The Airplane - Jay Spenser [63]
On August 8, 1908, Wilbur Wright was ready at last. A large crowd gathered spontaneously that Saturday. People spread cloths on the grass and settled down to picnics. Others found vantage points on the branches of trees.
A team of helpers wheeled the spindly Wright Model A Flyer out into the sunshine. After some difficulty starting the engine, it roared to life. Looking more like a businessman than an aviator in his gray suit, cap, and high starched collar, Wilbur climbed aboard and gripped the controls.
At his signal, a weight dropped from a derrick, drawing the airplane forward by means of a rope routed through pulleys. Before the astonished onlookers, the Flyer climbed quickly aloft, leveled out at 30 feet (roughly 10 meters), and maneuvered with such authority that it drew gasps. One newspaper noted the next day that the American “took turns with ease at almost terrifying angles and alighted like a bird.”2
In less than two minutes aloft, Wilbur Wright had stunned an entire nation. Over the following days, he flew longer and more dramatic displays, with figure eights thrown in for good measure. His mastery defied belief. In his hands, the Flyer tracked straight as a locomotive on rails before heeling over into a tight 180-degree turn completed in a few airplane lengths. His machine obeyed his every whim with a degree of precision no European had ever imagined possible.
A confident Wilbur Wright prepares to fly at Hunaudières racecourse, Le Mans, France, in the summer of 1908.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Horse-drawn carriages wait below as Wilbur Wright flies a passenger at Pau, France, in early 1909.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
The French doffed their hats in a generous and ingenuous outpouring of joy. All doubts dispelled, they magnanimously and fervently celebrated the American success. “Wright is a genius,” proclaimed Louis Blériot. “He is the master of us all.”3
“It is a revolution in aeroplane work,” agreed pioneer aviator René Gasnier. “Who can now doubt that the Wrights have done all they claimed?…We are as children compared to the Wrights.”4
Ernest Archdeacon’s words were perhaps the most telling. “For a long time, for too long a time, the Wright brothers have been accused in Europe of bluff—even perhaps in the land of their birth,” said the Parisian lawyer. “They are today hallowed in France, and I feel an intense pleasure in counting myself among the first to make amends for that flagrant injustice.”5
Six months earlier, thirty-three-year-old Henri Farman had actually managed to land where he took off by skewing his Voisin sideways through the air in a wide, ragged circle performed using rudder alone. Finding and holding a fine balance, he had coaxed the biplane into scuttling sideways like a crab in the air. Each time that the wobbling wings threatened to dip too far, he had backed off on the rudder for fear of capsizing.
Henri Farman poses by the tail of his Voisin-built biplane.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
That circling flight, Europe’s first, had been hailed as a triumph. Now the scales fell from European eyes; the Wrights ruled the air because they alone knew the secret of control.
On October 9, 1890, half a year before Otto Lilienthal began gliding in Germany, France’s Clément Ader stood on the grounds of a friend’s château. Gravel crunched underfoot as the forty-nine-year-old engineer, balding and moustachioed, readied his startling aircraft for test.
Named Éole after Aeolus, ruler of the winds in Greek mythology, Ader’s machine combined bat-like wings with a toadstool fuselage that rested on small carriage wheels. A lightweight steam engine drove its forward propeller, the blades of which resembled feathers.
A brilliant self-taught electrical engineer and inventor, Ader made his fortune early in life improving on Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and helping to wire Paris for service. His interest in flight dated back two decades to a gasbag balloon he had built.