He was amiable and kind-faced. Wilbur, prematurely bald, about forty then, had deeper furrows in his face and seemed to look at you with a kind of reserved suspicion.
When you spoke to the two of them, it would be Orville who would answer, and Wilbur would either nod his assent or add an incomplete sentence as his way of corroborating what his younger brother had said. At no time did I ever hear either of them ever render a hasty or ill-considered answer to any question I asked, and sometimes they would take so long to reply that I wondered if they had heard me.
Apparently, the brothers Wright had decided as a matter of family honor that Orville would fly all the tests at Myer, because I don't recall Wilbur ever flying the new model until after the tests were completed. After a number of short flights, Orville made an endurance flight of one hour, twenty minutes, on July On the twenty-seventh he announced that he was ready to resume the tests where he had left off the year before. With Frank Lahm as passenger, he flew one hour, twelve minutes, and forty seconds, thus more than fulfilling the requirement to remain in the air for an hour with a passenger.
It established a new record for a two-man flight. Next and last specification to be satisfied was the speed test over a measured five-mile course. Because of my previous map-making experience, Major Squier asked me to lay out the course. I chose a rise of ground at Alexandria, Virginia, almost due south of Fort Myer, called Shooter's Hill, to be used as a turning point. It is the present site of the George Washington Masonic Memorial, the cornerstone of which had been laid not long before.
I chose this site because it was above the surrounding terrain and should have been easy to navigate toward at an altitude of or so feet. I arranged for a temporary telephone as well as a telegraph line between the two points, the latter to be used for sending a signal at the exact second the plane crossed the measured mark at Alexandria. The telegraph instrument was actually placed on the Masonic Memorial cornerstone. Remembering my dirigible experience, I was concerned that we would wander off our course from Myer to Alexandria, so I arranged for a small captive balloon to be ascended from Shooter's Hill and one anchored about halfway between the two points.
Finally, it was announced on July 29 that the cross-country speed test would be attempted the next day. The only question among the board members was who was to be the navigator-passenger on this all-important flight. It was decided that the Wrights should make their choice. They did: me. A heavier man would have added weight to the plane which would have slowed it down. A man who couldn't read a map and had not been aloft before might get the pilot lost, add unnecessary distance to the flight, and thus decrease the speed average.
A 10 per cent bonus was riding on every mile they could squeeze past 40 miles an hour. About 7, people showed up on the afternoon of July 30, which was less than usual. Rain showers discouraged many from making the trip because they knew that the Wrights never flew if the weather was unfavorable. About four o'clock it looked as though the sky was clearing and the wind was dying down. Orville told the board members he would be ready in about one hour and a half.
Orville, being the younger brother, usually acted as herdsman and drove the cows over into a corner separated from the rest of the field by a small ditch.
At first the flyers had to wait for a suitably stiff wind before launching the machine, from a short stretch of wooden track; but later they set up a sort of derrick with a pulley and weights to aid them in taking off.
The feet of their engine—that is, the projections by which it was fastened to the plane—had been broken at Kitty Hawk, and during the winter they had built a new engine.
Though of the same size and design as the original engine, the new one developed a bit more power, partly because the Wrights took a little more pains to decrease friction. Later, again using the original parts, they built a third engine that developed still more power, and, as there were no further mishaps to necessitate its rebuilding, that is the engine now in the original Wright plane on exhibition at the Kensington Museum in London. Though the experiments in the Huffman cow pasture were the big scientific news of the century, almost nothing was ever said about them by the newspapers, not even by those in Dayton, only eight miles away.
This was not because the Wrights were secretive. It was true that they preferred to work unhampered by curiosity-seekers; but they knew the best way to be unmolested was to make no mystery of what they were doing. Even if they had tried to they could hardly have kept secret what they were up to in that open field, with an inter-urban car line and a public highway on one side of it and a railroad on another. Moreover, though they did not want any personal publicity, yet they realized that their experiments were of great scientific importance, presumably of interest to newspapers.
It would hardly be courteous not to let the newspaper people know that they would always be welcome. Therefore, before they attempted even one trial flight at the Huffman pasture they wrote letters to each of the Dayton papers, as well as to each of the Cincinnati papers, that on a certain day they would attempt to fly and would be glad to have any newspaper representatives who felt interested come to watch them.
Also on hand were a number of friends and neighbors of the Wright family. Altogether perhaps fifty persons were present. The Wright brothers dragged their machine out of the shed and started to warm up the engine, but the engine did not work properly. This had not happened before. They had never had the slightest engine trouble at Kitty Hawk. Whatever was wrong now was too puzzling to remedy in a few minutes.
Moreover, the wind was low—only about five miles an hour, and at least an eleven-mile wind was needed to launch the plane. The Wrights said they would try a flight if the wind picked up, even though the engine wasn't behaving well. But the wind failed to increase. The crowd waited and two or three of the reporters—too experienced to be easily fooled—began to make comments to one another.
They hadn't wanted to come in the first place. Why had they been asked to waste time on such an assignment? A few of the bystanders though had only sympathy for the brothers. They actually seemed sincere in thinking they could fly. The Wrights were sorry to disappoint the spectators but showed no signs of embarrassment.
They had learned to take events as they came. Finally, after the day had dragged on with no sign of a more favorable wind, one of the brothers announced:. With so short a track and the engine not acting right, we shan't much more than get off the ground, but you'll see how it operates. The machine rose five or six feet from the ground and went perhaps sixty feet before it came down.
That wasn't much of a story for the reporters, but most of them wrote something about it. The versions differed widely. Some reports had the machine rising to a height of about seventy-five feet. The newspapermen asked if there would be a flight the next day. But the Wrights couldn't be sure. First of all they must find out what ailed that engine.
They might be able to do that overnight or it might take another day. However, all that wished to return the next day would be welcome. Indeed, any newspaper representative would be welcome at any time. One or two of the newspapermen did return the next day. But they didn't tarry long. The wind was a bit more favorable but the engine still sulked.
None of the reporters ever came again! One friend of Orville Wright still insists, jokingly, that the Wrights purposely failed to fly when the newspapermen came to the field to insure against being bothered by reporters again. That would be a good after-dinner story except that it isn't true. Cox's Daily News in Dayton during those early years of flying.
Such callers got to be a nuisance. The Wrights did aim at first not to be in the air when an interurban car was passing. But that precaution soon proved to be unnecessary.
Few people ever paid any attention to the flights. One day the general manager of the interurban line was on a passing car when the plane was in the air and he ordered the car stopped for a few minutes.
He and a friend stood gazing at the incredible sight. But none of the other passengers bothered to step off. Passengers on the Big Four railroad trains which passed near the field must have observed the flights from time to time. Yet there was no indication that their stories of what they had seen ever caused any "talk. Probably if it was anything it was some kind of new-fangled balloon. If it had been a flying-machine surely there would have been something about it in the newspapers.
One fact that kept the flights relatively inconspicuous was that much of the time they were within 10 or 15 feet of the ground. Only occasionally were they up 75 or feet.
They never flew beyond the field itself, because if they had had to make a forced landing elsewhere they might have faced an irksome job toting the machine back to its shed.
At first, the inventors made only short straightaway hops, as at Kitty Hawk. But they knew of course that if their machine was to be practical they must be able to steer it in any direction, and by the late summer of they were making circular flights. On September 15th Wilbur turned the machine a half-circle in the air, and five days later Orville made the first complete circle. It was not until the autumn of that they began to attempt much distance.
As they used only a small gas tank and had no grease cups on their bearings, each flight ended either when a bearing became overheated or the fuel was exhausted. But they added grease cups, one at a time, as more lubrication proved to be necessary, and then installed a larger gas tank. On October 3, , Orville flew about 20 miles, in 32 minutes; and two days later Wilbur flew 24 miles in 38 minutes and 3 seconds. The gas tank had not been full when he started, or he might have continued much longer.
Yet the miracle of flight still failed to attract much attention. Amos Stauffer, plowing corn in an adjoining field, could not help seeing the flying-machine in the air, but he kept right on plowing. Across the Springfield pike from the cow pasture lived the Beard family, tenants on the Torrence Huffman farm. They had a young son, Torrence, named for their friendly landlord, and this boy often came over with a bucket of drinking water.
Whenever the plane landed abruptly Mrs. Beard was likely to dash across the road with a bottle of arnica, feeling sure it would be needed, as sometimes it was. But there were few other visitors. Two somewhat mysterious visitors did come, however. The Wrights saw two men wandering about nearby fields during most of one day and thought they must be hunters, though there was not much game thereabouts. On the following day the two strangers were seen again, and finally they came across the field to where the Wrights were tinkering with their machine.
One of them carried a camera. They asked if visitors were permitted. The man with the camera set it down off to one side, twenty feet away, as if to make it plain that he was not trying to sneak any shots. Then he inquired if it was all right to look into the shed. The brothers told him to make himself right at home. Was he a newspaperman? No, he said, he was not a newspaperman, though he sometimes did writing for publication. That was as near as he came to introducing himself.
It was some time later that the Wrights learned the identity of that visitor. Orville chanced to recognize him in a group picture of members of the Aero Club, in a magazine. It was Charles M.
Manly, chief mechanic for Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institution. The Wrights had not been "secretive" about what they were doing even though their visitor had been needlessly uncommunicative. That the Wrights were secretive had become such a legend, however, that nearly all who wrote about them felt in duty bound to build up that idea.
In , M. Coquelle, representing the magazine, L'Auto , of Paris, came to the United States to attend the six-day bicycle races in New York, and made a trip to Dayton. His magazine was a competitor of Le Sport , in Paris, and these rival publications had taken opposite sides regarding the possibility that the Wrights really had flown. Since M. Coquelle's magazine was pro-Wright, he wished to report in a way to make a sensation.
Unhampered by facts, he did an imaginative tale almost worthy of his compatriot, Dumas. While in Dayton, according to his story, he went to a newspaper office to learn if anything had been printed about the Wrights' experiments. One of the printers, after at first refusing to talk, finally took from a leather case in his pocket a proof sheet of an article about the Wrights' first flight. It was the only article of the kind ever printed, but had never appeared in the paper, the inventive Coquelle said the printer told him, because the Wrights had enough influence to suppress it!
Though Dayton newspapermen did not exactly besiege the Huffman pasture for details of the great news story lurking there, one of their number was in frequent contact with the Wrights.
Besides being a newspaper editor, Beard also taught school at Fairfield, about a mile from the Huffman farm, and went back and forth by the interurban car line that passed the field where the Wrights were making history. It frequently happened that on the trip back to Dayton he was on the same car with one or both of the Wright brothers, returning from their flights. Beard, now an insurance agent in Dayton, told me recently about those trips with the Wrights. They seemed like well-meaning, decent enough young men.
Yet there they were, neglecting their business to waste their time day after day on that ridiculous flying-machine. I had an idea it must worry their father. As young men, the brothers went into business together, first operating a printing press, then a bicycle repair shop.
Eventually the duo began selling their own custom-made bicycles to customers. But the brothers never lost their love of flying. At the time, other aircrafts such as gliders—or aircrafts without engines—did exist, but the Wrights wanted to add more power to the objects they were flying. In the brothers began experimenting with building their own aircrafts.
In the brothers traveled from Ohio to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to begin their flight experiments. The oceanside dunes at Kitty Hawk had regular breezes and soft, sandy landing surfaces—perfect for their studies. The brothers first conducted tests with kites before experimenting with gliders. The father made a single exception, however, on May 25, , and allowed the brothers to share a six-minute flight near Dayton with Orville piloting and Wilbur the passenger.
After landing, Orville took his year-old father on his first and only flight. The brothers made four flights in the Wright Flyer on December 17, , and as Orville and Wilbur stood discussing the final flight, a sudden strong gust of wind caught hold of the aircraft and flipped it several times. The aircraft sustained such heavy damage to its ribs, motor and chain guides that it was beyond repair.
The Wright Flyer was crated back to Dayton and never flew again. After their success in , the Wright brothers continued their aircraft development. They marketed their two-passenger Wright Military Flyer to the U. Army, which required a demonstration.
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