Birdmen
Page 29
Undeterred that his old employer had already landed the deal, the irrepressible Charles Hamilton, now foisting his particular brand of insubordination on Alfred, took off in his Black Devil and flew an unofficial reconnaissance over Juarez, a war zone in which no cease-fire had been ordered. Government soldiers were fascinated so no one shot at Hamilton, who took the opportunity to buzz a fort and cause a terrified soldier to dive into the river. Hamilton followed that stunt by attempting to break his contract with Alfred during a subsequent Mexican tour, then trying to steal his airplane, which had been impounded, for which he was thrown in jail for three days before bribing his way out and hotfooting it back across the Rio Grande, where he and Alfred filed suit against each other.
Alfred survived Hamilton but whether he could survive his own profligacy was another issue. After a disastrous three-month whistle-stop tour where once again many watched his aviators but few paid, he doubled the capitalization of his company to $1 million, sold stock, then purchased land and built the complex in Garden City. The presence of two women among the students at the flying school brought him what was by now his familiar combination of great notoriety and a trickle of revenue. On August 1, when Harriet Quimby passed the test given by the Aero Club and won license #37, and Matilde followed twelve days later for license #44, Alfred had at least succeeded in making the Moisant flight school as well known as any in America. Success by his aviators in Chicago flying Moisant monoplanes might therefore provide an actual spur to revenues. Alfred was also cheered by the recent addition to his team of Chicago native St. Croix Johnstone, whose daring in the air was reminiscent of Hoxsey or Ralph Johnstone (to whom he was not related) and did precisely the sort of flying that the hundreds of thousands who were expected to line the lakefront would thirst for. Within weeks of joining the Moisant team, Johnstone had set an American record for duration, staying in the air for four hours while covering 176 miles on a measured course.
Harriet Quimby in her trademark purple flying suit.
The Wrights had also come to Chicago with a good deal of optimism. The exhibition team had added new members to supplement mainstays like Frank Coffyn and Parmalee, who had not been dismissed after all, but they could also pin hope on independents flying Wright machines. One was Walter Brookins, who seemed not as prepared to become an orange rancher as he had thought. Another was newly licensed Calbraith Perry Rodgers, who had been taught by Orville at Dayton only weeks before but who seemed the sort of natural flyer who might well have a spectacular debut in Chicago.
But Glenn Curtiss had a new sensation of his own, an aviator beside whom all these others paled. Curtiss, it seemed, in a stroke of immense good fortune, had stumbled on quite possibly the greatest flyer who ever lived.
Jerome Fanciulli had eventually persuaded Curtiss to give Lincoln Beachey a place on the exhibition team, and at first Beachey seemed a competent but not spectacular flyer—certainly nothing like the “Boy Aeronaut” who had displayed such skill in the undercarriage of a dirigible. He first flew for Curtiss at Los Angeles in December 1910, and then performed well in the novice class at the San Francisco meet in January 1911. The following week, Beachey was part of the Curtiss team that flew in Cuba, although McCurdy got all the headlines. In Tampa on March 1, Beachey made a flight at night in a Curtiss biplane equipped with two acetylene headlamps—Blériot’s invention—on the biplane’s front assembly. He made a second flight without the lamps and was almost killed when he was forced to fly through the smoke of smudge fires lit to mark the airfield and his machine ran into an obstruction while landing. Miraculously, and in a harbinger of future events, Beachey walked away from the crash.
Later in March, Curtiss set up a monthlong training school in Pinehurst, North Carolina, to coincide with equestrian season and sent Beachey to run it. The school made quite a splash among Carolina society and Beachey became a local celebrity by taking up a series of noteworthy passengers, including the winner of the local golf tournament and a visiting Japanese naval officer, “a hero of the siege of Port Arthur.” In an unfortunate and unintended preview, newspapers reported that “Commander Saito was enthusiastic over his experience and expressed his faith in the aeroplane for naval purposes in time of war.”3 By mid-April, Beachey was again flying exhibitions, and soon began to exhibit glimmers of the virtuoso antics to come.
The first week of May, Beachey was a member of the three-man team Fanciulli sent to an exhibition at the Benning Race Track at the eastern border of Washington, D.C. Reporters had not forgotten the man who had flown a dirigible around the Capitol five years earlier. “I guess I am about the only private individual who has ever stopped Congressional legislation,” Beachey said in an interview. “I alighted in the square on the east front of the Capitol, and when I stepped out of the machine I found [Speaker] Uncle Joe Cannon had declared a recess of the House out to look at the balloon, and I answered questions for an hour before they would let me fly back.… I also called on President Roosevelt but he was out in Georgetown so I missed him.”
Two days later, he did it again. “In a hitherto unattempted and unscheduled feat, without parallel in the history of aviation,” a page-one story read, “Lincoln Beachey, one of the pluckiest little aviators which the profession has yet produced, yesterday afternoon darted away from the aviation field at the Benning race track, flew over the thickly populated section of the city, and circled the United States Capitol.”4 The flight was made in swirling, hazardous winds and Beachey added a number of spiral dives to a spectacular ten-mile loop around the city as thousands stood gaping in the streets. “Five years ago I satisfied a strong desire to circle the Capitol in a dirigible,” Beachey said afterward, “and since that time I always wanted to perform the same feat in an aeroplane. The Capitol loomed in the distance and I could not withstand the temptation.”
Fanciulli lost no time in promoting Beachey’s flight. The licensed Curtiss agent, the National Aviation Company, took large ads in Washington newspapers that read, “Buy a Curtiss Aeroplane. The kind that flew over Washington yesterday, three thousand feet above the Capitol. The Curtiss machine is without a blot on its record. It has never had a serious accident. It is the swiftest, safest, and most easily controlled machine in the world.” A second advertisement appeared immediately underneath. “LEARN TO FLY. Fame and Fortunes for Aviators. Good Pilots Find Immediate Employment at Big Salaries.”5
During that same meet, Beachey added what would become one of the most popular events at air shows and one that spectators would actually have to pay in order to see, a race between an airplane and an automobile. Charles Hamilton had pioneered such a contest the year before but in the coming months Beachey and champion driver Barney Oldfield would make the event their own. President Taft witnessed the contest at Benning, which Beachey narrowly won, and declared it “the most exciting thing I ever saw.”
After Washington, Beachey tried a number of difficult and oddball stunts. In mid-May in New Haven, Connecticut, he dropped baseballs from three hundred feet while the Yale catcher moved underneath trying to snag them. The balls fell too wide for the catcher to get to them and they eventually gave up.
During this period, Beachey also made a major improvement in the design of Curtiss airplanes, albeit totally by accident. As Beckwith Havens related, “Beachey was flying one day and hit the fence and broke his front controller [elevator]. Even though he didn’t have front control, he flew anyhow and did some wonderful flying. So I thought there’s something about this … he’s got no front control.… I’ll take my front control off. The mechanic [Lou Krantz] said, ‘No. Not unless Curtiss tells me to.’ But [later] we were a day ahead for a meet and I said, ‘Lou, here’s my chance to take my front control off.’ He said, ‘All right, on one condition. I’ll set the thing up the day before and you come out and fly it before the crowd is here.’ So I did and it was just like you’d been shackled all your life and suddenly you tore off your shackles. Oh, it could fly! It was just a bad mistake having those two c
ontrols because they were just fighting each other.”6 Shortly thereafter, the “headless biplane” became standard for Curtiss machines. The Wrights, of course, had moved their elevators to the rear in the Flyer B the previous year.
In late June 1911, Beachey suddenly announced that he would fly over Niagara Falls. No one had ever dared brave the falls previously; the winds were swirling and treacherous and the spray could easily disable the engine. Even Curtiss, who generally balked at nothing, tried to dissuade Beachey from undertaking a flight that seemed certain to end in death. Beachey was undeterred. On June 26, 150,000 people came to watch an aviator attempt the impossible. The New York Times reported, “Sweeping down from immense height in a shower of rain … Beachey … passed over Horseshoe Falls, under the steel arch bridge, on down the Gorge almost to the Whirlpool Rapids, then rose … and, shaving the wooded cliff, landed safely and unconcerned on the Canadian side.” Not content merely to overcome an obstacle thought insurmountable, Beachey slowed at the brink of the falls before plunging straight down, then skimmed along “less than fifteen feet from the tumbling water … missing the top of the gorge by only a few feet.”
Lincoln Beachey flying under a bridge span at Niagara Falls.
What stunned the crowd most was that even when the airplane was buffeted by the wind and spray, at no time did Beachey seem anything but in total control. The closing line of the Times article was “Beachey will repeat the flight tomorrow.”*2
Praise for Beachey’s daring and skill rang out from every corner of the nation. Only Collier’s magazine, owned by Robert Collier, Wilbur and Orville’s close friend and member of the Wright Company board, was critical, although it took more than a year to be so. Henry Woodhouse, in a 1912 article, attacked the circus atmosphere that surrounded aviation and the unnecessary risks taken by aviators, themes Wilbur had harped on except in relation to his own flyers. Woodhouse asserted, “Even more reckless was the feat of Lincoln Beachey last year when he ‘did’ the Niagara Falls in his aeroplane. He was flying in the neighborhood of the falls when he thought of taking a trip under the suspension bridge. He did not know that the atmospheric conditions about any bridge are supposed to be more or less impossible. Five times he went down the gorge, intending to shoot under the arch, five times he had to jump over the bridge to avoid mishaps. The sixth time he knew the conditions of the air under the bridge and shot through the arch like a dart, so close to the water that sprays drenched his plane. Needless to say, had his motor stopped it would have been certain death for Beachey.” The article was notable not just for the gross inaccuracies in describing Beachey’s flight but for the timing—it was published just when the patent suit against Curtiss had been submitted for judgment—and the lack of mention of all the aviators who had died in Wright Flyers.
In an era of revolving-door celebrities, the Niagara Falls run had vaulted Beachey into the forefront of public consciousness. Always with a nose for publicity, he began to fly more spectacularly, adding a series of spins, dives, and corkscrews to his repertoire, all to the delight of crowds large enough that his appearances actually made money for promoters.
Beachey’s signature maneuver, one that not a single other pilot could master, was the “Dip of Death,” in which he flew thousands of feet aloft and then plunged straight down, sometimes with his hands off the controls and held out to his sides. Only when he was so near the ground that a horrible crash seemed inevitable did Beachey pull out of the dive and glide to a perfect, controlled landing. The Dip was reminiscent of the way in which Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxsey had died, and other aviators were astounded that Beachey could maintain control where even the best of them could not. He claimed to have discovered the trick unwittingly, although separating fact from embellishment in Beachey’s public statements was a near impossibility.
“I was high above the clouds,” he told reporters. “I felt like an angel. And in a twinkling death seemed to creep upon me and reach out and touch me with a bony fingertip. My motor has stopped dead!” From there, Beachey said that he began to “drop, drop, drop with dazzling speed.” He turned the nose down in order to “die calmly.” But near the ground, he eased the biplane out of the dive and was as surprised as anyone to land it safely. It was, he observed, “the forerunner of all that people have been pleased to call my ‘air deviltry.’ ”
“Beachey was a weird character,” Beckwith Havens observed. “He was a little bit of a fellow, very short, with a pugnacious jaw, and not afraid of anything, especially people.”
As moody and distant in private as he was flamboyant in public, Beachey neither smoked nor drank. “He couldn’t drink,” Havens noted. “One glass of champagne and he’d be tight.” Beachey’s only vice was women and in that he indulged with enthusiasm and regularity, not the least inhibited by the inconvenience of a wife he thought he had left in San Francisco. “We used to have excitement with him because he was running away from his wife and she was always trying to catch up with him and get some of his money. He was making a lot of money. But Beachey was so afraid of this wife of his … that she’d get some of his money … that he’d get a safety deposit box in the various towns where we were and just put it in those boxes. And then forget where they were. When he died, I think there were these boxes all over the country.”
Beachey’s wife finally divorced him in 1914, on grounds of “abandonment and cruelty,” and was granted an unspecified but likely substantial financial settlement.
In early August Curtiss scored a coup, and once again Beachey enabled him to maximize its impact. Gimbel Brothers had offered $5,000 to the winner of a race from New York to Philadelphia with the requirement that the winning aviator must pass over the Gimbel stores in each city. The race took place on August 5, one week before the opening of the Chicago meet, and three flyers were scheduled to compete, all in Curtiss machines: Beachey, Hugh Robinson, and, marking his return to the Curtiss fold, Charles Hamilton. That Curtiss allowed Hamilton to fly for him after the legal and financial wrangles with the semi-mad flyer is a testament to either a forgiving nature or stupidity. Either way, on race day the winds were strong with an ominous sky to the west and Hamilton begged off, publicly claiming the conditions were unsafe and he had not had an opportunity to test-fly the Curtiss airplane. But safety and Charles Hamilton were two terms never used in mutual description; far more likely is that Hamilton demanded money at the last instant and for once Curtiss refused to pay. But Eugene Ely, who had watched the notoriety he had achieved get buried in a tide of Beachey publicity, immediately volunteered to go in Hamilton’s stead.
Beachey took off first, leaving Governors Island just after two thirty in the afternoon, followed by Ely and then Robinson. The three airplanes headed north, circled the Gimbel department store at Greeley Square, and then turned south. Ely’s engine gave out at the halfway point but Robinson and Beachey, each making one stop to refuel, made it to the end. Many thousands watched from roads and rooftops along the route and 100,000 people were jammed into downtown Philadelphia at the finish. Beachey was the winner, with an elapsed time for the 112-mile course of 2 hours, 2 minutes, 25 seconds. He was greeted by a young woman in “a purple hat and purple and white gown” named Mae Wood, a Curtiss student, who “extended congratulations.”
Beachey and Robinson had both flown through storm clouds and were drenched and frozen from the strong winds, but Beachey seemed little the worse for it. “It was my longest cross country flight,” he said, “but it was so easy that I do not see why I could not fly from here to Chicago after I get something to eat.”7
Beachey took the train to Chicago instead, but when he arrived four days later he was pleased to find himself the number one attraction for the greatest gathering of aviators and airplanes ever assembled.
Attendance from the first day to the last was everything Harold McCormick and his partners could have hoped for. Newspaper photographs show visitors literally jammed along the lakefront, hundreds of thousands each day. On opening day, twenty-f
ive airplanes flew over downtown Chicago, as many as ten at once. The Wright team had a promising opening with Art Welsh (who, unbeknownst to the Wrights, was actually a Russian-born Jew named Laibel Welcher) setting a new record by flying more than two hours with a passenger. As always, Wright machines would fare superbly in duration tests. Another Wright team member, Howard Gill, won the day’s honors for altitude, reaching 4,590 feet.8
The second and third days of the meet each featured a plethora of thrills for the avalanche of spectators who witnessed flying that sometimes began at 8:30 A.M. and did not end until 7:30 P.M. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported, “Hundreds of thousands of people dammed the usually swift current in Michigan Avenue yesterday. The vertical sides on the west were banked as high as the highest cornice with solid masses of humanity as intent as the awed throng below in following the aviators circling in the air.”9 Unless they arrived early, Chicagoans who had purchased tickets, a small percentage of the total assemblage, found it difficult if not impossible to reach their seats in the grandstand.
Lincoln Beachey, christened “the fancy diver,” won a tight twenty-mile biplane race from Englishman Earle Ovington with a local boy, Jimmie Ward, finishing a close third in a contest newspapers declared “the greatest ever witnessed over an aviation course.” Wright aviator Oscar Brindley remained in the air so long, two and a half hours, that he received a relieved cheer when he finally landed at dusk.