4. Secretary of the Navy George von L. Meyer. (National Archives)
5. The Wright 1901 glider, being flown as a kite, on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. (Smithsonian Institution)
For several reasons no naval use for aircraft occurred to him. He was not a technician. More important, both he and Rear Admiral Wainwright, his Aide for Operations, believed that Navy money should go into fighting machines, that planes would never fight. Even if bombing, which had been suggested, became practicable, it would never be used, he thought. He was certain, as was Wainwright, that the rules of chivalrous warfare would preclude such barbarity.
But what about all those letters to the Department from air-minded civilians? In September 1910, Secretary Meyer called in his Assistant Aide for Materiel and told him to answer the queries, to watch developments, and to bring up any that should concern the Navy. In this offhand fashion, 54-year-old Captain Washington Irving Chambers became the first naval officer to be permanently assigned to duties involving naval aviation.
One would like to think of man’s first flight as a dramatic single achievement. But in so complex a field this view is over-simplified. Many dreams and long years of theoretical experimentation preceded the actual event. Four centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings showed his grasp of some of the fundamental principles of flight. In the last half of the nineteenth century, inventors and experimenters were busy seeking their practical application. Such men as Otto and Gustave Lilienthal in Germany, Percy S. Pilcher in Great Britain, and John J. Montgomery and Octave Chanute in the United States, sought experience in building and flying gliders. Clement Ader built four unsuccessful planes, and the Frenchman, Alphonse Pénaud, designed a rubber-band-powered model that actually made a short flight.
These new developments were noted and studied by Samuel Pierpont Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who by 1894 had designed a model which flew for a few seconds. Two years later, his model was making flights of distances up to 4,000 feet.
Langley’s “aerodrome” was a curious-looking contrivance. Four delicate wings, two on each side in tandem and braced with fine external wires, were attached to a central, keel-like frame. Weighing 26 pounds and 16 feet in length, this steam-powered model was capable of sustained flight for about a minute and a half, at the end of which time it would settle into the water with only minor damage.
Reports of these experiments reached Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and he initiated an investigation by a joint Army-Navy board. This resulted in negotiations with Langley by the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications and an undertaking by Langley to construct a large-scale version of his flying machine which would be capable of carrying a man aloft. This was late in 1898.
6. Langley’s aerodrome, 7 October 1903. It “. . . hovered a moment, then plunged into the Potomac.” (Wide World Photo)
Then followed four and a half years of delay and frustration in the course of which, failing to find an adequate ready-made motor, either in the United States or abroad, one was designed and built. It was a rotary engine, which weighed 120 pounds and developed over 50 horsepower. Much time also was spent in devising a complicated spring-powered catapult device to launch the craft.
In July of 1903, all was declared ready. The aerodrome sat on its catapult atop a houseboat on the Potomac River. There had been plenty of advance publicity, and the reporters were out in force. Then some hitch caused the attempted flight to be postponed. This happened again and again during the summer but, on 7 October, Charles M. Manly, Langley’s assistant, got the machine up to 24 knots at the end of the launching platform. For a moment the aerodrome was airborne. According to a contemporary account, it “hovered a moment, then plunged into the Potomac.” On 8 December, there was another try in which the rear wings collapsed. Nine days later, down on the Carolina dunes, without any fanfare at all, the Wright brothers made the first successful heavier-than-air flight.
The publicity subsequent to Langley’s series of unsuccessful attempts and frustrating failures threw a vast cloud of doubt over the whole affair and indeed over the development of all aviation. The caustic ridicule broke Langley’s heart, and he died in 1906. Sixteen years later, his prophetic genius was recognized by the Navy when the first aircraft carrier, the USS Langley, was placed in service.
Two years after Langley had started work on his man-carrying aerodrome, the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, became interested in gliding. These young bachelors studied the records of Lilienthal and Chanute, and Langley’s air pressure tables. In the bicycle shop where they earned their living, they built biplane gliders with bamboo outriggers holding an elevator forward and a rudder aft. Seeking to find a place with gentle slopes and steady summer winds, they wrote to the Weather Bureau, which recommended Kitty Hawk, a remote village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There they assembled and flew their gliders.
Two summers of trial and error made the Wrights the first experimenters to realize the need for lateral controls, and the sea birds soaring low over the surf suggested to their minds flexible wing-tip controls. Basically, Langley and the Wrights worked from the same data, but approached the problem of flight differently. Langley had measured inert bird wings, the Wrights watched birds soar. Langley had taught the mathematics of ship stability. He applied these principles when he built a stable, self-propelled model of a flying machine, then scaled it up to man-carrying size. The Wrights first learned to fly rather unstable gliders, then scaled these up to carry a power plant. Later, a foot-square wind tunnel rigged up in Dayton gave them better data on the lift of cambered wings.
7. The Wright 1902 glider in flight at Kitty Hawk. (Smithsonian Institution)
8. Wilbur Wright in prone position following landing of his 1901 glider at Kitty Hawk. (Smithsonian Institution)
The next glider the Wrights took to Kitty Hawk had more efficient wings, with tips the operator could warp. That summer, more practice and tumbles taught them to glide straight, bank their turns, recognize stalls, and avoid them. When winter weather ended their 1902 gliding they knew less than Langley and Manly about ship stability, but far more about airmanship and wing design. They were certain they had the data to build, and the skill to fly, a powered machine.
During the spring and summer of 1903, they built a 4-cylinder, in-line, gasoline engine for a larger glider. Mounted, right of center, on the lower wing, it delivered its 16 horsepower through bicycle chains to two wooden propellers.
At Kitty Hawk two more months slipped by and winter arrived before the brothers had their machine ready. On 17 December 1903, just nine days after Langley’s fiasco, they tossed a coin for the first ride. Orville won. He stretched himself prone on the lower wing, where he balanced the 152-pound engine, and braced his toes on a cleat tacked to the rear spar. When he shifted his hips, the U-shaped saddle under his belly simultaneously moved rudder and wing tips. His right hand opened the throttle; his left operated the elevator.
Then, in the teeth of a 27-knot wind, the plane lifted off and Orville Wright flew 120 feet in 12 seconds. Each of the brothers flew twice that day. On the last flight, Wilbur covered 852 feet in 59 seconds and smashed a wing in landing. That night, when the big day was over, the inventors wired the news
