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Fly boys

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

The first time, it might as well have been the Antarctic for the two bicycle-store owners from the Midwest. But this was their fourth consecutive year experimenting at the Kill Devil Bluffs, four miles from the village of Kitty Hawk. And on the morning of Dec. 17, 1903, they were ready for one of the most famous moments in history. Wilbur had telegraphed his father saying that success was assured.
Eight days before, Charles Manly, piloting Samuel Langley’s aerodrome, plunged into the Potomac River. Langley, an official of the Smithsonian and the world’s leading proponent of manned flight, had spent $70,000 on his government-backed project.
Orville’s 12-second flight, captured in a photograph, was the first by a heavier-than-air mechanically-propelled airplane.
Their fourth flight, 852 feet in 59 seconds by Wilbur, is mentioned in every almanac. Yet the raw facts can obscure the reality — the Wrights, who were aged 36 and 32, weren’t simply first, they were far ahead of any competition.
In that sense, the subtitle of Tobin’s work, “The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight,” is misleading. Nonetheless, it’s a thrilling story, the core of which takes place over the course of a decade.
In 1899, Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian requesting materials about aviation. A clerk dutifully sent back a bibliography. That same year, using kites, he developed his concept of “wing warping,” a huge milestone in aviation history.
In 1900, he was in touch with 68-year-old Octave Chanute in Chicago. The French-born, American-raised civil engineer was the self-appointed secretary of a worldwide network of serious experimenters. The most famous and respected experimenter, the German engineer Otto Lilielthal, had been killed in a gliding accident in 1896. It was a blow, but people like Chanute, along with Langley and his closest friend, Alexander Graham Bell, continued to believe that powered flight was possible.
Chanute once argued that men who were both cautious and daring would make the big advances in aviation. He had, in fact, perfectly summed up the brothers from Dayton, Ohio.
The Chicago engineer replied warmly to Wilbur Wright, offering himself as a mentor. He helpfully suggested that, for gliding experiments, the brothers might find ideal conditions on the Atlantic coast — advice that led them to the dunes of the Outer Banks.

Self-assured leader
Wilbur and Orville Wright were the third and fourth sons of Bishop Milton Wright, a leader of the United Brethren Church. Wright, who’d once railed against slavery, was consumed with a new passion after the Civil War — the evils of freemasonry. After decades of internecine squabbling, he split to form the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (Old Constitution).
“He was a little still-necked in his dealings with his church, but he was obviously a terribly warm figure in that family and his children were very fond of him and protective of him and helped him a great deal,” Tobin said. “Having come from a pretty tough, isolated frontier background, he had an unusually open mind. He encouraged his sons to follow their intellectual interests wherever they might lead. I found that striking.”
His wife, the former Susan Koerner, contracted tuberculosis while in her 50s. A couple of years later, 18-year-old Wilbur was injured in an ice hockey accident that cost him several teeth. Soon afterward, he complained of heart palpitations. All hopes for further education were shelved and, as the eldest at home, he took on much of the burden of caring for his mother until her death in 1889. He became introspective, reading prodigiously but emerging finally as the self-assured leader of the family. He teamed up with Orville in his printing business. Then they found a new livelihood when the “wheeling” craze took hold, opening the Wright Cycle Company.
The two lived contentedly with their younger sister, Katharine, and their father at 7 Hawthorn St., Dayton. Tobin pointed out that unmarried adult siblings living in the same household was a far more common arrangement a century ago than it is today. He suggests, in his book, that given Wilbur’s early demanding roles, caring for his mother and advising his father, it might have been difficult for him to have contemplated breaking away. Tobin said he found Wilbur to be “an extraordinarily admirable figure and likeable — a fine sense of humor, very dry.”
Orville, on the hand, could be “superficial and immature,” Tobin said, adding: “They were people of very high integrity. They would have been difficult to get close to.”
While researching “To Conquer the Air,” Tobin walked around the streets were the Wrights had lived.
“I was struck by was how close their home was to their bicycle shop and to all the places they would have gone,” the author said. “They lived close to their brother and his family, and other friends. Although Dayton is not a small town, they lived in a tight-knit neighborhood.”
Tobin reflected on how the world has changed in a few generations. In 1903, his grandfather was a boy in Ireland. Cornelius Tobin came to the U.S. after a spell in Wales, but was back in Europe as a soldier in the U.S. army in World War I, a conflict that greatly speeded the development of airplanes. He settled later in the Detroit area, which is where James Tobin was born 46 years ago.
Not far away, at Dearborn, Mich., Henry Ford had created Greenfield Village in the 1930s, to which he brought the Wrights’ house and the Wright Cycle Company, formerly of 1127 W. Third St., Dayton.
Frequent field trips to the historical park is part of growing up in Detroit, said Tobin, who lives in Ann Arbor. “I spent a great deal of time wandering around the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop when I was a kid,” he said.
Tobin went on to study history at the University of Michigan. He worked for 12 years as a journalist in Detroit and was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His first book, “Ernie Pyle’s War,” about the World War II correspondent, which was published in 1997, grew out of a doctoral dissertation he wrote at the University of Michigan. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Tobin, who’s married and the father of two daughters, had found his forte — popular history with a strong narrative drive. After the critical success of the Pyle book, his editor suggested some ideas for a follow up. One of them had particular appeal, because it tapped into his childhood enthusiasm for aviation and the Wrights. What emerged was a group biography, with Tobin fleshing out the key figures in aviation’s first decade, such as Langley, Bell, Chanute, Glenn Curtiss and Alberto Santos-Dumont.
Tobin is in no doubt, however, about the brothers’ central place in the story. “It is clear that European aviation efforts had stalled with the death of Otto Lilienthal in 1896, and that those efforts were totally recharged by the Wright brothers’ successes,” he said.

Huffman Prairie
After its “infant success” on Dec. 17, a gust of wind smashed up the flyer. It never flew again. However over the next two summers, with new flyers, the Wrights perfected their ideas and skill at Huffman Prairie, a rented space outside Dayton. By the fall of 1905, they had a “machine of practical utility.” In one typical effort on Oct. 5, Wilbur flew for 25 miles in a 40-minute period. Hundreds witnessed these flights — many of them as passengers on a passing trolley car, others as invited guests. One of the latter was the landlord of their bicycle store, Charles Webbert. “It was beyond my comprehension,” he recalled later. “I just took off my hat and sat down.”
The Wrights had supporters who’d seen the phenomenon for themselves, but most in the aeronautical community were skeptical and the wider world entirely indifferent. Wilbur and Orville opted to stop flying until they could find a buyer. By the spring of 1908, though, most discussion about aviation revolved around the mysterious brothers, even though Alexander Bell had assembled a talented team.
“The Wrights were now widely believed to have a secret worth knowing,” Tobin writes. “They were either geniuses or frauds, and either case would make a great story.”
The Wrights soon provided the world its answer. In August, Wilbur took his plane into the air at Le Mans, in France, thrilling the crowd and conquering a nation that had believed that aviation was their science. In September, Orville stunned a gathering in a similar way at Fort Myer, Va. Not long afterward, though, he was seriously injured in a crash that killed his copilot, Thomas Selfridge. They’d come along way since their first trip to the Kill Devil Bluffs.
“I’ve never known of anyone who was as painstaking in planning out the steps that would be needed to accomplish what would be a very difficult task,” Tobin said. “It was a mundane, non-flashy but extraordinarily important aspect of their success.” Wilbur confirmed the brothers’ fame with a trip around New York harbor in 1909. It was 10 years after his query letter to the Smithsonian. That institution, standing by their man, Langley, would take decades to fully recognize the Wrights’ achievement. Early on, their great, rival Glenn Curtiss, tried to undermine the brothers’ patents by claiming to demonstrate that Langley’s aerodrome could have flown. Recently, Smithsonian scientists have concluded finally that the aerodrome could never have taken to the air.
Langley, who died in 1906, at age 72, believed in engine power. Others focused on wing design and lift. The Wrights concluded that these issues were already solved. Balance and control were key.
“It seems so obvious now, because we’ve grown up with the Wrights’ handiwork all around us, but it wasn’t to anyone else at the time,” Tobin said. “It’s a measure of the Wrights’ real achievement.
“They were really responsible for a whole combination of breakthroughs, and certainly no one else was on the trail of those breakthroughs at the time they made them.”

Contenders
But what of other, more obscure figures? Enthusiasts for the cause of German-immigrant mechanic Gustave Whitehead, who lived in Fairfield, Conn., say he flew perhaps as early as 1899 and certainly by 1901. Claims are made also on behalf of New Zealand farmer Richard Pearse. And there are several others.
“These are like urban legends,” Tobin said. “Oh I’ve heard the most extraordinary things, while I’ve been traveling around the country talking to people about this book.
“What we know is that what the Wrights did led to practical airplanes, immediately and directly. If someone else flew an airplane, then possibly they did, but it didn’t lead to anything. That’s what makes the claims incredible.
“If they’d been successful, they would have shown it to someone, they would have gotten financial backing, they would have built more like it, they would have succeeded before the Wrights in that whole area. So I’m very dubious.”
General historians like Tobin and historians of aviation technology are satisfied that they have enough information to understand the genesis and the evolution of the key concepts.
Tobin said he was struck by the fact that the Wrights did not operate in a vacuum. He added that he came to see them as part of a global phenomenon, rather than as American stick-figure heroes.
“It’s a great mistake to see them as quintessentially American figures,” Tobin said. “They may or may not be, but, in fact, they were part of a worldwide enthusiasm for technology in general and for flight. There was a tremendous interest in flight all around the world.”
Wilbur Wright died in 1912, at age 45, after contracting typhoid fever. He was single. He’d once said that it would be too much to maintain both a wife and a flying machine.
When Katharine finally, at 50, accepted an offer of marriage, it infuriated Orville. “That’s the main thing I hold against him,” Tobin said. Brother and sister only reconciled when she was on her deathbed four years later.
Orville Wright died in 1948. He was 76.
No obituary could surpass the tribute given by one hometown newspaper four decades before. In 1908, the Dayton Herald said the city should be proud to call Wilbur and Orville sons and brothers, adding that, “Dayton may crumble to dust, but the name of the Wright brothers will endure as long as earth endures.”
(“To Conquer the Air: the Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight,” by James James Tobin, is published by the Free Press. 433 pp. $28.)

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