Wright Brothers – Wright Contemporaries

July 30, 1909 was an exciting day for the Wrights. Orville completed the final army contract requirement for selling their airplane to the U.S. War Department. He flew the Wright Flyer in a speed trial to Alexandria, Va. and then back to Ft. Myer at an average speed of 42.58 mph over the 10-mile round trip.

It would have made headlines around the world except that a Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, had flown his airplane, the Bleriot XI, across the English Channel five days earlier.

In 1908, Lord Northcliff had offered a prize of $5,000 for the first pilot who flew across the English Channel. Bleriot, an avid aviator who was close to bankruptcy, decided to try for it.

He pointed a finger toward in the direction of Dover, England and took off from France on a rainy morning of July 25, 1909. He had no compass. Crutches were strapped to the side of the airplane because he had badly burned his foot on his plane’s exhaust pipe on a previous flight.

He headed for a place along the English coastline known as Northfall Meadow beside Dover castle. The meadow was only 100 feet off the water and the only site where he could safely land because the white cliffs were too high for him to reach and the beach at Dover was too small for a plane to land.

A French newspaper reporter standing in the meadow would wave a flag to direct Bleriot to the spot.

It was a calm day. It was so calm he didn’t have to use wingwarping or the rudder to fly a straight path. Events were going smoothly until he saw the English coastline in the distance. Then a strong wind came up and with it a mist that made it hard to see.

The wind was blowing him off course to the North. Just as he appeared to be in trouble, three ships came into view. He gambled and followed the ships, hoping they were headed to Dover. He guessed right.

He then headed southward along the famed white cliffs. Suddenly, he saw the flag being waved in the meadow and headed for land.

By now the wind was blowing harder, making a landing extremely difficult. He cut the engines as he neared the ground and made a controlled crashed landing. It broke

the landing gear and damaged the propeller, but he had made it! The flight lasted 37 minutes.

The Wrights had flown much farther by that time, but flying the English Channel had the crowd appeal that Lindbergh’s flight over the Atlantic would have 18 years later. The French newspapers immortalized the moment for the glory of France.

A crowd of over 100,000 welcomed Bleriot back to Paris as a national hero with a grand parade. It was comparable to a reception for Napoleon Bleriot was born in Cambrai, France in 1872. He established a successful automobile accessories business and then turned his interest to aviation around the turn of the century.

He made a series of airplanes with little success. His model XI first displayed in 1908 would be a success. The monoplane weighed about 500 pounds and was constructed of a frame consisting of ash and spruce covered in Irish linen. The wing area was 150 square feet. It employed an adaptation of the Wright Brothers wingwarping, the first European machine to employ it effectively.

A 3-cylinder, 25-hp engine built by an Italian named Alessandro Anzani powered the airplane. The engine spewed out a cloud of castor-oil vapor oil that covered everything including the pilot. It was crude but reliable.

Eventually, 132 of the airplanes were built. Some of them were used by the French military in the early years of WW1. A few of them still exist and can still become airborne.

Charlie Taylor was an indispensable third member of the Wright Brother’s team. It was he who built the custom gasoline engine that powered the first flight at Kitty

Hawk in 1903.

Charlie went to work for Wilbur and Orville on June 15, 1901. It was the beginning of a long-term association between Charlie and the brothers, both as an employee and a friend.

Charlie had dropped into the Wrights’ bicycle shop one evening for a visit. Wilbur asked him if he would like to work for them. Charlie asked, “how much will you pay?”

Wilbur replied, “$18 a week.” That was more than the 5 cents an hour that Charlie was making at the Dayton Electric Company, so he said he would take the job.

With the hiring of Charlie, Orville and Wilbur could now go to Kitty Hawk before the end of the summer when the bicycle business dropped off.

The hiring of Taylor was the recognition by the brothers that they were serious about pursuing their “hobby” of flying. They could now keep up their bicycle business and simultaneously pursue their hobby.

Charlie was on the job for only three weeks when the brothers took off for Kitty Hawk. They left Charlie in total charge of the bicycle shop which included handling all

the money. That was a sure sign the brothers had complete trust in him. Their trust was to be amply rewarded.

The brothers were pleased, but not Katharine, their sister. She didn’t like Charlie’s smoking and frequent use of profanity.

Began Work on Flight

When the brothers returned from Kitty Hawk that year, they knew that the published aerodynamic data on wing lift was in error and that they would have to create

their own. They put Charlie to work building a wind tunnel for that purpose. This was the first job Charlie was assigned that had anything to do with airplanes.

The redesigned wings based on the data derived from the wind tunnel experiments proved to be successful during the Wrights’ experiments at Kitty Hawk in 1902.

Now they needed an engine to power the aircraft. Failing to find a company that would build the engine, the Wrights decided to build one themselves. (One company

did offer to build a one cylinder engine that lacked power and was too heavy.)

Charlie started making the engine in the winter of 1902 and finished it in six weeks following sketches provided by the Wrights. He only had rudimentary equipment to

work with which consisted of a drill press, a lathe and hand tools, but that wasn’t an obstacle for Charlie.

The engine produced 12 horsepower, 4 horsepower more that the target design. The additional horsepower enabled the Wrights to strengthen the wings and framework of the Flyer.

The engine was relatively simple. Fuel flows by gravity from a can into a reservoir in the top of the crankcase, where it vaporizes and mixes with air flowing into the

cylinders. Instead of spark plugs, it has igniters that close like switches when a cam turns, then spark as they separate.

The crankcase was contracted out and was made of Alcoa aluminum.

Building the engine was an amazing accomplishment for Charlie. Although he had limited formal education and little experience with engines, he had a natural aptitude for working with machines.

Charlie worked steadily for the Wrights for the next 10 years as their chief mechanic. He was with them in Europe; with Wilbur during his extraordinary flight circuiting

the Statue of Liberty; at Fort Myers for the Army trials and many other locations. He could claim he was the first airport manager after managing Huffman Field in

Dayton where many of the brothers’ flight experiments were conducted.

The “Vin Fiz”

He left his job with the Wrights in 1911 to be the mechanic for Calbraith Perry Rodgers, who planned to be the first to fly an airplane, named the Vin Fiz, across the U.S. The airplane was a Wright built machine and Charlie knew how to maintain Wright airplanes.

Rodgers wouldn’t have successfully accomplished his goal without Taylor. Along the way the airplane crashed 16 times and was repaired so many times by Charlie that little was left of the original airplane by the time it arrived in California.

Continued Involvement with the Wrights

Charlie continued to work for the Wrights in their Dayton factory and stayed with Orville after Orville sold the factory and retired in 1915. Charlie helped Orville with his continuing experiments and kept his automobile running.

In 1916 Charlie helped restore the original 1903 Flyer for public display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. This was the first public exhibition

of the airplane and for the first time Orville realized that the Flyer was a valuable artifact that should be preserved.

Charlie left Orville’s employment and moved to California in 1928 where he worked in a machine shop and invested in real estate. The timing was bad. The Depression struck and Charlie lost his investment and his job.

In 1937, Henry Ford hired Charlie to help restore the original Wright bicycle shop and home. Ford was moving the buildings from Dayton to his Greenfield Village

museum at Dearborn, Michigan. Charlie stayed with Ford until 1941 when he returned to California and found work in a defense factory.

Tragedy and Redemption

In 1945, Charlie had a heart attack and never worked again. He eventually ended up in a hospital charity ward.

An enterprising reporter found him there and published an article describing his sorry status. As a result of the publicity, the aviation industry quickly raised funds to

move him to a private sanitarium where he died at the age of 88 in 1956. He is buried in a mausoleum dedicated to aviation pioneers in Los Angeles.

While Orville was alive (he died in 1948), Orville wrote Charlie regularly, including every Dec. 17, commemorating the anniversary of the first flight.

In his last note Orville wrote: “I hope you are well and enjoying life: but that’s hard to imagine when you haven’t much work to do.” It was signed “Orv.”

The October 5, 1896 of the St. John, New Brunswick Daily Sun contained a article titled, A Real Negro Poet; Surprising Gifts of Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

This historic 1896 article is reproduced below:

First, some background.

Dunbar and Orville Wright were classmates at Central High School in Dayton, Ohio. They knew each other well. Paul helped Orville with his writing and literature assignments and Orville helped Paul with math and science.

Orville began a printing business while still in high school and was the first to print Dunbar’s writings including advertising flyers and tickets for poetry recitals. One

was a neighborhood newspaper edited by Dunbar named the Dayton Tattler.

Dunbar’s book of poems, Majors and Minors, came to the attention of William Dean Howells, a novelist and critic and the dean of late 19th century American letters.

Howell’s praise of the book in the Harper’s Review launched Dunbar into the big time among literary circles.

Dunbar often wrote and spoke about civil rights issues and was friends with other famous black leaders including Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B.

DuBois.

Here is the 1896 article:

“At last an intellectual bridge has been cast across the chasm dividing the black from the white race! At last, for the first time in the history of this country – or so far

as we are aware, in the history of any other country – a man of pure African blood has arisen to speak for his people in the person of Mr. Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

For several years poems bearing this name have been appearing in the leading magazines, but they bore on the surface no racial mark, and the fact that some of them

were in the Negro dialect counted for nothing since many white writers have attempted that, although with less success. It was not, therefore, until a slender, quiet,

shabby little volume of verse, dateless, placeless and without a publisher, drifted out of the west and accidentally reached Mr. Howells – who is always quick to see

and never reluctant to praise what is really good – that the young African-American poet was introduced to the larger audience which the importance of his work

deserved.

Only then did it become generally known that the author was black, that his parents were slaves who learned to read after they were free, and that he himself had

stood shoulder to shoulder with the heaviest laden of his race. He was educated in the public schools of his birthplace, Dayton, Ohio and was until recently an elevator

boy.

As these facts came out the significance of Mr. Dunbar’s poetry stood revealed, and it was recognized not only for its intrinsic worth, for its lyrical beauty and metrical

quality, which are quite enough to lift into prominence, but as the first authoritative utterance of the inner life of a race which had hitherto been dumb.

The little book thus voicing what had never been before spoken was privately printed and called “Majors and Minors,” the Majors being in English, and the Minors in

dialect, sometimes the dialect of the Middle-South negroes and sometimes of the Middle-South whites, and in the case of negro dialect reproduced with a perfection

that no white writer has attained.

These poems, covering a wide range of thought and feeling, have been gathered with a number of new poems into a much larger volume soon to be published by

Dodd, Mead & Co.

Mr. Howells has written an introduction to the new work (Lyrics of a Lowly Life), and in it he says:

“What struck me in reading Mr. Dunbar’s poetry was what had already struck his friends in Ohio and Indiana, in Kentucky and Illinois. They had felt as I felt, that

however gifted his race had proven in music, in oratory, in several other arts, here was the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate literature.

In my criticism of his book I had alleged Dumas in France, and had forgotten to allege the far greater Pushkin in Russia; but these were both mulattos, who might have

been supposed to derive their qualities from white blood vastly more artistic than ours, and who were the creatures of an environment more favorable to their literary

development.

So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African blood and American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically. It

seemed to me that this had come to its most modern consciousness in him, and that his brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American negro

objectively, and to have represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire

truthfulness.

I said a race which had come to this effect in any member of it had attained civilization in him, and I permitted myself the imaginative prophecy that the hostilities and

the prejudices which had so long constrained his race were destined to vanish in the arts; that these were to be the final proof that God had made of one blood all

nations of men.

I thought his merits positive and not comparative; and I held that if his black poems had been written by a white man I should not have found them less admirable. I

accepted them as an evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all.”

It is a curious fact that until the acceptance of his book Dunbar had never earned any money by his literary work. After high school he couldn’t find work so he had to

settle for the position of elevator boy at the Callahan building in downtown Dayton. He earned $4 per week. The few books he wrote and which gave him a reputation

were published at the expense of himself and his friends, and brought him no immediate profit.

His rise has been a hard struggle with discouraging conditions. When the acceptance of his new book of poems was announced it was accompanied by a sum of $400.

This amount was in the form of four crisp $100 bills of the new design. The poet had never been the possessor of so much money in his life, and its unexpected receipt

sent him into a state of ecstasy. His success, however, has not made any change for the worse in the simple and unaffected youth, who until recently guided the

destinies of an elevator.”

Dunbar developed pneumonia and died at the young age of 34 on February 9, 1906. The City Fathers of Dayton offered to bury Paul in Library Park stipulating that he

would be the only person interned there. His mother, wanting to rest by her son, declined and he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery adjacent to his friends the Wright

Brothers.”

The Paul Laurence Dunbar House in Dayton has been designated one of 31 National  Poetry Landmarks by the Academy of American Poets.

Laverne Sci, director of the Dunbar House State Memorial at 219 N. Paul Lawrence Dunbar St., said the selection puts Dunbar “in some wonderful company. I am

delighted at recognition for him that is both overdue and comes at a wonderful time.” (Dayton Daily News 08/05/2004)

Also see: Paul Lawrence Dunbar: The Wright Brothers Friend

Griffith Brewer, a British patent attorney, was a true friend of the Wright brothers and the staunchest supporter of Orville in his long fight with the Smithsonian Institution over their deceitful claim that Langley’s “Great Aerodrome” was the first machine capable of flight.

Brewer met Wilbur in 1908 when Wilbur was conducting flying exhibitions in Le Mans, France, near Paris. Brewer had heard of the Wrights in 1906 but was skeptical of their claims of flying. Although Brewer was involved in balloon racing, he didn’t believe that a flying machine was possible.

Here is Brewer’s vivid description of his first meeting with Wilbur:

“I arrived at Le Mans after a heavy night journey and walked down beside the field to the shed on the right side of the road. There, opposite the shed, out in the middle of the field, was the first machine, or rather the machine of 1908, with Wilbur Wright tuning it up.

“There was quite a crowd buzzing around at his work and as you know, a crowd of that kind is very disconcerting, so I had some compunction in adding to the crowd, and instead of going out to the crowd along side the machine I sat down by the shed and smoked my pipe.

“A mechanic came from the machine over to the shed to fetch a spanner, so I gave him my card to give to Wilbur Wright, and when he returned I saw Wilbur Wright look at it and he nodded across to me and then went on with his work.

“Time went on and there was no flight. Ultimately the machine was wheeled back to the shed. The crowd dispersed, they all went back to Le Mans, and I began to think I was forgotten. Sitting with my back to the shed (the machine had gone inside and Wilbur had gone inside) I wondered whether I should sit out there indefinitely. Then out came Wilbur Wright and said: ‘Now, Mr. Brewer, let’s go and have some dinner!’ We went across to Madame Pollet’s Inn and had a very nice simple dinner. We talked of all things American and I did not bother him with aviation. That was probably his first rest from the subject of flying since he left his home in Ohio many weeks before.

“We continued our talk on topics of mutual interest long into the evening, both keenly interested in America life and habits, and when we strolled back to the shed where Wilbur turned in for the night I said goodbye and felt I had known him for a long time.”

That was the beginning of a close friendship that lasted some 40 years. Brewer first visited the Wrights in their home in Dayton in 1910 and regularly visited them some 30 times afterwards over the next four years. He attended the dedication ceremony of the Wright’s relocated home and bicycle shop at Ford’s Greenfield village in 1936.

The Wrights found him a delightful visitor. His wit was subtle, the kind of humor the Wrights enjoyed.

While at Le Mans, Wilbur surprised Brewer with a short airplane ride, making him the first Englishman to experience the thrill of flight. He asked Wilbur to teach him to fly at a later time.

In June 1914, Brewer returned to Dayton for a three months visit to take flying instructions at Huffman Prairie and begin writing on a book on the history of aviation. On the way, he stopped at the Smithsonian Institution and was surprised to learn that Langley’s Great Aerodrome, that had twice failed to fly before the success of the Wrights, had been reassembled and was in Hammondsport, NY for new flight trials under the direction of Glenn Curtiss.

The Smithsonian and other Langley supporters were belittling the Wrights’ success by claiming that Langley would have succeeded if it were not for the failures of the catapult mechanism located on the top of a houseboat. If Curtis were successful in flying the reassembled machine, it would prove that the Aerodrome was capable of flying before the Wrights. The reputation of Langley, the director of the Smithsonian and designer of the Aerodrome would be salvaged.

The rebuilt Aerodrome did lift off Lake Keuka, New York on May 28, 1914 in a straight-line flight of 150 feet. After additional tests, it was restored to its 1903 configuration and returned to the Smithsonian for display as the first machine capable of flight.

Orville was outraged over the Smithsonian activity and asked Brewer to visit Hammondsport and find out what he could. Brewer could logically ask for a tour of the site as a representative of the British aeronautical community. Brewer, a shy person, said he felt like a detective going into hostile country.

Lorin also went to Hammondsport a year later but he was caught taking photographs and was forced to give them up to the Curtiss people. He was able to observe and confirm to Orville the many design changes made to the Aerodrome.

Brewer came away from his visit with photographs that proved that the Aerodrome had been significantly modified from its original configuration in 1903. Subsequently, he wrote a letter to the New York Times that was published June 22, 1914 that enumerated some of the changes.

World War I then intervened. The war ended the visitations from the Wrights for seven years.

The unbelievable aspect of this sorry episode is that the Smithsonian continued to assert that no significant design changes had been made to the machine.

On October 20 1921, the war now over, Brewer went back on the offense in support of the Wrights. He gave a lecture to Royal Society of the Arts that exposed what was actually taking place, proving beyond reasonable doubt that the 1914 tests had not demonstrated that the 1903 Aerodrome was capable of flight. The paper he presented was titled, “The Langley Machine and the Hammondsport Trials.” (Orville had supplied Brewer with a list of the serious alterations made to the Aerodrome). The paper caused a great furore among the aeronautical community in Great Britain and the United States, many of who had accepted the claims of the Smithsonian at face value.

But the Smithsonian was not backing down from its claim. Some were still supporting it. The Literary Digest referred to Langley as the “Discoverer of the Air.” The French Journal-L’Aerophile congratulated Walcott, the director of the Smithsonian Institution on “doing posthumous justice” to a great pioneer.

Orville began to worry that if something was not done soon, the Smithsonian version of events would make it into the history books.

In November 1923, Brewer had an idea for a new approach. He wrote a letter to Orville that would initiate a sequence of events that would ultimately expose the Smithsonian’s treachery and restore the 1903 Flyer to its honored position of being the first airplane to fly.

In his letter, Brewer suggested that the Science Museum at South Kensington would be glad to have an opportunity of taking care of and exhibiting the first machine to fly.

Orville responded, “If I were to receive a proposition from the officers of the Kensington Museum offering to provide our 1903 machine a permanent home in the Museum, I would accept the offer, with the understanding, however, that I would have the right to withdraw it at any time after five years, if some suitable place for its exhibition in America should present itself.”

In April 1925, Orville decided that he would send the 1903 Flyer to the Science Museum. The Dayton Journal was the first to publicly announce the decision in a headline, “London Museum may get first Wright aeroplane.”

A number of people asked him to reconsider. He responded to their pleas by saying, “I believe that my course in sending our Kitty Hawk machine to a foreign museum is the only way of correcting the history of the flying machine, which by false and misleading statements has been perverted by the Smithsonian Institution.”

Orville, Mabel Beck, and Jim Jacobs reassembled the Flyer in Orville’s laboratory in Dayton to guarantee that it would appear in its original form. They performed some restoration work on the woodwork and completely recovered the plane’s fabric. They placed the machine in crates along with assembly instructions. The crates were loaded on the ship, Minnewasku, and it sailed to England on February 11, 1928.

The Flyer would not return to America until 20 years later.

On March 23, 1928, the British public was able to see the Flyer. Some 10 million people saw the Flyer while it was on display.

Orville’s decision to send the Flyer to London was a smart political decision because he knew that as long as the Flyer remained in England it would be a constant reminder to Americans of the incorrect story. This gave him a powerful bargaining chip to use with the Smithsonian.

In 1937 he wrote in his will that the flyer would stay in England until he and only he requested its return. And he wouldn’t request its return unless the Smithsonian acknowledged that the Wright plane was the first to fly.

During WW II the museum packed and stored the Flyer in the basement of the museum and later, when bombing intensified, moved it to a quarry in the West Country, some 100 feet below ground.

Several attempts were made to solve the controversy including appointing a committee headed by Charles Lindbergh to talk to Orville, but Orville was sticking to his demands.

Orville knew eventually that the political pressure would build. A congressional hearing was in the works. Also the current director of the Smithsonian had not been involved in the controversy so was not encumbered with the past. The time was ripe to reopen negotiations.

Through the efforts of Brewer and Fred Kelly, the Wrights biographer, the Smithsonian controversy was finally resolved. In compliance with one of the principle conditions of resolution, the Smithsonian admitted to their deception by publishing an article in one of their official technical magazines that enumerated the many changes that they had made in the Aerodrome tested in Hammondsport.

Orville was pleased that his demands had been satisfied. On December 8, 1943, he wrote to Colonel Mackintosh, director of the Science Museum asking for return of the Flyer when it could be transported safely.

He wrote, “I appreciate the great trouble the plane has been to the Museum under war conditions, and I am grateful for the unusual care the Museum has taken for the plane’s safety.”

Orville wanted historical accuracy. He continued his letter:

It has been suggested that I permit the plane to be retained and again be exhibited in the Museum for six months after the war is over while a copy is being made. I think this will be agreeable to me. But before the construction of a copy is started, I would suggest that another set of drawings made by the Museum in 1928 be sent to me for correction …. I have complete and accurate drawings of the engine and shall be glad to furnish them if you decide to make a replica …. I shall do whatever I can in helping you to get an accurate copy of the plane and motor.”

Tragically, Orville died January 30, 1948 before the priceless national treasure arrived in America later in the year. A month later Griffith Brewer also died.

Brewer was devoted to ensuring that the Wrights received the recognition that they deserved. He lectured many times on their behalf and never gave up.

The Wrights in turn had a great feeling of gratitude for all their faithful friend had done on their behalf.

Reference: Wright Reminiscences, compiled by Ivonette Wright Miller