In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or the entirely real possibility that at some point, like Otto Lilienthal, they could be killed.
In an article in Cosmopolitan magazine several years before Lilienthal’s death, Samuel Langley had emphasized that those willing to attempt flight ought to be granted the kind of attention and concern customarily bestowed on those who risk their lives for a useful purpose. It was a risk, however, from which both Langley and Octave Chanute had excused themselves, because of age.
All the same, and importantly, the times were alive with invention, technical innovations, new ideas of every kind. George Eastman had introduced the “Kodak” box camera; Isaac Merritt Singer, the first electric sewing machine; the Otis Company had installed the world’s first elevator in a New York office building; the first safety razor, the first mousetrap, the first motor cars built in America—all in the dozen years since Orville started his print shop and Wilbur emerged from his spell of self-imposed isolation.
Then, too, there was the ever-present atmosphere of a city in which inventing and making things were central to the way of life. At about this time, just prior to the turn of the century, according to the U.S. Patent Office, Dayton ranked first in the country relative to population in the creation of new patents. The large factories and mills of Dayton kept growing larger, producing railroad cars, cash registers, sewing machines, and gun barrels. (The Davis Sewing Machine Company, as one example, was turning out four hundred sewing machines a day in a factory fully a mile in length.) In addition were the hundreds of small shops and workrooms making horse collars, corsets, soap, shirts, brooms, carriage wheels, rakes, saws, cardboard boxes, beer kegs, and overalls, not to say bicycles.
In his letter to the Smithsonian, Wilbur had made mention of his interest in birds. To achieve human flight, he had written, was “only a question of knowledge and skill in all acrobatic feats,” and birds were “the most perfectly trained gymnasts in the world . . . specially well fitted for their work.”
Among the material the Smithsonian provided him was an English translation of a book titled L’Empire de l’Air, published in Paris in 1881. It had been written by a French farmer, poet, and student of flight, Louis Pierre Mouillard. Nothing Wilbur had yet read so affected him. He would long consider it “one of the most remarkable pieces of aeronautical literature” ever published. For Wilbur, flight had become a “cause,” and Mouillard, one of the great “missionaries” of the cause, “like a prophet crying in the wilderness, exhorting the world to repent of its unbelief in the possibility of human flight.”
At the start of his Empire of the Air, Mouillard gave fair warning that one could be entirely overtaken by the thought that the problem of flight could be solved by man. “When once this idea has invaded the brain, it possesses it exclusively.”
That said, Mouillard moved on to the miracle of flying creatures, writing with unabashed evangelical fervor.
Oh, blind humanity! Open thine eyes and thou shalt see millions of birds and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. All these creatures are whirling through the air without the slightest float [support]; many of them are gliding therein, without losing height, hour after hour, on pulseless wings without fatigue; and after beholding this demonstration given by the source of all knowledge, thou wilt acknowledge that aviation is the path to be followed. . . .
By merely observing with close attention how the winged tribes perform their feats, by carefully reflecting on what we have seen, and, above all, by striving correctly to understand the modus operandi of what we do see, we are sure not to wander far from the path, which leads to eventual success.
It was only necessary to have “good eyes,” and know how to keep in sight, with telescope or field glasses, a bird going at full speed, but still more “to know what to look at.”
Wilbur had taken up bird-watching on a rugged stretch along the banks of the Miami River south of town called the Pinnacles. On Sundays he would ride off on his bicycle to spend considerable time there observing as Mouillard preached.
Mouillard had spent much of his life in Egypt and Algeria, where he came to love especially the great soaring vultures of Africa. He had observed them by the thousands, yet however often he saw one fly high overhead, he could not help following it with a feeling of wonderment.
He knows how to rise, how to float . . . to sail upon the wind without effort . . . he sails and spends no force . . . he uses the wind, instead of his muscles.
This, Mouillard said, was the way of flight that would “lead men to navigate the immensity of space.”
III.