The Airplane - Jay Spenser [71]
Based on this crowning success, the Wrights filed a patent in March 1903 describing their control system as worked out on the 1902 Glider. It speaks volumes about the emphasis they put on control that their patent was based on a glider rather than the powered machine that followed.
In 1904 and 1905, Wilbur and Orville arranged to use an almost 100-acre (40-hectare) meadow at Simms Station eight miles east of Dayton to continue their experiments. Called Huffman Prairie, the property was bordered on two sides by well-traveled roads. Beside the Dayton-Springfield Pike, the busier of the two, ran an interurban light-rail system.
While the Wrights valued privacy so as to be able to work, they were not secretive. In fact, one of the first things they did at Huffman Prairie was to invite local reporters to witness their initial flights. Alas, lack of wind and a very balky engine kept them from getting into the air. The event was restaged soon afterward, but the same thing happened, and the reporters never came back.
Had these attempted press demonstrations succeeded, the world would have had electrifying news of the airplane’s certain invention in the middle of 1904. Instead, locals would watch the Wrights fly day after day, taking it entirely for granted, even as the world at large dismissed as unfounded rumor the first great invention of the twentieth century.
The Wrights traveled to Huffman Prairie and back via the light-rail system. It was a forty-minute trolley ride each way from their home in West Dayton to the Simms Station stop, diagonally across from their flying field. At Huffman Prairie, the Wrights built a shed like the ones they had constructed at Kill Devil Hill. Here in May 1904 they completed an airplane that was similar overall to the Wright 1903 Flyer.
Heavier and more robust, the Flyer II also had a new engine providing one-third more power. Ready to fly, they found themselves waiting instead. Most days, Dayton’s variable weather and capricious winds—particularly the lack of it—kept them grounded in frustration.
In early September, they improvised a derrick with a hanging weight that could be dropped to catapult the airplane aloft. This eliminated the need for a brisk wind into which to take off. After that, flying became frequent.
The brothers found that the 1904 machine shared its predecessor’s pronounced dynamic fore-and-aft instability. Wanting to porpoise in flight, it required a skilled hand on the elevator to keep it flying straight. Bobbing oscillations arose to plague many flights, resulting in hard landings punctuated by splintered wood.
The season’s great accomplishment came on September 20, when Wilbur executed the world’s first-ever circling flight. This was a necessary capability if they were to stay within the confines of their small pasture, which they intended to do for safety. Caution also led them to keep the airplane flying low over the ground, generally no higher than the top of their shed.
Amos Root, an elderly and energetic apiarist, had been invited to witness that event. On January 1, 1905, he printed the first eyewitness account ever published of an airplane flight in, of all places, his journal Gleanings in Bee Culture. “Dear friends,” Root began, “I have a wonderful story to tell you—a story that, in some respects, outrivals the Arabian Nights fables.”12
The miraculous machine Root saw put through its paces left him awestruck. “When it first turned that circle and came near the starting-point,” he told his readers, “I was right in front of it; and I said then, and I still believe, it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life.”13
At the end of the 1904 season, the Wrights knew they had more work to do; their control of the flyer was