Heavier Than Air (1930)

The first man ever to fly an airplane is a gray man now, dressed in gray clothes. Not only have his hair and his mustache taken on this tone, but his curiously flat face, too. Thirty years of hating publicity and its works, thirty years of dodging cameras and interviews, have given him what he has obviously wished for most: a protective coloration which will enable him to fade out of public view against a neutral background. Orville Wright is not merely modest; he is what the sociologists call an asocial type. Bachelorhood is one evidence of this. You might discover another yourself, by searching the back files of newspapers for photographs of him. You would find fewer than you expected, and almost all of those you did find would be of his back. Temperament is doubtless partially responsible for making him thus. So, doubtless, is the way the world has treated him as a pioneer.

December 17, this year, is the twenty-seventh anniversary of the day when the younger of two of the sons of the Reverend Milton Wright, Bishop of the Church of the United Brethren of Christ, flipped a coin with his brother at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and, having won the toss, climbed into a motorized orange crate which slipped crazily forward—and left the ground. Orville and Wilbur Wright had for almost three decades looked toward this moment, and during most of that time they had shared the secret of their ambition with only one other person, a sister. Then, as they grew up in Dayton, Ohio, they had to take their experiments into the open. They flew odd kites before groups of raucously unsympathetic townsmen who asked what kind of business this was for grown men. They were going to fly!—and at a time when Samuel Pierpont Langley was falling into the Potomac River near Washington demonstrating that man could not fly, and when the joke of the day was that flying machines ought to be launched upside down so that they might soar, not fall. Then followed the immediate aftermath of their success, and its psychological effect. After Kitty Hawk the Wrights had returned to Dayton, which couldn’t realize that the two boys who ran the bicycle shop had flown. They tried a public flight for the townspeople, and when it was unsuccessful the newspapers printed funny stories. Thereafter, Dayton could see the Wright plane in the skies, and hear the uncertain musketry of its engine, and still not believe that anyone had accomplished power-driven flight. An old farmer expressed the general local opinion when he said: “There’s no use fussin’ with that thing, Will. It’s against Nature to fly, and even if anybody does, it won’t be anybody from Dayton.” Nor did the rest of the country show much interest. It wasn’t until 1908, two years after Europe had accepted the success of emulators of the Wrights, such as Santos-Dumont and Bleriot, that this nation came to suspect that the machine made by the bicycle-repairmen was a reality, perhaps even a success.

Now you find Orville Wright, when you confront him in his workshop, a timid man whose misery at meeting you is obviously so keen that, in common decency, you leave as soon as you can. He is to be found in his office, if you intrude, in a small brick house at 15 North Broadway, Dayton. It has two stories, a few yards of frontage on the street, and an ell that vanishes somewhere in the rear. In only one way does it stand out from the run of buildings along the street. It is not the ugliest house, nor the handsomest, nor the most sinister, nor the most inviting, nor the most well-kept, nor the most ramshackle. It is simply, by a long shot, the most undistinguished. By no stretch of the imagination would you suspect it houses fame.

The interior furnishings carry out the same motif. The front room is a spare box. There is a thin, faded rug on the uneven floor. The walls are bare of pictures. Not a memento is to be seen. There is a roll-top desk against one wall and a small table against another. There are three chairs, thin chairs. The gentleman opposite you is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a doctor of technical science of the Royal Technical College of Munich; he holds almost every honorary degree that a university can award; he owns enough medals to entomb him completely if he ever wore them all at once; he is an honored member of every association of aëronauts in the world; but on rainy days the roof leaks and he winces faintly when, every nine remorseless seconds, a drop of water flashes past the pale light of the window into the little pool on the floor.

He has been victimized and distorted by the written word ever since his first flight in 1903, when a reporter swiped a telegraphic message telling his father, the Bishop, that the machine had flown, and, knowing no fact but that, wrote what seemed good to him—a long, richly embroidered piece of imaginative prose describing in detail a flight of a virtuosity to which no plane has yet attained. He hates to have anything written about him, especially the conventional struggle-and-success story in which he has almost always been publicly presented. He regards his and Wilbur’s early work with a kind of religious pride, and would have it understood clearly and without gush that there were no melodramatic heartbreaks in learning to fly—save the inevitable financial ones. He insists that neither he nor Wilbur ever tried anything until they had worked it out first on paper and then in the laboratory, and that on the field, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that which was planned to happen happened. By this logic he insists there was no thrill whatever in leaving the ground on the first successful flight, in 1903. He was too sure he would fly to be excited. He says he had only one thrill in aviation: the moment when the bare idea of flight came to him as he lay abed at night as a sleepless small boy. He has almost never written for print and he refuses to write his autobiography. The persuasive demons who have put John D. Rockefeller, Colonel House, and the Pope into the sound movies will never triumph with him. “The only birds who talk are parrots, and they are not birds of high flight,” once said Wilbur, who had a certain flair for epigram. His brother’s interest in aviation is now only that of a bystander. He occupies himself now largely in “putting some of Will’s papers in order,” so that the amazingly exact early data of aërodynamics which the brothers worked out in the eighteen-nineties will not be lost. He serves on a few aëronautical committees. Curiously, although he never entered aërial sporting events in the earlier days and frequently evidenced his dislike for them, the post in which he now takes the greatest interest is the chairmanship of the contest committee of the National Aëronautic Association.

The inventor can no longer travel much. His shattering accident at Fort Myer in 1908 resulted in an injury to his spine which takes itself out now in the form of an excruciating neuritis when he is subjected to vibration. Railroad companies may pillow him like a rajah, but a Pullman car is still too rough a form of travel. An airplane, which must land on bumpy ground at forty miles an hour, is unthinkable. In spite of his painful disability Orville Wright did leave Dayton for a long trip in December, 1928, when, to participate in observance of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first unsteady flight, he went back to Kitty Hawk. It’s a story worth a digression.

It all began in Washington, as do so many things. In 1927 it was decided that something should be done to commemorate a quarter-century of flight, and that a memorial be erected on the desolate sand dunes of North Carolina where two Americans had first lifted a flying machine into the air. As a preliminary to carrying out this plan, various assistant secretaries of aviation in government departments were appointed to a commission to investigate and recommend. They set out for Kitty Hawk, something of a Tibet in accessibility. One of the secretaries flew, and made the trip in an hour and twenty minutes, but the others spent five days in getting there and back by train, boat, and Ford. On their return they presented a proposal. It was that, since no human being would ever think of going to Kitty Hawk deliberately, a strictly utilitarian building be erected—a Coast Guard station combined with an aviation beacon to guide coastwise pilots and marked by an appropriate plaque. This plan immediately fell afoul of Senator Bingham of Connecticut, who was taking responsibility for aviation in the Upper House. He wanted a Greek temple, made of Connecticut granite. Also a Congressional committee or two and the Fine Arts Commission had to consider the situation, which got more complicated all the time. Three months before the time for the dedication of the monument no decision had been reached, but a battalion of engineers of the United States Army was nevertheless dispatched to prepare for the event. It marched valiantly across the wastes and encamped before Kill Devil Hill, a burly sand dune. Here, at the top of the sandhill, the soldiers built a derrick, by which the cornerstone was to be lowered, and a stand to hold the two hundred distinguished persons who were to see it put in place. Again there were complications. The work was no sooner done than a violent windstorm swept Kitty Hawk, blowing relentlessly south for two days. When it was over the officer in charge went out to inspect his work and found that, while their derrick and stand had triumphantly withstood the blast, Kill Devil Hill had moved coyly away from there. The army groaned and swore, but its officers led a rally and in two days the battalion had shovelled Kill Devil Hill back in place.

On December 17 no decision as to what the monument would be had been made, but the dedicating delegation started for Kitty Hawk anyhow. It was a long and miserable procession. The State of North Carolina had early entered heartily into the spirit of the celebration, announcing that, coöperating with the nation, it would build an automobile road to the site of the memorial. It succeeded merely in getting the old road thoroughly torn up. Progress, in the automobile transport of the neighborhood, was made largely in low gear, with hot water spouting from the radiators. On the way down two Fords collided and another went into the ditch. The expedition had taken a doctor along and before he got back he had treated cases of multiple contusions, sprains, influenza, bronchitis, lacerations, acute hysteria, immersion, exposure, and exhaustion.

Whatever pain Orville Wright suffered on the wintry way down, this modest, retiring man undoubtedly underwent greater agony during the public glorification of his and Wilbur’s work. The cornerstone was laid. It was a spectacle unique in history, for nobody knew what it was the cornerstone of. It probably didn’t matter much, as Senator Bingham and the other orators spoke into a whistling thirty-five-mile wind which blew most of their words away unheard.

The return from Kitty Hawk was another retreat from Moscow. Some of the native automobile-owners had scrapped their “Welcome to Kitty Hawk” banners and gone off home to get warm. The Spanish delegation, as a result of an interpreter’s error, had got things mixed up and gone off to attend a duck dinner given by a native. A large part of the group, including Orville Wright, set out finally, and somewhat desperately, for the shore of Albemarle Sound, to catch a ferry that would take them out of the wastes. Most of them missed it, but one of the officials commandeered an antiquated government rum-chaser which appeared fortuitously. Unhappily, the commander of the craft didn’t know the waters very well and had to stop every little way and get his bearings from bumboatmen. Unhappily also, the boat began to sink—or so it seemed to two highly important delegates who noted some six inches of water in the bilges. Surreptitiously, so as not to alarm the ladies, they began to bail. They first used their cupped hands, afterward their silk hats. They worked for ten minutes in heroic silence, until the chief bos’n's mate saw them and said: “This craft’s a self-bailer; so long as she’s got this load she’ll carry that much water.” Somehow, the creature seems to have escaped court-martial.

The thoughts of Orville and Wilbur turned to flying in 1878, when Orville was seven. The Bishop, their father, had bought them a toy helicopter and from it they visioned a machine which would carry people. It was a boyhood dream which persisted into manhood. Years later, as young men, Orville and Wilbur found that the larger you built a helicopter the harder it was to make it fly. They turned to kites and gliders and had only a half-hearted interest in following their elder brothers to Yale or any other college. An accident suffered by Wilbur on a hockey rink settled matters. It made him a semi-invalid for a time, and helped to reconcile their family to this unconventional decision. For a livelihood they opened the Wright Cycle Company in West Third Street, Dayton. Their spare time was spent in building gliders on the biplane principle of Octave Chanute, and flying them as kites. They were so successful that soon they were riding aloft in them. For two years they studied complicated questions of stability. They had almost no previously assembled data to go on. They built themselves a wind tunnel and spent months in calculating the lifting power of different wings. By the time they were ready to apply power they knew enough of stability to be reasonably certain that they would not kill themselves.

The application of power was almost hopelessly baffling. How could anyone design an aërial screw for them when, in the year 1901, marine engineers were vague as to the principles by which a marine propeller drove a ship? How could they hope to buy a gasoline engine light and efficient enough to be carried aloft when the best automobile motor could drive a car at but fifteen miles an hour and weighed a cumbrous ton? The answer is: they couldn’t. The Wrights designed their own propeller from their own data and smoothed it down with a spoke-shave. They forged and hammered and cast their own engine in the Dayton cycle-shop.

When the first machine was publicly exhibited in 1904, it looked awesomely ridiculous and no spectator who saw it trundled onto the field believed it would take the air. Even after it had, this country didn’t realize it. It was France which first became convinced that it had, and when Wilbur circled near the cathedral at Le Mans, that nation embraced him as it had embraced no other American since Franklin. It was then that the brothers became international figures; then that Orville was photographed standing with a derby hat almost rakishly one side, in the presence of Edward VII; then that Orville and Wilbur, each looking uncommonly wretched in a frock coat and silk hat, stood flanking President Taft on the White House steps. Then followed the miserable years in which there was no time to fly; in which patents, litigation, contracts, editors importuning for manuscripts, and toastmasters begging for a few words, all but ruined the happiness of the brothers. Wilbur always looked cross. Orville always looked frightened. Each was both.

Orville Wright took a great many tumbles in serving his apprenticeship, but only once did he have a serious accident. That was at Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1908, during the course of the first army tests. Three and a half times around the parade ground and Orville’s plane, carrying Lieutenant Selfridge as observer, dropped one hundred feet and buried its nose almost vertically in the ground. Selfridge was killed, Orville was badly hurt.

In the weeks that followed Orville spoke not one word of pain and was never even heard to mention Selfridge. He was a man obsessed with a burning question: “How did it happen?” By minute investigation he decided later that a guy-wire fixture had worked loose and permitted the wire to foul the propeller.

Wilbur’s death from typhoid, in 1912, was a sad blow to Orville, whose gradual withdrawal from the front ranks of aviation began then. He last piloted a plane in 1914 and last flew in one in 1918. In the latest edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica” you will find a long article about Wilbur Wright. Reading it you might gather that he was the sole inventor, developer, and pilot of the first successful airplane. There is but the faintest suggestion that Wilbur ever had a brother. This perplexes you until you see the initials indicating the author of the article: “O. W.”

Now Orville stays in Dayton and the longest trip he is apt to make is from his home, where he lives with two servants, to his office, where he works with one secretary, seeing no one if it can be avoided, saying nothing if he can help it. He does not now concern himself with the company which bears his name. None of the millions which have gone into aviation has found its way to him. He certainly hasn’t the talent for acquisition. In the early nineteen-tens capitalists who sought to promote his and his brother’s patents found the pair indifferent and dreamily impractical. Or so they said. One must remember, however, that some years before this the brothers had sought financial backing and then had found the capitalists indifferent and dreamily impractical. At any rate, when the war started, Orville was merely running a flying school, and that on no high business basis. He lives in comfort which is adequate for him.

He still receives letters by the hundreds. Answering them all would keep a score of secretaries busy. Boys write to him for advice on models. Inventors try to interest him in their ideas, reminding him of his early battle against prejudice. But Will’s papers must be put in order. This he finds as much of a draft on his time as he can meet. He looks tired, his voice is almost listless; unquestionably he is in some physical pain. The mail accordingly is neglected.

Orville Wright refuses to predict the future of aviation. He is both exact and exacting: what he does not know definitely, what is not a matter of demonstrable fact, he does not speak about. He feels that airplane design is somewhat in the doldrums because, while there have been refinements and improvements, no new principles have been developed. Perhaps the Autogyro appeals to him; he cannot, however, avoid showing that he thinks little of worth has appeared since he and Will gave up. He feels deeply upon the subject of accidents, saying that there are vastly too many of them and that this country has a bad record. He regards this as a matter of better pilot training; not, he thinks, until the spirit of daredeviltry dies out and pilots shun a hazard with the horror of a veteran locomotive engineer will we witness material improvement. ♦

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