Knabenshue was not the only member of the exhibition team to chafe under the Wrights’ puritanical, parsimonious rule. Their two most proficient remaining flyers, one of whom was their former protégé Walter Brookins, were in open rebellion. As early as the Baltimore meet, just after Belmont, he had complained of not being allowed to fly the best machines, as if he were blamed for the crash of the Baby Grand at Long Island that prevented the Wrights from claiming the Gordon Bennett trophy. After Hoxsey’s death, Brookins’s estrangement became more pronounced.
On May 21, Orville wrote to Wilbur, “Russell and Knabenshue have been having a great deal of trouble with Brookins and Parmalee. The trouble with Parmalee comes from his associating with Brookins. We would be better off if we were rid of Brookins. I have never in my life seen such a swelled head as he has developed. As a matter of fact, I think something is wrong with the machinery inside of it; his whole manner is so entirely changed from what it was a year ago. He spends his whole time talking of his superiority, and of the small amount he is paid for his services.” That Brookins’s “swelled head” might have been caused by watching two of his closest friends plunge to their deaths for $50 while the Wrights made $1,000 per day for their services apparently never entered Orville’s thinking. As with Chanute and many others, Walter Brookins had been transformed virtually overnight from an intimate, a boy they had watched grow up, a student in their sister’s class, and a pilot who had risked his life to fly their planes, to a greedy ingrate.
Brookins and Parmalee flew with Frank Coffyn and some newly trained replacements but the results were not good, at least financially. Orville wrote a number of letters to Wilbur in early June complaining of the paucity of revenues realized by participating in small meets. Later in the month, Brookins announced that he was giving up flying. Orville learned of Brookins’s resignation in the newspapers, and decided that a minor mishap at a meet in Quincy, Illinois, had prompted the action. “He bought an undeveloped orange farm and some mining stock. He announces that he is going to devote his time to these!”
Whatever the personality issues, Brookins would have been a great loss, even more so if Parmalee went as well. At San Francisco, Parmalee alone had salvaged the honor of the Wright team with a splendid three-hour, forty-minute endurance flight, longer than any American had ever continuously stayed in the air. Coffyn, as he noted, was extremely cautious and none of the new flyers had the skill or panache to capture the imagination as had Johnstone or Hoxsey. Even with Brookins and Parmalee, for the first three months of the 1911 season, the exhibition team cleared only $8,000. An additional $5,300 was owed from an exhibition in Columbus, Ohio, which was never collected despite a lawsuit to compel payment. Orville blamed foreign flyers for depressing the prices and, of course, those aviators flew infringing machines. The Wrights had initiated suit against Curtiss, Paulhan, and Grahame-White but, for reasons they never made clear, they had held off in filing similar actions against others—for example, the Moisant aviators.
With what seemed to be a highly favorable decision in the French courts, Freedman demanded that change. He wrote to Orville, “The field here is developing so largely and the future to me to be so important that the necessity of fully protecting and assuring yourselves of your rights and your patents appears to me to be more important than ever.… There appears, from what I see in the papers, to be a good many infringements now being worked, both in manufacture and patents, and I believe in these matters we should take as strong a policy as possible to protect ourselves.” Freedman suggested waiting until June before initiating more actions, by which time he assumed Wilbur would have returned from Europe, but when Wilbur decided to remain, they went ahead without him. In the August issue of Aeronautics was an article, “Wright Company to Start Wholesale Suits.”
Wilbur’s decision to remain in France and Germany was unilateral. In at least three letters to Orville he expressed a desire to attempt to get the European businesses into shape, “if I am not needed in America.” Wilbur’s opinion of German business practices was no more favorable than of the French. He described the conduct of the subsidiary and other of its associates as a “bare-faced fraud” designed to steal profits from their American partners by circumventing the licensing fees. In America, Wilbur insisted, such conduct would “come under the laws relating to criminal conspiracy … and would be an indictable offense.”*5
His frustration was compounded by an inability to control problems with the American company and the pending legal actions. After chiding Orville for writing only “two letters in two months,” on May 26, Wilbur lamented, “I do not understand why I hear nothing about our American law suits. I instructed Toulmin under no circumstances to grant White an extension of time. His time [to respond] should have expired on the 12th of May, but I have no news. Also Curtiss’s time should expire the first of June but nothing seems to be going on.” Wilbur complained about Toulmin’s performance as “simply throwing away money.” But Wilbur’s harshest comments were reserved for Frank Russell. “If he gets smart on your hands, ‘fire’ him. He is not in charge of anything but the factory and the selling departments. We are bossing the legal and exhibition departments ourselves.” Then, in a deeply revealing dictum, Wilbur concluded, “If he says anything about being under me only, as distinguished from being under you, let him know in short order who is boss.”
Then Toulmin came under fire again. “Please do not let Toulmin allow any delay in our cases against Curtiss, White, and Paulhan. Each three months of delay costs us at least $50,000. Impress it upon him that every moment is precious. We will never be in good position until we can get injunctions again and every month passed without an injunction means thousands of dollars of loss. Each day counts! Make him hurry matters.”
What these 1911 letters reveal is not simply the strain under which Wilbur was functioning but also the pressure he was putting on his brother. Orville’s letters discussed problems but never did he order Wilbur to take one course of action or another and never did he imply that Wilbur was the cause. In Wilbur’s letters, as in the exchange after Thomas Selfridge’s death, the opposite is true. Wilbur, in fact, often challenged Orville to “measure up,” as if his brother could resurrect Johnstone and Hoxsey for the exhibition business or make the judicial process move at a suitable pace. Orville never discussed how he felt about these demands, the compulsion to perform from his older brother, but in one year Wilbur would be dead, and the lack of resolution of these very issues would be cited by Orville himself as the reason.
As for Wilbur, despite his spending almost half the year in Europe, in theory to provide the sort of on-site management that was sorely lacking in the French and German companies, it was not at all clear whether his presence made any difference at all. All that his extended absence seemed to achieve was to exhaust him and leave him every bit as perturbed and discouraged as when he left. Even the French decision, which had seemed so promising, did not result in the rush to obtain Wright licenses that Wilbur, Orville, and Freedman had assumed. For this, Wilbur placed the blame on Henry Peartree, the lawyer who had shepherded the case through French courts. Late in May, as “the settlement [got] farther and farther away,” Wilbur grumbled, “I will not waste my time with him now, but will let matters rest a while and take the negotiation up elsewhere.” But it was hardly Peartree’s fault. As Blériot, Farman, and the other defendants were well aware but Wilbur only learned in May, an appeal would likely continue the case until 1913.
Returning home would provide no respite. When Wilbur stepped off the boat in August 1911, he found himself facing an acute threat to the ability to generate income from licensing that emanated not from a conglomeration of small manufacturers but rather from a group of men as wealthy and as powerful as those who sat on the Wright Company’s board.
* * *
*1 The suit was still active when Ryan gave his speech. It would be thrown out one week later.
*2 According to law, after the plaintiff had complete
d deposed testimony, which the Wrights had by March, the defendant had four months to reply, after which, if the judge agreed to move forward, a trial date would be set. Motions from either side could delay the process further and, with matters so technical, ultimate resolution might be many months or even years away.
*3 Wilbur was at first dissatisfied, feeling the substitute “gave us bushels of beautifully colored husks and gave the others the kernel.” The expert had agreed that the Wrights had founded the flying art; that the patent was valid; that the details had not been revealed before the patent had been applied for; and that they had discovered “the method of control that enabled man to fly.” He did however conclude that the Wrights had “not sufficiently claimed the independent command of wings and rudder” and therefore the French manufacturers had not infringed. Later, however, Wilbur realized the question of infringement had been left open but was more favorable to him than to the defendants. So strong was the ruling that he assumed Blériot, Farman, and the others would move to settle rather than continue to a final judgment.
*4 Willard and J. A. D. McCurdy formed a partnership to both mount their own exhibition team and to manufacture a “headless biplane” where “no ailerons or plane warping will be used for stability but the ribs will extend back of the rear beams considerably and be warped.”
*5 In that same letter, from Berlin on May 6, Wilbur spoke of Walter Rathenau, a director of Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), an electrical engineering company founded by his father. Rathenau had advocated the development of a German aircraft industry since 1907 and was an early supporter of the Wrights. Wilbur nonetheless accused him of being party to the fraud. “The story of his transactions,” he wrote, “is exceedingly interesting, especially if told in court; and I feel certain that, like all Jews, he lacks courage for an open fight, however much he may bluster with those poor idiots who are afraid of him.” In a letter of June 6, Wilbur specifically said that Rathenau had swindled him, and insisted in a letter to Katharine that he would have Rathenau and “his dummies” kicked off the board. But Rathenau, as it turned out, lacked neither courage nor honor. He became one of the most respected men in Germany during the war and one of the most respected men in all of Europe in its aftermath. He was named foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, a position he took despite repeated and credible threats against his life. After he was assassinated in 1922 by right-wing extremists, hundreds of thousands of Germans of all religions and political persuasions lined the streets of Berlin to pay their respects as his casket was wheeled by.
Owning the Sky
Like most Americans, Harold Fowler McCormick was enamored of aviation. But unlike most Americans, if Harold wanted to see an air show in his home city of Chicago, he could stage it himself. And if he wanted it to be the biggest, most opulent air show the world had ever seen, he could do that, too. Harold Fowler McCormick was the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, chairman of the board of International Harvester, and thus a scion of one of the richest families in America. To add even more heft to his bank balance, Harold, not yet forty, was married to the former Edith Rockefeller, daughter of John D.
McCormick’s idea, hatched in spring 1911, was to recruit midwestern Brahmins to join him in sponsoring an air show that would dwarf all that came before. The very best American and international aviators would be invited to participate. The meet would be staged on the bank of Lake Michigan, where the crowds might exceed a half million. The International Aviation Meet Association, which he established to run the event, would be initially capitalized at $200,000, with more in reserve if needed. At least $80,000 in prize money would be up for grabs and the association would also be generous with appearance fees, expenses for overseas flyers, and amenities for spectators. Before a single flyer had agreed to appear, McCormick and his associates had exceeded all records for funding an air meet.
The Wright flyers were among those asked to participate, of course, and as soon as word reached Dayton, Knabenshue was dispatched to engage in licensing negotiations. Knabenshue was told to ask for the standard 20 percent of the total of prize money and appearance fees. As with San Francisco, the Wrights assumed the committee would grouse, take the proposal under consideration, attempt to negotiate a lower amount, and then ultimately agree to terms. Orville wrote to Harry Toulmin in May, “Of course [the promoters] will not do this, nor will they be able to get the foreigners over without a license from us. The foreigners will shy of America, unless they have assurance from us that they will not be prosecuted.”1
But the McCormicks were used to making terms, not acquiescing to them, and the committee rejected the Wright proposal out of hand. Knabenshue wrote to Orville, “I then asked the Committee if I was to understand that the Committee refused to pay the Wright Company a license and the reply was made by Mr. McGann [a committee lawyer] that ‘it looks like it.’ ” Knabenshue then asked the committee to abandon the meet, which they refused to do. “There are a number of lawyers on the Committee,” Knabenshue added, “and the situation had evidently been thrashed out before I arrived.” The members had also decided that if the Wright Company brought suit against individuals, “the Committee would protect the aviators by cash bond or otherwise.”
McCormick’s committee had a counteroffer: Wilbur and Orville could join as competitors, just like everyone else. “These men expressed themselves as believing that the Wright Company had everything to gain by entering its machines and participating in the contests and winning such praises that might be awarded to them and, on the contrary, had everything to lose by precipitating lawsuits in connection with this meet as there would be a great amount of adverse criticism that such action, if taken, would be considered unsportsmanlike, unfair, ill-timed, and out of place.”
Lest there be any doubt of the committee’s resolve, one of their attorneys leveled an ultimatum of his own. “Mr. McGann told me that the Wright Company could bring suit if they saw fit, and in case they did, these members—all wealthy men—would finance whatever the costs would be to fight against such action and to make every effort to prevent a final adjudication of the Wright Bros. patents.”2 McGann did not stop there. “The publicity committee is composed of the heads of the various newspapers in this city and that if the Wright Company should bring any action against the Association or any member of the meet, these newspapers will publish all facts in the case and do everything within their power to embarrass the Wright Company in such proceedings.” Knabenshue added, “Personally, I believe this to be true.”
Orville eventually met twice with McCormick, lamenting that without the licensing fees the Wrights actually lost money with their exhibition team “as a result of people remaining in this country who were brought over at the expense of the promoters of the [Belmont] meet and who would not have come at all except for the fact that the meet was licensed.” Orville even had Frank Coffyn take McCormick aloft for a short spin. Despite McCormick’s apparent sympathy to Orville’s plight, there would be no change in policy. “The facts of the case,” Orville wrote to Wilbur, “are that they do not want to pay anything for a license and they expect our men to come for the prizes they can win.” Orville was also negotiating with the sponsors of a Boston meet who heard of the Chicago negotiations and refused to pay license fees as well. He asked Wilbur to “begin the circulation of the report among the European aviators that we now intend to go hard after every one of them that comes to this country, so that the promoters of the Chicago and Boston meets will have difficulty negotiating with the foreign men.” Then Orville knuckled under and entered the Wright team as competitors only, securing a small appearance fee to save face.
Whether because of the Wright threat or for other reasons, only one foreign aviator crossed the Atlantic for Chicago, although a number of foreign flyers already in the United States entered the meet. The most notable of those was Thomas Sopwith from England, who came with a Wright and a Blériot, oblivious to the ruling in the French court that his second airplane inf
ringed Wright patents.*1 But to some extent, lack of European competitors worked in the meet’s favor. Most of the prominent names were either members of the Wright, Curtiss, or Moisant exhibition teams or were independents who flew their airplanes, so the Chicago meet added a layer of team competition that further stoked public interest.
That the Moisant team was still in existence was due to either the perseverance or pigheadedness of Alfred, depending how one chose to view a man who continued to pour capital into a venture that had only lost him money. After his brother’s death, he simply pushed harder. He bought out the equipment of a small manufacturer that had gone broke, rented a factory, and, using a modified Blériot design, began turning out Moisant monoplanes. His French and Swiss aviators continued flying circus exhibitions in the South, almost always with more spectators watching from outside the fence than in. Occasionally, ticket sales allowed Alfred to approach break-even, but generally they fell short. Popularity, however, wasn’t a problem; the diminutive Roland Garros proved a particular draw, maneuvering his Moisant with a fine touch that elicited screams from the crowd.
Alfred saw opportunity in the wake of Ely’s flight from the Pennsylvania, when Congress appropriated sufficient funds to create an incipient market for military sales. In early February, the Moisant aviators, none of whom was American, flew a successful test scout mission for the United States Army. That was followed by a genuine reconnaissance over Mexico, observing both sides in the ongoing civil war. It wasn’t precisely live action, since the flight had been announced in advance and the parties had agreed to a brief cease-fire. Alfred then offered seven airplanes, with pilots, to the Signal Corps for scouting purposes. The army did engage airplanes, but they chose Curtiss’s instead of Moisant’s. It was typical of Alfred’s leap-first approach to business that he believed the War Department would abandon its ongoing relationships with the Wrights and Curtiss to make its largest purchase ever from him.
Birdmen Page 28
