The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

One fact that kept the earlier flights relatively inconspicuous was that much of the time the plane was within 10 or 15 feet of the ground. Only occasionally was it up as high as 50 feet. There were no flights beyond the field itself, because if necessary to make a forced landing elsewhere, dragging the machine back to its shed might not have been easy.

The Wrights had aimed at first to avoid being in the air when an interurban car was passing. But that precaution soon proved to be unnecessary. Few people ever paid any attention to the flights. One day, though, the general manager of the interurban line was on a passing car when the plane was in the air and he ordered the car stopped. He and the chief engineer of the line, who was with him, got off and stayed a while to look at the incredible sight.

Across the Springfield pike from the field lived the Beard family, tenants on the Torrence Huffman farm. Whenever the plane landed abruptly Mrs. Beard was likely to dash across the road with a bottle of arnica, feeling sure it would be needed, as sometimes it was. But there were few other visitors.

Two somewhat mysterious visitors did come, however. The Wrights saw two men wandering about near-by fields during most of one day and thought they must be hunters, though there was not much game thereabouts. Again the next day the two strangers were seen, and finally they came across the field to where the Wrights were adjusting their machine. One of them carried a camera. They asked if visitors were permitted.

“Yes, only we’d rather you didn’t take any pictures,” one of the brothers courteously replied.

The man with the camera set it down off to one side, twenty feet away, as if to make it plain that he was not trying to sneak any shots. Then he inquired if it was all right to look into the shed. The brothers told him to make himself right at home. Was he a newspaperman? No, he said, he was not a newspaperman, though he sometimes did writing for publication. That was as near as he came to introducing himself. After the callers had gone, Charlie Taylor, the Wrights’ mechanic, said: “That fellow’s no writer. At least he’s no ordinary writer. When he looked at the different parts of the machine he called them all by their right names.”

Later the Wrights learned the identity of the visitor. Orville chanced to see a picture of him in a New York newspaper. His identity was confirmed some time afterward when he and Orville were formally introduced to each other—though neither referred to their previous meeting. The man had been chief engineer for Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institution.

Toward the end of September, the Wrights were able greatly to increase their distances. On September 26, there was an uninterrupted flight of 11⅛ miles in 18 minutes and 9 seconds; and on September 29, one of 12 miles in 19 minutes 55 seconds. Then, on October 3, there was a new record of 15¼ miles in 25 minutes 5 seconds; another, on October 4, of 20¾ miles in 33 minutes 17 seconds; and finally, on October 5, 24⅕ miles in 38 minutes 3 seconds.

The flights of October 3 and 4 would have been longer except that certain bearings had become overheated. By October 5 the inventors had added more grease cups where needed and also installed a larger gas tank. But the tank was not full when that final test began and the flight ended because the fuel was exhausted. It was the intention of the Wrights to make one more test and put the record at more than an hour; but now for the first time the miracle of flight actually began to attract more spectators and the brothers decided it might be prudent to quit for the season before details of the machine’s construction became public knowledge. However, there was one more short flight—just one circle of the field—on October 16.

After the close of the 1905 experiments, a test of the engine showed that it produced more power than when first put into use. This gain was attributed to the increased smoothness of the cylinders and pistons produced by wear.