The Airplane - Jay Spenser [15]
Even more recently, Octave Chanute—America’s most celebrated railroad engineer—had convened a group of aerial experimenters at the shore of Lake Michigan in Indiana, just one state over from Ohio, to test manned gliders of varying designs. Like Langley, Chanute was elderly and did not himself attempt to fly.
It helped that, despite broad derision, men of their obvious qualifications were willing to openly explore the possibility of human flight. But Wilbur didn’t need any convincing on that score. “For some years,” he later wrote of his fascination, “I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.”11
Lilienthal’s death brought this to the fore. Flying became a subject of conversation, thinking, and daydreams for the brothers. They told themselves their interest was purely for the sport of gliding, but there was more to it than that. Supposing for an instant, then, that a machine could indeed be built that people could navigate through the clouds, how did one set about designing such a thing?
On May 30, 1899, Wilbur took pen in hand and wrote a letter to the Smithsonian Institution. “Dear Sirs,” begins this famous missive on Wright Bicycle Company letterhead, “I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of bats of various sizes after the style of Cayley’s and Pénaud’s machines. My observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable.”12
In this and other ways, the brothers gathered what little published information was to be had. Even with foreign works helpfully translated by the Smithsonian, there was little to work with. They pored over the meager body of research.
Fortunately, additional help and encouragement came through a correspondence Wilbur had entered into with Octave Chanute. Now retired, the eminent U.S. civil engineer was traveling widely in a self-appointed role as clearinghouse for information about flight experimentation around the world.
The Wrights kept a low profile in their research. The reason initially was their focused work ethic combined with a natural distaste for immodest or unseemly displays. Later, as they progressed, there also arose a natural desire not to give away too much until a key patent they had applied for was granted.
A century later, this self-imposed isolation remains a source of misunderstanding about the Wrights. Viewed superficially, it suggests that an absence of outside ideas, influences, and distractions somehow allowed them to usher the airplane into being. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth; they succeeded because of other people’s ideas, and those ideas came from around the world.
Octave Chanute.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Ask aviation buffs to name the world’s first multinational airplane program and chances are many will name the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic transport of the 1960s. If so, they’re off by six decades, because that accolade belongs to history’s first airplane.
In addition to its U.S. heritage, the Wright 1903 Flyer also boasts an Australian, Belgian, Dutch, English, French, German, and Swiss pedigree. These nations had a direct and immediate hand (sometimes more than one) in the Wrights’ supposedly solitary success at Kitty Hawk.
For example, Dutch-born Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli in the 1700s first identified the relationship between pressure and velocity in fluid flows, helping to explain aerodynamic lift. A British-born Australian, Lawrence Hargrave, came up with the box kite in 1893—a key invention, as we shall see. Belgian-born French inventor Jean-Joseph-Étienne Lenoir gave the world its first practical internal combustion engine in 1859, while Germans such as Nikolaus August Otto and Gottlieb Daimler quickly improved on it. And still other countries can claim more tenuous connections through contributors who had no inkling their discoveries would someday be applied to