SCRUB IT

Scrub It

 

by Paul Jackson

Kill Devil Hills: December 17, 1903

It's a real bind when, having carefully cultivated a personal image of super cool on your Facebook page, a well-meaning friend trashes it all in a second by posting a picture of you acting the fool after an incautious night on the town. That sudden letdown is not a new, "social media" phenomenon: 

A century ago, the Wright Brothers were caught out in exactly the same manner.

The picture above was taken in October 1902 by Octave Chanute, the father of US aeronautics, and mentor to the Wrights. Chanute was visiting Kitty Hawk to ‘talk shop’ with his protégés and test-fly his triplane glider, but in this instance he has snapped the Wright 1902 glider during one of its take-offs. The image was later donated to Wright State University, and may be downloaded here

At the risk of boring the reader with a statement of the patently obvious, it should be noted that the glider — being a glider — is taking off down-hill. The photographer is standing on the same sand dune, a few feet lower down from the take-off point, and looking down to where the glider is intending to fly. Taking into account the Kill Devil Hills geography, the absence of another major sand dune in the middle distance indicates that glider and camera are pointing slightly east of north, where the terrain is uninterrupted until the settlement of Kitty Hawk, three miles distant.

Before the dunes were stabilized during construction of the Wright memorial park, the prevailing northerly wind removed sand from the northern faces of the Kill Devil Hills and deposited it in the lee of the south faces at the rate of some 20 feet per year. This process meant there was no chance for vegetation to grow on the north faces. Sand previously inside the dune was exposed to the wind for only a few days before it was on the move to the rear.

Lower down, beyond the base of the dune, the flattish land provided just enough shelter for scrubby growth. Examination of the land in Chanute’s picture shows the raw, sand face of the dune in light color, close to the camera and slightly discolored by disturbed or damp sand; and, in the middle distance, a change to a darker area, marking the start of scrub, where the land has levelled out. Around the base of the dune is a small apron of flat sand where only the first few grasses have had time to colonize since the dune rolled southwards. No tufts of grass are visible on the sloping ground near the camera.

A few other pictures taken at Kitty Hawk, and reproduced in reference books, have been over-exposed and show darker shades throughout. The principle holds, though: vegetation shows darker than pure sand.

Does the arrangement of the above picture look familiar?

We have already drawn attention to serious anomalies in the well-known “First Flight” photograph which cast considerable doubt on the claim that this was a take-off from the flat — thereby voiding the first-flight claim entirely. The findings are described in great detail in previous posts but, in summary, they are: (1) perspective within the photograph shows the start end of the launch rail to be higher than the take-off end; (2) ground is visible well below camera height, on which is a scrub-lined ridge leading to even lower (base level) ground; (3) two helpers both agree they carried the Flyer up a hill for launching; and (4) a written statement by the Brothers’ father, less than a week after the event, states that the launch rail began with a downhill slope to assist the aircraft in gathering speed.

Our previous analysis mentioned ground shades in passing, but the availability of a photograph by Chanute, undeniably showing the surface coloring change when viewed from part-way up a dune, makes the conclusion positively unavoidable: The famous “First Flight” picture shows (5) the airplane taking-off downhill from bare sand on the side of a dune and making a power-assisted glide towards scrub land at a lower level.

Had the Wrights “started from level” as they claimed, the ground under, or in the immediate vicinity of, the launch track would probably have looked like this, as shown in their photograph catalogued as 00674 by the Library of Congress.

Small clearings of flat sand are visible, but the operative word is “small”. Patently, however, the land all around the launch track in the “First Flight” picture is completely devoid of scrub, and so strongly suggestive of sand starkly exposed to the prevailing wind — downward sloping sand, in other words, like in Chanute’s picture.

There is not a blade of grass to be discerned anywhere in the “First Flight” photograph, yet the end-of-fourth-flight photograph (Library of Congress 00514, reproduced below) is much like the above (tufts of scrub marked red).

The Flyer took-off from an area devoid of vegetation and landed in an area liberally strewn with clumps of grasses. Yet the Wright Brothers tell us that the surface they lifted-off from was the same surface — at the same height above sea level —on which they alighted. Their own photographs prove that the two spots were very different.
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 Note from your founding editor

This post is another essay from Paul Jackson, one of our highly respected and much appreciated contributors to our blog: "Truth in Aviation History."

For more from this author, please go to these links:

The Wrights' 1903 Launch: It's All Downhill from Here  as well as

 Kitty Hawk: A New Perspective: The Wrights' Famous Photo