The Airplane - Jay Spenser [14]
Dayton was a great place for this latest business venture. The small city offered the foundries, machine shops, and light industry needed to support entrepreneurial manufacturing operations such as the Wright Bicycle Company. Being a commercial crossroads, Dayton also provided ready access to stock items from elsewhere.
Whatever the Wrights needed to build bicycles—metalworking, castings, bicycle chains, sprocket gears, or rubber tires—they learned to make themselves, have others manufacture locally, or procure nationally. It was invaluable experience for the challenges ahead.
Now successful business partners in their twenties, the brothers spent most evenings, weather permitting, on the verandah of their house. Orville sat upright, arms folded. Wilbur slouched back on his shoulders as they toyed with ideas and discussed events. Neither would ever marry, and money meant little to them. They shared a single bank account, each drawing according to need, neither caring what the other took.
In 1895, the discussion turned to the exploits of Otto Lilienthal, Germany’s renowned aerial pioneer. An article showed captivating images of Lilienthal flying in wings that he had fashioned himself. Interested as they were in the German’s experiments, neither brother had any inkling they might themselves soon take up flight’s challenges.
Otto Lilienthal.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Lilienthal in flight, 1894.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
That changed one hot August day the following year when word arrived of Lilienthal’s death from injuries sustained in a glider crash. Wilbur came across the sad news and waited till later to read the newspaper account to Orville, who lay severely stricken and close to death from typhoid fever (this same disease would claim Wilbur in 1912, at age forty-five).
After Orville recovered, they pored over images of the bearded German experimenter wearing his ingenious wings. Some depicted him standing atop a hill like an athlete waiting to race forward. Others showed him soaring fearlessly through the air, legs splayed like the talons of a bird.
The obituaries suggested that, like Icarus of the ancient Greek myth, Germany’s flying man had simply dared too much. For his audacity he paid the ultimate price. If so, words uttered before his death showed he felt flying was a cause worth dying for.
“Opfer müssen gebracht warden,” Lilienthal had said.10 Sacrifices must be made.
Wilbur couldn’t get the event out of his mind. It started him thinking all over again about the activity then under way to solve the “problem of flight,” as it was called. He and Orville followed it in the papers.
Only a few months before, for example, Samuel Pierpont Langley, the American physicist and astronomer at the helm of the Smithsonian Institution, had launched a model airplane off a houseboat on the Potomac River south of Washington, D.C. The Aerodrome No. 5, as he named it, weighed 25 pounds (11.25 kilograms) and measured more than 13 feet (4 meters) in length and wingspan. Powered by a 1-hp steam engine, this craft flew about two-thirds of a mile (1 kilometer) in wide circles before settling into the water.
Langley actually misnamed his craft an aerodrome in an attempt to call it “aerial runner” in Greek. Since the suffix-drome draws from dromos, meaning “racecourse” or “field,” the word aerodrome would soon come to denote a flying field, not a flying machine. This etymological error notwithstanding, the Aerodrome No. 5 had demonstrated history’s first extended flight by a manmade, powered, heavier-than-air device of significant size and weight.
Samuel Pierpont Langley.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Langley Aerodrome No. 5, 1896.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Could Langley’s Aerodrome be scaled up sufficiently to carry a human being? He certainly thought so. Buoyed by his success, he worked