More "Errors," "Inaccuracies," and "Whoppers" by Orville Wright in "Boys' Life"

Wilbur Wright dies.

Wilbur Wright died of typhoid on May 30, 1912. The world was stunned.  By the time of his death, it had been accepted by many over the world that the Wrights were the first to fly as they had claimed. But it was Wilbur who had made the only possible flight December 17, 1903, that was long enough to be considered "sustained"--852 feet.

From a New York Times article  after Wilbur Wright's  death

 

Soon though, with Wilbur no longer alive, it's easy to see that his younger brother, Orville, stole his title of "first to fly." We can see that in the Sept.,1914, Boys' Life article, where Orville claimed that he was the one who had made the flight of 852 feet. However, he wouldn't have been able to stick to that story--even though it's still being published by Boys' Life. So probably with Orville's help, the unsustained "flight" of only 120 feet that Orville really made became accepted as the "first flight."

Monument and plaque at Kitty Hawk pictured below commemorate Orville Wright as first to fly. These were created and dedicated after Wilbur Wright's death.

This photo autographed by Orville is supposed to be of the "first flight of 120 feet that he claimed in Boys' Life was made by Wilbur. Note that it's clearly Wilbur who is standing beside the plane. Also note level ground, level rail, no hills in sight.

It might appear that I'm giving undue attention to the Boys' Life article by Orville Wright. But there are many other significant statements in that article that are not true and that continue to be repeated in history a century later.

I have already repeated  the first of the errors, "inaccuracies," and downright "whoppers" by Orville Wright in the article. He admits only number 1 and number 2 to Mr. Max J. Herzberg in 1942. (See complete letter to Herzberg at end of post.) I'm noting these and others in this list as follows:

1. Orville's claim that he made the longest flight of 852 feet on Dec. 17. Orville couldn't very well continue with this claim because it became well accepted from the brothers' own documents and reports that Wilbur made that "flight," and that Orville made the first "flight"of only an estimated 120 feet. But long before the letter written to Herzberg in 1942 ( below), the public had come to believe that Orville's first flight of 120 feet was a true flight. (manned, powered, controlled, sustained). He was now lauded as "first to fly," whereas before Wilbur died in 1912, Wilbur wore the crown. (See
N. Y. Times quote at beginning of this post.)

2. Orville tells Herzberg that the longest flight was 59 seconds instead of 57. Orville states that 57 seconds was an error in the Boys' Life article in his letter to Herzog in 1942, but this seems fairly inconsequential. The statistics the Wrights reported were mostly estimates, anyway.

3. Back to Dayton when and why? Orville claims he went all the way back to Dayton from Kitty Hawk in December to get a new propellor shaft after it was broken in Wilbur's first attempt at powered flight. (Boys' Life, Sept, 1914 ,Page 3, column 3). Impossible if, according to the two brothers' original stories, the first attempt was on December 14 and the last four were on the 17th.  There wasn't  enough time to travel to Dayton and back between the 14th and the 17th. Orville did return to Dayton on November 30 to get new propeller shafts made and started back on December 9, according to Fred Howard's biography, "Wilbur and Orville," but the trip wasn't because Wilbur damaged the shafts in the first flight attempt.  It was because the shafts weren't strong enough to withstand the vibration of the engine, according to Howard.

4. That pesky question again: hills or level ground?? Orville says in Boys' Life that he couldn't attempt a turn on the "flights" because the hills wouldn't permit it. Here's the quotation:

 "Then after a few secondary adjustments, I took my seat for the second time. By now I had learned something about the controls, and about how a machine acted during a sustained (sic) flight, and I managed to keep in the air for fifty seven seconds. I couldn't turn, of course--the hills wouldn't permit that--but I had no great difficulty in handling it."

The hills? What hills? The Wrights claimed that all of their flights December 17 were made from level ground and the only "hill" they mentioned was the small 'hummock" that was struck and ended the longest flight. Either there were no hills, and Orville's statement here is incorrect as well as the witnesses' statements that the Wrights took off from the hill, or the telegram pictured below, the photos we have been presented by the Wrights, and subsequent statements have been falsified.

Telegram the Wrights sent their father Dec. 17 states they took off from level ground

This photo is supposedly of the 1903 flyer on its last flight of 852 feet that Orville claimed he made in Boys' Life. Note no hills in sight and the take off rail on level ground. Note also level ground in the autographed "first flight" picture above.

According to Fred Culick,of the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) and Ret. Professor of Cal Tech, the Wrights never attempted any turns in 1903; because they were too busy fighting to keep their plane in the air. If no turns were made, then the flights may have been capable of being controlled, but how can we determine that? Further, if the flights were initiated from a hill (assisted by gravity), then they would not be considered sustained.The ultimate question is: were the flights powered, controlled, and sustained as we have been taught in the historical literature? Or not?

5. "Witness" Johnny Moore's age. Orville says that Johnny Moore, who was declared by the Wrights as one of the five witnesses to "the first flight in history," was a "small boy of about thirteen or fourteen," who happened to wander on to the site. Shouldn't the official witnesses of such an important event have a few credentials? Especially since the Wrights' claims later created such hardship on other aviation pioneers in the form of lawsuits, injunctions, expenses, and reputations? 

According to the U. S. Census, Johnny Moore was actually eighteen years old in 1903, but was considered "slow," according to various other accounts. . 

Other statements in the Boys' Life article seem intended to make Orville and his brother appear bigger and more knowledgeable than they really were.

6. Orville's long narration that the great pioneer Otto Lilienthal's tables of lift and drag were wrong is not true.  Lilienthal 1848-1896 was a German pioneer aviator who had done hundreds of glides before he died . He was just ready to install an engine on his glider for powered flight when he was killed. Lilienthal was meticulous in creating tables of lift and drag from his gliding tests.The Wright brothers tried to use Lilienthals' tables to develop their early gliders, but found when they applied the tables to their machines there wasn't as much lift as the tables seemed to predict.  The Wrights soon came to the conclusion that Lilienthal's tables were wrong.

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7. Orville also states that the aviation Pioneer Octave Chanute didn't understand that Lilienthal's tables were wrong or why.

 The great aviation pioneer Chanute, who had died in 1910 after enormous contributions to the development of early aviation is presented as less knowledgeable than the Wrights here and in subsequent documents. That is unacceptable. The Wrights were the amateurs at the time, not Chanute. It was Chanute's and Lilienthal's glider research and Chanute's system of trussing that the Wrights used in their gliders and planes. Chanute had provided a great deal of assistance and support  to the Wrights and other early pioneers. He believed that progress in aviation should be shared and he helped to disseminate new information. The Wrights had studied Chanute's 1894 book "Progress in Flying Machines" to learn about the state of the art. Wilbur wrote to him and asked him questions in his letters when he ran into problems. See early Chanute collection digitized in the Library of Congress.

Today we know that the Wrights' problems in 1901 weren't the inaccuracy of Lilienthal's tables as many so called historians like to parrot -- it was the Wrights' naive interpretation of them that was wrong. See John David Anderson, Jr. "A History of Aerodynamics," 1997, pp. 210-12. (The Wrights' early documents display ignorance and perhaps already a downright arrogance). But Orville's statements about the "inaccuracies" of Lilienthal and Chanute's lack of understanding haven't been given up and are repeated in various forms by historians time and time again. Orville continued to make that claim in his approved "biography," The Wright Brothers,"" by Fred Kelly first published in 1943. Also please refer to "How We Invented the Airplane" by Orville Wright, edited by Fred C. Kelly, copyright 1953.

 Note that Fred Culick of the AIAA attempts to show that that the Wright brothers came to accept the tables. Culick quotes these statements from Wilbur's diary dated way back in 1901 and 1902. (link pending)

Excerpts from  Wilbur Wright's diary

But Orville continues to declare the tables wrong--and that he and Wilbur discovered the correct figures through their wind tunnel experiments of 1901. However, there is enough evidence now to challenge these claims by the Wrights.

As I stated in the previous post, either the Boys' Life magazine is unaware of the many errors in it, or it doesn't feel it's important to correct them. ( It would seem that some are just too obvious to miss.) I believe the editors should correct them in the best tradition of the Boy Scouts' first law.

And as I've stated, it's particularly troubling to confront such manipulation of the the truth in the Wright saga when we begin to examine in future posts their attempts and often successes in belittling, maligning, and discrediting other great pioneer aviators. One successful example of defamation: Orville's claim that one of our greatest aviation pioneers, Glenn Hammond Curtiss was guilty of fraud and collusion. Curtiss was respected and beloved in his lifetime. He is well described in another issue of Boys' Life, August, 1961, pp. 21, 51-53, "The Boy Who Fixed Things." Other examples are Gustave Whitehead, John Montgomery (both of whom were accused of "mythical flights," Dr. Albert Zahm, Charles Doolittle Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian; Charles Manly, and Edward Chalmers Huffaker. These great men were among those belittled, called liars, and/or discredited. Links to my claims will be provided as time permits.

Presented below is the complete letter that Orville wrote to Mr. Max Herzberg in reply to a request to use the Boys Life article in an anthology: Please refer to The Library of Congress digital collection. (link pending)

  

Letter to Herzog where Orville admits some errors, Library of Congress

Complete letter from Orville Wright to Mr.  Herzog, below, in which he calls the editor of "The Independent" dishonest and deceptive for not fully and openly correcting an article about the Wrights. However, the editor of "The Independent" did indeed apologize in writing more than once, and this fact is obviously not acknowledged by Orville.

(See footnote, previous post.) Letter from the Library of Congress digital  collection.

                         
        To be continued...