Birdmen
Page 27
With all the inventiveness, Ely’s flying would still have to be near perfect. The platform was only four feet wider than the width of the airplane and he would be touching down at approximately forty miles per hour. A miscalculation would mean falling off the side of the ship, or worse, plowing into the crowds of sailors and visitors who would be crowded on the deck.
The first week of the San Francisco meet was subdued, the aviators performing with proficiency but without the escalating brilliance and risk that had attended Johnstone’s and Hoxsey’s performances. No records were set; no gasp-inducing tricks were attempted; no one tried for high altitude; and there was “a noticeable absence of the celebrated Wright ‘spiral.’ ” “The flights were unspectacular,” Aeronautics noted. “No doubt the recent death of Hoxsey had its psychological effect upon the aviators and tempered their usual performances.”3 Even the airfield, renamed “Selfridge Field,” had the feel of death about it. Still, on January 8, a hundred thousand people paid to see the likes of Brookins, Latham, Willard, and Parmalee soar over the grounds. But as Aeronautics also reported, “Considering the poor flights made on that day it is credit to San Francisco’s interest in aeronautics that the attendance was good the rest of the meet.”
But ten days later, the meet would have its one first. On January 18, shortly before 11 A.M., Ely ascended before seventy-five thousand spectators. He flew across the bay and then to the warship waiting ten miles away. The bridge, deck, and superstructure of the Pennsylvania were packed with crew and more than one hundred notable guests who had been shuttled from shore. Standing between the captain of the Pennsylvania and the captain’s wife was Mabel Ely.
Ely circled the ship once and then came in to land, the wind dangerously at his back, as it had been during John Moisant’s fatal crash. After he cut his engines but before he had touched down, an updraft caught the airplane, threatening to cause Ely to miss the line of sandbag-anchored ropes, but he expertly dropped the tail and set the airplane down dead center on the deck about halfway down the platform. The ropes stopped him and to the cheering of both sailors and civilians, he got out of the airplane to be greeted by his wife, the captain, and attending luminaries. Captain Pond invited the Elys for a celebratory lunch during which the airplane was turned around. An hour later, a sated Ely reappeared, took his place at the controls, and completed the second successful takeoff from the deck of a ship. When he landed at Selfridge Field, army and navy personnel hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him before the cheering crowds.
As impressive as Ely’s flight was, it did not precipitate a ground-swell of support for military aviation from army and navy brass. Change does not come easily to the military and reluctance among senior officers to divert ample funds to support development had not been diminished. The Wrights’ assessment that aviation would linger as a sporting pursuit remained the conventional wisdom and Congress’s appropriations to investigate airpower continued to be paltry, as Captain Chambers’s letter to the Wrights attested. Captain Chambers, in fact, was not just the head of the aeronautics section—he was the aeronautics section. He didn’t even have an office, but sat at a desk squeezed between file cabinets at the War Department.4
Ely’s biplane on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania.
But a number of younger officers had been persuaded that aviation would revolutionize battle tactics, a perspective shared by Curtiss. After his Hudson River flight, Curtiss said publicly, “All the great battles of the future will be fought in the air. I have demonstrated that it is easy to fly over cities and fortifications. It would be perfectly practical to drop enough dynamite or picric acid down on West Point or a city like New York to destroy it utterly.”5 That point of view had begun to be shared by the public. The day after Ely was mobbed by army and navy officers, the San Francisco Call ran a front-page article titled, “Tacticians Must Begin to Figure: Fear of Aviators Means That the Rules of Warfare Must Be Revised Entirely.”
Even for those isolated members of the military who had considered the utility of aviation, the projected uses of aircraft in battle demanded a fresh perspective. With Baldwin’s dirigible and Orville’s successful tests at Fort Myer, the army had considered flying machines solely for scouting and surveillance. But bomb-dropping contests had become regular events at exhibitions and at the Sheepshead Bay meet Curtiss had carried an army sharpshooter aloft to discover both if someone could shoot accurately from the air and whether or not the recoil would affect flight. The marksman only hit a target on the ground twice in four passes but the experiment made it yet more difficult not to think of the airplane as a potential weapon.
Whether for scouting or delivering ordnance, aircraft in war would be subject to risks and strains more acute than in peacetime flight. Lacking what would be later referred to as “test pilots,” the closest approximation to wartime flying was done at exhibitions. The very sort of outrageous risks taken regularly by Johnstone, Hoxsey, and Hamilton in dives, spirals, or flying in high wind and extremely low to the ground were precisely what was required to determine if an airplane could be effective in combat. And foolhardy flying or not, if aviators could not successfully pull off high-risk maneuvers, it meant that ultimately the fault would be with the aircraft. That was a fundamental truth of combat that both Wilbur and Orville failed to grasp.
This is not to imply that the Wrights did not try to improve their product. They produced specialized versions of the Flyer to climb to altitude, attain high speed, or travel for great distances. Their notebooks and letters are filled with the most detailed specifications and descriptions of every inch of their machines. Their correspondence is replete with suggestions, proposals, or questions about solving problems or improving performance in what they had built. Wilbur’s investigations of Johnstone’s crash and then Hoxsey’s were minute and exhaustive. Not an angle of incidence or point of resistance or innocuous mechanical process did not regularly come under their intensely critical gaze.
But while focusing on details of a machine whose essential design they never questioned, as if it were 1903 and they were still in North Carolina, they missed the larger picture: that the very rudiments of aircraft technology were not only bound to evolve but were in fact already evolving. Wilbur remained a stunning theoretician and Orville a superb craftsman. To regain their preeminence, they needed only to return to what had first gotten them to Kitty Hawk: approaching the problem as if it were entirely new, with no past designs to burden their thinking. Wilbur was still more than capable of great intellectual leaps but to achieve them would require a reprioritization of his time. But he had in large part ceased to be a scientist or an engineer and was now almost entirely a business executive, a role for which he was uniquely unsuited.
So while Curtiss continued to seek fresh applications for existing technology in order to create new products, the Wrights, having designed a product they were convinced might need refinement but not recasting, focused their energies on sales. The officers assigned to Wilbur and Orville were taught to fly Wright machines and taught very well; those assigned to Curtiss participated in development, testing, frequent failure, but often ultimate success.
One of Curtiss’s visions was an airplane that could take off and land on water, a true hydroplane. Development of such a craft occupied Curtiss and his team in the first months at North Island. More than fifty versions failed before he got one to work. “Those of us who did not know Mr. Curtiss well,” Spuds Ellyson observed, “wondered that he did not give up in despair. Since that time we have learned that anything he says he can do, he always accomplishes, as he always works out the problem in his mind before making any statement.… It was never a case of ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ to his amateur or his regular mechanics, but always, ‘What do you think of making this change?’ He was always willing to listen to any argument but generally managed to convince you his plan was best.”6
Belying Grover Loening’s assertion that Curtiss was only a promoter, Augustus Post described Curt
iss’s inspiration for the draft design. “During the period when he was planning a new series of experiments, Mr. Curtiss, accompanied by Mrs. Curtiss, attended a New York theatre in which there was being presented a play much talked about just then. The curtain went up on the first act, and the noted aviator was apparently enjoying the show when, just as the scene was developing one of its most interesting climaxes, he turned to Mrs. Curtiss and said: ‘I’ve got it.’ On the theatre program he had sketched what ultimately became the design of the hydroaeroplane.”7
On January 26, 1911, that design reached fruition. A Curtiss aircraft, buoyed by two pontoons and a redesigned “deflector” front assembly to prevent water from being forced over the top of the pontoon, successfully rose from the waters off North Island. Curtiss himself made three short flights and then after each, landed successfully on the water. Five days later, Curtiss had an improved version with a single pontoon, flat-bottomed and covered with waterproofed canvas. The float was twelve feet long, two feet wide, and one foot deep, with a sharp upsweep from the underside at the bow and a sharp down-sweep from the top side at the stern. He once again took off successfully, then landed, settling on the water “like a duck.” Curtiss had not removed the wheels but rather attached the float independently and he would soon modify the design to create the world’s first amphibious airplane.
Curtiss piloting his flying boat at sixty miles per hour.
For those flights and a subsequent one later in February in which the hydroplane was lifted from the water to the deck of a warship—demonstrating that no special platform was needed for a ship to carry an aircraft—Glenn Curtiss spurred further innovation and became known as “the father of naval aviation.” Ironically, the Wrights would also benefit from Curtiss’s innovations. In March 1911, Wilbur and Orville offered to train one aviator if the navy bought a Wright airplane for $5,000. In July, after a fresh round of appropriations by Congress, the Wright Company made the sale.
Curtiss’s flights over water came in the middle of a quite favorable run. At a meet in San Diego that opened the day after San Francisco closed, only Curtiss machines were entered and Curtiss himself flew and “showed that the Curtiss machine was certainly capable of all the air gymnastics the Wright machines had been executing.” Lieutenant Ellyson flew publicly for the first time; he crashed but walked away unhurt and eager to go up again. Another Curtiss crew gave an exhibition in Havana, Cuba, where McCurdy flew across the island and around Morro Castle. But the best news for Curtiss came in early February when the receiver in the Herring–Curtiss bankruptcy announced that the Hammondsport plant had been sold back to Curtiss, its original owner, for $18,000. Curtiss had been using the plant on a temporary basis with the receiver’s permission for some months, so the sale-back gave the newly incorporated Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company a manufacturing facility, allowing Curtiss to abandon plans to totally relocate to California.
Herring was a party to Curtiss’s other lawsuit as well, of course, as a codefendant, and the Wrights were having as much trouble pinning him down as had Curtiss. Herring had been scheduled on a number of occasions to give a deposition, only to offer a series of excuses at the last minute in pleas for more time. At one point, Orville wrote to Wilbur, “Herring put in a plea for an extension … on account of his being sick.… I presume he will be asking for another but I have instructed Toulmin to fight any further extension.” But the Wrights, who urgently needed as quick a resolution to the suit as possible and had hoped for a trial that summer, sat in frustration as the presiding judge continued to grant Herring’s and Curtiss’s requests.*2 As Orville wrote in a telling passage to Toulmin in June, “Curtiss has been busy since his return from the West in getting business and not in getting ready for this trial. Delay is money to him, and his only hope.”
Wilbur had spent virtually no time in 1910 designing aircraft and 1911 promised to be the same.8 The attorney handling the infringement suit in France against Blériot, Farman, and the rest asked urgently for one of the brothers to come to testify. Wilbur and Orville had agreed to alternate, and so in March Wilbur sailed for Europe, intending to be gone perhaps a month. Instead, shuttling between France, Germany, and Britain, he would not return until August.
Wilbur had friends in France, to be sure, but among the general population he had become anathema for impugning the integrity of men the French saw as heroes and pioneers in their own right. Certainly, Wilbur never had much need of trappings of any sort but he had enjoyed the accolades, the visits to the best homes, and dinners with the elite of French society, none of which would occur on this trip.
Still, initially the journey seemed well considered. After Wilbur gave testimony in Paris, the “substitute,” the aeronautics expert appointed by the court to aid with technical matters, issued an opinion that seemed to agree with the Wrights almost entirely.*3
Despite the ruling, significant problems remained, once again centering on leadership in the French subsidiary. “I have been pretty much over the CGNA accounts and I find that the trouble over here has been more the result of bad management than rascality though the latter might not be entirely lacking.” CGNA had been effectively acquired by Astra, which Wilbur described as “the best robber in the pile.” Although bookkeeping and supervision were in fact shoddy, the principal problem seemed to have been what Wilbur described as “totally unreliable motors” that were depressing sales for French-made machines.
Back home, although heartened by what seemed total victory across the Atlantic, much of the Wright Company’s affairs were in a surprising state of disarray. The source was once again management—in this case, their own. In an April 23 letter to Wilbur, Orville wrote:
Our exhibition department is in a rather demoralized condition just at present.… When Knabenshue started out after business, he came back completely discouraged. He found that the Curtiss people have been out, while we were fooling around, securing our business. They got the Grand Forks job away from us. The Curtiss outfit are taking work at one half to two-thirds of our prices. Knabenshue was very much opposed to cutting prices at all, and was in favor of taking less work at higher prices, leaving the cheaper work to Curtiss. I told him he must take work away from Curtiss, whether we made any money on it or not. That he should not allow Curtiss to make any money this year.9
Although Orville would not so acknowledge, the origin of Knabenshue’s poor morale was not simply the need to acquiesce to cut-rate contracts; the Wrights had proved to be overbearing employers. In a number of letters from June 1910 until the end of the year, Knabenshue had been chided severely for everything from entering into agreements that didn’t comport specifically to Wright dictates to being told not to bring his wife and daughter with him to air meets. In March 1911, Knabenshue sent the Wrights a letter written on company stationery. Referring to his expiring employment contract, he wrote, “It states that I am to have entire charge of this department. During this season I received considerable interference on the part of several members of your organization, and this same interference resulted directly in the loss to the Company of a great many thousands of dollars.” Although other members of the company, notably Frank Russell, had occasionally stuck their noses in, the two members who had interfered the most were, of course, Wilbur and Orville. And since he had not received a renewal, Knabenshue added, “In view of the foregoing, I wish to tender my resignation to take effect at the expiration of the current contract.”
After some dithering and dickering, Knabenshue was talked out of quitting and on March 27 was presented with a contract extension at favorable terms with a specification that only Wilbur and Orville could give him instructions. Knabenshue continued to refuse. “I beg to state that the proposition as submitted by you is not in accordance with the verbal agreement with Mr. Wilbur Wright and I therefore respectfully decline.” He clarified his refusal three days later. “As long as I receive proper support from the Wright Company and that I have the business of securing and signing all exhibit
ion contracts, I will continue to operate under the conditions named in your letter of March 27.”
A week later, Orville capitulated. He agreed to allow Knabenshue to sign contracts “after having first secured our approval” but retained the right “to withdraw this privilege at any time should your signing of contracts be unsatisfactory to our Company.” After securing this tepid endorsement, Knabenshue grudgingly agreed to stay on. One week afterward, Orville described Knabenshue as “demoralized.”
In that same April 23 letter, Orville related a remarkable exchange with Glenn Curtiss. Curtiss had come to Dayton to meet with Orville “to see what arrangements could be made to stop all the other people excepting those in his outfit and ours. Willard and three or four others have left Curtiss. It was these that he especially wanted us to prosecute!”*4
Then, according to Orville, Curtiss made a surprising admission concerning the upcoming New York hearing on the infringement case. “He would like to have his case disposed of in some way so that he will not have to go on the stand. He says he has a very poor memory, and that although he always tries to tell the truth, he cannot always remember exactly what he said before, and that the lawyers would probably make it very embarrassing for him!”
It is difficult to know what to make of the statement. That Orville is not telling the truth is extremely unlikely given both his own propensities and that he was disclosing the information to his brother. So if Curtiss did say it, why? In no other instance does Curtiss lament a bad memory. Quite the reverse. And if he was dissembling to Orville, the most likely explanation is not that he feared he would lie inadvertently on the witness stand but rather that he feared to be forced to do so intentionally. And the most likely incident about which he would feel the need to lie is the 1906 meeting with the Wrights at which the brothers had insisted they had disclosed vital data on the mechanics of flight that Curtiss had pirated. Which suggests that, whether or not Curtiss believed that he had developed a new technology in ailerons, he was not as innocent of the Wrights’ accusations as he pretended.