Birdmen
Page 17
As they had at Reims, French-made planes dominated, but the $10,000 grand prize for speed went to Curtiss. He also won the quick-start prize and finished second in altitude. Wright Flyers were again shut out. After the competition was completed, Curtiss took d’Annunzio aloft, the first time he had carried a passenger. The poet exclaimed, “Until now, I have not really lived.” He later announced that he was rewriting the protagonist of the novel on which he was working to make him more resemble the redoubtable American.
When Curtiss crated his airplane to head for home, he did so as an American hero. Few newspapers devoted more than a line or two of copy to note that he was being sued by two other American heroes who accused him of being a thief. On September 22, just days after he disembarked from the Kaiser Wilhelm in New York, the Aero Club of America hosted a luncheon honoring the Rheims Racer’s victory, for which Wilbur Wright was invited to share the head table. Wilbur declined to attend.*6
But Wilbur gained retribution only days later at a venue every bit as lavish and ostentatious as Reims or Brescia, except this one was in the largest and most important city in the United States.
In 1905, a commission made up of New York’s most elite began planning a celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the river that bore his name and the centennial (plus two years) of Robert Fulton’s sailing a steamboat on it. Members included Andrew Carnegie, William Rockefeller, William Van Rensselaer, Andrew Dickson White, Grover Cleveland, Joseph H. Choate, J. P. Morgan, Oscar Straus, and Seth Low.
The occasion was as much to celebrate the rise to preeminence of the only recently incorporated New York City as the accomplishments of two men.*7 Hudson–Fulton would be celebrated in all five boroughs; hundreds of thousands of incandescent bulbs would light the streets and the masts of ships; millions of yards of ribbon would stream from lampposts, doorways, and buildings; fifty-two American warships would take part in an international naval parade up the Hudson that would stretch for ten miles. Exact replicas of the Half Moon and the Clermont would be built, manned, and sailed. On the ground, a military parade would march up Broadway, extolling the might of a nation that had recently joined Europe in the race to empire. There would be a historical parade, a carnival parade, a children’s festival, and dedicated museum exhibits; Brooklyn would host a series of auto races. The extravaganza would attract more than one million visitors, including dignitaries from virtually every nation on earth.
Initially, the organizers had envisioned an airship display over the Hudson as one of the centerpieces of the weeklong event. Thomas Baldwin signed on early and would be the featured balloonist. As the months played out, however, it became clear that no spectacle would be complete without an exhibition of America’s acclaimed new invention, the airplane.
In early August, the committee contacted Wilbur Wright and offered $15,000 for a flight of at least ten miles or one hour, with as many trials as were needed. At first, Wilbur hesitated. New York Bay and the Hudson were considered particularly treacherous to airplanes because of unpredictable crosswinds and updrafts caused by the Palisades on the New Jersey side. A crash at such a prominent venue would be a professional as well as a personal disaster. Finally, however, the opportunity to demonstrate the Flyer’s capability to an immense domestic audience proved too tempting to refuse. Wilbur told Orville of the contract in the same August 21 letter in which he informed his brother that he had “met Mr. Toulmin at Washington for the purpose of starting suit against the Curtiss crowd.”14
After word of the Reims meet reached America, the committee cabled Curtiss and offered him $5,000 for a flight from the staging area on Governors Island to Grant’s Tomb at 122nd Street and back, a distance of about twenty miles. It is uncertain if Curtiss was aware he was being paid only a third of what had been offered to the Wrights for a flight of twice the distance but, in any event, Curtiss accepted, intending to use the Rheims Racer. Only after he returned to the United States, however, did he discover that Herring had accepted $5,000 from Rodman Wanamaker to display the Racer in Wanamaker’s department store.
Having nothing to fly, Curtiss returned to Hammondsport immediately after the Aero Club luncheon for a replacement airplane, this one untested and with a good deal less horsepower than the Racer’s V-8. It did not arrive until September 27, leaving just a day to assemble and prepare the craft, and then make the flight. Curtiss had also accepted an offer of $5,000 to help commemorate St. Louis’s centennial the first week of October, a schedule that would have been workable if the Rheims Racer had been available when he docked. The Wrights had been invited to St. Louis as well, but had refused.
Two adjacent hangars had been built on Governors Island, so for the first time since the Wrights filed suit, Wilbur and Curtiss were forced into proximity. Neither of the combatants exhibited animosity in public. When Curtiss arrived, he made a point of popping into the Wright hangar to say hello and Wilbur made a point of asking a number of questions about Reims. Newspapers dutifully reported that “no ill feeling exists because of the suit which the Wright brothers have brought against the Herring–Curtiss company for alleged infringement of patents. Wright asked Curtiss if he found the information given him by the Wrights before he sailed for France of any value to him. Mr. Curtiss replied that he had and further pleasantries were exchanged.”15
Grover Loening had a much better view and saw things differently. “Wilbur was furious at this controversy,” he wrote later. “[He] openly despised Curtiss, was convinced he was not only faking but doing so with a cheap scheme to hurt the Wrights, and here on this very occasion was the first public appearance of that vicious hatred and rivalry between the Wright and Curtiss camps.”16
Loening, who would spend a lifetime in aviation, went to the Hudson–Fulton while still an engineering student at Columbia University. Because of family connections and his knowledge of aeronautics, he was allowed to loiter in areas generally reserved for the aviators and so witnessed behavior hidden from public view. Curtiss treated him civilly but Wilbur took to the twenty-one-year-old, even putting him to work on the Flyer. The Wrights subsequently hired Loening after his graduation and within four years he was the Wright Company’s chief engineer.
Predictably, as a lifelong Wright supporter, Loening was no friend of Curtiss. In his memoirs Loening described him as merely “a promoter,” rather than “an engineer or scientist,” as opposed to Wilbur and Orville, who were both. He attributed Curtiss’s notoriety solely to a coterie of clever “publicity men.” Loening related an anecdote from the Hudson–Fulton exhibition to prove his point. “On a flying field, I once found Curtiss standing near one of his new planes. I asked him a simple question about the approximate area of the tail surface. Curtiss answered, ‘Oh, I don’t know, but if it isn’t right the boys will fix it.’ And in that answer is the evidence that Curtiss was a promoter and not an engineer or even his own designer, excepting in a vague way. But if Orville was asked a similar question, he would bring out of his pocket a little memorandum book he always carried and tell you exactly, not approximately, the figures inquired about.”17
Leaving aside for the moment that when this encounter took place members of the Wright and Curtiss camps were hardly likely to be expansive with each other, the notion that the man who designed and built the most efficient motors on earth—and the machine that had just beaten the world at Reims—did not know the specifications of his own aircraft is absurd.
Loening’s recollections of the Wrights are more elucidatory. “One of the interesting things about Wilbur … was the hours of practice he would put in on the controls of the plane, sitting in the seat, hangar doors all closed, no one around, quietly sitting there imagining air disturbances and maneuvers and correcting the rudder and warping wings and elevator to suit.”
But where Loening’s reminiscences are most valuable are in his discussion of early flight:
The modern aviator has no conception of what those early planes were like. The st
ability was nil—flying them felt like sitting on the top of an inverted pendulum ready to fall off to either side at any moment. The speed range was nothing at all. High speed, landing speed, climbing speed were all within one or two miles an hour, because the planes got off into the air with no reserve whatever, and only because of the effect of the ground banking up of air which was not then understood.… Turns had to be most carefully negotiated because the excess power was so low that the plane would often sink dangerously near the tree-tops.18
Wilbur examining the canoe attachment he designed for his first flight over water at the Hudson–Fulton Celebration in New York.
As the appointed time for the air exhibitions grew near, the weather again refused to cooperate. On September 28, both Wilbur and Curtiss waited in vain for the 20-mph gusts to lessen, but they did not. Each had a particular reason not to chance his first flight in marginal conditions. Curtiss, using an untested machine of limited power, couldn’t be certain if his airplane would respond in a crisis. Wilbur had attached a canoe sealed with canvas to the underside of his aircraft to add buoyancy in case of a crash on the water; he feared the airplane might flip over without it. As the canoe might alter the aerodynamics, he wanted to be certain of full control during his maiden flight.
After it became clear that no one would fly on the twenty-eighth, Wilbur returned to his hotel in Manhattan, but Curtiss remained on Governors Island and slept in the hangar. He woke early the next morning to discover that the winds had abated but fog had settled in over the bay. From there, what he did or did not do became a source of controversy.
Curtiss, according to later press reports, took off, disappeared into the fog, then returned to Governors Island sometime later to land. It turned out, however, that none of the reporters had actually been present for the flight. Loening later insisted Curtiss hadn’t flown at all. “Curtiss never got off the ground,” he wrote. “The required run into the wind would have brought him right by where I stood.… Also Curtiss never could, in my opinion in that morning fog, again have located the landing area on the island.”19
When Wilbur arrived shortly after 9 A.M., Loening told him that Curtiss had fabricated the story. While Wilbur never personally accused Curtiss of lying, neither did he dissuade anyone else from doing so. That the Wright camp openly scoffed at Curtiss’s claim was duly transmitted to the press but no reporter chose to print the allegation.
Of all the reporters covering the event, perhaps the most knowledgeable was another twenty-one-year-old, Jerome Fanciulli. Fanciulli had studied aerodynamics in college, joined The Washington Post, and then moved to the Associated Press, where he became their expert on aviation. Fanciulli had covered the trials at Fort Myer and witnessed Selfridge’s death. Both the Wrights and Curtiss respected him, but Curtiss had taken to him as Wilbur Wright had taken to Loening. Fanciulli, on the other hand, thought Curtiss “rather naïve and badly needing someone to manage his affairs, especially his public relations.”20
Fanciulli was about to be married and was content to remain with the AP, but Tom Baldwin urged Curtiss to lure him away to perform the very functions in which Fanciulli had discerned Curtiss as weak. Curtiss took Baldwin’s advice and pressed Fanciulli to head the exhibition team Curtiss foresaw developing, as well as to establish a flight school and oversee sales and marketing of Curtiss airplanes. Fanciulli was tempted but unwilling to have anything to do with Herring, whom he considered a “four-flusher and a fake.”
During their meeting, Fanciulli was blunt and direct, and Curtiss, rather than bristling at criticism from an upstart, left convinced that the young reporter was just what he needed. Eventually, Curtiss set up a separate corporation, the Curtiss Exhibition Company, and named Fanciulli vice president and general manager.
After Curtiss’s brief flight—or nonflight—the winds once again picked up and he wheeled his airplane back to the hangar and left for his hotel. Wilbur found the temptation irresistible. First he took his Flyer with the canoe affixed underneath for a brief spin around Governors Island to see how it handled. Satisfied even in 15-mph winds, soon afterward he ascended once more, this time flying toward and then around the Statue of Liberty. Before returning to land, Wilbur banked the aircraft toward the huge ocean liner Lusitania, which would dominate headlines for a different reason six years hence, and flew across the bow. Thousands cheered onshore and foghorns were cacophonous in the bay. In the afternoon, Wilbur made a third flight, this time venturing into the Hudson River crosswinds.
Even then, Wilbur wasn’t done. After he and Curtiss were grounded by weather for the next two days and Curtiss was forced to leave for St. Louis, his contract with the Hudson–Fulton commission unfulfilled, Wilbur decided he would fulfill not only his obligation but also Curtiss’s.*8 On October 4, Wilbur catapulted his Flyer aloft, American flags affixed to the elevators and the canoe, and flew up the Hudson.
A newspaper reported, “An aeroplane flashed past the white dome of Grant’s tomb today, then turned gracefully in midair over the Hudson shot like a falcon back to Governors Island, 10 miles away. Wilbur Wright of Dayton, O. thus placed his name in the ranks of Hudson and Fulton today in one of the most spectacular feats in the history of aeronautics.”21
With Wilbur’s tour de force and Orville setting records before hundreds of thousands of exultant Germans, Curtiss’s victories in France and Italy were finally pushed from the headlines. But the Wrights were also attracting attention of a different sort. In October 1909, Aeronautics engaged a New York patent attorney named Thomas A. Hill to analyze the Wrights’ suit. Hill knew as much as any attorney anywhere about aircraft design and subsequently served on the board and as president of the Aeronautical Society. To demonstrate impartiality, the Aeronautics editors felt it necessary to include a preliminary note that was certain to elicit a volley of guffaws on both sides of the Atlantic. “All interested in the advancement of aviation have welcomed the suit brought by the Wright Brothers, and aviators all over the world should commend the Wrights for taking the initiative towards establishing ‘the limits to which other inventors may go’ with respect to their particular patent.”
Of course, aviators all over the world were furious with the Wrights. In his memoirs, Grover Loening noted that by bringing suit the Wrights had “turned the hand of almost every man in aviation against them.”
“I have carefully inspected the file wrapper at Washington,” Hill wrote, “and also their bill filed in [United States District Court] and am at a loss to find the motive for such a suit at this time.” The crux of Hill’s argument was that nothing in the Wrights’ patent made reference to or seemed to incorporate “supplemental structures” (ailerons) that in no way altered the “lateral margins” of the wings. To buttress his opinion, Hill cited the Wrights’ own letter to the patent examiner appealing the initial rejection of their application. “The twist is in the [wing] surface itself,” Wilbur had written, “and has no reference to a variation in the angular inclination of a plane to a car or body suspended beneath it.” As ailerons were planes (surfaces) suspended beneath the top wing, Hill considered this demonstrable proof that the Wrights had not conceived of ailerons as a means to lateral stability and therefore could not be seen to have included them in their patent. Hill then cited Harry Toulmin, who, in appealing yet another rejection of the patent application (there were many), wrote, “The lateral balance of the machine is controlled by the twisting of the ends [of the wings].… This is the main feature of the applicants’ invention.”
Hill concluded, “It is impossible to find under the most liberal interpretation of said claims the particular construction characterizing the Curtiss machine. The use of supplemental surfaces appears to be indisputably a public right.”*9
It was, however, going to become more difficult for Curtiss to prove that in court; Wilbur and Orville had decided to accept serious investment money and with the money would come all the resources that money buys. The first solicitation had come from Fred and Russell Alger
, majority stockholders in the Packard Motor Car Company and sons of a former governor of Ohio. The Algers had corresponded with Orville for a year, expressing interest in forming a corporation. Orville had been noncommittal. In July 1909, Russell Alger suggested bringing in other automobile manufacturers, including Henry Ford. The Wrights still gave no encouragement. In August, the Algers finally made a firm offer. Their group would put up $65,000, for which they would receive 65 percent of the stock. The Wrights would get 35 percent for their patents and also be paid 10 percent of the gross of each airplane sold. Wilbur wrote to Orville, “I replied that we would not care to let so large a proportion of the business go on so ridiculously low prices, but that we might consider letting a small block, say twenty-five percent, go at a rather low price.” The Wrights felt strapped for cash and, as Wilbur wrote to Orville, it was “not going to be easy getting a big cash bonus because the French company has made such a mess of things.”*10
But help was on the way in the unlikely person of a baby-faced twenty-four-year-old at Morgan Bank. Clinton R. Peterkin had begun as an office boy nine years earlier and worked his way up to a junior loan position. Peterkin proposed to Wilbur that he be allowed to put together a roster of investors. Wilbur admired brashness and so, probably with more than a dose of skepticism, he let Peterkin go ahead—but only if the backers he attracted were well-known and powerful.*11
To what was likely everyone’s surprise but his own, Peterkin succeeded in doing that very thing. He first ran the idea past old man Morgan himself. Morgan not only pushed in some of his own chips but brought in Elbert Gary, chairman of United States Steel. With those two on board, attracting additional investors was easy. Soon the investor list included Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, Howard Gould, and an assortment of mine owners, rail magnates, and steel company executives. The Wrights asked to include the Algers and publisher Robert J. Collier, who had been supportive in the pages of his magazine.