Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  By the time Wilbur’s letter arrived, Selfridge had met with Bell in Washington. Bell was so impressed that he wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt and asked for the young lieutenant to be assigned to him. Roosevelt, an old friend, agreed.

  Also in January 1907, Bell met Glenn Curtiss, then en route to Florida to attempt to become the fastest man on earth. Weeks before, Curtiss had received a request from a crackpot inventor from Detroit for an immensely powerful eight-cylinder motor for a flying machine of dubious design.*2 Curtiss didn’t take the idea seriously but the man paid, so he built the engine. The inventor decided it wouldn’t work after all, so, out of curiosity, Curtiss mounted the massive contraption on an elongated bicycle frame. With that, he had the world’s largest motorcycle—and the fastest. Curtiss intended to prove that on the flat, water-packed sand proving ground at Ormond Beach.

  Bell had initially intended to use Manly’s motor design, but after speaking with Curtiss he changed his mind. Bell asked Curtiss to join him in Nova Scotia for the kite project and Curtiss agreed to consider it. Curtiss continued on to Florida, where his eight-cylinder monster completed a measured mile in 26.4 seconds, or 136.3 miles per hour, setting a land speed record that lasted until 1930.

  After he returned to Hammondsport, Curtiss agreed to leave the factory for the summer and become a member of Bell’s team. In addition to Selfridge and Curtiss, Bell had recruited two Canadian engineers, Frank W. “Casey” Baldwin (no relation to Cap’t Tom) and J. A. D. McCurdy. While Bell was aware of the Wrights’ work and certainly of their patent, he viewed the patent, and all patents, as limited to specific mechanisms.*3 He also did not take their designs seriously.

  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 Wrights tried to counter the suspicions without altering their stance. They agreed to submit an article to the inaugural June 1907 issue of Aeronautics magazine, a splashy new journal devoted exclusively to aviation, which featured detailed scientific tracts, news of the various aero clubs that were springing up nationwide, and reports on air shows and fairs. Balloons occupied a good deal of space in the early issues but were quickly squeezed out by news of fixed-wing machines. Along with the Wrights, Octave Chanute submitted an article to the first edition and virtually every balloonist and manufacturer took out an advertisement. The Curtiss Manufacturing Company had a full page on the reverse side of the cover, offering motors of 3½ to 40 horsepower in two, four, and eight cylinders. Thomas Baldwin had a full page toward the back of the magazine extolling the California Arrow.

  The Wrights offered details of their flights—length, duration, and average speed—without any discussion of aeronautics, simply noting that “the favorable results which have been obtained have been due to improvements in flying quality resulting in more scientific design and to improved methods of balancing and steering.” Chanute’s article, while positing the “now acknowledged success of the Wright brothers,” also observed—ominously for Wilbur and Orville—that “some 30 or 40 European aviators have built or are building ‘de toutes pieces,’ motor equipped flying machines on wheels in the hope of speedily accomplishing mechanical flight.” Even at this formative stage, an improvement to the Wrights’ derrick launching system was in the works.

  With competitors closing the gap, the Wrights finally got a bit of good news from home. Cortlandt Field Bishop, president of the Aero Club, had impressed on a New York congressman who was also his brother-in-law the importance of the Wrights’ invention and the obstinance of the army in giving them a fair hearing. The congressman spoke to President Roosevelt, who instructed Secretary of War Taft to take a fresh look. Taft referred the matter to the Wrights’ old nemesis, the Board of Ordnance and Fortification. 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. Orville handled these negotiations since Wilbur had already left for France. He also agreed to a public trial after the contract was signed but before any money was paid, in which they would fly at least fifty kilometers at fifty kilometers per hour. Other than the specifications, this represented much the same conditions that had borne no fruit two years earlier.

  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. The only country in which there was some interest was aviation-obsessed France, but getting to the right people involved navigating through a morass of government officials, financiers, industrialists, and palm-greasers. Wilbur and Hart Berg could never be certain that the people to whom they were speaking had any authority at all.

  Eventually, Wilbur proposed to fly fifty kilometers at one thousand feet, after which the French government would purchase a Flyer for one million francs and, as had become standard, agreed to a demonstration after signing as a condition of sale. Different from the offer at home, however, was that if the deal was consummated, France would enjoy a period of exclusivity before the private consortium that would manufacture the Flyer could sell airplanes to other nations.

  Accustomed to making family decisions that were not later questioned, he cabled the details to Orville as a courtesy. To Wilbur’s shock, the usually acquiescent Orville refused to endorse the deal, balking at the exclusivity clause. Subsequently, the French refused as well. A stung Wilbur wrote to Orville, “So I am turned down on both sides after both sides had, I thought, indicated approval quite definitely.… I confess that I am a little hurt that you should refuse to take this job yourself and then turn down my recommendations after I supposed you had given your assent to every important point in the proposition submitted.”2

  The strain of continued failure began to wear on both. As would be the Wrights’ pattern, each blamed everyone but himself. To Wilbur, Ferdinand Ferber went from a man France was lucky to have to “the man largely responsible for the failure of the final negotiations in March 1906,” someone “double faced” and “bitterly hostile.”3 In July, Orville complained about Flint & Company. “I am so completely disgusted with them that I would like to sever our connection … they have been so tricky that it keeps us busy watching them.”4

  Acrimony turned internal as well. In the same letter, Orville complained of Wilbur’s scanty communications, and Wilbur responded by carping that Orville didn’t understand the pressures he was under. He complained to his father in a long and bitter letter on July 20. “You people in Dayton seem to lack perspicacity,” he began. But most of his vitriol was saved for Orville. “Instead of tending to his own work and letting me attend to mine, he seemed to have no responsibility as
to his own work, but the whole responsibility as to mine.… So far as his letters indicate, he spent his time on things of no use in the present situation, and left the necessary things undone.”

  This last reference was, bizarrely, to the lack of a Flyer in Europe with which to fly the very demonstrations that Wilbur had categorically refused to make. Neither brother had been off the ground in two years. Now, with the strategy of nonflying falling apart, Wilbur asserted to Milton, “If a serious mistake has been made, it lies in the assumption that the machine would be available quicker than now seems possible. I am not to blame for this.” As the difficulties mounted, the two-way “scrapping” in the shop became one-way abuse, with Wilbur foisting blame on Orville for any problem that came up.

  So Orville ordered a machine crated up and shipped across the Atlantic and then he left for France himself. He arrived in time to submit another proposal to the French minister of war. The matter moved with glacial speed through the French bureaucracy, compounded by the exodus for August vacations. Sick of waiting, Wilbur left for Berlin to attempt to make a sale to the Germans. But German bureaucrats worked no more quickly than the French and Orville’s reticence with regard to granting any exclusivity to the French applied to the Germans as well. In August, Wilbur once more took out his anger on his younger brother. “I have no letter whatever from you since I left. You must keep me informed. It will not do to telegraph me to do nothing in Germany without giving an opinion of the terms.… We must have an offer in shape to present immediately once it is decided to make one. It is as important for me to know everything that happens in Paris as for you to know what is going on here. I have kept you informed but you have sent me nothing.”5 That same day, Orville did send a letter to Wilbur suggesting they suspend negotiations until they could make arrangements to demonstrate the Flyer to their potential customers but the airplane continued to lie in its crates at French customs in Le Havre.

  Wilbur and Orville remained in Europe until late fall, shuttling either together or separately between Germany, France, and England in a fruitless crusade to obtain government commitments to purchase their product. Skepticism was so widespread as to whether they achieved anything approaching what they had claimed that two German officers traveled to Dayton in October to interview Bishop Wright and some locals to confirm the accounts. Even when they reported back favorably to their government, no one was willing to sign on.

  In October, Wilbur admitted defeat. He wrote to Katharine, “We doubt whether an agreement will be reached before we have really made some demonstrations somewhere and stirred up some excitement.” 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.

  Official specifications were forthcoming within a month. Bidders would be required to submit drawings and descriptions of all parts of their machines, although this was modified to allow the Wrights to “maintain their secrets”; prove they held patents on all proprietary features; demonstrate that the airplane was capable of carrying two persons with a combined weight of 350 pounds and sufficient fuel for 125 miles; travel at least forty miles per hour average with and against the wind, with deductions from the price for less, bonuses for more; fly at least one hour and then land the airplane so that it could immediately take off again; steer in all directions without difficulty and at all times be under perfect control and equilibrium; provide a simple and transportable starting device; and instruct two men in its operation. Although not specified, it was understood that both operator and passenger would be seated rather than lying prone.

  These were precisely what Wilbur had agreed to in their talks with the board. The Wrights had gone from feeling as if the world were conspiring against them to having the deck stacked in their favor, assuming only that they could deliver what they had promised. Still, the government could not simply hand money to one manufacturer without first soliciting bids, so it opened the trials to anyone who could produce an airplane that met the specifications. The Wrights were unconcerned. Nobody else could—and what was more, anyone bidding would be required to post a certified check for 10 percent of their bid. The trials would be at Fort Myer, Virginia, and bids were due February 1, 1908.

  On January 27, the Wrights submitted their bid for $25,000 for the first machine and $10,000 each for anything more, along with a certified check for $2,500. As in any open auction there were a number of other bids, most from cranks and one from a convict. With one of the other bidders, however, it was difficult to determine into which category he fell. Offering to sell the army a flying machine for $20,000 was none other than Augustus Moore Herring.

  Herring had recently resurfaced in interviews but as far as anyone could determine, he had done nothing in aviation for years; nor did he seem to hold any patents. But his name was well-known, as were his successes with the Herring–Chanute glider, so once he posted his $2,000 he was an official bidder.

  The Wrights’ experience with Herring at Kitty Hawk had led them to assume that the bid was a bluff, as they had done with a remark he had made the month before about having learned the secrets of the Wright machine. They were, as they saw it, the only real bidders.

  Then in March, as if to demonstrate that 1908 would be very different from 1907, Hart Berg informed Wilbur and Orville that they had a deal in France, not with the government but with a private consortium. The terms, which the Wrights would have rejected three months earlier but which they now welcomed, included a series of demonstrations before pen was put to paper. But if the Flyer performed as advertised, the Wrights would receive $100,000 on delivery of the first machine, $4,000 for each of four additional airplanes, as well as 50 percent of the stock of the new company, some of which would be used as working capital.

  Although they had done significant work in the shop, particularly on the motor, the army requirements included a number of milestones that they had yet to achieve. To the Wrights’ credit, although their most recent model Flyer was three years old, they never exhibited a wisp of doubt that they would fulfill even the highest expectations for their machine.

  Still, to ensure that the Flyers that would take to the skies over Fort Myer and in France would represent the pinnacle of their efforts, they repaired to test and improve their product. And that couldn’t be done properly in Ohio, so the Wrights returned to the scene of their original triumph, Kitty Hawk.

  * * *

  *1 The Signal Corps, which had funded Baldwin’s dirigible, was far more forward-looking than the Bureau of Ordnance and Fortification.

  *2 When recounting the story two decades afterward, Curtiss could not remember the man’s name, only that his plan was to build an airship shaped like an enormous stovepipe that sucked air in the front and blew it out the back.

  *3 Bell had no small experience in patent law. He had been a party in perhaps the most famous and contentious patent suit in American history. Elisha Gray, a serious inventor in his own right and the founder of the Western Electric Company, had sued Bell, claiming that Bell had stolen his design for what would become the telephone. The two inventions had reached the patent office on the same day, February 14, 1876. Each insisted he had been there first, although Bell’s application was logged in before Gray’s. Charges and countercharges were exchanged for years and suggestions of skulduggery involving bribery, influence peddling, and d
runken patent examiners persist to this day. The Supreme Court finally settled the matter, at least legally, by deciding for Bell in 1888.

  Closing Fast

  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. French designers had been experimenting furiously, some with radically different designs. Both Louis Blériot and another engineer, Léon Levavasseur, built monoplanes, but could not initially make them fly. (Levavasseur named his airplanes after his financier’s daughter, Antoinette, and formed a company under that name in 1906.) The Voisin brothers had teamed with a young enthusiast named Henri Farman, son of an English father and French mother, who had flown an unstable but airworthy craft more than two kilometers in October 1907. The following month, steering with his rudder alone and making essentially flat turns, Farman flew in a one-kilometer circle.

  While Wilbur was correct that none of these craft could match the Flyer, improving the handling of an airplane that could stay in the air for kilometers was a good deal easier than making one fly in the first place. The gap was closing. But in the early days of 1908, few would have predicted that the biggest threat to the Wrights would emanate not from Europe but rather from a small town in central New York.

  On September 30, 1907, while the Wrights were bouncing from one sales misadventure to another, Alexander Graham Bell officially established the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA). For reasons never fully explained, his wife, Mabel, supplied the $20,000 to capitalize the venture. The camp, at Beinn Bhreagh, Bell’s estate in Nova Scotia, was a combination of think tank and old man’s vanity play. From the first day, the group had meetings, kept minutes, and signed a formal agreement that began “Whereas the undersigned Alexander Graham Bell of Washington, D.C., U.S.A., has for many years past been carrying on experiments relating to aerial locomotion at his summer laboratory at Beinn Bhreagh, near Baddeck, N.S., Canada, and has reached the stage where he believes a practical aerodrome can be built on the tetrahedral principle driven by an engine and carrying a man, and has felt the advisability of securing expert assistance in pursuing the experiments to their logical conclusions and has called to his aid Mr. G. H. Curtiss.” Bell listed the other members of the group, then went on for two more pages without inserting a period into his remarks. Although any prior inventions of the members would remain their property, anything developed by the group would belong to the association.