Baldwin was stumped as well; according to a later magazine account, he removed a 24-horsepower engine from an automobile, but the result was an uncontrollable hash.3 Then in 1904, he “chanced to see a new motorcycle, the motor of which seemed to be exactly what he wanted to propel his new airship.”4 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.
Glenn Curtiss was born in Hammondsport in 1878, his middle name given to him by parents who thought the small town on Keuka Lake in western New York State was paradise. His father died when Glenn was four. In school, where he completed only eighth grade, Curtiss showed high proficiency in mathematics, a good deal less in spelling.
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. When the family lived in Rochester so that his sister could attend a school for the deaf, Curtiss, still a teenager, got a job at the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company and there invented a stenciling system that allowed the backs of film to be stenciled one hundred times faster. Like Wilbur Wright, Curtiss was always thoughtful and analytic when taking on a mechanical problem and even as a young boy seemed serious to the point of being glum. Despite his outward demeanor, however, he was said—again like Wilbur—to have a sharp, biting wit.
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.”5 Curtiss put what he later called his “speed craving” to practical use as a bicycle messenger for Western Union.
Word of Curtiss’s mechanical acumen got around and he was often solicited by local bicycle owners to perform tune-ups or make repairs. In 1897, when he was not yet twenty, he sold all the leftover stock from his father’s harness business and used the proceeds to take over a bicycle repair shop. He soon opened a second shop and acquired sales licenses for a number of national brands. In March 1898, Curtiss married Lena Neff. The two would remain devoted to each other for more than three decades.
By 1900, Curtiss was building bicycles and, as with the Wrights, his designs were superior to most other machines on the market. 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. The first one had been offered for sale in the United States only five years earlier and only a few thousand were in existence, most poorly balanced jerry-built affairs.
In 1901, 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.”6 Although the finished product functioned, it was underpowered, so he ordered a larger motor. That one was a “terror” but misfired constantly and Curtiss realized he could build a better engine than he could buy. The result was a reliable motor that achieved a better horsepower-to-weight ratio than any other for sale. He traveled to nearby fairs to race his own machines and orders began to roll in.
Within two years, Curtiss had acquired a reputation for brilliance at engine design and his motorcycles were purchased by enthusiasts across America. He opened a factory to try to keep up with demand and was continually adding capacity and employees as word of G. H. Curtiss motorcycles spread. But no matter how big the business got, Curtiss never ceased being a fixture on the factory floor, overseeing production and making improvements to the product. In January 1904, he traveled to Ormond Beach, Florida, and set a world ten-mile speed record, finishing the run in 8 minutes, 54.4 seconds, a mark that held for seven years. Six months later, he received the telegram from Thomas Baldwin.
Curtiss found Baldwin’s request for a disembodied motor strange, especially since Baldwin hadn’t mentioned to what use he intended to put his purchase. Still, an order is an order, so Curtiss pulled a motor off a used motorcycle, polished and tuned it, then sent it off to California.
Curtiss’s used two-cylinder V-shaped motor was the last piece of Baldwin’s puzzle. He attached it to scaffolding installed underneath a balloon filled with hydrogen gas and christened the finished product the California Arrow. Baldwin later provided a description of the apparatus:
The Arrow consisted of a bag of Japanese silk, seventeen feet in diameter and fifty-two in length, covered with ten coats of varnish, inside and out, and outside of all a netting of number sixty cotton seine, with six-inch square mesh. The keel or rudder of the ship is forty feet in length, made of laminated spruce, and forms an equilateral triangle, the strongest curve known to modern science and the one that is used in bridge construction. The Arrow only weighs 300 pounds and is sixty feet in length, and has a rail on top, with two rails on either side, three feet apart.
In October 1904, Baldwin took his Curtiss-powered dirigible east to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. The fair had opened the year before to mark the purchase’s centennial, but the planned aeronautics exhibition with its whopping $100,000 prize for the most successful flight had been put off in an attempt to attract competitors.*3 To help stage the extravaganza, the exposition’s organizers had appointed Octave Chanute and Alberto Santos-Dumont to an advisory board in 1901. With the Wright glider achieving spectacular results and motorized flight perhaps imminent, in January 1902 Chanute contacted the Wrights and urged them to participate.
Wilbur was tempted but, aware that “a power machine … is the only kind that could hope to be awarded a prize of any kind,” he was uncertain that he and Orville could complete such an aircraft in time. Therefore, he added, “Whether we compete will depend much on the conditions under which the prizes are offered. I have little of the gambling instinct and unless there is reasonable prospect of getting back at least the amount expended in competing I would enter only after very careful consideration.”7 In the end, however, he declined, deciding that regardless of what he and Orville offered, Santos-Dumont would ensure that the competition would be skewed to favor airships. Wilbur informed Chanute, “As there are no consolation prizes provided for flying machines … we would have to win the grand prize or nothing.”
In early fall 1904, Santos-Dumont, the most famous balloonist in the world, shipped his balloon to St. Louis and stored it in a shed where it was promptly vandalized; unknown saboteurs slashed the gas bag repeatedly. Santos-Dumont was certain that jealous competitors were the culprits but, as he had suffered a similar incident in London, American authorities were dubious. Police intimated that members of the Frenchman’s own crew were responsible. Outraged at the suggestion, Santos-Dumont withdrew from the competition and returned to Paris.
With the field thus left open, Baldwin anticipated leaving St. Louis with a triumph and $100,000. He arrived with “a small flat trunk containing a silk balloon and netting, a small crate containing a motorcycle engine, and a long crate containing the propeller shaft.” The propeller and framing would be fashioned on-site.
One of the other balloonists he encountered at the fair was a twenty-eight-year-old from Toledo named Augustus Roy Knabenshue. Knabenshue, who went by his middle name and whose father was editor in chief of the Toledo Blade, had been bitten by the ballooning bug as a child. By his early twenties, he was appearing at fairs and charging attendees for asc
ensions. Initially, he purchased balloons, some from Baldwin’s factory, but had since taken to fabricating his own. Ballooning was still something of an avant-garde pastime, so to spare his straightlaced family embarrassment, Knabenshue registered at fairs as “Professor Don Carlos.”
Knabenshue and Baldwin immediately hit it off. The younger man couldn’t wait to see the famed globe-trotting “Cap’t Tom,” as Baldwin had taken to billing himself, achieve the first dirigible flight in the United States, and Baldwin had found a man to help with the extensive preparations. Knabenshue agreed to build the propeller and the undercarriage and ultimately he assembled the California Arrow himself.
All seemed in readiness but when Baldwin attempted to test-fly his airship, he made a troubling discovery—the Arrow couldn’t lift off the ground with him at the helm. Baldwin was near fifty and fat in a thin young man’s game. Knabenshue, however, was small and reedy, one hundred pounds lighter. Although Knabenshue knew nothing of steering and controlling the airship, Baldwin asked him to pilot the craft and offered basic instructions in direction and attitude, the latter of which involved scrambling forward and backward along the catwalk under the scaffolding. Baldwin was charging a thousand dollars for each flight in addition to the prize money and he offered his young apprentice 50 percent of the profits after expenses. On October 25, Roy Knabenshue took the California Arrow aloft.
Knabenshue later recalled that before the flight, Baldwin, ever the promoter, “walked me beyond earshot and repeated his instructions. If anything happened to cause the loss of the balloon full of gas, it would ruin our prospects of making a profit on the first flight. The only sensible thing to do would be to go over the fence and come down immediately. We would then tow the ship back and be ready for a flight the following day.”8
Roy Knabenshue on the catwalk of Cap’t Tom Baldwin’s airship at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.
Baldwin had been prescient. The motor had been fed a poor mixture of gasoline and oil and Knabenshue, handling the Arrow inexpertly, was forced to land in a cornfield. But to the surprise of both pilot and designer, the voyage was a huge success. The Arrow had traveled fifteen miles, remained aloft for more than an hour, and newspapers were filled with breathless accounts of the voyage.
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. The only mitigating factor was discovering the $100,000 prize was a fantasy, the money having been used by the promoters as operating expenses for the fair.
Whether he was hoodwinked or not, the St. Louis flight brought Baldwin national attention. Requests for exhibitions abounded, each offering more money than the last. Knabenshue returned to California and flew for Baldwin before adoring crowds.
Cap’t Tom went east to Hammondsport to meet the man who had built the motor that powered the Arrow. Baldwin said afterward that he expected to encounter a stuffy businessman in his forties or fifties, well dressed and self-important. Instead, he found himself opposite a quiet, painfully shy young man dressed in overalls who had to wipe his hand free of grease in order to offer a handshake. This unlikely pair struck an instant friendship, each drawn by admiration to qualities in the other that he lacked. They set into an extended discourse on the best way to improve airship propulsion. Within days, Curtiss had refined his designs, making them even lighter and more efficient to suit the needs of airships, the same needs that would later present themselves in fixed-wing aircraft.
Baldwin remained in Hammondsport for a few weeks, most of the time as a guest in the Curtiss home. He charmed everyone in sight with his bluff, open manner, his unflagging good humor, and his tales of far-off climes. When he left, Baldwin had concluded a long-term arrangement with the Curtiss Manufacturing Company to supply propulsion for the fleet of Arrows he planned to build.
When Baldwin arrived in California, Knabenshue announced that he was leaving Baldwin’s employ and striking out on his own. The exact circumstances of the parting are unclear—it was described merely as a “disagreement”—but six months later Knabenshue would exhibit his own airship, the Toledo, at an Independence Day celebration in his hometown. Knabenshue’s craft, also powered by a Curtiss motor, was sleeker and more aerodynamic than the California Arrow and Knabenshue began to grab headlines Cap’t Tom thought reserved for him.
Baldwin resolved to return to preeminence. He hadn’t lost any weight during his weeks as a Curtiss houseguest so he needed a replacement pilot. With bookings to be honored, he was likely prepared to accept anyone who could fly, certainly someone less adept than Knabenshue, who even Baldwin admitted had become expert in controlling the airship.
Instead, he found someone better. Early in 1905, a brash, fearless teenager named Lincoln Beachey walked into his office and within minutes Baldwin knew he had struck gold.
Beachey was born in San Francisco on March 3, 1887. His father, W. C. Beachey, was a blind Civil War veteran who could not work, so his mother, Amy, took in laundry to make ends meet. Although Amy Beachey worked from morning until night, the family was always strapped for funds. Eventually she placed her husband in a soldiers’ home and in 1902 unsuccessfully sued for divorce, claiming her husband had failed to provide for her because his pension was not large enough to contribute to the family’s support.
Lincoln Beachey had a keen mind—like Glenn Curtiss, he was especially adept at mathematics—but left school at age twelve or thirteen. He later said that he immediately began to learn the mechanics of airships but the evidence is that he restricted his activities to ground-based vehicles for the next three or four years.*4 In 1902, he was registered in a two-mile bicycle race; by 1904, he had graduated to motorcycles. Beachey’s competitiveness was quickly established. In June of that year, he finished first in a five-mile race but was “disqualified on the ground of professionalism.” In addition to temperament, Beachey’s body type was ideally suited for flying. At a stocky five feet seven, he could be quicker and surer along the treacherous undercarriage than even Roy Knabenshue.
Beachey arrived just in time for Cap’t Tom to send him north to Portland and the Lewis and Clark Exposition. Once again, prize money was offered for successful flights, but this time the money had been kept separate from operating expenses. Baldwin constructed two new airships for the July event. The first, much larger than the Arrow, he dubbed the Angelus; the second he named the City of Portland.
Although the Angelus was plagued by a series of mechanical problems and eventually ruined, Beachey’s handling of the giant ship garnered raves. A feature article by the Associated Press lauding the “Boy Aeronaut” made the rounds in newspapers across America. Described as a “blue-eyed lad of eighteen of retiring disposition who makes daring flights in the big Baldwin airship,” Beachey was asked what it felt like to fly.
“There’s really nothing to it. It’s just the same as being on the ground so far as nervousness is concerned. I stand on this two-inch beam along the under side of the frame work, walk along it when I want to reach some other part of the ship, and think nothing whatever about being 2,000 feet up in the air; all my thoughts are centered on how to make the ship operate as we expect it to do. It’s just as safe up there as it is down here if you don’t get scared, and scary people have no business in an air ship.”9
After he switched to the smaller City of Portland, Beachey continued to amaze, making the balloon “do practically everything but turn somersaults,” until September 26, when he made what the Associated Press called “perhaps the most remarkable flight ever made in an airship.”10
As reported in the Los Angeles Herald:
Beachey navigated the huge vessel with wonderful dex
terity and precision, at all times having it under perfect control. He made one stop on top of the Chamber of Commerce building, where he delivered a letter written by President Goode of the exposition to the chamber of commerce relating to the efforts of that body and the commercial clubs of the city to secure an attendance of 100,000 at the exposition next Saturday—Portland Day. Beachey once more ascended and headed his airship toward the office of the Oregon Journal, where he dropped another letter by President Goode. From the Journal the airship swiftly made its way to the Oregonian building, where another letter addressed to the Evening Telegram was dropped on the roof. From the Oregonian building, Beachey headed westward toward St. Vincent Hospital, maneuvering high in the air for a few minutes. Beachey then headed the airship for the exposition grounds, where he landed safely.11
Shortly after the fair closed, the Boy Aeronaut and Cap’t Tom had a falling-out, likely over money, and Beachey traveled to Toledo to join Roy Knabenshue as his “assistant.” The two began appearing in exhibitions across the nation, splitting large fees. Knabenshue was an excellent pilot, but no one could look good compared to Beachey. He demonstrated such preternatural control of an inherently uncontrollable airship that he could actually maneuver down a narrow street between two rows of tall buildings. Not yet twenty years old, the Boy Aeronaut became a regular feature in newspapers and magazines.
Beachey’s burgeoning fame wasn’t hurt by a series of near disasters. In one instance, while he was “several hundred feet off the ground,” the gasoline tank for the motor sprung a leak and caught fire, threatening to ignite the remaining gasoline and the hydrogen in the balloon. After trying in vain to smother the fire, Beachey leaned over the flimsy rail and opened the relief valve, allowing the remaining gasoline in the tank to run out. With only what “little vapor remained in the engine,” Beachey then guided the ship to its ascension point, where the ground crew secured it. When he alighted, both of Beachey’s hands were burned.12 The following year, a broken propeller landed him in the treacherous currents near Hell Gate in New York, where he made his way to a buoy until he could be rescued by a passing boat.13
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