Heads In Air, Feet on Ground WILBUR AND ORVILLE

By R.Z. Sheppard

Wilbur won the toss and went first: "He lay down on the lower wing with his hips in the padded wingwarping cradle, while Orville made a last-minute adjustment to the motor. When everything was ready, Wilbur tried to release the rope fastening the machine to the rail, but the thrust of the propellers was so great he could not get it loose and two of the men had to forcibly push the Flyer backward a few inches until the rope slipped free. Orville ran beside the machine, balancing it with one hand. In the other hand he held a stopwatch, which he started as the Flyer lifted from the rail."

The brothers' first attempt at controlled powered flight belongs in history's blooper file. Orville's timepiece read 3 1/2 sec. when the Flyer reared and bounced into a hill. Wilbur had used too much rudder and stalled 15 ft. over the beach at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Orville's turn came three days later, Dec. 17, 1903, at 10:35 a.m. He took the clattering rig to an altitude of 10 ft. and traveled through the air for about 40 yds. before coming down hard enough to crack a skid.

The lift-off was recorded on a photographic plate; the bulb of a mounted bellows camera was put into the hand of a North Carolina surfman, who was told when to squeeze. His timing was perfect, but Wilbur was too excited to punch his stopwatch and had to estimate the duration of the event. Ten years later, a curtly precise Orville described what had happened during those unofficial 12 sec.: "a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed, and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started."

Today Orville would probably have to say something like "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." But there is nothing in Fred Howard's biography to suggest that either of these Dayton bicycle mechanics ever had such a grandiose notion. The bachelor sons of Bishop Milton Wright lived in a circumscribed world of nuts and bolts. They took care of business, and by trial and error they slowly realized their dream of flight on the sands of the Outer Banks and over Huffman Prairie, a half-mile-long field on the Dayton-Springfield trolley line.

Why did they succeed while other pioneers failed? Howard, a former editor of the Wrights' papers at the Library of Congress, suggests a kind of sibling synergy. Individually, the brothers were smart and handy. Together, their complementary skills and temperaments set off a brilliant chain reaction. The Wrights were also practical tradesmen who could finance their flying experiments through the cycle company. The cost of building and launching the 1903 Flyer was, according to Orville, less than $1,000, while the U.S. Government spent $50,000 to have Samuel Langley construct a similar aircraft that fell into the Potomac River seconds after takeoff on Oct. 7, 1903.

Howard recounts the period much as the pragmatic Wrights must have seen it. New applications of materials and industrial technology were increasing rapidly. It was not hard to imagine a bicycle chain driving a propeller or an arrangement of spars and spoke wire strengthening a fragile open structure. From their experiments with gliders, the Wrights learned to control flight by wingwarping: tilting one wing up while bending the other down compensated for the unbalancing effect of the wind. The mechanical principle and its realization became clear to Wilbur one day while he was idly twisting a long inner-tube box. A historian would later equate the importance of this incident with Newton's observation of a falling apple. Biographer Howard is more restrained and more engaging when he attributes the insight to a "genius for the tactile" born of long experience handling wood, cloth and metal.

The brothers had discussed their control device with Octave Chanute, a respected elder in aeronautics and author of Progress in Flying Machines (1894). The free exchange of information among early flying enthusiasts would result in dozens of patent-infringement suits brought by the Wrights in the U.S. and Europe.

The litigations were complex and inconclusive. They also slowed the progress of aviation. Wilbur and Orville makes its way bravely through the fogs of legal and commercial arrangements. The author is more confident in technical matters and the manner in which aviation fever spread. He provides exhilarating details on the Wrights' daring exploits at flying exhibitions at home and abroad and dismaying information about their vain attempts to get the U.S. Government off the ground. Wilbur died of typhoid fever in 1912. Orville survived him by 36 years, or long enough to see his Flyer evolve into both a bonanza and a vehicle of immense destruction. He could not have foreseen the blitz or Hiroshima, but he obviously accepted all the risks of flying. In any event, his sympathetic and thorough biographer notes that Orville Wright never carried any insurance.