I am about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business. I wish to obtain such papers as the Smithsonian Institution has published on this subject, and if possible a list of other works in print in the English language.
Lest there be any doubts about him or the seriousness of his intentions, he added: “I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine.”
From the list of books provided by the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, Richard Rathbun, and with a generous supply of Smithsonian pamphlets on aviation forwarded to him, he and Orville both began studying in earnest.
Especially helpful were the writings of Octave Chanute, a celebrated French-born American civil engineer, builder of bridges and railroads, who had made gliders a specialty, and Samuel Pierpont Langley, an eminent astronomer and head, or secretary, of the Smithsonian. Formerly the director of the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh and a professor of astronomy and physics at the Western University of Pennsylvania, Langley was one of the most respected scientists in the nation. His efforts in recent years, backed by substantial Smithsonian funding, had resulted in a strange-looking, steam-powered, pilotless “aerodrome,” as he called it, with V-shaped wings in front and back that gave it the look of a monstrous dragonfly. Launched by catapult from the roof of a houseboat on the Potomac River in 1896, the year of Lilienthal’s death, it flew more than half a mile before plunging into the water.
Along with Lilienthal, Chanute, and Langley, numbers of others among the most prominent engineers, scientists, and original thinkers of the nineteenth century had been working on the problem of controlled flight, including Sir George Cayley, Sir Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison. None had succeeded. Hiram Maxim had reportedly spent $100,000 of his own money on a giant, steam-powered, pilotless flying machine only to see it crash in attempting to take off.
Meanwhile, the French government had spent a comparable sum on a steam-powered flying machine built by a French electrical engineer, Clément Ader, and with such dismal results that the whole project was abandoned, though not before Ader gave the name avion, for airplane, to the French language.
Along with the cost of experiments in flight, the risks of humiliating failure, injury, and, of course, death, there was the inevitable prospect of being mocked as a crank, a crackpot, and in many cases with good reason.
For more than fifty years, or long before the Wright brothers took up their part, would-be “conquerors of the air” and their strange or childish flying machines, as described in the press, had served as a continuous source of popular comic relief. In the 1850s, one French inventor’s ingenious idea had consisted of a chair, a pair of wings attached to his back, and a huge umbrella. (Whether the umbrella was for “ascensional power” or shade was never explained.) In the 1870s, one Charles Dyer of Georgia came up with a flying device in the shape of a duck. In the 1890s, a San Francisco Chronicle roundup report on the subject described “the flying-machine crank” as one who, with advancing age, gets increasingly foolish to the point of “imbecility.”
Among the more elaborate new ideas flooding the U.S. Patent Office for approval was a gigantic, fishlike machine called an “aerostat,” with sheet aluminum body and fan-shaped tail. According to the Washington Post:
The body is supported by a pair of wings that run its length, their inclination being controlled by a pilot wheel, so that the aerial vessel is able to rise or descend at will. It is propelled by a series of explosions in the rear, small pellets of nitroglycerine being fed automatically into a cup opening backward and discharged by electricity.
“It is a fact,” the Post later categorically declared, “that man can’t fly.”
Of all that was reported or said by way of ridicule nothing evoked such widespread delight, or would be so long remembered and quoted, as a comic poem titled “Darius Green and his Flying Machine.” Written by a popular New England author, J. T. Trowbridge, it had been a favorite for public readings and recitals at family gatherings the country over for more than thirty years.
Darius was a slow-witted farm boy who pondered: “The birds can fly and why can’t I? Could blue-bird and phoebe, be smarter than we be?” In secret in the loft of a barn, he set to work
. . . with thimble and thread
And wax and hammer and buckles and screws,
And all such things as geniuses use; —
Two bats for patterns, curious fellows!
A charcoal-pot and a pair of bellows;
. . . Some wire, and several old umbrellas;
A carriage-cover for tail and wings;
A piece of harness; and straps and strings . . .
These and a hundred other things.
When Darius leaped into the air in his creation from the barn loft, it was only to crash below in a heap of “tangled strings, broken braces and broken wings, shooting stars and various things,” the moral of the story being, “Stick to your sphere.”
In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Otto Lilienthal, they could be killed.
In an article in Cosmopolitan magazine several years before Lilienthal’s death, Samuel Langley had emphasized that those willing to attempt flight ought to be granted the kind of attention and concern customarily bestowed on those who risk their lives for a useful purpose. It was a risk, however, from which both Langley and Octave Chanute had excused themselves, because of age.
All the same, and importantly, the times were alive with invention, technical innovations, new ideas of every kind. George Eastman had introduced the “Kodak” box camera; Isaac Merritt Singer, the first electric sewing machine; the Otis Company had installed the world’s first elevator in a New York office building; the first safety razor, the first mousetrap, the first motor cars built in America—all in the dozen years since Orville started his print shop and Wilbur emerged from his spell of self-imposed isolation.
Then, too, there was the ever-present atmosphere of a city in which inventing and making things were central to the way of life. At about this time, just prior to the turn of the century, according to the U.S. Patent Office, Dayton ranked first in the country relative to population in the creation of new patents. The large factories and mills of Dayton kept growing larger, producing railroad cars, cash registers, sewing machines, and gun barrels. (The Davis Sewing Machine Company, as one example, was turning out four hundred sewing machines a day in a factory fully a mile in length.) In addition were the hundreds of small shops and workrooms making horse collars, corsets, soap, shirts, brooms, carriage wheels, rakes, saws, cardboard boxes, beer kegs, and overalls, not to say bicycles.