of not less than 30 miles per hour. Their price would be computed at a rate of £500 for each mile covered during the best of the trial flights. Alternatively, they could negotiate the sale of their patents (not yet granted) and engineering data that would permit the English to construct their own flying machines.
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Ruck was unwilling to purchase a machine on the basis of a trial flight of less than fifty miles. And the price for such a craft, according to the Wright formula, was £25,000, a sum far beyond his allocated resources. The matter moved up a rung in the chain of command to the Royal Engineer Committee, the War Office body charged with making scientific and technical decisions. The committee responded on April 22, suggesting that the military attaché in Washington be sent to Dayton to see the machine in the air.

On May 13, Reginald H. Brade, Assistant to the Secretary of the War Office, advised the Wrights to expect a communication from Colonel Hubert Foster, military attaché to the British Embassy. Foster, in turn, was instructed to arrange a visit to Dayton.
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Had Foster made contact in the spring, summer, or fall of 1905, the course of history might have been altered. Possibly the Wrights would have been willing to allow an official English visitor the privilege of witnessing a flight. But it was not to be. Foster, accredited both to Washington and Mexico City, spent the months of March through October 1905 in Mexico. He made no attempt to contact the Wrights until November 18. So far as Wilbur and Orville were concerned, it was just as well. Back in the air, they wanted no interruptions from the British or anyone else while they worked through their final difficulties.

Work began on the third Wright Flyer on May 23. They rolled the machine out for its first flight just a month later, on June 23. The new craft reflected what they had learned during the previous season. The span and chord of the wings were unchanged, but the camber was
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again, as it had been in 1903. The Flyer was longer than any of its predecessors and stood a bit taller as well, giving it additional ground clearance.

A pair of “blinkers”—semicircular vanes—were set between the twin elevator surfaces to prevent the sideslips so common in 1904. The propellers featured “little jokers,” tabs on the trailing edge designed to halt the deformation that had been observed the year before. Both the rudder and elevator were larger than in 1904.

The most important change was in the control system. Since 1902 they had flown with the rudder directly linked to the wing-warping system. With the experience of three seasons, they decided to give the pilot full control at last. His hips would remain in the warping cradle, with his hands on two control levers, one for the elevator and one for the rudder.

Flight testing began on June 23, and continued with eight hops over the next twelve weeks. There was no improvement over the performance of the 1904 machine. The longest flight was only 19.5 seconds. Without exception, every day ended with an accident and damage to the aircraft.

The most serious mishap in two years of experimenting with powered machines occurred on July 14. Orville had been in the air for only twelve seconds when, as Wilbur reported, “the machine began to wobble somewhat and suddenly turned downward and struck at a considerable angle.”
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The accident was a result of those undulations—Orv had lost control of the elevator. The machine smashed to earth, head first, at a speed of 30 miles per hour. The elevator and outrigger supports crumpled instantly. What was left of the machine bounced three times down the field, upending on the front edges as it slid to a stop. Orville was catapulted out of the cradle and through a broken section of the top wing. They found him, dazed and bruised, lying in the remains of the elevator.

This was the catastrophic accident they had dreaded ever since they first began gliding. Safety was much on their minds that summer. Not long after Orv’s accident they received word that Daniel Maloney had been killed flying a glider designed by Californian John Joseph Montgomery.

Twenty years before, in 1883 or 1884, Montgomery had made one short, nearly disastrous glide. The first American to take to the air aboard a heavier-than-air craft found the experience so sobering that he immediately ceased flying and devoted his time to laboratory work.

Chanute met him at the Chicago meeting in 1894, and included an account of Montgomery’s early work in
Progress in Flying Machines
. Disagreements over the value of the Californian’s “theoretical” contributions led to a falling out, however. Chanute had not heard from him in over a decade.
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Suddenly, in the spring of 1905, Montgomery’s name was in the headlines. This time he had built a tandem-wing glider vaguely reminiscent of the Langley Aerodrome. Rather than testing the craft himself, he hired two daredevil “pilots,” Daniel Maloney and Charles K. Hamilton, who allowed themselves to be carried aloft with the glider dangling beneath a hot-air balloon. The idea was to cut loose at an altitude of several thousand feet and glide back to earth. It was an incredibly dangerous stunt to try with a craft that could scarcely be controlled except by weight shifting. Small wonder that the newspapers paid attention.

The inevitable catastrophe occurred at Santa Clara University on July 18. Maloney dropped free and maneuvered a little, then the spectators noticed that something was seriously wrong. The aircraft smashed to earth. Maloney died shortly afterwards.

All that spring, Chanute’s letters were filled with the latest news of Montgomery’s “bold performance.” The Wrights remained silent. With Maloney’s death, however, Wilbur felt compelled to comment.

The Wrights knew infinitely more than Montgomery about the forces playing across the wings of a flying machine, and they would never have been so foolish as to release themselves in the air under such conditions. Control was the key to safety. Clearly, their own machine was often out of control in pitch. Orv’s crash forced them to come to terms with the final problem.

The solution lay in some modification to the elevator. In rebuilding the forward section of the machine, they enlarged the elevator surface area from 52.74 square feet to 83 square feet; they also moved the elevator from 7.32 to 11.7 feet in front of the leading edge of the wing. The longer “moment arm” served the same function as the addition of weight beneath the elevator in 1904.
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The aircraft that emerged differed significantly from that of a few weeks before. It embodied all they knew about flying—and some educated guesses. Back in the air on August 24, an enormous improvement in performance was immediately apparent. After less than a week of practice Orville was flying four circuits of the field, remaining aloft for 4 minutes and 54 seconds. The accidents vanished abruptly. By September, two-, three-, four-, and five-minute flights became common—without a single serious accident.

The impact of the design breakthrough was apparent by the end of the month. On September 26 Wilbur remained in the air for 18 minutes, 11
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seconds. For the first time, they ran the gasoline tank dry. The record continued to climb: 26 minutes on October 3; 33 minutes and 17 seconds on October 4.

By October 5, it was clear to a number of people that something extraordinary was happening out along the Dayton-Springfield Pike. As their confidence grew, the Wrights began to invite selected friends and neighbors out to watch them fly. Word spread across West Dayton, and up and down the country lanes surrounding Huffman Prairie, attracting additional uninvited spectators.

Wilbur flew two complete circles of the field on September 7, 1905. The Wrights were now certain that they had achieved the goal of a practical flying machine.

Amos Stauffer was out in his field on the afternoon of October 5, cutting corn with one of his hired men. He later recalled that it was about half past three in the afternoon when the distinctive popping, clattering, flapping sound of engine and propellers drifted over from the Huffman pasture. The Wright boys were at it again. Glancing up, he saw the airplane climb into view, fly a few hundred feet straight forward, then sink back out of sight in a gentle arc. The first flight of the day had lasted less than forty seconds.
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There was a small crowd again that afternoon—twenty, perhaps thirty, people gathered along the fence separating the Stauffer place from Huffman Prairie. Reuben Schindler, who clerked in a Dayton drugstore, was there, arguing with tinsmith Henry Webbert about the appearance of the airplane on landing. “Like a duck,” Schindler insisted, “she squatted on the ground.” No, Webbert countered, it looked more like a “turkey descending from a tree.”
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C. S. Billman, a West Dayton neighbor of the Wrights, had driven his new automobile out to the Prairie that afternoon with his wife, their daughter Nellie, and young son Charley. After the first flight of the day he was content to move from one knot of spectators to another exclaiming, “Well, she flies!”

For weeks thereafter, Charley, a wide-eyed three year old, would race through the house, arms outstretched, mimicking the sound of the airplane. The boy’s performance impressed one skeptic who called on the family shortly afterwards to check on the Wright brothers’ claims to have flown. “I’m about convinced,” the fellow remarked. “That boy could not be a paid witness.”
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Torrence Huffman and Dave Beard were watching from a grassy slope on the far side of the Yellow Springs Pike. They saw the workmen set the airplane into place at the head of the eighty-foot launch rail. Next, someone carried a coil box out to the lower wing and attached the leads to the engine. Two other men stepped up to the rear of the wings, counted to three, and pulled the propellers through. The engine coughed to life.

Wilbur, whose turn it was to fly, stretched himself out on the lower wing next to the engine and tested the controls. Beard and Huffman could see a helical twist run across both wings, first in one direction, then in the other. They watched the elevator rock up and down and the rudder move from side to side.

The pilot nodded to his brother, reached forward, and released the clip. The weight fell, catapulting the machine down the track and into the air. It undulated up and down as it flew the length of the field toward the two men on the slope, then swept up on one wing into the first graceful turn.

It kept right on going. Even the handful of neighboring farmers who had seen the craft off the ground before were stunned. Amos Stauffer spoke for all of them. “The durned thing just kept going round,” he remarked. “I thought that it would never stop.”
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