The Wrong Wright Story: The Myth Continues

A Review of the 2022 Smithsonian book “Flight”

 

 

During the past five years this blog has occasionally carried critical reviews of Smithsonian books about the Wright brothers. These books, written by nontechnical historians, contain dozens of serious omissions and errors. Unfortunately, they have been used as source material by countless other authors and spokespersons. Consequently, largely false descriptions of the Wrights’ work have become standard fare worldwide.

To my knowledge, the only book that totally agrees with the Wright’s actual records is The WRight Story. It’s the only one researched and written by an airplane design and performance engineer. It includes many hundreds of quotes of, and references to, the Wrights’ words gleaned from the study of over a thousand of their articles, test notes, patents, letters, equipment, and other records in the Library of Congress, Franklin Institute, Wright State University, and elsewhere.

It was hoped that with the retirement of a few of the “old guard” of senior staff and spokespersons at the National Air and Space Museum, some original research would occur there and a more correct description of the Wright Brothers’ development of their airplane would emerge under the Smithsonian’s banner.

The 2022 edition of Flight: The Complete History of Aviation by R. G. Grant indicates that this has not happened. Grant is another historian with no technical or scientific credentials, but with a number of books about history to his credit. In other words, his aviation credentials are about the same as David McCullough’s were. Unfortunately the accuracy of Grant’s discussion of the Wrights is little better. Nonetheless, the latest edition, published by Penguin/Random House, proudly carries the endorsement of the Smithsonian across the top of the cover.

In yet another effort to establish “truthinaviationhistory,” the errors in Flight’s account of the Wright brothers’ work are discussed here. No effort was made to determine how many errors might exist in the remainder of the book.

First, a very important general comment is warranted. Nowhere in the eight pages Grant devotes to the Wrights is any credit given to Octave Chanute, Dr. George Spratt, or Edward Huffaker for any of the generous and vital assistance they gave the Wrights, both in letters and in person at Kitty Hawk. Although this was enumerated in this blog’s September, 2021 critique of Visions of a Flying Machine, the importance of their guidance to the Wright brothers warrants repeating here.

 

l to r: Chanute, Huffaker, O. Wright, W. Wright (Spratt is the photographer)

They provided the Wrights with

• Chanute’s 1894 book which, from 1899 on, became the basis for the Wrights’ study of earlier works in aeronautics.
• The realization that the biggest problem remaining to be solved was how to control an aircraft’s motions.
• The need to master control with gliders before adding power.
• Trussed biplane wing construction.
• The idea of first testing gliders unmanned with tethering lines.
• The best gliding areas were the Georgia and Carolina coasts.
• Huffaker and Spratt alerting the Wrights to the reversal of movement of a cambered wing’s center of lift.
• The need for the Wrights to perform tests with a wind tunnel in order to correct their wing shapes.
• Providing the Wrights with photos of wind tunnel designs and the basic design of the measuring apparatus for their tunnel.
• A summary of the 1885 report by Sydney Hollands showing that a propeller should be twisted and also cambered like a wing. (The Wrights ignored his advice about tapering blades.)
• The design of a falling weight catapult enabling flight testing near Dayton and the Wrights’ flying for the next seven years.

Smithsonian authors have written that Chanute was of little to no help to the Wrights, even implying he was more trouble than he was worth to them. They used the omission of these documented facts to build the myth of the Wrights’ “genius” having enabled them to simply envision correct aerodynamic flows and the solutions to all of the problems they encountered. Nevertheless, the facts listed above are all documented with referenced first-hand proofs in The WRight Story.

Obviously, without these critical and timely inputs, the Wrights may well not have succeeded. If they somehow did, it would have taken them far longer, probably denying them the reputation of being the first to accomplish powered manned flight.

On his page 24, Grant writes “One of the Wrights’ objectives in the 1901 flights was to achieve controlled banked turns.” This is a clear indication that he used earlier Smithsonian publications for references rather than examining original Wright material. To make matters worse, he even misinterpreted those books.

Actually, the 1901 vehicle had no rudder whatsoever, making it impossible “to achieve smooth banked turns.” Even when they added a rudder in 1902 it was to enable the aircraft to continue flying straight when wing warping was used to correct roll. That’s why they connected the two controls. The Wrights’ patent drafted in 1902 make that perfectly clear on page one, lines 16-30 and lines 55-61, and page four, lines 16-45. They didn’t even try to make turns until 1904 at Huffman Prairie, and it took them two years and numerous crashes and redesigns to accomplish it then.

So when the author says, further down on page 24, that the Wrights discovered the wing-warp-induced yaw problem when they attempted turns, he is absolutely wrong, just like the previous Smithsonian authors and all others that have parroted that statement since.

Further down on page 24 he contradicts one of the previous points about the Chanute group’s contributions by writing as though the Wrights came up with the idea of a wind tunnel and its design on their own. But he’s in good company since all previous Smithsonian publications made the same misleading omission.

On page 25 he claims that the Wrights’ bicycle tests in 1902 showed them that the airfoil data from Otto Lilienthal that they used were wrong. Here he manages to make two errors in one sentence. First, the Wrights used the bicycle tests to correct the air density coefficient, not to determine actual airfoil lift data. Any lift data obtained from the bicycle tests was inconclusive.  Also, near the end of their wind tunnel testing Wilbur wrote, “for a surface like that described in his [Lilienthal’s] book [his lift coefficient] table is probably as near correct as it is possible.” Later he admitted “It is very evident….that a table based on one aspect [ratio] and [wing section] profile is worthless for a surface of different aspect and curvature. This no doubt explains why we have had so much trouble figuring all our machines from Lilienthal’s table.” Here the Wrights clearly admitted that their lifting problems in 1900 and 1901 were due to their own errors and not Lilienthal’s.

However in making this error Grant falls in line with previous Smithsonian authors who all erroneously claimed Lilienthal’s lift data were wrong and the cause of the Wrights’ trouble. So this falsehood lives on in almost every accounting of the Wrights’ work.

To his credit, Grant points out on page 26 that a 30-mph headwind would “help the Wright Flyer get off of the ground.” I have never seen that pointed out anywhere other than in articles in this blog and in The WRight Story. Actually, without the 25-knot headwind there would have been absolutely no flying by the Wrights in 1903. In fact, Wright aircraft were not capable of taking off without a strong headwind or the catapult (shown to them by Chanute) until 1910. This is important since Orville repeatedly stressed in every written statement that the 1903 Flyer “took off under its own power alone.” In fact, the headwind supplied over 90% of the necessary takeoff airspeed of the Flyer. It’s even more sobering to realize that all airplanes created by others could indeed “take off under their own power alone” without significant headwinds years before Wright airplanes could.

Further on page 26 he quotes the last flight on December 17^th as covering 852 feet in 59 seconds as reported by the Wrights. However the September 2002 issue of World War I Aeronautics included Carroll Gray’s analysis of the photo that Orville Wright labeled as the end of the “fourth flight.” Gray determined the aircraft to be only 250 feet from the end of the launch rail. The November 2019 posting of this blog presented a mensuration by this intelligence analyst of the same photo using professional techniques which determined it to be 277 feet from the launch rail. Two other careful analyses of the photo using totally different methodologies yielded numbers between those two distances.

Two witnesses’ descriptions (made decades later) off the flights of 1903 were of no help in verifying the Wrights’ distance claim. One offered no distance, and the other said it went "a half mile."

On page 27 Grant says the 1903 aircraft was fitted with two vertical tails which “they hoped would prevent the machine from going out of control in banked turns.” Again, the Wrights never attempted to make turns in 1903. The dual rudders were to perform the same function that the single moveable rudder performed on the 1902 glider. That was to enable the aircraft to correct an inadvertent roll without losing its heading or spinning into the ground.

The original fixed vertical stabilizers of 1902 didn’t work. The moveable rudders did keep the wing warping from changing the vehicle’s heading, but they were not given enough movement to swing it into a turn. This was fine for the Wrights who were never trying to turn at Kitty Hawk. They finally had to disconnect the rudders from wing warping in 1905 so they could turn them a little to correct warp induced heading changes, or turn them more to swing the aircraft into a turn and back out to level flight.

Further along on page 27 Grant says the Wrights’ “propeller design….forced the brothers to tackle…theoretical physics and math.” It’s not clear what “theoretical physics” he had in mind. Having designed a propeller himself in 1960, this author knows of no theoretical physics being involved. Merely the aerodynamics of a cambered wing and the mathematics of twisting the blades to achieve the proper angles of attack as the blades progressed outward from the hub, this according to the cruise airspeed, rpm at cruise power, and the acceleration of the incoming air.

Page 28 shows a photo of one of the Wrights’ falling weight catapults, but as always with a Smithsonian product, absolutely no credit is given to Octave Chanute for giving the concept, design, and photos to the Wrights in a letter of July 29^th, 1902. He got the design from Albert Merrill, a member of the Boston Gliding Society. But as with so many things the Wrights got from Chanute and his friends, Smithsonian products allow the readers to assume the catapult was merely another product of the Wrights’ “genius”.

Later, on the same page, he writes “Between 1903 and 1908 the Wrights developed their original Flyer into a more robust and powerful machine, without making any fundamental changes to its configuration or control systems.” Actually, that development occurred in 1904 and 1905 during testing at Huffman Prairie just east of Dayton, Ohio. The 1908 Flyers demonstrated at Ft Myer and Europe were essentially identical to the October, 1905 Flier. In fact, the 1908 vehicle tested at Kitty Hawk before public demonstrations was actually the 1905 machine with a second seat and new engine.

Although there were numerous changes to the airframe during testing in 1904 and ’05, it’s true that the Wrights made no fundamental changes to the configuration. While the vehicle still had instabilities, the Wrights wanted to show the world that their 1903 machine was indeed a valid design deserving of its reputation as the first manned, powered, “controlled” airplane.

They also knew numerous competitors were developing airplanes, and they desperately wanted to capitalize financially on their invention and reputation before any superior competition became available. That’s almost certainly why they never took the time to develop a better stable configuration. Unfortunately that decision was to cost them dearly within a few years.

But it’s not true that no fundamental changes were made to the control systems. They had to add another control separating the rudder from the warping control in order to successfully both control roll and accomplish turns in 1905. This may seem like a minor thing to Grant, but the Wrights certainly didn’t see it that way. The connected controls were the major feature of their 1906 patent and led to the patent battles they had with others in the U.S. and Europe.

 

The 1906 patent

They vigorously defended the use of a rudder with roll controls even though they already had disconnected it from wing warping. They sued foreigners that came to America to make flight demonstrations, and tried to sue some of them in their own countries. They vigorously sued Glenn Curtiss claiming he used his separate rudders when he banked to turn. In fact, they even tried to sue the U.S. Army for buying Curtiss airplanes. 

Some believe the Wrights were responsible for suppressing not only aircraft manufacturing in the United States, but also aviation research and progress of all kinds since there was no market or support for aviation research in academia or elsewhere in America due to the litigations. There is no question that at the start of World War One, while the major European countries each had hundreds of militarily capable airplanes, the United States had but a handful of aircraft incapable of combat. The U.S. Government actually had to force a halt to these litigations in order to get wartime aviation development and manufacture going.

So although Grant and the Smithsonian may think the Wrights’ changes to their controls were not significant, they actually sued much of the aviation world and crippled the aviation industry in their own home country over the very system they abandoned.

On page 30 he makes another statement that the Smithsonian, and indeed all writers and spokesmen believe must be correct; that the Wrights only contacted foreign governments about aircraft sales after being rejected by the U.S. government. Records of the Wrights’ correspondence shows that on the 18^th of January, 1905 Wilbur wrote a letter to the Dayton area Congressional Representative for forwarding through the President to the U.S. War Department proposing the sale of Wright aircraft to the U.S. military. But the records also show that over a week before that he sent a letter to his British army contact proposing the same thing. Later that year he contacted the French government before negotiations with the U.S. were completely over.

Orville Wright may well have been responsible for generating the myth of their not contacting foreign governments until after rejection by the U.S. In any case, no one seems willing to take the chance of finding out the truth and saying so.

Finally Grant closes the section on the Wrights by writing that Glenn Curtiss was the first to do a public demonstration of an airplane in the United States, and that by 1914 he was the leading producer of aircraft in the U.S. This true statement quietly slipped in at the end of the segment on the Wrights has tremendous significance to the whole Wright story and begs further discussion. 

 

Glenn Curtiss did the first public demonstration of airplane flight

If they were the first, and possessors of such inventive genius and such a burning desire to cash in on their invention, and having shocked the world with their exceptional capability in 1908, why did they fall behind their competition so quickly? No doubt Wilbur’s death in 1912 slowed progress. Maybe they got bogged down in legal battles. Or was it some mistake early on, like a penchant for isolation and secrecy, or their refusal to change an unstable configuration? Crashes and deaths gave their airplanes the reputation of being dangerous. Perhaps it was insufficient original research on cambered wing characteristics that led to their adoption of the tricky canard pitch control.

Any one of these could have been a setback. But more likely their lack of greater commercial success was a combination of a number of these reasons. Although Wilbur died an early death before their company’s failure, Orville went on another 36 years to die a multi-millionaire having flown on a four-engined, pressurized, commercial airliner and having witnessed the advent of the jet age and supersonic flight.

Conclusion

The Smithsonian myth of the Wrights’ ability to solve all the problems of manned powered flight with only their own innate genius is alive and well. But it’s a shame that such a respected citizen-supported institution having the reputation of a world class recorder of technological history insists on ignoring one of their biggest missteps. Even such a respected organization as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics has apparently failed to recognize and acknowledge that the historical record of the origin of the science they represent is largely incorrect.

Ironically, the Wright brothers’ story, as it really exists, is worthy of respect and admiration. Their combination of determination, resourcefulness, largely self-taught research and mathematical abilities, excellent craftsmanship, and cautious bravery was exceptional. And their ability to constantly view and analyze their aircraft as complete systems of interacting structure, aerodynamics, propulsion, and control schemes is what led them to the success they achieved.

Nevertheless, many of us who have based our professional careers on the wealth of aviation science available a century later would like to know exactly how those two, who were key to starting the aviation industry, achieved successful results before most all of that knowledge was available. That’s actually why we persist to find and tell the truthinaviationhistory.

The Wrong Wright Story Series #5: Flying Machines on Film

The Wrong Wright Story Series #5:  

Flying Machines on Film 

By Joe Bullmer 

This is the last installment in this series of critical reviews of leading publications concerning the Wright brothers’ creation of the airplane switches from books to video productions.

 

It features what is perhaps the most prominent documentary on the subject, the centennial 2003 production by PBS, NOVA of WGBH, Boston titled The Wright Brothers' Flying Machine. Major funding was provided by the Park Foundation, Sprint, Microsoft, and the National Science Foundation, although the NSF wisely attached a disclaimer regarding the production’s content.

Throughout this discussion, echoes of the same errors found in the Smithsonian books previously addressed are evident. Consequently, although many will be mentioned here, they will generally not be covered in as much detail in this article. More information on what is true can be found in previous articles in this series, and in complete detail in this author’s book The WRight Story. It becomes obvious that the Smithsonian’s falsehoods have infected history and the minds of nearly all those interested in early aviation.

NOVA’s The Wright Brother’s Flying Machine also features Ken Hyde, proprietor of The Wright Experience at Warrenton, Virginia. With the help of Rick Young, Greg Cone, and many others, Hyde recreated Wright gliders, a 1903 “Flyer", and the 1910 Model B featured in the video. Also featured in the video are Tom Crouch, the Curator of Aeronautics of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and John Anderson, its Aerodynamics Curator. Crouch appears in a couple dozen brief clips and Anderson in a half dozen.

Dr. Tom Crouch, PhD
Wright State University, Dayton, OH

 

Dr. John Anderson,
Aerodynamics Curator, NASM

 

The PBS centennial video begins discussion of the Wrights’ work by saying that the U.S. Weather Bureau suggested Kitty Hawk as appropriate for their tests. In fact, Octave Chanute suggested the Carolina coasts to the Wrights in the first place, and then, upon the Wrights’ request, the weather bureau provided weather records of these sites. This is the first in what will become a familiar litany of omissions and errors. 

The documentary launches off into technical matters by showing an exaggerated thick Clark-Y type airfoil with a flat bottom and hugely arched top, and mentioning the familiar sped-up flow across the top lowering its pressure and thus creating lift. This is a particularly ironic way to begin the documentary since the Wrights had no idea that this is how cambered wings create lift. They thought it was due to air smashing into the bottom of a thin cambered wing set at an angle to the airstream and pushing it up, just like the way water supports a skier. They even gave this incorrect explanation for lift in their first patent. Their correspondence reveals that the Wrights still believed this at least into 1906.

Right off the bat, Crouch authoritatively but erroneously states that the Wrights, seeing that Lilienthal’s gliders and Langley’s models flew so well, used their wing shapes as “the basis” for the wing shapes of their 1900 and ’01 glider wings. However in his 1901 speech to the Western Society of Engineers, Wilbur made it absolutely clear that they intentionally did not use Lilienthal’s arc-shaped wings. They also used only half his aspect ratio. A cursory glance at photos clearly shows the differences.

Unfortunately, NOVA falls for Crouch’s assertion, and shows Lilienthal’s circular wing curvatures with maximum cambers at their mid points. But soon thereafter, they clearly show the early glider recreations, carefully and accurately made from excellent photos, having short flat wings with only a very little camber right at the leading edges.

Next, Anderson says the Wrights “made the courageous decision” not to use Lilienthal’s data. This is followed by Crouch claiming that they couldn’t just “keep building gliders” and instead “used a much smarter approach” by deciding to build a wind tunnel. He goes on saying that building the tunnels themselves was fairly simple, but the measuring balances “illustrate the Wrights’ genius”. NOVA puts icing on the cake by claiming that “the balances are one of the most important experimental devices in the history of technology.”

In one minute, this trifecta of screw-ups illustrates how Smithsonian falsehoods have infected subsequent historians. It seems that rather than doing their own research, newcomers just search their vocabularies for unique ways of telling the same tales.

As stated in previous reviews, the Wrights made absolutely no mention of a wind tunnel until Chanute and his cohorts discussed the subject with them during the summer of 1901 at Kitty Hawk. They showed the Wrights photos of wind tunnels, straightening vanes, and the balance scheme for measuring lift vs drag of a wing section. (Of course, a straight smooth flow of air and a device to measure forces on test items are the two primary elements of any wind tunnel.) Armed with this information, the Wrights then built a tunnel at their first opportunity upon their return to Dayton.

The Smithsonian’s errors continue with Crouch reiterating that Lilienthal’s wing shapes were the basis for the Wrights’ 1900 and ’01 wings. The NOVA narrator immediately follows with the “Wrights built their first wings with the same cross sections that Lilienthal had used.” Both falsehoods are yet again immediately contradicted by more clips showing the nearly flat wings of the 1900 glider recreation made from close study of photos of the original vehicle.  

A Lilienthal glider replica. Note the wing shape.

From NOVA

 

Next, diagrams are shown indicating that, from the tunnel data, the Wrights moved their maximum camber from the 50% chord point forward to the 25% point for the 1902 glider. In fact, they moved it from just after the leading edge back to about the 30% point. This tortured subject is topped off with a strange statement by Crouch that “modern engineers with multi-million-dollar wind tunnels” get results “within one or two percent” of the wing profile determined by the Wrights. Things get even weirder in the next clip showing what appears to be the post-wind-tunnel 1902 wing camber curvatures on a 1900/1901 glider, something that never happened.

About 17 minutes into the 54-minute video, Crouch asserts that “The Wrights’ recognition of the fact that the control issue would be critical set them apart from virtually everyone else.” This is yet another idea that first came from Chanute in both his book -- which the Wrights obtained in 1899 --and his later correspondence with them.

Both Crouch and NOVA then excuse the instability of the Wright airplanes by explaining that, as builders and purveyors of unstable bicycles, they were unconcerned about not having “automatic stability” in their flying machines. Yet another often repeated failure of research.

 

In his 1920 sworn affidavit for the Montgomery case, Orville wrote “Our elevator was placed in front of the surfaces with the idea of producing inherent stability fore and aft, which it should have done had the travel of the center of pressure been forward [with decreasing angle of attack] as we had been led to believe.”

 

This error is followed by Crouch repeating another one by again implying that the Wrights were the first to devise wing warping. Then clips are shown of the Hyde/Young recreation of the 1902 glider with two vertical panels aft. This is particularly amusing since those twin panels were fixed and made the early ’02 glider, in the Wrights’ words, "the most dangerous vehicle yet," nearly unflyable.

They quickly replaced the fixed dual stabilizers with one moveable aft vertical rudder to counteract warp-induced yaw. That successful glider was flown that way for the rest or the test session. Perhaps Hyde or someone thought the twin rudders were a better-looking match to the biplane wings.

(Speaking of configuration errors, I have seen a model of a proposed multi-million-dollar memorial to the Wright brothers planned to be located near Dayton at the intersections of interstate highways 70 and 75. It features a gleaming stainless-steel Wright aircraft purported to be the 1905 Flyer III on a huge pedestal nearly 200 feet tall. But so far, the proposals feature an aircraft with no engine or propellers. Wouldn’t it be ironic to expend all that effort to gather many millions of dollars for a nearly 200-foot-high stainless-steel Wright memorial for millions to see every month, and then show something that never existed, particularly when a correct detailed recreation of the powered Flyer III resides in a museum on the other side of town? Worst yet, with no propulsion, the memorial vehicle would look more like their first 1902 glider, a vehicle the Wrights claimed was their worst, nearly unflyable, and which they quickly reconfigured.)

Moving on into propeller design, all the standard blunders on this subject appear. After showing Hyde carefully measuring original Wright propellers at the Franklin Institute, Crouch once more marvels at the Wrights’ realization that a propeller should be just a rotating wing, and that this “underscores the nature of their genius”. Then NOVA joins the cheering by proclaiming “the Wrights solved the fundamental riddle of propeller design.”

(This can be seen on page 162 of Lorenz and Herweg’s 1976 edition of Chanute’s book.) 

 

Unfortunately, the Wrights did just the opposite, making their propellers wider toward the tips. Although somewhat helpful in developing thrust with very low-speed props, this caused excessive stress loading there. This stress may have contributed to the failure of a propeller at Ft. Myer in 1908 causing the crash that injured Orville’s back and killed Lt. Thomas Selfridge.

About 25 and a half minutes into the video NOVA does a completely bungled foray into Langley’s Aerodrome testing. They show the photos of both separate attempts while claiming there was just one attempt, and in that one the aircraft went up 60 feet, then down, and then broke up before falling into the river, a description that’s not even close to what actually happened. It is well known that there were two attempts to fly Langley’s manned airplane. Photos clearly shown two completely different failures, the aircraft not gaining altitude in either attempt.

Next Crouch zips quickly through the 1903 tests at Kitty Hawk, giving the distances and times claimed for Orville’s first and Wilbur’s last attempts on the 17th of December. He then claims that was “the day that changed history.” Not content, NOVA jumps in claiming that within one year after that the Wrights built an aircraft that could fly for 30 minutes. It was actually two years before they accomplished that with a substantially modified aircraft.

NOVA next covers Wilbur’s successful demonstrations in Europe without mentioning Orville’s demonstrations at Ft, Myer that included the crash due to propeller failure that killed Lt. Tom Selfridge. They then show the photo of the first Wright factory at Dayton without noting that, in order to sell airplanes, for their Model B they had to abandon the canard elevator, the patented coordinated control, the catapult, and eventually on a later model, even wing warping. They also don’t mention that the company basically failed within six years and was eventually merged with the Martin company.

Thirty-three minutes into the 54-minute video, the focus changes to Ken Hyde’s ill-fated attempt to build and fly an accurate reproduction of the Wright Model B. He is shown measuring the authentic Model B at the Franklin Institute, using the same type of thread to weave fabric, and the same aluminum stain on the wood struts.

Constructing the replica

He even found an original Wright Model B engine in California, brought it back to his facility at Warrenton, Virginia, and rebuilt it. Creating this exact replica and getting it to flying condition took a team over ten years and required funding of seven figures by donors including the Northrup-Grumman and Curtiss-Wright Corporations.

While showing roll-out of the B replica, Crouch mentions that most of the Wright-trained exhibition pilots were killed in them. Ken follows that by courageously saying one must take chances to fly one, and you had to be brave to attempt it. He then makes the prophetic statement that most pilots of B’s were killed due to confusion and miss-use of the flight controls. He planned to avoid this fate by practicing on a specially programmed simulator. Ironically, he mentions the simulation showed the aircraft had a tendency to side slip when moderately banked.

They first measure the thrust available and find it adequate at over 160 pounds. Ken then attempts a taxi test but starts at mid-field due to storms having created bumpy soggy conditions on half of it. He gets more acceleration than expected, a problem on an aircraft with no brakes. He is heading for trees protruding out into the field, but instead of cutting power, turning away, and using a nearby ditch to stop the vehicle, Ken inexplicably elects to lift off and attempt to fly over the nearby tree tops.

The glider lifting off

While over the trees, he tries a shallow turn to the left in an attempt to return to the flying field, but the aircraft starts slipping to the left and losing altitude. Ken recovers but tries the same maneuver again while still barely over the tree tops. Of course, the same thing happens, but this time he sideslips into the trees. In seconds, ten years of work by whole teams, along with millions of dollars, was turned into a pile of junk. 

The crashed glider

 

Ken’s senior assistant, Greg Cone, sounds really disgusted. After getting the airplane out of the trees and seeing that the engine, one of only two original Wright engines in existence, is busted up, and the airframe demolished, Cone sounds ready to quit. (Apparently, he didn’t.) Ken, who suffered injuries, says they will need a lot more money, and (interestingly) some engineers, to try it again. But perhaps finding out that Hyde demolished the plane within a few seconds of taking off when he wasn’t even supposed to leave the ground soured the confidence of his financial backers. A second try has never been made.

Hyde astutely concludes his comments by saying that avoiding accidents “was not thought out that well.” Then he paraphrases a Wright quote, to wit, “you’ve got to fly to learn.” Maybe, but at least the Wrights had more sense than to try to maneuver while skimming over a bunch of trees on what was supposed to be a first taxi test. Certainly, busting up million-dollar airplanes within ten seconds of takeoff, after a decade of work, is not what the Wright brothers had in mind.

The 54-minute video is concluded without mentioning Hyde’s 1903 reproduction that failed to lift off of the ground in front of over a thousand onlookers at the Wright centennial ceremonies at Kitty Hawk in 2003. Apparently no one involved had a sufficient appreciation of the vehicle’s need for a strong headwind to lift it.

The quality of the NOVA production was of course doomed by relying on Smithsonian officials for technical and historical accuracy. This may be of minor concern for a TV production. As long as they have good video and authoritative sounding narratives, most producers seem happy. But unfortunately, it casts doubt among knowledgeable people about the veracity of other NOVA productions. It also provides yet another illustration of how the virus of faulty Smithsonian research infects the products of others innocently relying on their information.

Smithsonian Air and Space Museum personnel are not the only ones who rely on their, or their organizations, reputations to compensate for lack of knowledge of the subject, or diligent research. An excellent recent example of this is the 2015 book The Wright Brothers by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough.

I have not read the book, but have heard radio interviews and seen TV interviews of McCullough, and talks by him to promote the New York Times bestselling book. His degree of incorrect knowledge on this subject is surprising. Nonetheless, his book will undoubtedly sell well and become another source of errors in future works.

(As you read further, please keep in mind that the following was written over a year before David McCullough died. He was well respected and loved as a historian. However, his recent death does not change history or the inaccuracy of his account of the Wright brothers or their work.)

In a talk to the Massachusetts Historical Society, McCullouch made the following incorrect or misleading statements:

• “Everybody knew man couldn’t fly.” Actually, many newspapers and magazines had been showing for years that many, using unpowered gliders, had already flown over a thousand times.
• There was only one Aerodrome flight attempt that went up 60 feet and then dove into the water. In fact, there were two attempts. Both went down immediately after leaving the launcher, the aircraft not gaining ten feet.
• The Wrights designed their airplanes by watching birds. Although Wilbur alluded to birds bending their wing tips, Orville said he knew of nothing they got from birds.
• Mouillard’s book convinced the Wrights that “riding the wind” was the secret to birds’ soaring flight. McCullough evidently doesn’t know about thermals or updrafts due to surface features. The Wrights always knew power was necessary for the sustained flight of an airplane.
• He relates how their sister Katherine took care of Orville after his crash. However, he says nothing about Orville disowning her for "deserting" him when, after working with him for 18 years, she finally married.
• The Wrights created their wind tunnel and, with it, developed the first correct information. In fact, they were informed about wind tunnels and shown designs for their components and measuring devices by Octave Chanute and his cohorts Ed Huffaker and George Spratt. They subsequently built a tunnel and found that Lilienthal’s data, which he had published 13 years earlier, had been absolutely correct. The Wrights had just applied it to totally inappropriate wing shapes. They admitted all this in a November 24th, 1901 letter to Chanute.

Ken Burns and David McCullough

In 2015, documentarian Ken Burns interviewed McCullough on TV. During that hour-long interview:

• McCullough said “Wilbur was unquestionably a genius”. This may be easy to believe when you don’t understand the science or what Wilbur did, and are unaware of how much he got from others.
• Both McCullough and Burns had Lilienthal’s and Wrights’ wing cambers completely confused.
• In McCullough’s discussion of Wilbur’s and Orville’s personalities and intellectual differences he again had the names mixed up and was somewhat incoherent.
• He again said irrelevant things about “riding the wind”.
• Burns repeated numerous erroneous things he had read in McCullough’s book.
• Again, McCullough discusses Kate, omitting Orville’s disownment of her when she got married.

McCullough says the Wrights would never blame others for failures or attack competitors. In fact, they blamed others for their having the wrong concept of center of pressure movements, for having inadequate lift, for Wilbur’s fatal sickness, plus a number of other things. They attacked Henson, Stringfellow, Marriott, and others as having made no contributions to aviation, called Langley’s successful powered unmanned aircraft “toys”, sued many others in aviation, and even used the courts to try to throw foreign aviators out of America. Not long before Chanute’s death they turned on even him, a man without whose help, as we have seen in these earlier critiques, they may well not have been successful.

They occasionally even belligerently blamed each other for things. Wilbur repeatedly berated Orville’s business acumen, and blamed him for inadequate workmanship and packing when the aircraft Orville sent to France arrived damaged from customs inspections. In interviews for Kelly’s book, Orville blamed Wilbur for their incorrect concept of movement of the center of lift on a cambered wing.

The last flight in 1903 by Wilbur was the only trial that they, at that time, claimed had met their 300-foot criteria for a successful flight. However, after Wilbur’s death, Orville claimed he had made the first successful flight by adding the 27 mile per hour, 12-second wind speed distance to his 120-foot estimated ground distance to claim 570 feet “through the air”.


Summary

This concludes this series of critique articles. In spite of a fairly cordial discussion over ten years ago with the authors of the Smithsonian books discussed in these articles, there has been no subsequent interest expressed by them, or anyone else in the Smithsonian organization, in resolving any of these issues. On the contrary, recently the Institute proudly placed its name on the cover of Flight – The Complete History of Aviation, a book that repeats some of the most egregious long-standing Smithsonian falsehoods concerning the Wrights’ testing.

Cordial approaches to NOVA and PBS documentary producers have likewise elicited no responses. Apparently these authors and producers also intend to continue to enjoy success and royalties with little regard for the truth, arrogantly expecting it to quietly fade away and leave their reputations, incomes, and integrity intact. They probably think they did a noble thing, aggrandizing the Wrights’ by crediting their accomplishments to amazing inspirations of genius. However, in fact the Smithsonian has dishonored itself and its contributors, the Wrights, and particularly their advisors, by falsifying the story of what many consider the creation of the manned, powered, controlled airplane.

The NOVA producers, along with David McCullough, have provided examples of how the books reviewed in the first four articles of this series have infected aviation history. Even someone as well-intentioned and respected as Ken Burns was duped by McCullough’s interpretation of the Smithsonian fantasy. This author would have welcomed an opportunity to meet with Mr. McCullough and show him original source material, but unfortunately he died before this was published. While I respect his intentions, McCullough’s death does not change history nor the dangers of using Smithsonian books or information as source material.

The author of these articles and The WRight Story remains available to participate in open recorded discussions or debate with Smithsonian personnel, or any others in a position to resolve any of the issues raised in any of these five articles, in order to establish truth in aviation history.

-- Joe Bullmer

The Elephant in the Room

 

The Elephant in the Room

By Paul Jackson

Photograph courtesy of Bernard Dupont

Have you seen it yet? Not the one in the room that household guests politely refrain from mentioning, but the other elephant on Huffman Prairie, Dayton, Ohio, which aviation historians have feigned not to notice for the last century. It’s high time you were introduced to Jumbo. Paul Jackson will ‘do the honors’.

The story begins in what is now becoming familiar fashion – at least to regular readers of this blog – when a photograph taken by the Wright Brothers is found to show something different to what they wrote happened. A minor variation in this case is that the picture contains evidence of something significant happening that the Wrights passed-off as a minor hindrance, and over which generations of fawning historians have obligingly maintained the tradition of omertà.

Readily available for research is an image of the incident in question. It is downloadable in a range of resolutions from the Library of Congress at

https://www.loc.gov/item/2001696551

and also from that repository of Wright information and homage, the Wright State University

https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/special_ms1_photographs/70

For a caption the latter states:

Minor mishap of the 1904 Wright Flyer

The wreck of the Wright 1904 Flyer at the end of the 31st flight at Huffman Prairie outside Dayton, Ohio. Orville Wright was the pilot flying a total distance of 432 feet. The Flyer struck the ground with its front rudder, breaking the support.

All of which is perfectly correct—as far as it goes. The information is taken from Wilbur’s diary of flight testing, also available from the Library of Congress.

The date is show to be August 16, 1904. It says:

Aug 16th

[Flight attempt #] 31

160 ft track

Last 60ft in 2 sec

Wind 5 to 18 N.W.

First flight O.W.

Wind quartering about 45°.

Start good

Distance 432 ft

No anemometer [& time an assumation?]

Shot down and struck on front rudder, breaking off

By way of amplification and explanation:

(a) the Brothers were employing a 160-foot launch rail (compared with 60 feet as used at Kitty Hawk for what Truthinaviationhistory blog March 8, 2018 maintains was a downhill launch fraudulently claimed to have been made from level ground.)

(b) wind direction approximately 315° (from the northwest); speed appears to be in feet per second, equating to 3½ to 12 mph. Observations at previous tests gave anemometer readings in metres per second, accompanied by a second reading in feet.

(c) the wind of 315° was at 45° (“quartering”) to the direction of the launch track. This could mean a the track was laid out at 360° (due north) or 270° (due west), but comparison with the local geography – specifically the turnpike and adjacent railcar track (marked on the map below, and having a straight line of trees and telegraph poles) aligned 060/240° – indicates 270° to be the correct vector.

(d) “shot down” most certainly does not indicate the presence of hostile flak; “suddenly dived” might be a better phrase.

(e) “front rudder” is today called an “elevator” (ie, a horizontal control surface, even though placed at the front of the airplane by the Wright design and often referred to as a “canard elevator”).

We may now proceed to mark a map with all the known factors mentioned above. The basis of the map is one drawn by Orville Wright in 1928 and it conforms to the site as it is today (as checkable on Google Earth), it being preserved land within Wright-Patterson AFB.

Broken line is the intended westerly heading after take-off from the 160-foot rail. The rail was laid close to the (marked) hangar, but its exact starting point cannot be determined. However, the full photograph suggests it was pointing towards the three trees which Orville drew as marking the western boundary of Huffman’s land.

The full image. Huffman Prairie looking west from near the Wright hangar

One further item of reference material is required—a plan view of the 1904 Flyer:

So, we are now equipped to investigate the accident to the Flyer. A close-up of the scene reveals the following picture. (The figure is believed to be Charles Taylor, the Wright employee who built their engines.)

A close-up of the crashed 1904 flyer

Drawing of discernable features of the wrecked 1904 flyer (John Brown)

However, it does not look to be all of 432 feet away from the launching track, where the camera is. Could this be, perhaps, another one of these blatant exaggerations of flight distance—like the “Fourth flight photo” comprehensively disproven in an earlier (November 4, 2019) blog?

But hang on a minute; the curve back (visible in plan view) from the wingtips to the wing trailing edge establishes beyond any shadow of doubt that the Flyer is pointing towards its launching point. The airplane has turned through about 225° (almost two-thirds of a circle) over a distance of just 432 feet – a pretty wild maneuver, up there with the best of the air show “crazy fliers” acts – and during the last 118 years nobody has noticed that; or, at the very least, thought it worthy of remark.

Certainly, as stated in the flight-test diary, the Flyer has nosed into the ground, the front-mounted elevators taking the full impact. The twin (vertical) rear-mounted rudders sit high in the air after having “whiplashed” upward and forward,ripping through the diagonally-mounted fabric on theupper wing’s trailing edge, and coming to rest atopthe wing structure with their base tips pointing skywards. Knowing the wing chord (6 ft 6 in) and gap (6 ft 2 in), it can be calculated that the photograph shows the Flyer in a nose-down attitude of about 35°. Wilbur’s record of the flight testing program admits to a broken-off front elevator, but fails to mention that the entire tail section also detached itself from the wings and turned upside down as a consequence of the sudden arrival of the ground. Like Gaul, in the words of Julius Ceasar, the Flyer “est omnis divisa in partes tres.”

So, what happened? From the known weather on the day and the configuration of the Flyer on August 16, 1904, the following is likely.

Flight 31 - the likely path (John Brown)

The aircraft began its take-off run on the 160-foot launch rail. It proceeded slowly at first, having a meager 16 horsepower installed, because the Wrights were still a few weeks away from commissioning the “falling weight” launch catapult conceived by Albert Merrill and recommended to them by Octave Chanute. Heading west, the Flyer had to contend with a fluctuating crosswind from the starboard (right) side.

On leaving the rail, but still low down and in “ground effect” (the lift of the lower wings being artificially and temporarily boosted by the air cushon “trapped” between them and the ground), the Flyer began to ‘weathercock’. In other words, the tailfins were caught by the ”quartering” wind and turned the airplane about its vertical axis to face the direction the wind was coming from.

Whether or not this was what the test plan called for is immaterial*; the turn into wind was inevitable unless the pilot pulled the right “levers” to counter the swing and maintain the take-off heading for the climbout. In a “normal” airplane, the pilot wishing to continue westward despite a northerly wind component would apply port (southerly, in this case) rudder to cancel-out the turning tendency, balancing that with counter-intuitive application of starboard (right) stick. The technique is known as “crossing the controls” or “applying top rudder” and is equally effective in lining up for a crosswind landing.

*The setup of the camera suggests a slight drift to the south was expected after take-off; not a swing to the north.

Thereby is dramatically revealed the disadvantage of the permanently linked rudder-to-same-side-aileron (or warping wingtip) system the Wrights copied from a December 1902 photograph and written disclosure by Gustave Whitehead in the Ohio-based journal, Aeronautical World. They patented it without acknowledgement; flew it; regularly crashed it (as here); eventually discarded it; and, cynically, still kept enforcing the patent even after they realised its dangers. (Furthermore, the Wrights’ 1906 patent specifically describes [page three, lines 78 to 87] the moveable, coordinated rudder as a means of maintaining a straight line in flight. Some “straight line!”)

As it was being involuntarily turned onto a northerly heading, the Flyer’s port wing would be on the outside of the turn and, thus, moving faster than the starboard wing. Lift varies proportionately to speed, so the port wing would rise and, as a result, the starboard wing would fall. With the whole airplane traveling slowly and still in ground effect to boot, there would be precious little daylight under the starboard wingtip and an urgent need to interrupt the cycle of inexorably unfolding events.

The straightness of the northerly track drawn on the diagram probably fails to do justice to the frantic control movements being attempted by Orville. If he made the usually correct move with the ailerons (warping tips) then the “reverse-control-effect” – which occurs at very low speeds and is known these days to all student pilots as part of their training curriculum – meant that the aileron movement normally intended to raise the wing created so much drag that it actually caused it to drop. A classic no-win situation.

At length, the starboard wingtip probably scraped the ground and spun the Flyer to the right in a semi-cartwheel ground-loop. Everything went quiet. Orville walked away and the three parts of the airplane were joined up again within the commendably short time of six days. So, does all this matter?

The result of the crash which ended Flight 31: Flyer broken into three parts, but the picture caption (above) describes this as a "minor mishap"

I believe it does. The airplane may have traveled 432 feet, but in a wildly fluctuating path not conforming to the pilot’s wishes; his control inputs; or, indeed his instinct for self-preservation. A traveled distance of, say, 1,432 feet** would have permitted a more sedate flight path between the known starting and finishing points, but 432 feet only allows for perilously rapid changes of direction, including the insane act of racking the 16 HP airplane into a tight turn immediately after leaving the ground. Evidently, on this flight – and, one suspects, others – Orville (and Wilbur) was just along for the ride. There was no control.

**The next time Orville flew the aircraft (sortie #33), by a staggering coincidence he added exactly 1,000 feet to the flight distance, making it 1,432

Yet the plaque beneath the Flyer in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, claims the Wright airplane was capable of “controlled and sustained” flight from Day One at Kitty Hawk. The pages of Wilbur’s diary are regarded by some historians as a faithful record of the development of the airplane, but it is becoming increasingly clear that this cannot be, in view of its downplaying of embarrassing occurrences.

More informative is MacFarland’s Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright pages 469-472, from Wilbur’s February-March 1912 First Rebuttal Deposition in the 1911-1912 Herring-Curtiss legal case. This deposition discussed the 1904 flight testing and originally appeared in the court record of that case on its pages 519-521. Said Wilbur: "Usually the [1904] machine responded promptly when we applied the control for restoring lateral balance, but on a few occasions the machine did not respond promptly and the machine came to the ground in a somewhat tilted position". This is a remarkably underplayed statement by Wilbur, since Wright daily records indicate numerous crashes requiring repairs or replacement of wing spars, ribs, struts, skids, propellers, the engine, etc, and even minor injuries to themselves. As in this instance, they no doubt made the understatements to conceal their prolonged befuddlement at what was going on—despite repeated, incorrect fixes.

The suspicion must remain that the description of Flight 31 glosses over the unfortunate division of the Flyer into three parts, and passes the occurrence off as a minor “ding,” the culprit possibly being a downdraught while landing: AKA an “act of God.”

"'Tis but a scratch." (The Holy Grail; Monty Python)

For this and other reasons – not the least of which is the downward incline of the launch rail on December 17, 1903 (this blog, March 8, 2018) – it is the belief of this writer that while the Wrights usually told the truth, they often did not always tell the whole truth. Let none deny that they worked long and hard on “the problem of flight”—but it is clear that their record-keeping was more angled towards convincing historians that they flew under perfect control in December 1903 than to explaining to engineers how and why they only succeeded in doing so after September 1905.

A month after Flight 31, on September 20, 1904 (sortie #52) the Flyer is claimed to have demonstrated its navigational capabilities by flying a complete circle and overflying the start point, obediently following its pilot’s commands. See this blog for June 15, 2017 for detailed debunking of that assertion and view a written disclosure by key witness, Amos Root, that it crash-landed in an adjacent cornfield on that day, yet again out of control. That’s another date with the ground that the diary conveniently forgets to mention and current histories celebrate as a fully-controlled 360 degree turn—which, by any objective measure, it most certainly was not. Indeed, in late 1904, the Wrights were still devoting all their energies towards stopping the Flyer from uncommanded turning, and making it fly straight.

After a further year - in September 1905, and with significant modifications embodied - the Wright Flyer was at last showing the promise of achieving the “free, controlled and sustained” flight which was first documented in public during August 1908. On Flight 31, however, it was still rampaging like a rogue elephant—only mahout Orville was too ‘polite’ to mention it.

The Wrong Wright Story Series #4: The Invention of the Aerial Age

 

 The Wrong Wright Story Series #4:

The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age

By Joe Bullmer 

This, the fourth article in this series, addresses the book The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age, ISBN-0-7922-6985-3, a 2003 publication of the Smithsonian press. It was cowritten by the authors of the last two books addressed in this series, Tom Crouch, the Senior Curator for Aeronautics, and Peter Jakab, an Associate Director of the National Air and Space Museum. As one might expect, many of the mistakes by these authors noted in the previous reviews of their individual books are repeated in this book. Most are at least briefly mentioned here since an effort was made to make each of these articles complete.

The authors from left, Tom Crouch , Senior Curator, Ret., Smithsonian NASM, and Peter Jakab, Chief Curator, NASM.

Again, the period from 1899 through 1905 is specifically addressed since this is the period during which the Wrights developed a controllable powered airplane. However the period after that up to Orville’s death is also covered in the subbook, so a few comments on that are included. 

Page 48: Combining two of the sentences in the sixth paragraph, they collectively say “an airplane pilot…..must make constant control movements…..to stay in the air”. As stated in previous articles, anyone at all familiar with flight knows that, once a properly designed airplane is trimmed out, no control movements are necessary to maintain steady straight flight in reasonably smooth air.

Page 51: The authors discuss conflicting statements by the brothers regarding how they came up with wing warping, but don’t mention that twisting wings for control had been done by a number of the Wrights’ predecessors, a few even patenting it. This was also covered in Chanute’s book which the Wrights obtained in 1899.

Page 53: They claim warping was superior to previous methods of control. But separate winglets and ailerons, both causing less drag imbalance and thus superior to warping, had already been used by others. Eventually warping would be abandoned, even by the Wrights, in favor of ailerons.

Page 56: Here adulation for the Wrights’ supposed ability to correctly “visualize aerodynamics” gush forth once more. And again the statements made are not true. The comment in the second article of this series for page 66 of Jakab’s Visions lists seven examples of the Wrights’ failure to properly envision air flow and its effects.

Page 57:  The often-repeated comment on the similarity of airplanes to bicycles is made, to wit, since they both bank to turn, they must both be constantly rebalanced. Although every aviator knows this is wrong, this assertion has become standard fare among aviation historians discussing the Wrights.

Page 58: Here they repeat a whole series of errors on the Wrights’ wing design that were first stated in Visions of a Flying Machine. First, that the Wrights initially used Lilienthal’s camber shape which they didn’t, an error that plagued them with inadequate lift for a couple years until their wind tunnel showed that they had to use Lilienthal’s basic wing shapes. Then the Wrights are credited with discovering the center-of-pressure (actually lift) reversal on wings by just thinking about it. In fact, they never knew of the reversal of center of “pressure” movement until Dr. George Spratt and Edward Huffaker, visitors to their camp in 1901, told them about it. Then their visitors proceeded to prove it with tests showing where one of the Wrights’ wings balanced at various angles of attack.

Dr. George Spratt and Edward Huffaker.
Visitors to the Wright camp in 1901, these aviation pioneers taught the Wright Brothers about the reversal of the center of pressure movement on the wing of a plane.

Finally, this rant is concluded by claiming an aircraft is in equilibrium when the center of pressure (lift) coincides with the center of gravity. This is not really true unless the vehicle’s configuration is such that it tends to remain that way. Equilibrium is not a fleeting instantaneous condition. That was the basic problem with all early Wright aircraft. They had no inherent stability allowing them to maintain a state of equilibrium.

Page 61: Here the authors make an astounding blunder only equaled by the Wrights having made the same mistake. They talk about moving “the center of pressure on the bottom of the wing” back and forth to regain coincidence with the center of gravity to maintain balance. This sounds as though they didn’t know that what they called the center of pressure on the bottom is actually the center of lift which primarily results from a partial vacuum on the top of the wing. This distinction is crucial to understanding the science behind the movement of the center of lift.

In the next paragraph a truly staggering blunder is made by saying that a constantly moving elevator is used by every airplane today to maintain balance with the constantly moving center of “pressure”. Apparently they have no concept of how a trimmed horizontal stabilizer is set to stabilize an airplane so that no elevator movements are required to keep it there.

Page 62: The hits just keep coming. Here the assertion is made that the greater efficiency of a cambered surface (as opposed to a flat one) had been established by 1900. Actually Sir George Cayley established that nearly a century earlier in 1804. That’s why cambered wings had been used by most aviators since then.

Sir George Cayley, aviation pioneer, who established by 1804 that a cambered wing is more
efficient than a flat one.

Then they say experimenters such as Lilienthal and Chanute used “perfect arcs”, i.e., circular sections, on their gliders when any decent photos show they did not. They go on to give the Wrights’ erroneous thinking that led them to put all of the camber within the front ten percent of the wings, without mentioning that this degraded both lift and longitudinal stability.

Finally, they claim incorrectly that Lilienthal used a wing maximum camber that was eight percent of the wing chord whereas the Wrights used five percent. Actually, Lilienthal also used five percent on his gliders.

Chapter 3

Octave Chanute, mentor to the Wright Brothers.

Page 68: Here the absolute falsehood that “Octave Chanute provided the Wrights with little genuine technical assistance and few, if any, useful theoretical ideas” is repeated. This was also stated on page 84 of Jakab’s solo book Visions of a Flying Machine. This statement is so egregious that I will repeat here, in full, the comments I made in that Critique:

According to records of their correspondence, Chanute provided the Wrights with:

• His 1894 book that was the basis for their study of earlier aviation.
• Realizing the biggest problem remaining to be solved was control.
• The need to master control with gliders before adding power.
• Trussed biplane wing construction according to both brothers’ statements.
• The idea of first testing gliders unmanned with tethering lines.
• The best gliding areas being the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas.
• His cohorts Huffaker and Dr. Spratt showing the Wrights the critical reversal of the center of lift’s movement, thus largely solving their control problem.
• Doing tests with a wind tunnel to determine better wing shapes.
• Photos of wind tunnels and the design of their lift/drag balance.
• The basic design of a falling weight catapult enabling them to achieve controllability and maneuverability through testing near Dayton, and essentially enabling all of their flying for the next six years.

In fact, it is evident that without these inputs the Wrights may well not have succeeded. If they did, it would have taken them far longer, probably denying them the distinction of being considered the first to accomplish powered, controlled, manned flight.

Pages 72 & 76: The gliding tests at Kitty Hawk in 1900 are described as validating the pitch and roll controls. In fact, the machine had such poor lifting capability that it was mostly tested unmanned and tethered. Finally, with winds exceeding 20 knots, Wilbur managed just a few short hops, almost all with erratic pitch control and the warping inoperable.

Page 77: They claim the Wrights discovered the reversal of their wing warping roll control by attempting turns. This is absolutely not true. They discovered it by trying to maintain a constant heading while correcting inadvertent rolls caused by wind gusts and the anhedral, or droop, in their wings. They were not interested in developing a turning capability at Kitty Hawk, and the 1902 and 1903 vehicles could not be intentionally turned.

In their first patent they stated that “the machine is apt to become unbalanced laterally” and “The provision which we have just described [mechanically linked warp and rudder] enables the operator to meet this difficulty and preserve the lateral balance of the machine.” In other words, to keep the machine flying level, not to turn. They did not attempt turns until 1904 near Dayton, and could not reliably accomplish them until October of 1905.

In his sworn deposition for the Montgomery case Orville testified, “Sometimes in warping the wings to restore lateral balance….” and “When the wings were warped in an attempt to recover balance….”.  Clearly, they were attempting to fly level, not turn, when they discovered warp reversal. In spite of these numerous absolutely clear statements directly contradicting these books, every “historian” since these books were published parrots this same error. Tour guides in the Air and Space Museum still repeat it.

Pages 84-89: On these pages the authors attempt to once more heap credit upon the Wrights for something they didn’t think of by simply saying that “the Wrights decided to build a wind tunnel”. Reiterating, the subject was brought up during talks with Chanute, Spratt, and Huffaker when they visited the Wrights at Kitty Hawk during the summer of 1901. There is no mention of such a device in any of the Wrights’ records before then. During that discussion Chanute showed them photos of wind tunnel components, and Dr. Spratt showed them the scheme for the lift vs drag balance that the authors credit the Wrights with as a “brilliant intuitive leap”. The Wrights admitted they got this information from their visitors in later correspondence and a legal document.

These authors go on to write “The brothers’ artful weaving of their clear, straight forward conceptualization of the problem and their clever, effective means of experimentally obtaining results illustrates the Wrights’ engineering talents at their finest.” All this for equipment and procedures that were shown to them by visitors at Kitty Hawk, visitors to whom these authors give no credit at all for providing any help.

The authors also claim that the tunnel tests showed Lilienthal’s lift data to be “off” and that the tunnel allowed them to determine a more correct value of Smeaton’s coefficient. These are both colossal untruths. In fact, Wilbur informed Chanute that they had arrived at the correct value of Smeaton’s coefficient (actually the same value as that determined by professor Langley at the Smithsonian) from gliding data months before they built the tunnel. Also, Wilbur wrote Chanute that “for a surface….like that described in his [Lilienthal’s] book [his] table is probably as near correct as it is possible”.

The authors also wrote that “The wind tunnel experiments showed the brothers that long, narrow wings [i.e., higher aspect ratio wings] are more efficient than short, wide ones….”. Since Cayley published this in 1804, they also could have discovered it years earlier by simply reading. They subsequently abandoned their aspect ratio of 3.1 and adopted Lilienthal’s favored value of 6.5 for their 1902 glider.

Finally, on November 24^th, 1901 Wilbur wrote Chanute that “It is very evident….that a table based on one aspect [ratio] and [wing section] profile is worthless for a surface with different aspect and curvature. This no doubt explains why we had so much trouble figuring our machines from Lilienthal’s table.” In other words, the Wrights admitted, in writing, that their tunnel showed them that different wing shapes produce different lift coefficients. So the Wrights admitted that their lift problems were their own fault, and nothing was wrong with Lilienthal’s data.

These astounding and egregious errors by these authors have led to everyone who has ever written or spoken about the Wrights since, repeating their same false statements. They can be seen in museums, on placards, in numerous books, and heard in nearly all documentaries. Thus, important technical history has been falsified by careless, incompetent research at the highest levels of a Smithsonian museum.

Pages 89 & 90: Here they extol the virtues of tethered testing, what the Wrights called “flying it as a kite”, as though it was yet another wonderful idea the Wrights originated, although their copy of Chanute’s book has a whole section on kite style testing.

Wilbur left, Orville right, “flying it as a kite.”

They also fail to mention that when kiting, the brothers, being nearly 20 feet apart (one at each wing tip), couldn’t tell that when warping was applied, one end of the wings were pulling on the lines harder than those on the other end. So the tendency of warping to cause the vehicle to yaw, then bank even steeper, and finally spin into the ground, was completely masked to them. This actually set them back a couple years until they had enough lift to do extensive free glides and address the problem in 1902. Another aid in solving the spin problem may well have been their wind tunnel which clearly demonstrated the effect on a wing’s drag by a small change in its angle of attack.

Page 91: This page is ripe with exaggerations concerning the Wrights’ wind tunnel. These authors write that the device “carried the progress toward mechanical flight to another new plateau”. But of course, once more, they don’t mention that this was thanks to Chanute and his cohorts at Kitty Hawk.

Next a comment, similar to one in Visions, is made claiming that after the tunnel tests, the 1902 vehicle “flew just as a 747 or modern jet fighter flies”. Well yes, it used cambered wings and could go in the air in a straight line fairly level, but it couldn’t turn or maneuver, rather desirable qualities in a 747 or fighter plane. In fact, it would take three more years for the Wrights to develop limited versions of these capabilities in their aircraft. By the end of 1905 the aircraft the authors refer to as “only refined” had lengthened structure, relocated center of gravity, changed location, size, and loading of the canard, a fundamentally altered version of their patented control scheme, modified propellers, and oil, fuel, and water pumps added to the 1903 engine. Some “refinements”.

Chapter 4

Page 119 & 120: Picturing a propeller as a rotating wing is characterized as a “breakthrough” and an “intellectual leap”. If it appeared so, it was only because of a lack of research by the Wrights. As explained in the last article, Sydney Hollands presented the concept of a propeller as a vertically rotating cambered twisted wing at a meeting of England’s Aeronautical Society in 1885. In fact, he also pointed out that it should be tapered toward the tips of the blades, something the Wrights totally missed. Hollands even gave values for the twist angles. All this was covered in Chanute’s book which the Wrights obtained four years earlier. Nonetheless, this is another falsehood that has become a staple in subsequent accounts of the Wrights’ work.

Wright propeller reproductions (from Ash, Robert & Miley, Stanley & Landman, Drew. (2001).
Evolution of Wright Flyer Propellers between 1903 and 1912 By. 10.2514/6.2001-309.)

The propellers of the Sopwith Camel, a World War I British fighter, clearly show
a taper toward the tips of the blades.

In fact, three other designers of ships’ propellers, Lanchester in England, Drzweiecki in France, and Prandtl in Germany, had also addressed the design of air propellers as cambered twisted rotating wings. Chanute provided material on Drzweiecki’s work to the Wrights in 1903.

Also mentioned on page 120 is that, for the 1903 powered airplane, the Wrights chose a maximum wing camber depth of five percent. As previously mentioned, and contrary to assertions in this book, that is precisely the camber depth used and recommended by Otto Lilienthal on his gliders.

Otto Lillienthal poised for a glide.

Page 121: At the top of this page they claim that one of the “instruments” the Wrights had onboard in 1903 was a tachometer for both the engine and propellers. In fact they had no tachometer. All they had was a total revolution counter for the engine. This, in combination with the stopwatch, would yield the average engine rpm for a flight attempt. This is a minor unimportant point, but these kinds of totally unnecessary errors lead one to wonder what kind of research was done, and by whom, for this book.

Page 130: The first three flight attempts on December 17^th, 1903 are discussed without mentioning that none of them were actually measured for time or distance. These were simply estimated by the Wrights. Also, they don’t tell us that, according to the Wrights’ descriptions, the aircraft was out of control throughout all three attempts. Finally they don’t mention the 27 mph headwind that supplied 90% of the airspeed and 80% of the lift required for the airplane to leave the ground. Without those head winds there would have been absolutely no flying at all by the Wrights in 1903. This is proven by their 1904 aircraft not being able to leave the ground with light winds, although it had more power and launch rails up to four times longer.

Page 131: Here the authors discuss the fourth attempt, Wilbur’s last, without telling us the aircraft was out of control at its beginning and end, the Wrights claiming it only flew fairly level for a short period during the middle of the trial. They quote the Wrights’ claim for that attempt as lasting 59 seconds and covering 852 feet, a distance the Wrights said they measured.

Four decades later Orville identified a photograph as having been taken after the end of that attempt. But four independent measurement calculations from the photo reveal the aircraft to be less than 280 feet from the end of the launch rail. Also, the propellers are stopped and three dark objects at least three feet tall are on the center of the lower wing. This is all clearly shown on a large cropped version of the photo on pages 126 and 127 of this very book.

At the bottom of this page one of Jakab’s contradictions reappears with the statement that, in spite of the success of the 1903 airplane, “marketing and exploiting the [Wright’s] technology would require an aircraft capable of making turns….”. While correct, this is in direct contradiction to the statement back on page 90 claiming that even the 1902 glider could make coordinated turns.

Page 133: The claim from the Visions book that the Wrights invented a “fundamentally new technology” is repeated here. It’s not clear what fundamentals they are talking about since the only feature of Wright aircraft (besides engines and drive chains) that hadn’t been used by predecessors, namely mechanically coordinated roll and yaw controls, had to be abandoned in 1905 in order to make turns.

Chapter 5

Diagram from the famous Wright patent, granted in 1906.

This chapter, discussing the Wrights’ patents and early efforts to sell their airplanes, is most noteworthy for its numerous omissions. It discusses their first patent without mentioning that it

• Gave a totally incorrect explanation of how their aircraft were actually able to fly.
• Locked them into a configuration that was dangerous and rejected by other designers.
• Had the primary purpose of protecting a control system they already had to abandon.
• Was intended to freeze out competition worldwide, but primarily stifled aviation research and production only in the U.S.

The chapter also discusses the Ft. Myer crash that killed Lt. Tom Selfridge, the world’s first airplane fatality. Although the authors relate that the crash was due to a propeller failure, they don’t mention that one of the propellers had previously split and had been hastily repaired with glue and nails. What’s more, the split was at a tip, their propeller tips being excessively loaded due to the improper reverse taper of the blades.

The Flyer - and propellers - that crashed in 1908, killing Lt. Thomas Selfridge.

Chapter 6

Page 196: This chapter covers the period up to World War One. At the bottom of this page they mention that “The world was not beating a path to their [the Wrights’] door in a mad rush to buy flying machines.” No mention is made of the fact that numerous competitors were doing quite well. That was because Wright airplanes were considered obsolete, poor performing, hard and dangerous to fly, with no useful capabilities beyond lifting someone into the air.

Page 199: The book mentions that flying exhibitions were quite profitable at that time. But it does not reveal that Glenn Curtiss paid his pilots and crews far more generously than did the Wrights. That, along with safer and better performing airplanes, enabled him to put on far more thrilling shows.

Chapter 7

This chapter discusses the era between Wilbur’s death in 1912 and Orville’s in 1948, in particular the wrangling between the Smithsonian and the Wright family regarding the Smithsonian’s claims that Langley’s “Aerodrome“ aircraft was “the first airplane capable of manned flight”. It also contains one last enrichment of the Wright image by avoiding mentioning Orville’s disownment of his sister Katherine when she got married.

She abandoned her young teaching career to care for Orville after his back injury at Ft. Myer in 1908 and never went back to teaching. After devoting her life to her brothers and their aircraft business, finally in 1926 she decided to marry an old college sweetheart. Upon hearing of her marriage plans, Orville disowned her for “abandoning” him. Unfortunately, she was to have only two years of marriage before dying of pneumonia. But Orville had refused to have any contact with her until she was on her deathbed. This episode may well provide some insight into the attitudes he had regarding employees, their competition, the Smithsonian, and his legacy.

Pages 216 – 232: The book concludes with seven photos and over ten pages of text discussing the protracted, nearly four decades, of feuding between Orville Wright and the Smithsonian over who actually came up with the first airplane capable of manned powered flight. Was it the Wrights or Professor Langley, the director of the museum at that time, and creator of the ill-fated “Aerodrome”. In a pique, Orville sent the 1903 Wright “Flyer” to England for exhibition rather than give it to the Smithsonian. Finally, after WWII, a contract was signed, with the Wrights agreeing to bring the Flyer back for exhibit in the Smithsonian in 1948.

The relevant passage of the Wright-Smithsonian contract.

A very brief summary of the once-secret contract is given, saying that the Wright family can take the Flyer out of the museum if the Smithsonian ever says that any other aircraft was capable of, or accomplished, manned powered flight before the Flyer did. This really does not do justice to the actual legal document which appears in The WRight Story. But it does capture the threat under which the Smithsonian and its Air and Space Museum has operated since 1948. One wonders if this has something to do with museum personnel going out of their way to aggrandize the capabilities and accomplishments of Wilbur and Orville at every opportunity.

Summary

Unlike the previous discussions, for this book specific sources for specific comments were not referenced in this article. This publication is more in the nature of a “coffee table” picture book than were those. Still, its common use as source material warranted it’s review here.

This book’s value is actually in the photographs presented. Its large size and print quality, along with the quantity and enhanced quality of the photos are outstanding. However the value of its text is another matter entirely. Perhaps the motivation of the authors may have again been to instill admiration and pride in Americans (and in their museum) by explaining all the Wrights’ accomplishments as due entirely to their “brilliance” and “genius”.

But as an American, I am offended at such inadequate research and frequent fabrication as this coming from the top levels of a Smithsonian Museum. This is an Institution supported by American citizens, and expected to be the world leader in such research. The Smithsonian evidently does world class research on non-technical historical subjects, and in some technical areas. Evidently its history majors and PhDs are capable in such areas. However with the Wright brothers they stepped off into a highly technical area for which they were obviously unprepared. Worse yet, there existed a plethora of records of the Wrights’ work which largely refutes nearly all of their guesses and fabrications. And perhaps worst of all, those eager to take credit for such publications as these by claiming authorship evidently were completely unqualified to verify contributions to their publications.

It’s easy to find out such information as the ten vital contributions to the Wrights’ work provided by Octave Chanute, or a half dozen examples of the Wrights’ wrong guesses at aerodynamics, or indeed all the other falsehoods cited in these critiques. All one need do is simply read and comprehend all of the first volume of Marvin McFarland’s compilation of original Wright-related correspondence and records, along with Orville’s 1920 affidavit. These resources were in existence at least a half century before the books addressed in this series were written and published by the Smithsonian.

In recent years it has become evident that many people are quite comfortable with fantasies in place of truth. However, having devoted much of my professional life to the science of aeronautical theory, design, and performance, I cannot ignore the origin of the entire technology being falsified. So, along with a growing contingent of others, I will continue to contribute to the establishment of truthinaviationhistory. 

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Author Joe Bullmer has a Masters Degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Michigan with additional graduate studies in the subject (the exact same academic background as Kelley Johnson, designer of the U-2 and SR-71). He subsequently worked in aircraft design and performance and related subjects for the United States Air Force for thirty years. A substantial portion of this time was spent as an aircraft performance engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. During that time he had the rare opportunity to work with some of the top designers at Boeing, North American, General Dynamics, Lockheed (including Kelly), and McDonnell corporations.  He also collaborated with some of the best designers in the U.S. Air Force.

 

His areas of greatest interest have always been aerodynamics and stability and control. These are the keys to understanding the thoughts and testing of the Wright brothers.

 

Much of his work was in the field of technical intelligence. In this capacity he often was examining someone else’s airplane designs and determining what they did, why, and what the resulting performance would be. This turned out to be excellent preparation for his book since it is precisely what he had to do with the Wright brothers, designs. Intelligence work also developed his investigative and deductive skills which are prerequisites for any historical investigation.

 

Joe has presented aircraft design and performance briefings to U.S. Congressional and Senate committees, Presidential Cabinet members, and at the White House. Now 77, he has been retired for 25 years and has written The WRight Story, and a number of articles on early aviation. He maintains contact with a number of designers, flight test engineers, pilots, and historians.