Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  But before Wilbur could sit down with the generals, even before Orville’s two brilliant test flights, the Wrights’ dream of dominating aviation had been smashed. The culprit was not Glenn Curtiss. Such was the progress of aviation that a forty-kilometer flight around a set course was no longer exceptional. But on July 25, an event occurred whose immense significance not even the Wrights could deny. On that day, in a monoplane of his own design, with a foot so badly burned that he had to be helped into the cockpit, Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel.

  * * *

  *1 The Aeronautical Society was not affiliated with the Aero Club and was generally dismissed by the older organization as being filled with dilettantes.

  *2 Bell objected to a change in the rules. Originally the prize would go to the first airplane to travel twenty-five kilometers. When the magazine decided to keep the competition open for the entire year, Bell withdrew under protest.

  Trading Punches

  Nine months before Blériot’s flight, in October 1908, inspired by Wilbur’s demonstrations, Lord Northcliffe, owner of the English newspaper Daily Mail, had offered a prize of £1,000 ($5,000) to the first man to achieve the crossing. Northcliffe was in awe of the Wrights and as with most everyone involved in aviation expected Wilbur to immediately declare his intention to claim the prize. He even offered Wilbur an additional $7,500 under the table to undertake the flight.*1 But unwilling to risk failure in the harsh Channel winds, especially after Orville’s crash at Fort Myer, Wilbur declined to make the attempt. He chose instead the safer option of the Coupe Michelin, also worth $5,000. He was awarded that prize after a remarkable two-hour-and-nine-minute flight in intense cold at Le Mans in which he officially traveled seventy-three miles but “counting the wide curves” might have flown ninety.*2 He waited until the final day of the year to make certain that his effort would not be bested. “I am sorry that I could not come home for Christmas,” he wrote to his father on New Year’s Day of 1909, “but I could not afford to lose the Michelin prize, as the loss of prestige would have been much more serious than the direct loss. If I had gone away, the other fellows would have fairly busted themselves to surpass any record I left.”1

  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. By summer 1909, three French aviators had airplanes they thought equal to the task.

  The first, Hubert Latham, whose father was the son of a wealthy English indigo trader and whose mother the daughter of an even wealthier French banker, was a fearless motorboat racer and big-game hunter and had already floated across the Channel in a balloon at night. Latham was tall, handsome, urbane, and equally facile in French, German, and English. He was never seen in less than the latest fashion and a cigarette in a long white holder was a constant companion. Latham would attempt the crossing in the Antoinette IV, Léon Levavasseur’s latest, a monoplane that had the look of a giant insect. The second was Wilbur Wright’s pupil, Count de Lambert, who had purchased two Wright Flyers and brought them to the French coast. The third was Blériot. After witnessing Wilbur’s exhibitions, Blériot abandoned the ailerons that he had stuck on the ends of the wings and adopted wing warping. Although here was a blatant appropriation of the Wrights’ patent, neither the Wrights nor the French company that was manufacturing Flyers under a Wright license took immediate action.

  Smart money and sentiment were with Latham. The Wrights’ achievements notwithstanding, the Antoinette seemed the most advanced aircraft and the French/English Latham could boast supporters on both sides of the Channel. Latham did take off first, early on July 19. With huge, cheering crowds on both coasts and motorboats and yachts dotting the water, Latham got about a third of the way across before his engine stalled and he was dumped into the rough Channel waters. When the warship that had been dispatched for just such an eventuality reached him, Latham was sitting placidly on the fuselage of the crippled Antoinette, puffing on a cigarette. As soon as he stepped out on dry land, he ordered another Antoinette, the VII, this one also with warped wings instead of ailerons.

  The next day, Count de Lambert became a casualty without ever clearing land. He crashed both of his newly purchased Flyers and was forced to drop out. That left Latham and Blériot to sit in their rooms in Calais and wait for the howling winds to sufficiently subside to allow them to fly in safety. Blériot was nursing a left foot with third-degree burns, suffered on an earlier flight of the XI when the asbestos insulation on his exhaust pipe had shaken loose. Blériot needed crutches to walk and intended to strap them to the fuselage so that he might make his way about when he reached England.

  Finally, just after midnight on July 25, the wind abated. Blériot and his wife were awakened at two in the morning. He ate breakfast, tested the aircraft, and waited for both sunrise and Latham. But Latham never appeared. An associate had forgotten to wake him. Blériot took off at 4:30 A.M., doubtless reveling in his luck. After six years, a string of failures, and countless crashes, he was flying uncontested to celebrity and renown—assuming he didn’t end up in the water.

  For the Channel flight, Blériot had purchased a three-cylinder, 25-horsepower Anzani motor, light but not particularly powerful. Ten minutes after takeoff, he disappeared into the mist. His wife stood terrified at the railing of the warship as it steamed to where her husband might be if he had gone down. Even with the cork lifebelt Blériot wore, with his foot bandaged and the water particularly rough, there was little chance of survival if he were forced into the waves. But ten minutes later, the Blériot XI emerged from the clouds. Cheering on the English side told those aboard ship that the monoplane was still airborne.

  Shortly after 5 A.M., Blériot landed in a field marked by supporters waving tricoleurs. Oil thrown from the engine covered his face and he complained that the wind over the Channel had stung, but he was helped out of the XI, unstrapped his crutches, and limped into immortality.

  Told of his competitor’s plight, Blériot agreed to split the prize if Latham followed him across that day, but Blériot’s luck was complete. Heavy wind and rain appeared almost as soon as he landed and Latham was left near Calais, “sitting with his head on his monoplane, weeping.”2 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.

  Orville Wright, when told of Blériot’s feat at Fort Myer, agreed it “was a great flight,” and that the Frenchman was one of the most daring of all aviators. But Orville also hastened to note that Blériot’s was a personal triumph and not “an advancement in the art of flying” as “the monoplane has not as good a method of control as the biplane we use.” Orville also noted that Blériot had “added movable wing tips to his machine.”3 But no backhanded praise could obscure that the Frenchman had stolen headlines out from under him. Blériot’s flight, noted a Wright biographer, “was one of those rare moments when the entire world sensed that something extraordinary had occurred.”4 Told of Orville’s comments, Glenn Curtiss also congratulated Blériot and added, “He has demonstrated beyond a doubt that he has built a monoplane that is serviceable and trustworthy.”5

  As well as gaining him personal glory, Blériot’s crossing had restored French national honor. To mark the return of aviation supremacy, a consortium of champagne growers led by Marquis de Polignac, chairman of Pommery, decided to host the world’s first-ever “air meet,” a combination contest and exhibition in the fields of Bétheny, outside Reims. Reims, the historic site of the coronation of French kings, would now install the first kings of the skies.

  Louis Bléri
ot over Dover. His flight across the English Channel would bring worldwide acclaim, to the consternation of the Wrights.

  There would be no half measures in what Polignac and his fellows termed La Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne. A stock offering was floated to finance the affair, rail track was laid between Reims and Bétheny, and grandstands were built to accommodate thousands, with opulent private boxes above to house Europe’s wealthy, famous, and noble. Restaurants and bars would be available for the masses, while private chefs, valets, and even hairdressers and florists would be on call for the upper crust. A railroad station was constructed at the site and telephone and telegraph lines extended from Reims. For the actual flying, a six-mile course was laid out and almost fifty sheds and hangars erected.

  Whatever grandiose dreams the organizers may have harbored, reality outdid them. Tickets were grabbed up almost as they were printed, every hotel room in Reims was quickly booked, and a thriving spare-bedroom market grew up among private homeowners. When even that proved insufficient, city fathers erected temporary shelters to house the crowds. Eventually, so many spectators descended on Reims that an area large enough to hold forty thousand was hastily built to supplement the grandstand.

  In the program, daily prizes and 200,000 francs would be awarded for a variety of performance criteria, including distance, speed, duration, and altitude. By far the most prestigious event would be the Coupe Gordon Bennett, awarded to the aviator who completed the fastest two laps of a ten-kilometer course that was longer than any man had flown publicly just one year before.*3 France was betting on its new Legion of Honor recipient, Louis Blériot.

  Although the organizers very much wanted the meet to be “international,” only one of the more than twenty competitors who had agreed to come to Reims was not French—George Cockburn, a Scot. The Wrights easily could have participated. Orville was already in Europe, having sailed over with Katharine in August to set up the Wright subsidiary in Germany. There he dined with Kaiser Wilhelm and Count Zeppelin and proceeded to stun the Germans as had Wilbur the French. Seeing how the Wright exploits had prompted all this aviation hysteria, it would have been a coup to journey to Reims and walk away with the big prize.

  But the Wrights once again refused. In this case, it was not timidity but pique; their competitors, after all, were a bunch of patent infringers. Still, Orville wrote Wilbur that he had been told, “Our machines will take 75% of the prizes at Rheims unless something unexpected happens.”6 So Orville remained in Germany to generate sales, conducting demonstrations before huge crowds, which included almost every member of the royal family, and Wilbur stayed put in America. With the Wrights unavailable, Cortlandt Field Bishop, Aero Club president and Curtiss partner, asked Curtiss to represent American aviation at Reims. Although Curtiss later claimed to have “been chosen,” he in fact knew he was Bishop’s second choice.7

  Nonetheless, Curtiss accepted instantly. Like Blériot, he focused on the top prize, the Gordon Bennett trophy. “Without letting my plans become known to the public, I began at once to build an eight-cylinder, V-shaped, fifty-horsepower motor. This was practically double the horsepower I had been using. Work on the motor was pushed day and night at Hammondsport, as I had not an hour to spare.”8

  Curtiss also designed an airframe for the event, made it as small, light, and maneuverable as he could, then as with the Golden Flier placed ailerons at the end of the wings on the last front bracing between the two airfoils. He dubbed his entry the Rheims Racer.*4 He finished with so little time to spare that “in order to get to Rheims in time to qualify, we had to take the aeroplane with us on the train as personal baggage.” When Curtiss arrived he was stunned to learn that Blériot had mounted an eight-cylinder, 80-horsepower motor on his refurbished XI, and Latham, who was back in the Antoinette IV after another failed attempt to cross the Channel on July 29, had been reported as flying as fast as sixty miles per hour. Curtiss, whose “personal hopes lay in my motor,” then thought his chances “very slim indeed.”

  Almost forty fixed-wing airplanes were entered but only three aviators were in Wright Flyers, five of which had been purchased from the Wright Company French affiliate.

  As the meet opened, Curtiss was informed that the Wright brothers had filed a patent infringement suit against the Aeronautical Society of America in New York City and against Herring–Curtiss Company and him personally in Buffalo. He replied, “I should like to ask the Wrights if they really believe my machine is an infringement of their patents. It is quite absurd to say so.”9

  The infringement suit seemed to be the first in a series of omens. Curtiss suffered a badly sprained ankle in a practice flight and in another barely avoided a midair collision with an Antoinette by quickly gaining altitude and flying over the other aircraft. The maneuver earned applause from the thousands who lined the practice area and a sigh of relief from Curtiss. Unlike most of the French, he had brought only one plane with him and if that was damaged he was out of the competition. He therefore avoided many of the early events, resulting in some grousing from an American contingent that included former first lady Edith Roosevelt and eleven-year-old Quentin, the ex-president’s youngest son.

  Although spectators and aviators were forced to contend with weather that was often uncooperative, the actual flying overwhelmed any inconvenience. The New York Times called the Reims meet “a week of miracles.”10 Hundreds of thousands who had never seen a plane in the air, many of whom did not even believe that flight was possible, witnessed three, five, even eight airplanes in the sky at once. On one occasion, seven aircraft flew against the backdrop of the 275-foot-tall towers of the famed medieval cathedral that heretofore had been the city’s most magnificent attraction. Huge crowds gasped at crashes and cheered success. Standing marks for distance, duration, speed, and altitude—Latham soared to a heady 508 feet—were beaten and then beaten again. Hubert Latham, Henri Farman, and a newcomer, Louis Paulhan, played leapfrog in the record books. Farman eventually stayed in the air a stunning three hours and fourteen minutes, traveling 112.41 miles, obliterating Wilbur Wright’s distance record and winning $10,000, the biggest single prize awarded. Farman also won the $2,000 prize for flying with passengers, which had been expected to go to an aviator in a Wright.

  By the time the Coupe Gordon Bennett was run, crashes and mechanical mishaps had eliminated all but five qualifiers. Glenn Curtiss went first and set a blistering time of 15:50.4, or 45.73 miles per hour.11 The three flyers who went next, Latham, Cockburn, and Eugène Lefebvre in a Wright Flyer, could not come close to Curtiss’s time, but the last competitor was Blériot. With a more powerful engine, Blériot outstripped Curtiss on the straightaways, but the aileron-equipped Rheims Racer was far more efficient in the turns. 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 besting a competitor at the first Gordon Bennett Race, Reims, France.

  On the last day of the meet, Curtiss won another speed race, this one thirty kilometers, and became, with Blériot, one of the two most celebrated aviators in the world.

  The Wrights, despite a fast start—their airplanes set duration records on the first day and Lefebvre set a speed record on the second—did not have a successful meet. 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. As Orville observ
ed to Wilbur, “We were completely flaxed out. The machines like the Antoinette, with long fore and aft dimensions, are much steadier in winds—that is, do not pitch.… Lefebvre was the only one that did anything to uphold the reputation of our machines.”12 Orville would soon transmit even worse news. Soon after the meet ended, Eugène Lefebvre was killed in a crash, the second aviation fatality, both coming in Wright Flyers.

  Losing as they did at Reims left the Wrights angry and confused, especially since, as Orville put it, “If I had gone in [the races], I think we would have taken everything.” Orville also noted to Wilbur, “But I did not enter, having received the telegram saying you were displeased with my competing.”13 Where there was no disagreement was on their view of Glenn Curtiss. In addition to the Scientific American trophy, the man whom Orville had described as “frightened” at Reims had now employed stolen technology to win the Gordon Bennett prize. Curtiss in two short years had gone from an obscure fabricator of motorcycle engines to Wilbur and Orville Wright’s most loathed and feared competitor. That he flew to acclaim seemingly oblivious of his crimes must have incensed the rigidly moral Wrights all the more.

  Curtiss, now a major attraction, packed up the Rheims Racer and headed to Brescia, Italy, where a group of promoters had put together another air meet. Brescia, at the time Italy’s third-largest city, was a noted racing center, first for bicycles, then automobiles. Many of the French aviators, including Blériot, journeyed south as well, although Blériot would be less of a threat as he had burned both his hands after an explosion on the last day at Reims. Not as opulent as Reims and plagued by the same spotty weather, Brescia nonetheless attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, including King Victor Emmanuel and Princess Letizia, Giacomo Puccini, and the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. A young Franz Kafka attended the meet as a reporter.