Made In America - Bill Bryson [208]
Nothing in their background suggested that they would create a revolution. They ran a bicycle shop in Dayton. They had no scientific training. Indeed, neither had finished high school. Yet, working alone, they discovered or taught themselves more about both the mechanics and science of flight than anyone else had ever come close to knowing. As one of their biographers put it: ‘These two untrained, self-educated engineers demonstrated a gift for pure scientific research that made the more eminent scientists who had studied the problems of flight look almost like bumbling amateurs.’3
They were distinctly odd. Pious and restrained (they celebrated their first successful flight with a brief handshake), they always dressed in business suits with ties and starched collars, even for their test flights. They never married, and always lived together. Often they argued ferociously. Once, according to a colleague, they went to bed heatedly at odds over some approach to a problem. In the morning, they each admitted that there was merit in the other’s idea and began arguing again, but from the other side. However odd their relationship, clearly it was fruitful.
They suffered many early setbacks, not least returning to Kitty Hawk one spring to find that a promising model they had left behind had been rendered useless when the local postmistress had stripped the French sateen wing coverings to make dresses for her daughters.4 Kitty Hawk, off the North Carolina coast near the site of the first American colony on Roanoke Island, had many drawbacks – monster mosquitoes in summer, raw winds in winter, and an isolation that made the timely acquisition of materials and replacement parts all but impossible – but there were compensations. The winds were steady and generally favourable, the beaches were spacious and free of obstructions, and above all the sand-dunes were mercifully forgiving.
Samuel Pierpont Langley, the man everyone expected to make the first successful flight – he had the benefits of a solid scientific reputation, teams of assistants, and the backing of the Smithsonian Institution, Congress and the US Army – always launched his experimental planes from a platform on the Potomac River near Washington, which turned each test launch into a public spectacle, and which then became a public embarrassment as his ungainly test craft unfailingly lumbered off the platform and fell nose first into the water. It appears never to have occurred to Langley that any plane launched over water would, if it failed to take wing, inevitably sink. Langley’s devoted assistant and test pilot, Charles Manly, was repeatedly lucky to escape with his life.
The Wright brothers by contrast were spared the pestering attention of journalists and gawkers and the pressure of financial backers. They could get on with their research at their own pace without having to answer to anyone. And when their experimental launches failed, the plane would come to an undamaged rest on a soft dune. They called their craft the Wright Flyer – named, curiously enough, not for its aeronautical qualities but for one of their bicycles.
By the autumn of 1903, the Wright brothers knew two things: that Samuel Langley’s plane would never fly and that theirs would. They spent most of the autumn at Kitty Hawk – or more precisely at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk – readying their craft, but ran into a series of teething problems, particularly with the propeller. The weather, too, proved persistently unfavourable. (On the one day when conditions were ideal they refused to fly, or do any work, because it was a Sunday.) By 17 December, the day of their breakthrough, they had been at Kitty Hawk for eighty-four days, living mostly on beans. They made four successful flights that day, of 120, 175, 180 and 852 feet, lasting from twelve seconds to just under a minute. As they were standing around after the fourth flight, discussing whether to have another attempt, a gust of wind picked up the plane and sent it bouncing across the sand-dunes, destroying the engine mountings