Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  But Wilbur had missed the message of Brookins’s crash. The Wright machines could climb, turn gracefully, fly for long distances, and attain high speeds. But in tight situations, where quick maneuvering and complete control of the aircraft were required—the precise sort of flying that was about to predominate in exhibitions and, of course, would always be a prerequisite in war—the Flyers fell short. And in so doing they became unsafe.

  In fact, whispering about the safety of Wright aircraft had already begun. Holden Richardson, one of the first naval officers trained as an aviator, flew both Wright and Curtiss machines.

  The Wright plane was furnished with a kind of mixed up control … very unnatural. You had to maneuver the bar sideways and you had to move it fore and aft for elevation and then you had a little control mounted on that same thing, so if you wanted to make turns, you could change the incidence of the wing tips, just lower the wing tips.… [The Curtiss controls] were definitely better … a shoulder yoke control … you’d lean left or right to operate your ailerons. The wheel was mounted on a cross-wire so you could push fore and aft for working the elevators. He didn’t use feet except to control the power, the throttle. The Wright machine was mounted on skids and was assisted in take off by means of a falling weight.*4 Curtiss had enough power to take off right from the sand and gain altitude for maneuvering.4

  Wilbur and Orville, of course, saw nothing wrong with their systems, particularly as they viewed daredevil flying as simply foolish, so they made no effort to improve their product beyond some minor enhancements. The Baby Grand with its new eight-cylinder motor would be capable of speeds of eighty miles per hour but be no easier to maneuver than previous models—more drag racer than Formula One.

  But Curtiss refused to press his advantage. Despite the urgings of Jerome Fanciulli that Charles Hamilton was at best unreliable and that Curtiss needed a real team of his own, Curtiss continued to treat exhibition flying in a more or less ad hoc manner. There was a corporate entity called the Curtiss Exhibition Team but no flyers to man it. Not that there was a shortage of applicants.

  After hearing about Arch Hoxsey’s exploits, Beckwith Havens was ready to come east. “I thought, ‘If Hoxsey can do it, by gosh, the money looks good to me too.’ So I wrote to the Wrights and Curtiss and told them I wanted to fly.”

  The letters did not get a response but Hoxsey then gave Havens an introduction to Augustus Post, another of the larger-than-life figures who dominated early aviation. A balloonist, fixed-wing flyer, and charter member of the Aero Club, Post owned one of the first automobiles in New York City, was a noted singer of ballads, appeared in a vaudeville act, and was a major figure in the development of the Boy Scouts. Distinctive with a singular full beard, in November 1910 he would emerge from a lost week in the Canadian wilderness after a balloon in which he was racing was blown hundreds of miles off course. On another occasion, a newspaper reported that “when Mr. Post was learning to fly an aeroplane, he gained distinction at a meet at Sheepshead Bay by jumping out of his grass-skimming craft when it was headed into a fence, grabbing it by one wing and turning it around, and then jumping aboard again for a spin across the field without having turned off the motor.”5

  When he met Havens, Post exclaimed, “You’re just what we want! Some new blood in aviation!” He sent Havens to Fanciulli, who hired him in the only position Curtiss had made available. It was not as a pilot. “The first job I had was exhibiting [a Curtiss] airplane in New York. I was the world’s first airplane salesman.”

  While Curtiss dithered, the Wrights’ brand of flying continued to predominate. At the Harvard–Boston meet in September, the Wright team decimated Curtiss and Charles Willard, the only aviators in Curtiss aircraft. Brookins, now fully recovered, won for altitude—4,732 feet—and slow lap; Johnstone won for duration, distance, and accuracy. Including appearance fees, Wright aviators won $39,250 compared with $16,500 for Curtiss and Willard, $14,000 of which the Wright team received merely for showing up.

  But neither Brookins nor Johnstone was the big winner. That title went to the dashing Englishman Claude Grahame-White. Alternating in a Farman and a Blériot, he won for speed and bomb-throwing accuracy (the first time such an event was included in a major meet) and took in $10,000 for winning a race around Boston Light. In all, Grahame-White officially pocketed $29,600, a sum liberally augmented by the $500 he charged each of the many attendees who wanted to take a flight with him. Grahame-White was everything that Wilbur and Orville loathed—flamboyant, rakish, grossly materialistic, uninterested in science, and an obsessive woman chaser.

  But Grahame-White and Charles Hamilton seemed to be where the money was, so the Wrights persevered, making what they considered great concessions to sensationalism but what were in fact merely necessities of basic marketing. On September 29, Walter Brookins flew from Chicago to Springfield, Illinois, 192 miles, a new cross-country record. As had Lena Curtiss, Wilbur followed the flight in a railroad car, cheerleading attending reporters. Within weeks, Grahame-White outdid him. After the Aero Club declined to sanction a planned meet in Baltimore—meaning the promoter did not intend on paying a fee to the Wrights—Grahame-White, strictly in an amateur capacity, flew an infringing Farman biplane twelve miles over Washington, D.C., circled the Washington Monument and the Capitol, and then landed on Executive Avenue near the east gate of the White House. There he was greeted by a contingent of army and navy officers led by Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, and cheered lustily by the hundreds who stood jammed along the narrow street.6 At roughly the same time, the Burgess Company, where Augustus Herring had made his next stop, began selling biplanes, which their advertisement proclaimed as “designed and built specially for C. Grahame-White,” and for which the aviator received a hefty fee.

  The Wrights had their own comeback. In October, at a Wright-sponsored meet in St. Louis, with photographers crowded in front of his airplane, making it almost impossible for him to taxi, and with moving-picture cameras rolling, Arch Hoxsey took former president Theodore Roosevelt aloft.

  Arch Hoxsey taking former president Theodore Roosevelt aloft.

  These skirmishes were prelude to what promised to be the major battle in late October at the International Aviation Tournament at Belmont Park, the event that had been discussed when the Wrights drafted their agreement with the Aero Club. Belmont promised to be the most important air meet yet to be held on American soil. The event had been conceived by Andrew Freedman as a Wright coronation, and for six months he had been so intimately involved in the planning that he had been named meet chairman. At one point, Aeronautics magazine wondered whether it might not be a good idea simply to run the event under the Wright Company’s auspices. Although the Wrights’ participation officially remained unofficial, in addition to Freedman, Wright Company stockholder August Belmont was chosen as the president of the organizing committee and the venue was, after all, Belmont Park.

  In all, $67,300 would be available in prize money. At Freedman’s insistence, the Belmont meet was also chosen as the site of the $5,000 1910 Gordon Bennett Cup race. Rumors flew that, given the Wright Company’s control of gate receipts, Glenn Curtiss would be forbidden entry, but organizers insisted Curtiss would be invited, and he was.

  But Curtiss would not—or could not—defend his Gordon Bennett title. The reason Curtiss declined to enter the race remains a matter of speculation. His biographer claimed that due to the ongoing litigation with Herring, Curtiss, exiled from his factory to a small shop in Hammondsport, simply could not build a machine that had a chance of winning.7 Certainly the business was in a shambles, so dysfunctional that he was forced to run announcements in trade journals. “All Communications Intended For Glenn H. Curtiss,” the half-page ad read, “Should Be Addressed to Aviation Headquarters 1737 Broadway, New York. Jerome S. Fanciulli, Business Representative.”

  But even so, the hypercompetitive Curtiss had never before shied from a long-odds fight and he had faced a similar situation in Reims a yea
r earlier. Nor is there any record of pressure being applied from either the Aero Club or the Wright Company lawyers, which likely would not have dissuaded him anyway. Whatever his reason, Curtiss chose to allow the most important prize in aviation to go to another flyer by default. And the Wrights were determined that the other flyer would be Walter Brookins in the 80-mph Wright R.*5

  The Gordon Bennett was not the only prestigious prize to be awarded at the meet. Board member Thomas F. Ryan, a director of Bethlehem Steel, offered $10,000 to the winner of a race from Belmont Park around the Statue of Liberty and back.

  The roster of contestants was the most impressive ever: Grahame-White, Latham, Hamilton, Brookins, Hoxsey, Johnstone, Willard, Clifford Harmon, a talented young French aviator named Roland Garros, and Tom Baldwin, who had switched from dirigibles to fixed-wing and brought his own biplane. And one other: the newest flying sensation, a man who after being in the air less than four months had become the rage in Europe, dazzling onlookers with flying that was either brilliant or reckless; no one could ever be sure.

  John B. Moisant.

  Moisant had burst on the scene at an event in which he had been refused entry. When the French declined to allow “the crazy American kid” to fly in Le Circuit d’Est, the world’s first long-distance air race, Moisant packed his friend Garros into the passenger seat of his Blériot and flew thirty-seven miles across Paris, passing directly over the Eiffel Tower, and then landed on the field at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where a quarter-million people had shown up to see the event begin. Moisant later insisted he had performed the stunt because it was the only way he could watch the race.8 Not satisfied with even that level of shock value, he announced on the spot that he intended to fly from Paris to London and, what was more, he intended to take his mechanic along—the first time anyone would cross the Channel with a passenger.

  The mechanic, Albert Fileux, weighed 185 pounds, certain to be too much for the Blériot. Moisant was dismissed as suicidal and Blériot himself begged the American not to force “pauvre Fileux” to accompany him.

  But Fileux wanted to go and on August 16, Moisant took off from Issy-les-Moulineaux with only an ordinary compass for navigation. One day and three stops later, Fileux and Moisant, his hands numb from the cold, touched down six miles from Dover. The next morning, the pair left for London, this last leg to be made with a cat given to Moisant by an English engineer, which Moisant named Paree-Londres. But Dover to London was plagued by breakdowns, bad weather, and other delays, all of which allowed suspense to build and Moisant to become an enormous celebrity. Finally, on September 6, he completed the journey. Within days, he had been invited to fly in the upcoming air meet at Belmont, New York.

  In press interviews, Moisant, small, trim, as dapper as Latham or Grahame-White, with a face The New York Times described as “rather beautiful,” constantly stressed his American roots. He intended, he told reporters, to return to the United States to fly on his home turf but noted that he would not participate in a proposed New York to Chicago race unless “he is guaranteed against all interference on the part of the Wright Brothers.” Moisant also knew of “a number of European flying men eager to cross the Atlantic to pick up some of the large prizes going begging there, but all are in the same quandary.”9 But with the Belmont meet endorsed by the Aero Club, infringing aircraft were welcome, since the first $20,000 of gate receipts would go to the Wrights.

  John Moisant with his cat, Paree-Londres, on his shoulder.

  Moisant stepped off the boat in New York a folk hero. He promptly announced he would enter both the Gordon Bennett and Statue of Liberty races.

  But before those races were run, hundreds of thousands were treated to exhibitions of flying that would have defied the imagination just six months before. Wilbur and Orville could not have helped but be pleased. The meet would be a washout for Curtiss while Wright aviators dominated the headlines.

  Seven airplanes flew in the rain on opening day, then ten were in the sky at once just two days later. That same day, J. Armstrong Drexel, “Chip,” an American flying a Blériot, set an altitude record of 7,183 feet. The press called it the “greatest day’s flying seen in the United States since the Wright brothers,” an accolade that would not last twenty-four hours.

  The following afternoon, in one of the great air duels in history, Ralph Johnstone broke Drexel’s record, flying in a “raging snowstorm” above the clouds. For much of the ascent, Hoxsey, Latham, and Count Jacques de Lesseps had kept pace.*6 Hoxsey and Johnstone were already known as “the stardust twins” for their constant attempts to best the altitude marks of the other. The Wrights had constructed a Flyer specifically to attain altitudes, featuring elongated wing tips, minimal wing surface, and lightweight, low-horsepower motors.

  At about 5,000 feet, Latham’s Antoinette suddenly began to plummet, swinging side to side in buffeting air as Latham tried desperately to maintain control. The Antoinette disappeared behind a clump of trees, but Latham miraculously managed to land the craft and emerge uninjured.

  Hoxsey and de Lesseps continued to climb, but had to break off at about 7,000 feet because of the wind and frigid weather. But Johnstone kept going, snow and hail whipping across the Flyer and frost fogging his goggles. When he finally returned to earth, it was found that he had soared to 7,303 feet. The Hartford Courant reported that “the undemonstrative Wilbur Wright danced with joy when he glanced at the barograph.”*7 10

  One day after that, Johnstone and Hoxsey “went up in a gale so stiff that for a time they hung over the field immobile in latitude, though they were steadily gaining in altitude, and then began to drift backward.”11 Johnstone was blown fifty miles out over Long Island but “kept climbing until his last drop of gasoline was exhausted.” When asked about Johnstone’s flight, Wilbur, the same man who had previously declared that Walter Brookins “should be hanged” for flying in conditions far more benign, merely said, “I guess that’s the first cross country flight made tail end foremost.”

  Wilbur’s opinion of daredevil pilotry had changed abruptly. He and Orville had initially tried to impose conservative limits on team members, restricting them to simple demonstrations of takeoff, ascending, maneuvering, and landing. In September 1910, Wilbur had written to both Johnstone and Hoxsey before a meet in Detroit. “I am very much in earnest when I say I want no stunts and spectacular frills put on the flights there. If each of you can make a plain flight of ten or fifteen minutes each day keeping always within the inner fence well away from the grandstand and never more than three feet high, it will be just what we want.”12

  His conversion was likely based on a combination of resignation, pride, and the profit motive. In the first place, exhibition pilots, particularly Johnstone and Hoxsey, simply refused to be held back, and they weren’t being paid enough for financial threats to have any bite. And Wilbur and Orville could not have helped but feel a rush of satisfaction watching their creations perform to limits even they would have initially thought impossible. Finally, as Curtiss had demonstrated, what better way to call attention to your product than to show it engaged in one spectacular feat after another? To say nothing of the fact that each of those spectacular feats was funneling thousands in prize money into Wright Company coffers.

  The exploits of Johnstone and Hoxsey had set a perfect stage for the Gordon Bennett race, scheduled for the morning of October 29. The Liberty run was initially supposed to take place later the same day, although delays subsequently forced it back to the afternoon of October 30. The favorites in the Gordon Bennett were Claude Grahame-White in a Blériot with a 100-horsepower Gnôme motor and Walter Brookins in the Wright R. The Wrights would have traded all the notoriety of previous days for a victory over Grahame-White, thus making them the heir to Curtiss’s 1909 championship.

  But if someone was going to beat Grahame-White, it wasn’t going to be Brookins. Just after taking off, but before his start could be declared official, four of the eight cylinders on the Baby Grand failed. Brookins tried
to control the craft in a 20-mph tailwind but the airplane plunged to the ground not fifty feet from the grandstand. Brookins was thrown from the machine in great pain, his “whole body black and blue, as though he had been beaten with a club,” but once again he had escaped with only bruises.13

  The Wrights were out of the Gordon Bennett, a contest for which they had cared enough to design an airplane specifically. They watched as Grahame-White scorched the twenty-lap, 62.1-mile course in one hour and one minute, beating the “mile-a-minute” mark, faster than anyone had ever flown such a distance. Neither of the two other Americans, Charles Hamilton or Chip Drexel, was considered able to even approach Grahame-White’s time and they did not. Hamilton, flying his own creation, the “Hamiltonian,” 110 horsepower but utterly unproven, could not complete a lap, and Drexel, in a 50-horsepower Blériot, was simply not a good enough flyer to maneuver a low-power machine to victory in high winds and so quit after seven lackluster laps.*8

  With Brookins out without having officially started, however, a third spot had opened up on the three-man American team, a spot for a daring aviator to be thrust into the breach to save the honor of America.

  The perfect idiom for John B. Moisant.