The Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk

Most ages do not begin with a thunderclap. They begin with a thin wooden spar lifting clear of a launching-rail in a cold wind, watched by five men who have never seen such a thing before and will struggle, afterwards, to explain what they saw. The age of flight is not opened by a government, a soldier, or a millionaire. It is opened by two bicycle-mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, who have read everything written on the subject and trusted almost none of it.

THE SHOP ON WEST THIRD STREET

Orville Wright is thirty-two, Wilbur thirty-six. They keep a shop at 1127 West Third Street in Dayton, where they build and repair bicycles and, in the back room, set type and print. Their father, Bishop Milton Wright of the United Brethren in Christ, brought home a toy helicopter once, a thing of cork and bamboo and twisted rubber, and the brothers, small then, watched it climb to the ceiling and never quite let it go. They are the descendants of one Captain Daniel Wright, a Puritan who crossed from England to Massachusetts in 1657; a Welsh-and-English line, frugal, devout, methodical. Neither brother finished high school. Both can calculate lift coefficients in their heads.

For four years they have come south every autumn to a strip of dune-grass and sand the locals call Kill Devil Hills, four miles from the fishing-village of Kitty Hawk, between the Atlantic and the Albemarle Sound. They have flown gliders here in 1900, 1901, 1902, each year carrying back the measurements that have shown them, item by item, that the published tables of Lilienthal and Langley are wrong. They have built their own wind-tunnel in the back of the bicycle shop and rewritten the numbers. By the autumn of 1903 they have, in a wooden shed on the sand, a powered machine of their own design: forty feet and four inches of wingspan, two pusher-propellers driven by chains, a four-cylinder engine of twelve horsepower built by their shopman Charles Taylor because no manufacturer would build them one to specification. Six hundred and five pounds, all told. They call it, in the patient way of men who name a thing for what it is, the Flyer.

THE COLD MORNING

Thursday, the seventeenth of December 1903. The puddles around the camp are skinned with ice. A north wind comes in off the Atlantic at twenty-seven miles an hour, which is more than they would have chosen and less than they can refuse: every day of December eaten by weather is a day closer to the season they cannot work in. At ten o'clock they raise a signal-flag on the shed to call the men down from the Kill Devil Hills life-saving station. John T. Daniels comes, and Will Dough, and Adam Etheridge; William Brinkley of Manteo, in the village on business; and Johnny Moore, sixteen, a local boy who has wandered up to watch. Five witnesses. Orville sets the Wright-supplied glass-plate camera on a tripod, aims it at the end of the launching-rail, and shows Daniels, who has never operated a camera in his life, the bulb to squeeze when the machine leaves the rail.

Earlier in the week Wilbur had drawn the longer straw and tried first. On the fourteenth he lifted the Flyer perhaps three feet off the sand, over-corrected the elevator, and pancaked back. No serious damage. The skids took it. They re-rigged. Today, by the turn-and-turn-about they have agreed between them, it is Orville's flight. He lies down across the lower wing on his belly, hips in the cradle that warps the wings for roll, left hand on the elevator lever that controls pitch. The engine is running at full throttle, held on the rail by a single restraining wire. The propellers hammer the cold air behind him.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

Everything that the brothers have ever done converges in the next breath. They have not bet on inspiration. They have bet on the table of lift coefficients corrected in their own hand, on the propellers they computed from first principles when they realised no one had, on the engine block cast by Taylor in the back of a bicycle shop, on the canard elevator out in front because a horizontal tail would not give them the authority they needed in pitch. A twenty-seven-mile-an-hour headwind on the rail. A ground-roll of about eight miles an hour expected. Airspeed of roughly thirty-five over the wing at release. The numbers are tight; the numbers are theirs.

He looks once down the sixty-foot rail. He does not think of glory; he thinks of the cradle under his hips and the lever under his left hand, of the warp-wires running out to the wingtips, of the engine note that must hold. There is no man living who has done what he is about to do, and so there is no advice. Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas, the brothers will wire their father that evening from Kitty Hawk, with the times rounded and a typist's error stretching the fifty-nine seconds to fifty-seven; but that is a sentence for the evening, when the thing is done and the wire-clerk's pencil scratches it onto the form. Now there is only the rail, and the wind, and his brother's hand on the right wingtip to steady the machine as it begins to move.

He releases the wire at ten-thirty-five. The Flyer goes forward against the gale. Wilbur runs alongside the right wingtip and lets go. The machine lifts at the end of the rail. It climbs to perhaps ten feet, dips, climbs again; Orville is fighting the elevator, which is too sensitive, hunting the air; Daniels at the camera, scarcely knowing what he does, squeezes the bulb at the instant the skids clear the sand. The shutter falls. The plate is exposed. The Flyer flies for twelve seconds and a hundred and twenty feet of ground, and sets down in the soft sand.

TURN AND TURN ABOUT

They walk it back to the rail. At eleven-twenty Wilbur takes the second flight, a hundred and seventy-five feet. At eleven-forty Orville takes the third, about two hundred feet. At noon Wilbur lies down again and the Flyer goes out across the sand and keeps going: fifty-nine seconds in the air, eight hundred and fifty-two feet over the ground, the elevator pitching the machine up and down in waves as he hunts the trim. He brings it down hard at the end. The forward elevator struts crack. They carry it back to the camp and set it on the sand to begin repairs.

A gust comes across the dunes. It catches the Flyer and rolls it over end-over-end across the sand, tearing the fabric, snapping the struts, breaking the engine bed. Daniels, trying to hold a wingtip, is dragged through the wreckage and comes out bruised, with a story he will tell for the rest of his life. The Wright Flyer of 1903 will never fly again. It has flown four times in a single morning, and it has been enough.

THE TELEGRAM, AND THE SILENCE AFTER

They walk the four miles to the Kitty Hawk weather station and wire Bishop Wright in Dayton. The telegraph operator at Norfolk, where the message is relayed, offers the news to a friend at the Virginian-Pilot; the paper next morning prints a garbled account of a three-mile flight over the dunes, and the Associated Press declines to pick it up. In Washington, the Smithsonian's Samuel Pierpont Langley, whose government-funded Aerodrome has pitched twice into the Potomac that same month, will read no telegram from Kitty Hawk and hear no whisper of it for months. The age has turned, and almost no one has noticed. The brothers eat their supper in the shed, bank the stove, and write up the day's numbers in pencil in a notebook. They have, between them, an exact and unsentimental knowledge of what they have done. They do not need a newspaper to confirm it.

THE LONG AFTERWARDS

Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever at the family home on Hawthorn Street in Dayton on the thirtieth of May 1912, aged forty-five, with his patents litigated and his lungs worn thin from the courtroom and the road. Orville survived him by thirty-six years, retiring early from the company, sitting on aeronautical boards, growing into the unsmiling elder statesman of an industry that had outrun him. He died of a heart attack on the thirtieth of January 1948, in his seventy-seventh year, on the way home to Hawthorn Hill. The Flyer itself he rebuilt in his own workshop in the 1920s, and quarrelled with the Smithsonian over its proper attribution, and sent it across the Atlantic on loan to the Science Museum in London in 1928, where it stayed through the war. It came home at last to Washington on the seventeenth of December 1948, the forty-fifth anniversary of the flights and ten months after Orville's death, and hangs there still in the National Air and Space Museum, the most visited object in the building.

THE BRONZE ON THE SAND

An age is opened, in the end, not by the men who plan to open it, but by the men who have measured the air honestly and trusted their own arithmetic. The dunes at Kill Devil Hills have shifted in the century since; the sand will not stay where the wind does not want it. In 1932 the United States set the place down as the Wright Brothers National Memorial. A granite obelisk stands on the highest of the dunes, and a row of small bronze markers on the flat below shows where the launching-rail began and where each of the four flights of that Thursday morning ended on the sand.