Made In America - Bill Bryson [209]
Because it occurred so far from the public gaze, news of their historic achievement didn’t so much burst on to the world as seep out. Several newspapers reported the event, but often with only the haziest idea of what had taken place. The New York Herald reported that the Wrights had flown three miles, and most other papers were similarly adrift in their details.
Many of those who had devoted their lives to achieving powered flight found it so unlikely that a pair of uneducated bicycle makers from Dayton, working from their own resources, had succeeded where they had repeatedly failed that they refused to entertain the idea. The Smithsonian remained loyal to Langley – he was a former assistant secretary of the institution – and refused to acknowledge the Wrights’ accomplishment for almost forty years.
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The Wrights’ home town, Dayton, was so unmoved by the news that it didn’t get around to giving them a parade until six years later. Unperturbed, the brothers put further distance between themselves and their competitors. By 1905, in an improved plane, they were ‘flying up to twenty-four miles, and executing complicated manoeuvres, while staying aloft for almost forty minutes. Only the tiny capacity of the plane’s fuel tank limited the duration of their flights.5 The next year they received their patent, but even it was not the ringing endorsement they deserved. It credited them only with ‘certain new and useful improvements in Flying-machines’.
The Wright brothers seemed unbothered by their lack of recognition. Although they made no secret of their flying, they also offered no public demonstrations, and hence didn’t attract the popular acclaim they might have. Indeed in 1908, when the more publicity-conscious Glenn Curtiss flew over half a mile at Hammondsport, New York, many assumed that that was the first flight.
In 1914, long after Langley himself was dead, the Smithsonian allowed Curtiss to exhume Langley’s airplane, modify it significantly and try to fly it in order to prove retroactively that the Wrights had not been the first to design a plane capable of flight. With modifications that Langley had never dreamed of, Curtiss managed to get the plane airborne for all of five seconds, and for the next twenty-eight years the Smithsonian, to its eternal shame, displayed the craft as ‘the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free-flight’.6
The original Wright Flyer spent twenty-five years under dustsheets in a Dayton shed. When no institution in the United States wanted it, it was lent to the Science Museum in London and displayed there from 1928 to 1948. Not until 1942 did the Smithsonian at last accept that the Wrights were indeed the inventors of powered flight, and not until forty-five years after their historic flight was the craft at last permanently displayed in America.
The Wright brothers never called their craft an airplane. The word was available to them – it had existed in America for almost thirty years and, as aeroplane, in Britain for even longer. (Aeroplane was first used in 1869 in a British engineering magazine to describe a kind of aerofoil used in experiments.) In the early days there was no agreed term for aircraft. Langley had called his contraption an aerodrome. Others had used aerial ship or aerial machine. The Wright brothers favoured flying machine. But by 1910 airplane had become the standard word in America and aeroplane in Britain.
Flying and its attendant vocabulary took off with remarkable speed. By the second decade of the century most people, whether they had been near an airplane or not, were familiar with terms like pilot, hangar, airfield, night flying, cockpit, air pocket, ceiling, takeoff, nosedive, barnstorming, tailspin, crack-up (the early term for a crash), bail out and parachute. Pilots were sometimes referred to as aeronauts, but generally called aviators, with the first syllable pronounced with the short ă of navigator until the 1930s.
In 1914 airlines entered the language. The first airlines