Birdmen

Early Pioneers

Early flyers—“Birdmen,” as they were called—were pioneers, heeding the same draw to riches or fame or illumination of the unknown that motivated those who had crossed uncharted oceans centuries before, and so aviation was replete with outsized personalities, brutal competition, and staggering bravery.

Otto Lilienthal was no amateur. He was, rather, the most sophisticated aerodynamicist of his day. For thirty years, he had taken tens of thousands of measurements of variously shaped surfaces moving at different angles through the air using a “whirling arm,” a long pole that extended horizontally from a fixed vertical pole and spun at a preset velocity, a device originally developed to test the flight of cannonballs. In 1889, Lilienthal had produced the most advanced study ever written on the mechanics of flight, Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst—“Bird-flight as the Basis of Aviation.” As Wilbur Wright would later assert, “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the nineteenth century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. His greatness appeared in every phase.”

For the next five years, Otto Lilienthal made more than two thousand flights using eighteen different gliders; fifteen were monofoil and three bifoil.

Lilienthal became a world-renowned figure but he had little use for popular acclaim. Instead, he continued to publish scholarly papers and articles and in 1895 patented his invention.

On August 9, 1896, Otto Lilienthal’s did. During his second flight of the day, he stalled in a thermal about fifty feet off the ground, then fell, breaking his spine. The next day, Otto Lilienthal was dead. In his last hours, he uttered one of aviation’s most famous epitaphs: “Sacrifices must be made.”

Aerodynamics as a separate science was born in 1799 when an English polymath named George Cayley produced a remarkable silver medallion. Cayley had observed that seagulls soared for great distances without flapping their wings and therefore hypothesized aircraft wings as fixed rather than movable.

With a business to attend to and no real knowledge of even the formative aerodynamics of the day, he began by reading everything on the subject available at the Dayton Library, which wasn’t much, and—taking a cue from Lilienthal—spending endless hours watching birds in flight. Buzzards, with their immense wingspan, were his favorites.*1 After three years of self-education, Wilbur had gained some theoretical knowledge of aviation and was ready to move on.

Lilienthal, Langley, and virtually everyone who had researched aerodynamics had utilized a whirling-arm device. But a whirling arm was an “open” system and inaccuracies were inevitable.

In 1871, a remarkable English marine engineer and Aeronautical Society member named Francis Herbert Wenham built the first wind tunnel, a “closed” system, to test how different airfoil shapes would react to air currents.

Their wind tunnel was the most sophisticated ever constructed and the Wrights experimented with their invention for two months, testing two hundred airfoil shapes and configurations. They were obsessively precise and their measurements were more accurate than any previously achieved. When they concluded their testing just before Christmas 1901, they had confirmed that Lilienthal’s tables were “full of errors.”

Langley & Chanute

Langley was intimidating and imperious. He rarely performed the menial tasks of experimentation himself but instead employed a team of talented young assistants who were charged with adhering to minutely detailed instructions, some of which were contradictory or ludicrous. Langley demanded, for example, that the nuts and bolts of his models be polished as if they were museum pieces. He changed his mind repeatedly, causing much of his assistants’ work to be scrapped before it was completed.

…his extrapolation of the data to a principle that asserted it took less power to fly fast than slow—which he called “Langley’s Law”—proved to be embarrassingly incorrect.

Langley’s assistants built a series of rubber models, none of which would successfully fly. Rather than analyze the principles under which the models were built, Langley decided that the problem was insufficient power and set to increasing the size of his models to accommodate a larger motor. Beginning in 1891, Langley’s team built a series of what he called “aerodromes”; Langley, with no knowledge of Greek, was unaware that an aerodrome is a place rather than a thing.

What irked Herring the most, it seemed, was that while the assistants did all the work, Langley took the credit—as long as things went well. When they did not, the assistants were assumed to be at fault.*3 Herring endured for eighteen months, until November 1895, and then resigned. The only surprise was that he lasted so long.

“The aerodrome or ‘flying machine’ … resembled an enormous bird soaring in the air with extreme regularity in large curves, sweeping steadily upward in a spiral path, the spirals with a diameter of perhaps 100 yards, until it reached a height of 100 feet in the air at the end of a course of about half a mile.”*4 After the “steam gave out,” Bell added, “to my further surprise, the whole, instead of tumbling down, settled as slowly and gracefully as it is possible for a bird to do, touched the water without any damage, and was picked out immediately and ready to be tried again.”3 Samuel Pierpont Langley had succeeded in developing the first powered heavier-than-air flying machine.

Despite Langley’s success, Octave Chanute continued to maintain that development of a successful glider was the real key to flight.

…rather than the fixed cruciform tail he had installed on Langley’s aerodromes, Herring added a tail on a universal joint that could “give” in the wind to help maintain the glider’s attitude and avoid the corkscrewing of the Potomac flights. The design was an immense success. Hundreds of straight glides were made under full control.

While both Langley and Chanute believed the other’s approach to be a dead end, for the moment each was content to bask in his own success.

Where Chanute saw excessive publicity as ultimately harmful to the overall goal, Herring seduced the press.

Wilbur was largely unconcerned with the aspect of the problem on which Langley had obsessed—propulsion—and therefore told Chanute that he intended to experiment without motors. Those, he asserted, would be an easy appendage to add once the aerodynamics had been perfected. “What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery.… It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge & skill.”

On October 7, 1903, with great ceremony, before a gaggle of reporters, scientists, army officers, and government luminaries—but not Langley, who was “detained” in Washington—Langley’s manned aerodrome was hoisted to a track laid along the length of the houseboat from which it would be slung by catapult down the Potomac. Charles Manly, who had fashioned a sophisticated, lightweight motor that would generate 50 horsepower, sat in the center, prepared to soar into history. Onlookers stood on the banks of the river, waiting to throw their hats into the air and break into wild cheering. Finally, the stays were removed and a counterweight flung the machine toward the river. The aerodrome barely cleared the track before it proceeded to drop straight into the Potomac’s icy waters. So precipitous was its descent that Manly was lucky to free himself from the wreckage and bob to the surface in the cork vest he had worn to insulate him from the cold. Langley was eviscerated in the press, front-page fodder across the nation.

On December 6, Langley tried again. Newspapers across the nation once again reported on the attempt and once again the result was a disaster. “A complete wreck,” as The New York Times observed.

…with no background in mathematics and scant in engineering, Langley had ignored computations of scale and had never realized that it requires eight times the lift to keep a craft double the volume in the air. While the secretary insisted he would conduct another test within days, the army decided they had spent $50,000 on a boondoggle.

Robinson, a congressman from Arkansas, was quoted as observing, “The only thing [Langley] ever made fly was government money.”8…

When Chanute tried to warn Wilbur that the French were making great strides and might soon produce machines to rival his, Wilbur replied on January 1, 1908, “I still hold to my prediction that an independent solution to the flying problem would require at least five years.” If anything, Chanute had understated the case.

Wright Foundations

Wilbur Wright is one of the greatest intuitive scientists this nation has ever produced. Completely self-taught, he made spectacular intellectual leaps to solve a series of intractable problems that had eluded some of history’s most brilliant men.

After Wilbur’s death, Orville attempted to maintain the struggle, but while his hatred for Curtiss matched Wilbur’s, his talents and temperament did not. Many subsequent accounts have treated the Wright brothers as indistinguishable equals, but Orville viscerally as well as chronologically never ceased being the little brother.

Neither Glenn Curtiss nor Wilbur Wright ever came to understand his own limits, that luminescent intelligence in one area of human endeavor does not preclude gross incompetence in another. And because genius often begets or even requires arrogance, both men continuously repeated their blunders.

Unlike Langley, for whom a breeze of five miles per hour was sufficient to deter a launch, Chanute, as would the Wrights four years hence, wanted wind. “No bird soars in a calm,” Wilbur would observe.

By all accounts outgoing and gregarious growing up, in the winter of 1885 Wilbur was struck in the mouth playing a game akin to ice hockey and lost some of his front teeth. Although he recovered quickly from the physical injuries, he unaccountably sank into a depression that lasted almost three years.

The church schism left deep scars on Milton as well as Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine, the three Wright siblings still living at home, and drew them inward. “They came to believe in the essential depravity of mankind. The world beyond the front door of their home was filled with men and women who were not to be trusted.… An honest person was well advised to expect the worst of others.”

The safety bicycle became an immediate rage and along with the automobile helped remake the American landscape. It is nearly impossible to overestimate the societal impact of personalized mechanical transport on a population that could not previously move about for any distance without a horse. The prospect of traveling where one desired whether or not a railroad stopped there or a steamship docked there was intoxicating.

Because it lacked an engine, a bicycle was priced within the means of most Americans. Bicycles could be ridden to work during the week and then for recreation on Sunday. Enthusiasts could form clubs to explore and socialize. Young men could race. Bicycles soon became a popular means of allowing young gentlemen and ladies to pass wholesome time together.

Millions of the two-wheelers were sold in little more than a decade and hundreds of small manufacturers rushed to enter the booming field.

For unlike Langley, Wilbur understood almost by instinct that stability, not propulsion or even lift, was the crucial element of flight and that the safety bicycle, not the automobile, was the most appropriate vehicle from which to extrapolate control principles.

Within weeks, Wilbur had his first great epiphany, a counterintuitive deduction. He came to understand that the best way to achieve stability in flight was to make an aircraft inherently unstable.

“I make no secret of my plans for the reason that I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine, and that only those who are willing to give as well as to receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery.”

The United States Weather Bureau had recommended obscure, isolated Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as one of the few places in the nation with sandy stretches and steady prevailing winds of about fifteen miles per hour. Wilbur contacted the head of the local weather bureau and confirmed Kitty Hawk as the place to test his full-sized glider.

When Wilbur and Orville left North Carolina at the end of August, their mood was far different than it had been the year before. Instead of vaulting forward, they had taken a step back. Even worse, the problems they were encountering seemed without solution; they cut to the core of Wilbur’s hypotheses. Wilbur was unaccustomed to being so completely wrong.

But Wilbur and Orville realized that a wind tunnel was precisely what they needed to move past Lilienthal’s inaccuracies and obtain measurements that would allow them to correct the design flaws of the 1901 glider. They simply needed one that worked. So they set to build an improved model, bringing to the task their combination of incisive reasoning and flawless craftsmanship, spiced as always with a touch of Wilbur’s genius.

“As famous as we became for our ‘Flyer’ and its system of control, it all would never have happened if we had not developed our own wind tunnel and derived our own correct aerodynamic data.”

There were days when the brothers—Orville was by now going into the air as well—might make as many as seventy-five glides, some as far as three hundred feet.

By the time they left North Carolina three weeks later, they had completed perhaps one thousand glides, attaining distances of as much as six hundred feet.

Wilbur and Orville had their biggest successes after Herring and Chanute departed, making more than 250 glides in “any kind of weather,” including a 30-mph wind. The control issues had been solved. They had created a craft that could fly. At that point their research became congruent with Langley’s—all they needed was a means of propulsion.

Young Glenn Curtiss’s other passion was speed. Like the Wrights, he was bitten by the bicycle bug but preferred racing to touring. The local pharmacist noted, “He had tremendous endurance. He was never a quitter. He would do anything that was fair to win.”

The aircraft took off at the end of the track and flew; only 120 feet perhaps, but those forty yards were the first ever traveled in a controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight by a human being. Even the photograph was perfect. Daniels caught the machine just as it left the ground, Wilbur in mid-stride at its right. No image is more famous. The Wrights made three more flights that day, the last of which was a remarkable 852 feet by Wilbur.

Upon receipt of the December 17 telegram, Bishop Wright sent his son Lorin to The Dayton Journal but the editor did not consider a fifty-seven-second flight newsworthy. “If it had been fifty-seven minutes, then it might have been a news item,” the editor sniffed.

The application Harry Toulmin filed with the United States Patent Office in March 1904 would set the course of American aviation for the next thirteen years. Rather than simply specify the elements of Wilbur’s wing-warping system as a mechanical construction, Toulmin expanded the notion of wing warping to cover any system where the angle of any device at the wing tips varied the “lateral margins” in opposite directions from the angle of wings at the center.5 Thus Toulmin altered the patent from seeking exclusivity for a device to seeking exclusivity for an idea, the principle of lateral control itself. If such a patent was granted and ratified by the courts, it would apply to configurations that the Wrights themselves had not employed or even conceived of and so virtually no aircraft could subsequently be flown without licensing by Orville and Wilbur, precisely the breadth they were seeking.

On the first day, with about forty reporters present—no photographs were allowed—the Flyer refused to leave the ground in calm winds. After two days of bad-weather delays, the brothers succeeded into coaxing the Flyer into a jaunt of only thirty feet. “Then the Machine Dropped to Earth,” read the headline in one of the few newspapers that reported the event. Most of the remaining reporters left muttering that these Dayton boys were no better than Langley. Throughout the season, the Wrights found themselves less successful than with the Kitty Hawk machine.

The May fiasco turned out to be serendipitous; the Wrights were free to experiment and try to solve problems without their every failure reported in the newspapers.

Wilbur and Orville, who already believed the board was populated by dolts, declined to tip their hand. Instead, virtually the day after they received the letter from Washington, they rekindled their offer to Great Britain and also offered the Flyer to the French. To the British, they guaranteed a fifty-mile minimum.

When Orville explained that the rules had changed, offering statements of witnesses and photographs of the Flyer in the air in lieu of an actual flight, the attaché was flummoxed. “Many people, you tell me,” he wrote, “have seen flights on Oct 3, 4 & 5. I only want to see one too.”1 But the Wrights were as always uncompromising and ultimately the British government declined to accede to the Wrights’ terms. As 1906 began, the Wright Flyer remained the only successful airplane…

Unwilling to deposit $195,000 on a promise, the French sent a three-man commission to Dayton to see a demonstration without first asking permission of the Wrights. Incredibly, Wilbur and Orville refused even to show the delegation the aircraft, once again offering only witness testimonials and photographs to prove their claims. Although the members of the delegation were convinced the Wright airplane could fly, the French ministry refused to move forward without some notion of how far, how fast, and how high the Flyer could go. The Wrights, it seemed, had competition.

The ministers sent a telegram to Dayton adding conditions to the sale, such as a requirement that the airplane reach an altitude of one thousand feet, be delivered by August 1, 1906, and be exclusive to France, which the Wrights “at once rejected.” Instead, they proposed extending the option period one year if the French would extend the delivery date until October 1 and waive the exclusivity provision with regard to the United States entirely. The option lapsed. Soon afterward, the Wrights agreed to France’s terms but the war ministry refused to reopen negotiations. Wilbur and Orville got to keep the $5,000 but lost the opportunity for a far greater payday. Even worse, despite what seemed irrefutable proof that they had actually flown, whisperings began that they were simply a couple of bluffers who were attempting to perpetrate an elaborate hoax.

But rather than respond with a public flight, Wilbur and Orville dug in their heels. Wilbur wrote to Chanute on April 28, “Our position is constantly becoming stronger in other countries and we will soon find a sale somewhere. The French will buy eventually and probably under less favorable circumstances than today.” Whether this was bluff or self-delusion is not clear, but in no other country was a sale in the offing and the Wrights would never receive as much money from the French as they lost on this deal.

Wilbur and Orville even helped Baldwin retrieve his airship when a wind blew it from its mooring. The Wrights and Curtiss were each impressed with the intelligence and acumen of the other. Wilbur and Orville invited Curtiss to visit their shop. What followed was the most important and controversial meeting in early aviation history.

Unlike the Wrights’ Kitty Hawk flights, Santos-Dumont and his “perfected airplane” were reported on in virtually every newspaper in America.

…what Wilbur failed to appreciate was that even if Santos-Dumont’s aircraft was a technological dead end and might not compare to the Wrights’ vastly superior design, its very presence provoked a threat to the brothers’ already questionable strategy of playing a pat hand. Santos-Dumont’s success was certain to further inspire other designers and with sufficient knowledge of aerodynamics now available, competing machines that could compare might be completed quite a bit sooner than the Wrights’ estimates.

…newspaper reports almost always mentioned the Wrights in a way that virtually begged for the brothers to provide some verification of the rumors of their success. The nation was eager to make them heroes. But Wilbur and Orville would not be moved. They had decided on their strategy, and that, as far as they were concerned, was that.

After meetings and an exchange of correspondence, the Wrights offered to sell the army a Flyer that would carry two men and enough fuel for a 200-kilometer flight, neither of which they had yet approached in their tests, and to train an army aviator to operate the machine. For this they asked $100,000.

Within weeks, out of options, Wilbur returned to the United States, heading to Washington to negotiate terms for a demonstration flight that, if successful, would result in a sale. Orville sailed for New York a month later. In his new negotiations with the government, Wilbur dropped virtually all the Wrights’ initial demands and the army responded almost immediately. On December 5, 1907, Wilbur received a communication from the Board of Ordnance and Fortification. It noted that “Mr. Wright … said the offer therein contemplated [in their previous letters] disposal of certain secrets, but they were now prepared to furnish an operative machine capable of carrying two persons for the sum of $25,000.” All subsequent machines would be purchased for $10,000 and, as before, included the offer to train an officer.

After years of disdaining public media, Wilbur and Orville had finally learned that perception could not be ignored. They allowed, even encouraged, a number of reporters to follow them to the Outer Banks and report on their progress.

On August 8, Wilbur made the first public flight of a Wright Flyer at Hunaudières race track near Le Mans, 125 miles from Paris. By the time he landed, aviation had been changed forever. The French, who had been so smug after the successes of Farman, Delagrange, and Santos-Dumont, were stupified. Although his first flight lasted less than two minutes and Wilbur was using the stick control for the first time, the grace and control of the Flyer left onlookers literally gasping. Over the next two weeks, Wilbur made about ten more flights, none of them more than eight minutes. He flew easily and gracefully, turning in deep banks, carving circles and even figure eights in the sky, all with control of the aircraft far beyond anything seen before. “Frenchmen seemed to vie with each other in giving the praise and credit so long overdue,” Aeronautics reported, “and all hasten to say ‘never had any doubts.’ ”

The motor problem, while never totally solved, became moot on September 16, when Wilbur made headlines around the world by keeping the Flyer in the air for nearly forty minutes, covering twenty-nine miles at an average speed of forty-six miles per hour. All three marks represented official records.

He was given gold medals, honors, and testimonials; he won prizes and received congratulations from luminaries across Europe. He dined with Paul Painlevé and Auguste Rodin. Photographs, descriptions, and caricatures—most emphasizing his emaciated frame—filled the newspapers. Through it all, Wilbur never ceased being Wilbur. He was gracious but modest; appreciative but unimpressed. He tolerated the attention but was never either swayed or spoiled by it. Royalty impressed him not in the least.

The Wrights were the most noted Americans in Europe, written about in newspapers across the Continent, often either in hyperbole or outright fiction. But unlike articles in previous years, these exaggerations were all flattering, or would have been if Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine hadn’t found them so silly. That none of the Wrights had their head turned would be an understatement. “Kings are just like other nice, well-bred people,” Katharine remarked to a reporter.

Upon their return from Europe, the Wrights, who had yet to sell a single airplane in their native country, were treated like conquerors. On June 10, President William Howard Taft personally presented them with the Aero Club medals and the following week they were feted with a huge two-day presentation in Dayton. Bishop Milton Wright gave the invocation on the first day and in a grand ceremony on the second, General James Allen of the Signal Corps presented the brothers with a Congressional Medal, Governor Judson Harmon presented them with the Ohio Medal, and Mayor Edward Burkhart presented them with the Dayton Medal. Through it all, Wilbur and Orville stood in obvious discomfort at the spectacle and not at all pleased that they had been drawn away from their work. In fact, they were in the shop both mornings, leaving only to take part in as little of the hoopla as possible. Both brothers’ speeches were restricted to “Thank you, gentlemen.”

Wilbur could certainly have then attempted the twenty-three-mile Channel flight, less than a third of the distance he’d already flown, but again he declined. He missed an enormous opportunity. Crossing the Channel in 1909 was like crossing the Atlantic in 1927. The prestige that would accrue to the man who succeeded in traversing the most famous geographical barrier in Europe spurred a rush of activity and innovation.

In the final tally, none of three aviators in Wright Flyers—Count de Lambert, Lefebvre, or Paul Tissandier—placed first in any category; their score stood at one second, one third, and four fourth places, whereas Curtiss won two of the three events he entered and finished second in the other.

“We made the art of flying and all the people in it have us to thank for it.” Then he said, incredibly, “We spent every cent we had accumulated by years of savings, and we worked day and night for years amid the laughter of the world.”14 That Wilbur believed this fantasy, one he echoed often, is certain. But never in their years at Kitty Hawk or Huffman Prairie had they approached financial ruin and the world could hardly have laughed at experiments conducted in secret.

As always, Wilbur and Orville intended to maintain total control of the product. “We propose to train enough men in aviation to make us independent of the foreign contestants in case they do not respond to the invitation to participate in our meets,” Wilbur stated in a newspaper interview. Aviators would be trained in the Wright method of flying both in Dayton and in a training facility Orville had established in Montgomery, Alabama.

Team members were forbidden to drink, smoke, or swear, and there was no flying on Sunday. The Wrights provided the equipment, of course, which few of the team members could afford.

…the Aero Club of America agreed to refuse to sanction any meet or exhibition in which the promoters had failed to obtain a license under the Wright patents.12 Foreign aviators would thus be allowed to fly in sanctioned meets. Once again, the terms were steep—the Wrights demanded 10 percent of the gross receipts of any meet with an Aero Club sanction. Since few meets would clear that much, Wilbur and Orville had more or less ensured that anyone promoting an exhibition would be working for them.

May ended as badly as it began for Wilbur and Orville. On the twenty-ninth of that month, Glenn Curtiss completed the first true cross-country flight in the United States and he did it with the full participation of the nation’s largest newspaper, The New York Times.

But one of those competitors would not be Wilbur Wright. While $10,000 would seem irresistible to most flyers, once again Wilbur Wright chose to eschew ostentation and focus on sales—still refusing to understand that the two were interrelated.

“It is absolutely essential that the Wright machine be shown in its true capacity,” particularly in view of the public image of Curtiss’s airplanes.6 But if there was a paradigm for the type of man the Wrights would not employ, the hard-drinking, profane, and insubordinate Hamilton was it. Wilbur categorically refused.

“The Wright Company never let us keep any of the prizes we won,” Frank Coffyn noted. “The company kept them and we just got our $50 a day. No bonuses. Nothing. It was a very sore kind of project with us because the Curtiss Company allowed their pilots to keep fifty percent of all the prizes they won. We used to get furious about it but it didn’t do us any good. The Wrights wouldn’t let us have it.”

Wilbur arrived the following day to try to determine the cause of the calamity. When he heard that his favorite and most trusted aviator had flown in 25-mph winds, he told reporters, “Brookins ought to be hanged for attempting a flight in such circumstances.” Still, the accident was said to double admissions sales the following day.

Wilbur had missed the message of Brookins’s crash. The Wright machines could climb, turn gracefully, fly for long distances, and attain high speeds. But in tight situations, where quick maneuvering and complete control of the aircraft were required—the precise sort of flying that was about to predominate in exhibitions and, of course, would always be a prerequisite in war—the Flyers fell short. And in so doing they became unsafe.

Wilbur and Orville, of course, saw nothing wrong with their systems, particularly as they viewed daredevil flying as simply foolish, so they made no effort to improve their product beyond some minor enhancements.

Wilbur Wright joined in the general sentiment. He was so overjoyed to see Grahame-White defeated that he forgot the winner had flown an infringing aircraft.

The Wrights, for example, lacked either the time or the inclination to consider an alternative to wing warping, although European designers were beginning to employ a more efficient and reliable aileron alignment.

Within two years, no other airplane would use the Wright technology. Even the Wrights’ most sympathetic biographer admitted that after Belmont “it was clear that they had lost their technological edge … the inventors of the airplane resigned themselves to a position back in the middle of the pack.”

In the end, Orville concluded, “I have about made up my mind to let the European business go. I don’t propose to be bothered with it all my life and I see no prospect of its ever amounting to anything unless we send a representative here to stay and watch our interests.”

It was after the success at Hampton Roads that Curtiss changed his mind about making a deal with Wilbur Wright. He had come up with a better idea.

I made no conditions. I asked for and received no remuneration whatsoever for this service. I consider it an honour to be able to tender my services in this connection.”9 With the honor would come the support of the United States military, heretofore the exclusive province of the Wrights.

Wilbur and Orville were also now playing a much weaker hand. The deaths of Hoxsey and Johnstone had more than cost America the services of two of its best aviators; it had also robbed the Wright team of its star draws. No aviator had yet come forward to fill the void, but America thirsted for heroes and the field had opened up.

But while focusing on details of a machine whose essential design they never questioned, as if it were 1903 and they were still in North Carolina, they missed the larger picture: that the very rudiments of aircraft technology were not only bound to evolve but were in fact already evolving. Wilbur remained a stunning theoretician and Orville a superb craftsman. To regain their preeminence, they needed only to return to what had first gotten them to Kitty Hawk: approaching the problem as if it were entirely new, with no past designs to burden their thinking. Wilbur was still more than capable of great intellectual leaps but to achieve them would require a reprioritization of his time. But he had in large part ceased to be a scientist or an engineer and was now almost entirely a business executive, a role for which he was uniquely unsuited.

Wilbur had spent virtually no time in 1910 designing aircraft and 1911 promised to be the same.

…much of the Wright Company’s affairs were in a surprising state of disarray. The source was once again management—in this case, their own.

Knabenshue was not the only member of the exhibition team to chafe under the Wrights’ puritanical, parsimonious rule. Their two most proficient remaining flyers, one of whom was their former protégé Walter Brookins, were in open rebellion.

That Brookins’s “swelled head” might have been caused by watching two of his closest friends plunge to their deaths for $50 while the Wrights made $1,000 per day for their services apparently never entered Orville’s thinking.

Brookins announced that he was giving up flying. Orville learned of Brookins’s resignation in the newspapers…

With Orville at his side, he told the reporters who met him at the dock that he was not certain whether he would enter the Wright exhibition team in the unlicensed Chicago meet—ignoring the fact that Orville already had—and claimed to have little use for exhibitions in general. “I am more concerned in what the average man can do than I am in what the daredevil or simpleton can do with an aeroplane.”

Of all the Wrights’ legal actions, this one seemed the most ill-considered. The defendants were wealthy, powerful, and influential men being sued in their backyard. Orville’s initial willingness to enter Wright aviators would work against them as well. What was more, seeking a share of the proceeds was pointless. The meet had $142,000 in receipts against $195,000 in expenses, leaving only red ink for the Wrights. To get paid, they would need to sue the committee members as individuals, which provided an even less likely chance of success.

He would never again pilot a Wright airplane nor participate except cursorily in one’s development. Defending his monopoly, defeating those whom he saw as his enemies, had become every bit as much an obsession as defending his father from Milton’s enemies in the church.

In pursuing damages over technology, the Wrights had rendered themselves anachronisms. Their lack of moderation was equally self-defeating. Wilbur and Orville thought anyone who did not see things their way was either ignorant or duplicitous; anyone who overtly disagreed with them was either a liar or a cheat. The fact that the performance of their competitors improved while Wright airplanes remained substantially unchanged was, according to the brothers, only because the rest of the aviation community were a bunch of craven patent infringers.

In the space of four months, for example, trade journals contained detailed descriptions, schematic drawings, and/or how-to-build instructions for, among others, the Curtiss biplane, the Valkerie monoplane, the McCurdy headless biplane, the Nieuport monoplane, the Willard headless biplane, the Kirkbride all-steel biplane, the Burgess–Curtis “Baby,” the two-seat Deperdussin monoplane, the Queen monoplane, and even the Wright Model B.*1…

Milton wrote in his dairy, “The boys try a Curtiss machine and break it.” A few days later, he added, “Wilbur went out to try a Curtiss machine. It was hard to fly with.” It was Wilbur Wright’s final flight, at the controls of his rival’s machine.

Curtiss more than the Wrights seemed to sense the future. Despite trying to sell airplanes to the army and navy, Wilbur and Orville had not substantially moved from their belief that aviation would be primarily a sporting pursuit, perhaps with commercial applications down the road. Curtiss’s innovations, on the other hand, would all be applicable to the use of airplanes as a means of attack.

By the end of 1911, Wilbur’s frustration had begun to gnaw at his health. He had by his own admission worked harder and for longer hours pursuing the case against Glenn Curtiss than he had developing the Wright Flyer. He drove himself to exhaustion traveling around the country, meeting with lawyers and giving depositions, and grew so thin as to appear cadaverous. Family members began to express concern about the crushing pace he insisted on maintaining.

America’s two greatest designers were either spending a good part of their time (Curtiss) or all of their time (Wilbur Wright) trying to best each other in the courtroom.

“A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadily, he lived and died.” Wilbur Wright was a complex man, flawed to be sure, but Milton’s assessment did not contain one word that wasn’t true.

Showing remarkable presence of mind, Ely actually jumped from the airplane just before it struck the ground but the force of the fall was too much. When officials of the fair reached him, Ely was still conscious. “I lost control,” he is reported to have said. “I know I am going to die.” And he did, moments later.*1…

Although exhibition flyers such as Phil Parmalee would continue to be identified as “Wright aviators,” Wilbur and Orville officially disbanded their team and turned their energies almost exclusively toward the courtroom.

President Taft said that Wilbur “deserves to stand with Edison and Bell,” comparisons that were also made in a great many newspapers.

“Wilbur Wright was not a martyr. His life, if it means anything, shows that a man can carry a great work to success, not only without credit from his fellows, but with supreme indifference to their opinion.”

…as Orville and Katharine saw it, Wilbur had been killed by the “scoundrels and thieves” who refused to acknowledge the Wrights’ invention, and they would expend whatever energy necessary to avenge their brother. “Orville sued Curtiss for revenge and prestige,” Grover Loening stated flatly.

The overall effect of the America and the Langley was to keep Curtiss and his innovative aircraft in the headlines while the only noteworthy event for the Wright Company was the withdrawal of the C after yet another army flyer met his death, in February 1914. Orville continued to blame pilot error but the army’s board of investigation concluded what everyone but Orville had known all along: The design of the C was flawed, which no automatic stabilizer would change, and the machine was a death trap. That Curtiss was increasingly seen as not only an innovator but the true father of American aviation did not increase the Wright Company’s popularity.

When beloved Katharine, with whom he had been inseparable for three decades, finally decided to marry in 1926, he accused her of disloyalty, of abandoning him, and refused to attend her wedding. When Katharine lay dying three years later, he had to be dragged by his brother Lorin to her bedside.

Curtiss may not have been an intuitive genius but he was an inveterate innovator; he may have been incapable of a great breakthrough, but he would constantly improve any resultant product. Wilbur Wright was a visionary architect, but Glenn Curtiss was a master builder. One can dispute who was more vital but progress unquestionably demands both. By attempting to neuter Curtiss, even if their accusations were correct, the Wrights stifled the development of American aviation.

That Wilbur believed he was doing God’s work and toiling for the betterment of humanity by pursuing monopoly wealth seems congruent to both his public behavior and his private correspondence, particularly his insistence that he had little use for personal gain. Whatever the explanation, the demons that caused Wilbur Wright to abandon science, to eschew innovation, to embark on a hopeless crusade to vanquish foes both real and imagined, robbed him of decades of his life and America and the world of one of its exceptional intellects. That the tragedy of Wilbur’s fall was self-generated makes the irony only that much more cruel.

Curtiss & Engines

Upon examination, Baldwin saw that the machine and its lightweight two-cylinder motor had been fashioned by the G. H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company of Hammondsport, New York. He had never heard of the company but telegraphed and asked to purchase a motor not attached to a frame. The message was received by the owner, a twenty-six-year-old mechanical whiz named Glenn Hammond Curtiss.

From the time he was a small boy, Curtiss was a tinkerer. At ten, he made a camera out of a cigar box; at twelve, he built a telegraph out of spools, nails, tin, and wire. While in his early teens, he was often hired to wire neighbors’ houses for telephones or electric light.

At that point, however, Curtiss decided to mount a gasoline engine on one of his bicycles. “Motor cycles”—the name had been recently coined—were a newly invented hybrid of the automobile and the safety bicycle.

Curtiss obtained a mail order engine casting from the only company selling such items for motorcycles, but it came unfinished and without instructions so Curtiss cobbled together the rest. There was no carburetor, so he employed a tomato can “filled with gasoline and covered over with a gauze screen, which sucked up the liquid by capillary attraction. Thus it vaporized and was conducted to the cylinder by a pipe from the top of the can.”

Within two years, Curtiss had acquired a reputation for brilliance at engine design and his motorcycles were purchased by enthusiasts across America.

On September 9, he shattered all records by flying, albeit unofficially, for fifty-seven minutes over the Fort Myer parade ground, traveling an estimated forty miles, landing only to perform minor maintenance to his motor. He then returned to the air, this time staying aloft for sixty-two minutes and reaching speeds of perhaps fifty miles per hour.

The Wright patent seemed to deter no one. Early in 1909, Glenn Curtiss proceeded to take the very steps he had assured the Wrights he would not—exploit aviation commercially and in exhibitions.

Curtiss, watching from the staging area, was certain Blériot had won but when the times were taken, Blériot had finished six seconds behind. The huge crowd, which had been screaming Blériot’s name, was stunned when the Stars and Stripes was run up and the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The two thousand Americans in the crowd cheered wildly and Quentin Roosevelt told Curtiss his victory was “bully.”*5 With his victory, Glenn Curtiss had established himself as the fastest man on earth and in the air. That same day, Wright Company lawyers served papers on Curtiss’s wife in Hammondsport.

Curtiss’s flight down the Hudson was the most publicized feat of aviation in history, outstripping even Blériot’s jaunt across the Channel. The New York Times devoted no less than twelve separate articles to the flight on May 30.

“If I read Mr. Curtiss correctly, he is not too conservative to adopt a good improvement regardless of who owns the patent.”

After he cut his engines but before he had touched down, an updraft caught the airplane, threatening to cause Ely to miss the line of sandbag-anchored ropes, but he expertly dropped the tail and set the airplane down dead center on the deck about halfway down the platform. The ropes stopped him and to the cheering of both sailors and civilians, he got out of the airplane to be greeted by his wife, the captain, and attending luminaries.

One of Curtiss’s visions was an airplane that could take off and land on water, a true hydroplane.

More than fifty versions failed before he got one to work. “Those of us who did not know Mr. Curtiss well,” Spuds Ellyson observed, “wondered that he did not give up in despair. Since that time we have learned that anything he says he can do, he always accomplishes, as he always works out the problem in his mind before making any statement.… It was never a case of ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ to his amateur or his regular mechanics, but always, ‘What do you think of making this change?’ He was always willing to listen to any argument but generally managed to convince you his plan was best.”

…he turned to Mrs. Curtiss and said: ‘I’ve got it.’ On the theatre program he had sketched what ultimately became the design of the hydroaeroplane.”

Curtiss had not removed the wheels but rather attached the float independently and he would soon modify the design to create the world’s first amphibious airplane.

Curtiss spurred further innovation and became known as “the father of naval aviation.”

William Randolph Hearst had first offered the prize in October 1910, which at the time seemed like nothing but a ploy to hype his newspapers. To win, a flyer would have to cover twenty times the distance that Glenn Curtiss had in his Albany-to-New York flight the previous May and no airplane was remotely up to the task.

It was the most advanced craft ever built; included a collapsible waterproof hood to protect the operator from spray and was “so strongly built that it can be beached with safety even in a high surf.” Almost immediately, Curtiss sold models in France, Germany, Russia, and Japan, and orders came in “faster than the machines could be built.”

Curtiss never seemed to grasp the notion of pioneer patents; either his lawyers had been negligent in not informing their client of the most important change in patent law in a century, or they had so informed him and Curtiss refused to acknowledge that such a restrictive measure could actually exist. In either case, Curtiss quite clearly felt himself not only heroic in standing up to a couple of bullies but also a defender of other persecuted opponents of the Wrights. “Had we not taken this stand, the Wright Co. would have been in the position to enjoin all manufacturers and the whole industry would have been monopolized. Not only warping machines, but aileron construction and the Farman construction would have been controlled; in fact, any machine that could fly, including hydroplanes would come under jurisdiction of the Wright patent, so that the trade certainly owes us something.”

Orville was experimenting on the Great Miami River with what he called the Wright Company’s first true hydroplane, the CH, which was in truth merely a Model C with a pontoon slapped on. But just before Orville was prepared to introduce the CH, Curtiss unveiled his latest design, the first-ever tractor hydroplane, built specifically for Wright adversary Harold Fowler McCormick. Curtiss was innovating at such a pace that he said designating his models would be meaningless. The CH, a clumsy, badly performing craft that never met the navy’s performance criteria, was rendered obsolete before it ever left the water.

Tractors were beginning to supplant pushers across the industry; largely because of the crashes of the Wright C, the army would soon stipulate that all land-based aircraft must have front-mounted engines. Wing design was also in flux. Monoplanes had appeal to designers for sport flying, but for exhibitions—or in war—monoplanes had yet to demonstrate sufficient strength to hold up under the increased stress. Curtiss was actively experimenting in both technologies; Orville was not. Orville was also proving to be an ineffective manager. Grover Loening had just begun at the Wright factory in mid-1913 and, despite the fact that he adored Orville personally, he was distressed at what he saw. “Factory organization was pretty rough. Orville would delay making a decision and drive us all nuts trying not to disobey his orders on the one hand and yet not knowing what to do.”

Hazel’s opinion had discounted Curtiss’s claim that all three parts of his stabilizing apparatus—two ailerons and rudder—were not used in conjunction. But in doing so, Hazel had tacitly admitted that all three must be used in conjunction to uphold the Wright patent. Curtiss should design his aircraft so that no question could exist that all three were not employed at the same time.

Without patent protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the inventor’s price—which necessarily includes all the time and expense of research and development—so the incentive to experiment and create will be severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited. Finding the proper balance remains difficult. Although pioneer patents have passed from jurisprudence, the patent system remains as difficult to administer as it was in the Wrights’ time as the plethora of suits among Internet providers and device makers will attest.

The current Miami International Airport was begun during that period as Curtiss Field.

Airships & Balloons

Baldwin had not given up his “visions of an airship.” While in Germany, he met with Count Zeppelin and kept himself abreast of developments in aerodynamic research.

In October 1901, while Baldwin was still attempting to devise the proper configuration of propulsion and directional control for his airship, Alberto Santos-Dumont, a young Brazilian coffee heir living in Paris, stunned the world—and won 100,000 francs for himself—by successfully navigating a motorized balloon around the Eiffel Tower before returning to his starting point.*2 Santos-Dumont was a fixture in Paris haute société. Barely one hundred pounds, he wore only the best clothes, dined nightly at Maxim’s, and counted among his many intimates Gustave Eiffel—the tower’s designer—the jeweler Louis Cartier, and members of any number of royal families. On his trip around Eiffel’s tower, he used bicycle pedals to start a small gasoline engine that turned his propeller at 180 revolutions per minute. For his achievement, he received notes of congratulations from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

On October 31, the pair achieved an even greater triumph. Knabenshue traveled a three-and-a-half-mile oval course at an altitude of two thousand feet on a windy day. Spectators cheered and threw their hats in the air as the Arrow made its return against the strong current of air. Afterward, they hoisted Knabenshue on their shoulders and carried him around the field. Baldwin had proved his contention that an airship could maneuver and make headway against the wind.

So successful were airships that Baldwin convinced some substantial portion of the general public and an even larger percentage of congressmen that military balloons were the future of aviation, and they began to lose interest in fixed-wing aircraft entirely.

Exhibitions & Crashes

Baldwin offered to prove the efficacy of his invention by a public test jump—assuming, of course, someone was willing to pay him to do it. “I went to Mr. Morton of the Market Street Cable Line and told him I thought I had an exhibition that would be a good feature for the Golden Gate Park, and he asked me what it was, and I told him a parachute jump. I said I would jump for a dollar a foot, and he answered: ‘Go ahead and jump a thousand feet!’ ” In January 1887, Baldwin did precisely that, floating gently to the ground below and his thousand-dollar prize.

Although Orville had broken his femur and four ribs and dislocated his hip, doctors from the first knew he would recover. Selfridge had two fractures of the skull in addition to internal injuries. He was wheeled into the operating room as soon as he arrived at the hospital but never regained consciousness. Just before 9 P.M., he died. Powered flight had its first fatality, Thomas Selfridge, an exceedingly bright and almost universally respected officer, only twenty-six years old, for whom everyone who knew him had only the highest regard, except perhaps for the man who had sat next to him in the crash.

Thousands if not millions of Americans were willing to pay to witness the miracle of flight; exhibitors would be all too willing to risk the future buffets of the judiciary while they stuffed their wallets.

Coffyn also admitted that, without incentive to make extra money, he was extremely conservative. “I did my flying in a careful manner. [The other flyers] did stunts and things. I was just careful enough not to overtax the strength of the plane and that’s how I got through it, I think.”

Although it was the third most common substance in the earth’s crust, not until 1886 was a commercially feasible electrolytic process developed to extract the metal from aluminum oxide.*2 In the two subsequent decades, aluminum—light, malleable, corrosion resistant, and in alloys almost as strong as steel—was employed in a dizzying variety of industrial operations. The metal was even used to line the interior facing of the dome in the rotunda of the Library of Congress. That the metallurgy of aluminum was not sufficiently understood before it was thrown willy-nilly into manufacturing would have dire consequences in subsequent years, but for John Moisant it turned out to be merely an inconvenience. He built his “aluminoplane,” L’Ecrevisse (“The Crayfish”), then, without bothering to take a lesson, seated himself behind the engine, signaled his mechanic to start the engine, and lifted off. The apparatus performed wonderfully, perhaps too wonderfully. L’Ecrevisse climbed at a steep angle at speeds approaching eighty miles per hour.

Johnstone was blown fifty miles out over Long Island but “kept climbing until his last drop of gasoline was exhausted.” When asked about Johnstone’s flight, Wilbur, the same man who had previously declared that Walter Brookins “should be hanged” for flying in conditions far more benign, merely said, “I guess that’s the first cross country flight made tail end foremost.” Wilbur’s opinion of daredevil pilotry had changed abruptly. He and Orville had initially tried to impose conservative limits on team members, restricting them to simple demonstrations of takeoff, ascending, maneuvering, and landing.

His conversion was likely based on a combination of resignation, pride, and the profit motive. In the first place, exhibition pilots, particularly Johnstone and Hoxsey, simply refused to be held back, and they weren’t being paid enough for financial threats to have any bite.

With Brookins out without having officially started, however, a third spot had opened up on the three-man American team, a spot for a daring aviator to be thrust into the breach to save the honor of America. The perfect idiom for John B. Moisant.

Moisant, eating a piece of pie, protested that his airplane had been damaged in an earlier crash and was not yet fully repaired. The controlling mechanism would not allow him to maneuver properly and might even cause a crash.

Moisant, “between mouthfuls of pie,” hurried into his aviation clothes and ordered his damaged Blériot out of the hangar. With literally seconds to spare before the race was closed, Moisant took off.

While Grahame-White’s time was never in danger—he won by almost an hour—Moisant astounded spectators and his fellow flyers alike by finishing second.

Disconsolate, Moisant simply sat in his doomed monoplane. His brother Alfred hurried over to find out whether his brother was hurt. When he learned that John was fine, he told him to get out of the wreck. They would buy another craft. They jumped into Alfred’s automobile, raced through the staging area, and eventually found a new 50-horsepower Blériot belonging to another French aviator, Alfred Leblanc. Leblanc had crashed a 100-horsepower Blériot during the Gordon Bennett race and was at his hotel in Manhattan recuperating. Alfred called and offered him $10,000 for his airplane. Leblanc accepted.

The crowd, rather than cheer the winner, began to chant Moisant’s name as an airplane he had never so much as set foot in was wheeled out to the starting area.

Grahame-White’s machine was more powerful, but Moisant simply refused to be denied the prize. He eschewed all caution and headed directly for Bedloe’s Island, barely clearing treetops and buildings in the most populated section of the route. As he approached the statue, he ascended to almost three thousand feet, made his turn for home, and then combined a downward glide, a light tailwind, and the same direct route back to the finish. Moisant beat Grahame-White’s time by forty-two seconds.

“My brother doesn’t fly to land. He flies to win.”

“I will race him anywhere at any time under any circumstances on equal terms.”16 Moisant meant, of course, that if he had a 100-horsepower machine, Grahame-White would have no chance.

Quite a turnabout for a man who had been declared a fugitive by this very same country not six months before.

In an irony he likely did not appreciate, Wilbur’s newfound leverage with promoters came not from having the law on his side but from the quality of his exhibition team. Wright aviators Johnstone, Hoxsey, Brookins, and even newcomer Phil Parmalee had soundly beaten Curtiss flyers at Belmont and, except for Moisant, were now the biggest American headliners around. Hamilton pleased the crowd but rarely won anything.

Selling airplanes for their employers was far less important than making names for themselves and notoriety was best achieved by performing feats of greater and greater daring.

Hamilton was drinking more than ever and rarely took to the air without a couple of shots of whiskey. That he didn’t die in one of his many crashes amazed his peers.*2…

The large air meets he wished to emulate had been held, if not in out-of-the-way places, at least where an interested spectator could not simply wander over and get as good a view from outside the fence as one who had purchased a ticket. In the cities at which the Moisant flying circus performed, however, that was precisely what local devotees could do. Alfred’s problem, therefore, was not a lack of enthusiasm for his flyers but a lack of people willing to pay for something they could get for free. “The Moisant circus is a failure,” Wilbur wrote to Orville in early December. “They are losing money steadily and I think will soon wind up their affairs. They took in $600 for a three day show at Chattanooga and only $200 the first day at Memphis.”

Johnstone was the third American to die in a crash and all three had perished in Wright machines.*3…

Among those mourning Hoxsey’s death was his former passenger Theodore Roosevelt. “I am more grieved than I can say over the tragedy that came to Hoxsey. He was courageous and a splendid type of fellow. I wanted to make the trip in the air with Hoxsey because he was an American aviator and had an American machine. I admired Hoxsey for the skill he had displayed in handling his aeroplane. I felt that it was entirely safe to trust him when I ventured into the air with him.… It is important that aviation be carried on.… Hoxsey gave his life as a noble sacrifice.”

Within hours, America’s two most prominent airmen had died. Pictures and stories about aviation’s darkest day dominated the front pages. Some surmised that the two crushed bodies would mark the end of daredevil flying. Instead, it was merely the beginning.

Not only would the surface on which Ely was to alight be moving, but some means would be needed to stop the machine once it had touched down on a surface only forty yards long. The airplane’s momentum would thus have to be arrested quickly but not so suddenly that Ely was pitched out, as John Moisant had been in New Orleans. Curtiss devised a system so clever that some variation of the arrangement has been in use ever since.

Ely’s flying would still have to be near perfect. The platform was only four feet wider than the width of the airplane and he would be touching down at approximately forty miles per hour. A miscalculation would mean falling off the side of the ship, or worse, plowing into the crowds of sailors and visitors who would be crowded on the deck.

Ely reappeared, took his place at the controls, and completed the second successful takeoff from the deck of a ship. When he landed at Selfridge Field, army and navy personnel hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him before the cheering crowds.

Lacking what would be later referred to as “test pilots,” the closest approximation to wartime flying was done at exhibitions. The very sort of outrageous risks taken regularly by Johnstone, Hoxsey, and Hamilton in dives, spirals, or flying in high wind and extremely low to the ground were precisely what was required to determine if an airplane could be effective in combat. And foolhardy flying or not, if aviators could not successfully pull off high-risk maneuvers, it meant that ultimately the fault would be with the aircraft. That was a fundamental truth of combat that both Wilbur and Orville failed to grasp.

Wrights had proved to be overbearing employers. In a number of letters from June 1910 until the end of the year, Knabenshue had been chided severely for everything from entering into agreements that didn’t comport specifically to Wright dictates to being told not to bring his wife and daughter with him to air meets.

Orville’s letters discussed problems but never did he order Wilbur to take one course of action or another and never did he imply that Wilbur was the cause. In Wilbur’s letters, as in the exchange after Thomas Selfridge’s death, the opposite is true. Wilbur, in fact, often challenged Orville to “measure up,” as if his brother could resurrect Johnstone and Hoxsey for the exhibition business or make the judicial process move at a suitable pace.

Whatever notoriety Wright airplanes did achieve was garnered by independents, most notably Cal Rodgers.

The thirty-day limit came and went—Hearst would never be forced to pay out the money—but Rodgers never quit. As tales of his perseverance were reported in the newspapers, he became a national phenomenon, hundreds and then thousands gathering at each of his landing spots.

The name Curtiss therefore became synonymous with the most daring exhibition flying, a reputation the erstwhile speed demon on land and in the air enthusiastically embraced. Whereas owning a Wright airplane connoted solid, conservative flying, owning a Curtiss meant flying in the machine Beachey flew.

Beachey worked relentlessly to perfect his craft. In 1911, for example, a tailspin meant almost certain death, since no aviator had found a means to recover once the aircraft began spiraling toward the ground. Convinced he could solve the problem, Beachey flew his Curtiss biplane to five thousand feet and then intentionally threw it into a tailspin. Trying different techniques as he spun downward, he eventually kicked the rudder hard against the spin, and the plane leveled out. (He likely would have been killed in a flexible-winged Wright.) He repeated the maneuver another eleven times to be certain it was no quirk. Then, rather than take credit for the service he had performed for other flyers, Beachey simply incorporated the move into his already stunning repertoire and called it, as he did in Dubuque, “the Corkscrew Twist.”

As had become almost customary, spectators rushed to the crash to fight for souvenirs “as police fought in vain to keep them back. In a few minutes the field was cleared of every bit of wreckage. Ely’s collar, tie, gloves, and cap similarly disappeared.”

In a nation of 76 million, before radio and television, where only the tiniest percentage of Americans had ever seen or heard Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, or Wilson, by the time Beachey’s career ended as many as 20 million people had witnessed his matchless artistry. Spectators often exceeded 100,000 and twice in Chicago topped a half million; Beachey regularly earned more in a day than most Americans made in a year. His skill was so unerring, so exceptional, that he was dubbed “the Man Who Owns the Sky.”

“People come to see me die.”

So that spectators would be prevented from rushing the fallen airplane to fight for souvenirs, the wreckage was burned on the spot. As was customary, the remainder of the day’s events were canceled, but the next day the crowds were back.

Rodgers had become known for his reckless flying, ignoring friends who urged him to be more cautious. “The air is nothing to me now,” he said to reporters. “I’ve conquered it. I have never been afraid when I go up.”

The airplane did not respond and Rodgers “crashed into the surf and was crushed beneath the engine.”8 He perished within moments. When there was no attempt to keep spectators away from the site, some swarmed over the wreckage fighting for souvenirs even before Rodgers had died.

“There goes another. It won’t be long before it gets all of us. We ourselves do not realize the chances we take.

Parmalee had recently told his fiancée that he believed his good luck in avoiding injury was about to run out. After Parmalee’s death, Turpin vowed never to fly again.

In the 1,369 days since Thomas Selfridge had been killed at Fort Myer, an aviator had died roughly every ten days.

Although distraught at the death of a friend and fellow pilot, when asked if Quimby’s death would cause her to reconsider flying, Scott replied, “Certainly not.” She added later, “All aviators get it sooner or later. If they stay in the game it is only a question of time before something goes wrong and they are killed. We all realize that. All aviators are fatalists; they realize that what is to be will be.”*4…

The one trick Beachey had been unable to do, that no one was able to do, was a loop.

On September 1, 1913, Adolphe Pégoud did. Taking a Blériot XI to three thousand feet, Pégoud tried four times before finally completing a successful loop. The following day, before a military board of experts, he duplicated the feat.

The most significant practical effect of Pégoud’s loop was in demonstrating that aircraft had become a good deal more stable and were more solidly constructed than commonly believed. Thus the ability to maneuver, particularly against other aircraft, was heightened. To the public, however, the loop was simply another barrier that had been smashed by those intrepid charioteers of the skies.

Beachey “turned somersaults, dropped thousands of feet, flew upside down, and floundered about in the clear air until the spectators were dizzy.”6 He flew inside loops, outside loops, added spirals, corkscrews, and rolls. Unlike before his retirement, he had no challengers; no one thought to emulate Beachey’s preternatural control of an invention only ten years old. For the remainder of 1914, it is quite possible that Lincoln Beachey did the finest flying the world has ever seen.

To give potential customers a sense of what might be to come, in January 1914 Beachey flew through the entrance of the unfinished Palace of Machinery, circled, and then flew out again, the first and only indoor flight in history. “All I yearn for now is to fly underground,” he said afterward.

Adolphe Pégoud would die in combat as well, killed by a former student who afterward flew over the French lines and dropped a wreath.

The dive was perfect. But while aluminum’s weight-to-strength ratio is greater than steel in withstanding pressure, it is also highly ductile, which means it folds easily. “When Beachey started to level out, approximately 500 feet from the ground, one wing simply folded straight back and exploded like a prefire of the motor. It was not long before the other did the same thing.” Helpless, Beachey plunged into San Francisco Bay.

Beachey did not die from the impact or even lose consciousness. He had broken his leg in the crash but was otherwise unhurt. As he sunk into forty feet of water, he clawed desperately at his harness and the tangle of cables and detritus.

In the end, the greatest aviator America has ever seen died of drowning.

Beachey’s death in March 1915 marked the end of the exhibition era. Europe was at war and the taste for watching pilots die performing stunts seemed to fade in America, when so many young men were dying for more important reasons across the Atlantic. That same year saw the end of the participation of the Wright brothers in the advancement of powered flight. In October, after months of negotiation, Orville Wright left the industry he and his brother had been so responsible for creating. He sold his holdings in the Wright Company, including its patents, to a consortium of Wall Street investors.

For all his achievements and notoriety, it is difficult to view Orville Wright as anything but a sad and lonely man who never found his calling—and perhaps never even sought it—and who died without ever making one genuine friend.

Air travel is now so commonplace, has been so widely experienced, that those who risked their lives every time they took an airplane aloft, who flew in open aircraft totally exposed to the elements and without seat restraints, who took their machines to great heights in freezing cold or in pelting rain, who died and watched their friends die pushing up against the limits of performance, have become almost mythical figures. They were that, of course, but they were also simply young and eager men and women embracing a new technology with the breathless zeal of youth. The fear of death would dissuade them no more than it did the first climber to summit Everest without extra oxygen or the first diver to swim among sharks without a cage.

Patent Wars & Business

Many of the more prominent newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post ignored the story altogether.

While working to improve and refine their machine to create a salable model from the prototype, they needed not only to protect against the copying of their wing-warping construction, but also to prevent anyone else from developing a similar device before their patent was granted. Pioneer status was not retroactive.

“We would be ashamed of ourselves if we had offered our machine to a foreign government without giving our own country a shot at it, but our consciences are clear.”

After the October flight, increasingly concerned that their design would be stolen, they decided to do no more public flying. A signed contract would be prerequisite to a demonstration.

For the most part, Europeans seemed to agree. Even with Flint & Company’s representation, as in the United States, government officials were unwilling to commit funds to purchase a machine they had never seen, and in many cases, particularly in Santos-Dumont’s France, they questioned whether it had ever flown at all.

The board replied that the price was so high as to require a special appropriation by Congress, which could not be obtained until autumn, and questioned whether the Flyer would be sold to the United States on an exclusive basis. They once again asked to see a demonstration flight, noting that it would be of “material assistance … in reaching a conclusion.” Orville replied that the sale would in no way be exclusive to the United States, then added, “In view of the abundant evidence already available, we do not regard the actual sight of the machine a prerequisite to the formulation of terms of contract.” The army disagreed. Orville received a curt reply in which the board promised to take up the matter at its next meeting, and then another in October, three months later, in which they promised to take it up after Congress met. After that, nothing. Once again, the opportunity to sell the Flyer to the United States government had been squandered. Wilbur insisted on the same conditions in Europe with an equal lack of success. Even with the powerful Flint & Company at his side, one by one, governments refused to consider entering into a contract to purchase a product they hadn’t seen, even for no money down.

What pleased Wilbur more than the accolades was the rush of business. The impediments that had beset the contract with the French syndicate evaporated…

Hazel was preempting the decision, effectively putting Curtiss out of business in advance, denying him the opportunity to sell his airplanes and thereby perpetuate the income stream necessary to defend himself in court. As one law professor noted, “Maintaining patent rights through litigation can be so expensive that unless it is funded by rapidly expanding production of the invention, the patent holder [or defendant] can be bankrupted by litigation costs alone.”

Hazel himself was a questionable character. A high functionary in the political machine of United States senator Thomas Collier Platt and characterized in the newspapers as a “political henchman,” Hazel had been named to the bench at Platt’s behest by Ohio’s own William McKinley.

The New York Bar Association “by an overwhelming vote” had declared him unfit for the bench, after an exhaustive search of judicial records that “could not find any reported law case in the argument of which Mr. Hazel took any part,” nor had he ever “at any time appeared in any Federal court on any question and had never taken part as a lawyer in any matter involving admiralty, patent, revenue, or bankruptcy law.” Even worse, he was found to have lied under oath concerning a $5,000 commission he’d received for brokering the sale of an overpriced yacht to the federal government after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War.

Hazel himself admitted that “he had not paid much attention to the law … he has been busy organizing victories for the Republican Party.”

Hazel, when the man who had never been part of a patent infringement case in his life sat on an action that would help determine the future of one of the most important technological innovations in human history. The automobile.

The marshal didn’t speak French and Paulhan spoke no English, so at first the aviator thought he was being arrested.

The Wright Company’s legal attack might have been good business but it was abysmal public relations.10 It was one thing to try to prevent thieves from profiting from their crimes, if that was in fact what was going on, but it was quite another to cause enormous financial hardship to citizens of a city who had acted totally in good faith, to say nothing of depriving potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans of the chance to see an airplane for the first time. That the Wrights themselves had refused to fly in Los Angeles, as they had refused to fly in St. Louis, made them look all the more venal.

With a corporation capitalized at $1 million, their arch-competitor’s business in disarray, and a sympathetic judge issuing a ruling all but lifted from their business plan, they had nonetheless been outflanked. Public opinion was against them, the French were furious with them, and the opportunity to use the courts as a means of intimidation to halt future air shows had largely evaporated.

…need to court popular approval—or any approval—Wright Company investors understood that to effectively secure the preeminent place in the market they sought, some effort to mollify the howls of a growing population of critics was required. Otherwise public opinion just might bleed into legal opinion.

…the disastrously managed French company licensed to sell Wright aircraft had gone under.

The bankrupt company had then seen its assets shifted to another manufacturer, Astra, which had also acquired the license to produce Wright aircraft in effect royalty-free. Orville learned from his friend Count de Lambert that Astra had conspired to secure precisely that arrangement. “The entire business in France seems to have been a graft,” he wrote to Wilbur.

The losses didn’t faze McCormick or his associates. It had never been their intention to make money on the show—they had enough of that already. Harold McCormick wanted only to propel his city into the spotlight of world aviation and in that he was most certainly successful. Nothing that had come before or would be staged in the future—even subsequent events in Chicago—could match the 1911 meet for sheer grandeur.

That Wilbur, without whose genius there would have been no Wright Company, had turned entirely to business affairs and the Wright Company’s various lawsuits demonstrated that all other considerations had become secondary.

…there was an abundance of information readily available to allow an interested amateur to build his own airplane.

Then Wilbur made an extraordinary assertion. “When we think what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote [the past five years] to experiments, we feel very sad.”7 There is little question that the patent wars were devastating American aviation. By January 1912, France boasted 800 aviators a day making flights to only 90 in the United States.

Curtiss would try to keep stalling regardless; he had nothing to gain by allowing the trial to go forward. For him, the best legal outcome was to be allowed simply to continue to do what he was already doing—building and selling airplanes. Every week that passed, the Curtiss Aeroplane Company grew richer and, perhaps of greater importance, more entrenched with the military, especially the navy.

As the legal proceedings inched forward, Curtiss conducted himself as if they did not exist. His factory hummed along in a process of almost continuous expansion and his various lines of business all achieved unprecedented profits.

The means to achieve that end were certainly available. The Wright Company could now demand royalties and damages of whatever amount it chose for every machine that had ever been sold by any company, except Burgess–Curtis. But Orville refused. Whether he did so because of disinclination, a sense of fairness, fatigue, or some other reason cannot be determined with certainty but it is possible to get a hint of his thinking in an interview he granted to The New York Times in late January.

Having established that he could demand damages from everyone in the business, Orville detailed what he would do: He would adopt “a policy of leniency.… Innocent purchasers of aeroplanes which were infringements would be protected and aeroplane manufacturers who had built machines without deliberately knowing they were infringing would be dealt with lightly.” Thus, while licenses and the 20 percent royalty would be required for future sales, no retroactive compensation would be sought. But not for Curtiss. Glenn Curtiss alone would be required to pay every last penny of royalties for every airplane he had ever sold, a sum certain to once and for all break the man responsible for Wilbur’s premature death.

Orville’s partners were furious. In their world, when the marketplace presented an opportunity, it was seized, not deferred—and it certainly wasn’t deferred to satisfy a personal vendetta. Orville’s strategy would make them a good deal of money, it was true, but not nearly as much as would be made in a true monopoly. There is no record of the conversations in the executive committee meetings but they were sufficiently acrimonious that by early March Orville was undertaking to buy out all the investors in the Wright Company and become sole owner. His partners would haggle about terms but not one of them demurred.*1…

In 1911, Henry Ford had finally prevailed over George Selden and John R. Hazel.

Ford was now both very rich and very committed to seeing that the patent laws were not used to stifle innovation. It is uncertain when he and Curtiss first met, but there is a photograph of them together taken in Hammondsport in 1913. At some point he clearly offered to help Curtiss find a means to end-run Judge Hazel’s decision. After the appeals court ruling, Curtiss took Ford up on it.

Curtiss, it seems, had neglected to have his old company legally dissolved after the bankruptcy. Herring called a stockholders’ meeting at which he was the only stockholder present and then resurrected the company, at least on paper, with him as president and a board of directors of cronies. The company then refiled Herring’s previous suit against Curtiss and the other original board members on the grounds that they had connived to cheat Herring out of his stock after obtaining his designs and ideas, and then used those designs and ideas to make a good deal of money. That there had been no designs or ideas was once again omitted from Herring’s brief.

Military & Naval

Blériot, on the other hand, became an instant international icon. He was awarded the Legion of Honor and mobbed in London and Paris. Among the attendees at the luncheon in his honor to receive his £1,000 check was Ernest Shackleton, recently returned from the Antarctic.

Chambers approached Ely and Curtiss and asked the feasibility of not only taking off from the deck of a warship but landing there as well. Ely was immediately game to try…

As impressive as Ely’s flight was, it did not precipitate a ground-swell of support for military aviation from army and navy brass. Change does not come easily to the military and reluctance among senior officers to divert ample funds to support development had not been diminished. The Wrights’ assessment that aviation would linger as a sporting pursuit remained the conventional wisdom and Congress’s appropriations to investigate airpower continued to be paltry, as Captain Chambers’s letter to the Wrights attested. Captain Chambers, in fact, was not just the head of the aeronautics section—he was the aeronautics section. He didn’t even have an office, but sat at a desk squeezed between file cabinets at the War Department.

The war took an immediate toll on aviators who just months before had flown together as friends.

Legacy & Reflections

In the end, Orville did little more than experiment with an outmoded technology, doomed to obsolescence before he began. But obsolescence doesn’t come all at once. There were still triumphs to be had for the Flyer and the greatest was to be by Cal Rodgers.

“Strange as it may seem, few have commented on him as a Man, though his work has been lauded to the skies. He was generally misunderstood; he realized this but apparently cared little of what the world thought of him.