U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [430]
down with an I-told-you-so that rang from coast to
coast. The Wrights' big problem was to find a place secluded enough to carry on their experiments without being the horselaugh of the countryside. Then they had no money to spend;
they were practical mechanics; when they needed
anything they built it themselves.
They hit on Kitty Hawk,
on the great dunes and sandy banks that stretch
south towards Hatteras seaward of Albemarle Sound,
a vast stretch of seabeach
empty except for a coastguard station, a few fish-ermen's shacks and the swarms of mosquitoes and the ticks and chiggers in the crabgrass behind the dunes and overhead the gul s and swooping terns, in the
evening fishhawks and cranes flapping across the salt-marshes, occasional y eagles that the Wright brothers fol owed soaring with
their eyes
as Leonardo watched them centuries before
straining his sharp eyes to apprehend
the laws of flight.
-281-Four miles across the loose sand from the scatter-ing of shacks, the Wright brothers built themselves a camp and a shed for their gliders. It was a long way to pack their groceries, their tools, anything they hap-pened to need; in summer it was hot as blazes, the mos-quitoes were hel ; but they were alone there
and they'd figured out that the loose sand was as
soft as anything they could find to fal in.
There with a glider made of two planes and a
tail in which they lay flat on their bel ies and control ed the warp of the planes by shimmying their hips, taking off again and again al day from a big dune named Kil Devil Hil ,
they learned to fly.
Once they'd managed to hover for a few seconds
and soar ever so slightly on a rising aircurrent
they decided the time had come
to put a motor in their biplane.
Back in the shop in Dayton, Ohio, they built an
airtunnel, which is their first great contribution' to the science of flying, and tried out model planes in it. They couldn't interest any builders of gasoline
engines so they had to build their own motor.
It worked; after that Christmas of nineteen three
the Wright brothers weren't doing it for fun any more; they gave up their bicycle business, got the use of a big old cowpasture belonging to the local banker for practice flights, spent al the time when they weren't working on their machine in promotion, worrying about patents, infringements, spies, trying to interest govern--282-ment officials, to make sense out of the smooth involved heartbreaking remarks of lawyers.
In two years they had a plane that would cover'
twentyfour miles at a stretch round and round the cow-pasture. People on the interurban car used to crane their
necks out of the windows when they passed along the edge of the field, startled by the clattering pop pop of the old Wright motor and the sight of the white biplane like a pair of ironingboards one on top of the other chugging along a good fifty feet in the air. The cows soon got used to it.
As the flights got longer
the Wright brothers got backers,
engaged in lawsuits,
lay in their beds at night sleepless with the whine of phantom mil ions, worse than the mosquitoes at
Kitty Hawk.
In nineteen seven they went to Paris,
al owed themselves to be togged out in dress suits
and silk hats,
learned to tip waiters
talked with government experts, got used to gold
braid and postponements and vandyke beards and the
outspread palms of politicos. For amusement
they played diabolo in the Tuileries gardens.
They gave publicized flights at Fort Myers, where
they had their first fatal crackup, St. Petersburg, Paris, Berlin; at Pau they were al the rage,
such an attraction that the hotelkeeper
-283-wouldn't charge them for their room.
Alfonso of Spain shook hands with them and was
photographed sitting in the machine,
King Edward watched a flight,
the Crown Prince insisted on being taken up,
the rain of medals began.
They were congratulated by the Czar
and the King of Italy and the amateurs of sport,
and the society climbers and the papal titles,
and decorated by a society for universal peace.
Aeronautics became the sport of the day.