Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Copyright © 2014 by Lawrence Goldstone.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  All photos courtesy of the Library of Congress

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Goldstone, Lawrence, 1947–

  Birdmen : the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the battle to control the skies / Lawrence Goldstone.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-345-53803-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)—

  ISBN 978-0-345-53804-8 (eBook)

  1. Aeronautics—United States—History. 2. Wright, Wilbur, 1867–1912.

  3. Wright, Orville, 1871–1948. 4. Curtiss, Glenn Hammond, 1878–1930.

  I. Title.

  TL521.G568 2014

  629.130092′273—dc23 2014001424

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: David G. Stevenson

  Jacket photograph: © The Library of Congress

  Title page image by Gözde Otman

  v3.1

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE: Genius Extinguished

  CHAPTER 1: Fulcrum

  CHAPTER 2: Highway in the Sky

  CHAPTER 3: Men in the Dunes

  CHAPTER 4: To Kitty Hawk

  CHAPTER 5: Sophomore Slump

  CHAPTER 6: Gas Bag

  CHAPTER 7: Where No Man Had Gone Before

  CHAPTER 8: Patent Pioneering

  CHAPTER 9: The Vagaries of the Marketplace

  CHAPTER 10: The Inexorable Progression of Knowledge

  CHAPTER 11: The First Brazilian Aloft

  CHAPTER 12: Langley’s Legacy

  CHAPTER 13: Closing Fast

  CHAPTER 14: Vindication

  CHAPTER 15: Orville and Selfridge

  CHAPTER 16: The Toast of France

  CHAPTER 17: Trading Punches

  CHAPTER 18: Best-Laid Plans

  CHAPTER 19: Bowing to the Inevitable

  CHAPTER 20: Team Sports

  CHAPTER 21: Mavericks

  CHAPTER 22: Faster, Steeper, Higher

  CHAPTER 23: War Birds

  CHAPTER 24: Owning the Sky

  CHAPTER 25: The Wages of Righteousness

  CHAPTER 26: The Romance of Death

  CHAPTER 27: A Reluctant Steward

  CHAPTER 28: A Wisp of Victory

  CHAPTER 29: The Grip of the Spotlight

  CHAPTER 30: The Death of Innocence

  EPILOGUE

  Dedication

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Genius Extinguished

  At 3:15 A.M. on May 30, 1912, Wilbur Wright died peacefully in his own bed in the family home at 7 Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, surrounded by his father, Milton; his sister, Katharine; and his three brothers, Lorin, Reuchlin, and Orville. Wilbur had contracted typhoid fever one month earlier from, the speculation went, eating tainted clam broth in a Boston restaurant. At five feet ten and 140 pounds, his body had lacked the strength to fight off an ailment that in the coming decades would be routinely vanquished with antibiotics. He was forty-five years old.

  America had lost one of its heroes, one of two men to solve the riddle of human flight, and messages of praise and condolence poured into Dayton from around the world. More than one thousand telegrams arrived within twenty-four hours of Wilbur’s death. President William Howard Taft—who at 350 pounds could never himself be a passenger in a Wright Flyer, although his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt had been—issued a statement declaring Wilbur to be the “father of the great new science of aeronautics,” who would be remembered on a par with Robert Fulton and Alexander Graham Bell. Aeronautics magazine exclaimed, “Mr. Wright was revered by all who knew him, he was honored by an entire world, it was a privilege, never to be forgotten, to talk with him.”

  Across the nation, newspapers and magazines decried the sad stroke of luck that had robbed the nation of one of its great men. At 7 Hawthorn Street, however, members of the Wright family did not believe Wilbur’s death to have been a result of bad luck at all. To them, Wilbur had been as good as murdered, hounded to his grave by a competitor so dishonest, so unscrupulous, so lacking in human feeling as to remain a family scourge as long as any of them remained alive.

  Glenn Curtiss.

  The bitter, decade-long Wright–Curtiss feud pitted against each other two of the nation’s most brilliant innovators and shaped the course of American aviation. The ferocity with which Wilbur Wright attacked and Glenn Curtiss countered first launched America into preeminence in the skies and then doomed it to mediocrity. It would take the most destructive conflict in human history to undo the damage.

  The combatants were well matched. As is often the case with those who despise each other, Curtiss and Wilbur were sufficiently alike to have been brothers themselves. Both were obsessive and serious, and one is hard-pressed to find a photograph of either, even as a child, in which he does not appear dour. Wilbur Wright was the son of a minister, Curtiss the grandson of one. Wilbur was the grandson of a carriage maker, Curtiss the son of a harness maker. Each came to aviation via the same route—racing, repairing, and building bicycles—and each displayed the amalgam of analytic instincts and dogged perseverance that a successful inventor requires. Most significant, neither of these men would ever take even one small step backward in a confrontation.

  They may have been alike, but they were not the same. 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. Curtiss was not Wilbur’s equal as a theoretician—few were—but he was a superb craftsman, designer, and applied scientist. In physics, he would be Enrico Fermi to Wilbur’s Albert Einstein.

  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. As family correspondence makes clear, his relationship with Wilbur was a good deal more complex than is generally assumed and after his brother’s death, Orville was never able to muster the will to pursue their mutual obsessions with the necessary zeal.

  Curtiss, who often spoke of his “speed craving,” first turned his attention to propulsion. He experimented with motorizing bicycles and in January 1907 set a one-mile speed record of 136.7 miles per hour, for which he was hailed as the fastest man on earth; two years later, he would also be the fastest man aloft. By the time the Wrights, after a three-year delay, finally decided to aggressively market their invention, Curtiss was engineering the most efficient motors in the world. That he would mount those motors on aircraft created a threat to the Wrights’ aspirations of monopoly and they brought suit to stifle the upstart. Although the Wrights never ceased to insist that their unrelenting pursuit of Curtiss was a moral issue, it was, as is virtually all such litigation, about money.

  But for all the maneuvering and legal gamesmanship, the Wright–Curtiss feud was at its core a study of the unique strengths and flaws of personality that define a clash of brilliant minds. 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 inc
ompetence in another. And because genius often begets or even requires arrogance, both men continuously repeated their blunders.

  Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss might have been the principal players in this tableau, but they were hardly the only ones. 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. There were great designers such as Louis Blériot, who flew across the English Channel, the first man to do so, with a foot so badly burned that he had to be lifted in and out of his seat; Thomas Scott Baldwin, “Cap’t Tom,” inventor of the flexible parachute and incomparable showman, who almost convinced the world that balloons were the future of aviation; John Moisant, who after three failed attempts to overthrow the government of El Salvador took to aviation and within months became the preeminent flyer in the world; Harriet Quimby, an actress and journalist who cajoled flying lessons from her employer to become the first woman to receive a pilot’s license and then the first to cross the English Channel; and Glenn Curtiss’s most famous flyer, Lincoln Beachey, perhaps the finest aviator the world has ever seen, a man who boasted so many “firsts,” “bests,” and “never before dones” that his exploits would beggar credibility had they not all been documented by eyewitnesses.

  The saga of the Wrights and Curtiss is the story of early flight. There was no one and nothing in the remarkable decade of 1905 to 1915 that one or both of them did not touch or affect. Their drama was played out on a stage populated by incomparable characters engaged in a pursuit that had held humankind in its thrall from the dawn of civilization.

  Fulcrum

  On August 9, 1896, a wealthy German engineer named Otto Lilienthal hiked up a hill in Rhinow, thirty miles from his home in Berlin. At the top, he crawled under an odd-looking apparatus, braced himself against a specially designed frame, and stood up wearing a set of wooden-framed fabric wings that measured thirty feet across. He paused at the crest of the incline, made certain of the direction of the wind, took a deep breath, and then began to run down.

  To a casual observer, Lilienthal would have made a ridiculous sight: another harebrained amateur convinced that man could achieve flight by pretending to be a bird. Surely, he would end his run with a face full of dirt, perhaps a broken bone or two.

  But 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.”

  In 1891, Lilienthal was finally ready to test his calculations. He fashioned a set of fixed glider wings to the specifications he had developed from his research, strapped them to his shoulders, waited for wind conditions to be right, ran downhill … and soared. For the next five years, Otto Lilienthal made more than two thousand flights using eighteen different gliders; fifteen were monofoil and three bifoil. He maneuvered in the air by shifting his weight, usually by kicking his feet and thus altering his center of gravity. He became so adept that at times he could almost float, to allow photographers to gain proper focus. Because dry plate negatives had been perfected in the 1880s, the resulting images were of excellent resolution and soon made their way across the ocean. 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.

  Otto Lilienthal prepares to go aloft.

  But gliding was only an interim step; creating aerodynamic airfoils was only one aspect of what was commonly referred to as “the flying problem.”*1 To achieve the ultimate—self-propelled, controlled, heavier-than-air flight—issues of thrust, force, stability, and weight ratios needed to be addressed. And certainly no sophisticated flying machine would be maneuvered by an aviator kicking his feet. Still, efficient airfoils would expedite resolution of those other issues, so Lilienthal continued to glide, kick, and measure. As sophisticated as anyone living on the vagaries of air currents, Lilienthal was aware that luck had played a role in his continued success. And luck, he knew as well, had a habit of running out.

  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.”

  Word of his accident spread across the globe, including to Dayton, Ohio, and the headquarters of the Wright Cycle Company, Wilbur and Orville Wright, proprietors. Wilbur had been following Lilienthal’s exploits with fascination, and word of his death, as later Wilbur put it, “aroused a passive interest which had existed since my childhood.” Lilienthal’s passing left a void in the struggle for manned flight and on that day Wilbur decided to fill it.

  Wilbur was fortunate in his timing. In 1896, after centuries of stumbles, streams of research and data were about to coalesce to provide final focus for what was to be one of history’s most stunning achievements.

  The heavens have been the home of the gods in virtually every recorded religion and not a single civilization from earliest antiquity fails to depict men and often women in flight. Sometimes these ancient aeronauts are in chariots, sometimes in other odd conveyances, and sometimes, like angels in Christianity even today, they fly by wings sprouting from their bodies. Achieving flight, therefore, might well be considered the oldest and most profound of all human aspirations.

  Not surprisingly then, the science of flight has attracted the greatest minds in history—Aristotle, Archimedes, Leonardo, and Newton, to name just a few—but achieving the goal stumped all of them. Learning how to maintain a person or a craft in the air demanded more than a daunting scientific vision and meticulous mechanics; unlike many ground-based scientific enterprises, flight was almost impossible to test experimentally. Not that no one tried. In Roman times, slaves plunged to their deaths when ordered by men of science to leap from great heights with feathered wings strapped across their backs. Others throughout the centuries would fall to injury or death in a variety of quixotic contraptions.

  To make the problem even more intractable, air, the medium of flight, is invisible, while for early theoreticians of flight, science was based almost entirely on sensory observation. Unlike modern scientists, they did not have the tools to deal with phenomena they could not see, hear, or touch. For inquiries into the mechanics of DNA replication or the detection of dark matter in the universe, for example, sophisticated instruments and powerful computers are routinely employed to test hypotheses. The ability to test with precision allows theory to precede observation. Einstein’s theory of relativity, first advanced in 1905, was not proven until a solar eclipse in 1919 provided the opportunity for astronomers to actually observe through a telescope light bending around a distant star.

  Lacking such precision, a scientist can only extrapolate from observations in the natural world. Heavier-than-air flight was possible, of course—one need only watch a bird to appreciate that. So why couldn’t man fly as well? Yet as late as 1868, after more than two thousand years of study, the annual report of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain lamented, “With respect to the abstruse question of mechanical flight, it may be stated that we are still ignorant of the rudimentary principles which should
form the basis and rules for construction.”1

  Achieving human flight, then, turned out to be a giant puzzle, solved over centuries, piece by tortuous piece.

  Since air wasn’t even yet understood to be an actual substance, the first steps involved fluids. In 350 B.C., Aristotle hypothesized that an object moving through liquid will encounter resistance, and a century later Archimedes developed the first theory of fluid motion. From there, it would take more than seventeen centuries until Leonardo took up the problem and fluid dynamics began to be thought of as a rigorous discipline.

  Leonardo’s great contribution was based in his observation that when the banks of a river narrowed to constrict its flow, the water in the narrower area speeded up so that the movement of the river remained “continuous.” Leonardo could not quantify this function but his observation was eventually generalized into a mathematical relationship between speed and distance and eventually between speed and pressure—the faster a fluid moves over a surface, the less pressure it produces. But as Leonardo was also fascinated with bird flight, he made some effort to apply the principle to gases. That ultimately would result in a device where air moved farther and faster over the top surface of an airfoil than under the bottom, thus creating uneven pressure, which resulted in “lift.” He also understood that as an object moved through a medium, it would encounter resistance, friction between the object and the medium, which would slow its progress, later to be quantified as “drag.”

  It took another century for the next tentative step forward, this in 1600 by Galileo. The great Pisan astronomer was the first to quantify certain relationships in fluid dynamics and thus began to create a mechanical science from what had previously been only speculation. His most significant insight was that resistance will increase with the density of the medium, which would eventually lead to the understanding that as an airplane cruised at higher altitudes, fuel efficiencies would increase.

  But with all the advances by science’s titans, which later would include Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler, the applications continued to be solely in fluid dynamics—the resulting equations were then simply assumed to apply equally to gas as to liquid.*2 In fact, using his equations, Newton hypothesized that powered flight was impossible because the weight of a motor needed to generate sufficient power would always exceed the amount of lift that could be supplied by airfoils that did not weigh more than the motor could support. For those who believed flight was possible, the assumption remained that humans must emulate birds—that is, develop a mechanism to allow for wings that flapped. Devices that attempted to mimic bird flight in this manner were dubbed “ornithopters.” A sketch of such an apparatus was found in one of Leonardo’s notebooks.