Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  What made the meet unique was that with more planes in the air than had ever been seen in America and aviators trying desperately to outdo one another, the meet had not had a single accident or mishap.

  That changed on day four.

  “A wealthy Pittsburgh amateur” named William R. “Billy” Badger had entered the meet in a Baldwin biplane; Cap’t Tom was by then manufacturing machines based on the Curtiss design. Badger had just finished learning to fly at Baldwin’s flight school and had received his certificate only two weeks before. Chicago was his first public exhibition and Badger arrived determined to make a name for himself. If Lincoln Beachey had taken aviation by storm, why couldn’t he? For three days, Badger entertained spectators with a series of dives and spirals that garnered him the accolades he sought. Late in the afternoon of August 15, he decided to try a trick that only one man had completed successfully. He took his airplane to five hundred feet and turned it straight to the ground. At fifty feet, he attempted to pull out of the dive “when his machine crumpled like a pigeon shot while on the wing.”10 Badger was crushed under the wreckage and died soon afterward. He was the first aviator killed trying to emulate Beachey’s “Dip.” There would be many more.

  Two hours later, St. Croix Johnstone, flying a Moisant over the lake about a mile from shore, started a corkscrew dive of his own when, at about eight hundred feet, “his spidery monoplane tipped a bit, shot downward with a sickening swoop, overturning just before it splashed in the water.” Later reports said one of the monoplane’s wings snapped from the torque of the dive. Hugh Robinson, flying a Curtiss hydroplane, landed on the water and cruised to mark the spot where Johnstone’s monoplane, barely visible, was bobbing upside down.

  When I reached the wreckage, the ripples were still on the water. Above the water the tail of the machine had been torn to bits by the fall. I worked the hydro-aeroplane into the wreckage and then scouted all around. I cut in circles, hoping that Johnstone had started swimming. I knew if I found him I could carry him on my planes until the launches came. I couldn’t get sight of him, however. It was full ten minutes before the launches and pleasure boats arrived. I was satisfied by that time that Johnstone was dead beneath the wreckage.11

  Robinson then took off, which the crowd took as a sign that Johnstone was safe. A cheer went up, which buoyed Johnstone’s wife, who was waiting by the mooring at the foot of Van Buren Street. Officials tried to keep the news that Johnstone had drowned from her, but she eventually guessed the truth and collapsed.

  In the wake of two deaths in two hours, Harold McCormick issued a statement. “This has been a bad day for us. I can’t find words to express my sorrow over the death of the two men. I think, however, that the committee has done all in its power to make the conditions of the events as safe as possible.” Still, the committee tightened the rules so that “all recklessness will be eliminated from the meet.” The committee also noted that the deaths were “part of the sacrifice necessary to the advancement of aviation … such events must mark the progress toward the goal of safe, practicable flying; that a postponement of further experimentation and encouragement of flying would effect nothing but delay without a reduction of the fatalities that must occur before the goal is reached.”12 The day after Badger and Johnstone died, the crowds increased.

  The Wrights would provide McCormick with another complication. Although Orville had acquiesced to the committee’s demands and entered Wright aviators without condition or license, on August 9, when Wilbur walked down the gangplank of the White Star liner Oceanic in New York after six grinding, debilitating months in Europe, the equation seems to have changed. (To that point, the Wrights had almost always traveled on German ships, but the infringement suit in Germany had not been going well.)

  With Orville at his side, he told the reporters who met him at the dock that he was not certain whether he would enter the Wright exhibition team in the unlicensed Chicago meet—ignoring the fact that Orville already had—and claimed to have little use for exhibitions in general. “I am more concerned in what the average man can do than I am in what the daredevil or simpleton can do with an aeroplane.”13

  Within forty-eight hours, Orville was on his way to Chicago with a new set of instructions. Before he left, he sent an urgent telegram to Toulmin. “Chicago holding pirate meet. Organizers have personally conspired with pirate aviators by guaranteeing aviators that no license would be taken. Interesting and important case. We must act promptly and vigorously. Please meet me at Chicago Monday.” On August 16, Toulmin did act, filing suit against McCormick and the other promoters for patent infringement and asking a percentage of the proceeds of the meet.

  Of all the Wrights’ legal actions, this one seemed the most ill-considered. The defendants were wealthy, powerful, and influential men being sued in their backyard. Orville’s initial willingness to enter Wright aviators would work against them as well. What was more, seeking a share of the proceeds was pointless. The meet had $142,000 in receipts against $195,000 in expenses, leaving only red ink for the Wrights. To get paid, they would need to sue the committee members as individuals, which provided an even less likely chance of success.

  The losses didn’t faze McCormick or his associates. It had never been their intention to make money on the show—they had enough of that already. Harold McCormick wanted only to propel his city into the spotlight of world aviation and in that he was most certainly successful. Nothing that had come before or would be staged in the future—even subsequent events in Chicago—could match the 1911 meet for sheer grandeur. When the meet closed on August 20 with a cannon shot, Tom Sopwith, the leading money winner at $14,020, flew McCormick in a lazy circle over Lake Michigan and returned him to the landing field as the announced crowd of 350,000 cheered.

  Calbraith Rodgers also had a brilliant meet. Outsized for a flyer at six feet three and weighing more than two hundred pounds, Rodgers was a grand-nephew of both Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the War of 1812, and Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, who had helped open Japan to American shipping in 1854. Where the Wrights generally required student aviators to spend weeks learning to operate a Flyer safely, Rodgers had demonstrated complete control of the aircraft after ninety minutes. He received his aviator’s license on August 7, only five days before the Chicago meet opened.

  Rodgers was perfect to capture the imagination of the crowd. Wearing a constant rakish grin with a cigar protruding pugnaciously from one corner, he was wealthy, fearless, charismatic … and deaf. He had contracted scarlet fever as a child, and lost all the hearing in one ear and almost all in the other. Where many flyers used the sound of the motor to help them judge the attitude of the airplane, Rodgers was forced to rely on vibration alone.

  Like Sopwith, Rodgers flew constantly in Chicago, winning the grand prize for endurance and finishing third in prize money. (If Rodgers had flown for the Wright team instead of as an independent, he would have lost the prize because he would not have been allowed to fly on Sunday.) Rodgers, like so many others in the burgeoning field of aviation, had arrived at an air show as an unknown and left as a star.

  But no one was going to upstage Lincoln Beachey. Even after the meet had officially closed, he found a way to etch the last, indelible impression on the nine-day event.

  Beachey wanted the altitude record desperately. The official mark at that time was 11,150 feet, held by a captain in the French Army Corps. Two days earlier, Oscar Brindley in a Wright biplane seemed to have ascended to 11,726 feet, but his barograph was faulty and he was found to have actually gone only slightly more than half that height. Beachey had been ascending higher each day, but there was no way for him to clear 10,000 feet and have enough fuel to return safely to land, so he decided the only way to set a record was to use all his fuel on the way up. That would leave him in the thin, freezing air with no way down but to “volpane”—glide—left totally to the mercy of crosswinds and updrafts. At 5:30 P.M. on August 20, the “megaphone men” announced to the gra
ndstand that Lincoln Beachey would do precisely that. As with Niagara Falls, the decision seemed suicidal; no one had ever attempted to descend without power from anywhere approaching that height.

  Beachey “ascended steadily, first in circles around the borders of Grant Park and then in wide sweeps that swung him out over the city and then over the lake.”14 With the sky totally clear, Beachey was never out of eyeshot of the ground. His plane was reduced to a speck but then began to quickly grow larger. Beachey descended in tightening spirals. “One great circle carried him several hundred yards out over the lake and curved back over Michigan Avenue. His third circle was more nearly around the flying course and his fourth and fifth narrowed as he neared the earth. At the north end of the field he seemed almost to shoot downward.” As he neared the ground, spectators could see that his propeller was not turning. At about 7:30 P.M., after more than a two-mile, fifteen-minute glide, Beachey landed the Curtiss machine not ten yards from where he had taken off. After careful examination and testing of his barograph, it was determined that Beachey had ascended to 11,642 feet above Lake Michigan. Curtiss, who had watched the entire flight, told reporters, “That’s nothing. He frequently throws off his engine when he is at great height … his control of the machine is wonderful.” Glenn Curtiss and Orville Wright did not agree on much, but each man said that Lincoln Beachey was the finest aviator he had ever seen.

  George F. Campbell Wood, secretary of the Aero Club, writing in Aircraft magazine, said that Beachey’s flight for the altitude record was “without question, one of the finest performances in the annals of aeronautic competition, and this is not saying little at a time when wonderful air feats are the order of the day.” Then, in a passage remarkably prescient for a world not yet at war, Wood noted, “As to Beachey—believers in ‘safe and sane’ flying would naturally feel prejudiced against a man who would fly over the falls and down the gorge at Niagara, but the man compels one’s unstinted admiration by his admirable control, and his precision and accuracy give a glimpse of what the future may have in store for all of us.”15

  * * *

  *1 Sopwith, at age twenty-four, would found his own manufacturing company the following year. The most famous of his products would be the “Camel,” which saw extensive service in both World War I and the Peanuts comic strip.

  *2 The next day, the wind approached gale force. Beachey did not pass under the bridge and was lucky to escape with his life.

  The Wages of Righteousness

  On August 10, the day after Wilbur returned home from Europe, he attended an executive committee meeting of the Wright Company with Orville, whom afterward he dispatched to Chicago to sue Harold McCormick. Wilbur then returned to Dayton. He would never again pilot a Wright airplane nor participate except cursorily in one’s development. Defending his monopoly, defeating those whom he saw as his enemies, had become every bit as much an obsession as defending his father from Milton’s enemies in the church. Whatever experimenting in which the Wright Company would engage, whatever training of aviators or relations with the army or navy, would be under Orville’s direction. Wilbur was still the Wright Company president and Orville a vice president. That Wilbur, without whose genius there would have been no Wright Company, had turned entirely to business affairs and the Wright Company’s various lawsuits demonstrated that all other considerations had become secondary.

  In pursuing damages over technology, the Wrights had rendered themselves anachronisms. Their lack of moderation was equally self-defeating. Wilbur and Orville thought anyone who did not see things their way was either ignorant or duplicitous; anyone who overtly disagreed with them was either a liar or a cheat. The fact that the performance of their competitors improved while Wright airplanes remained substantially unchanged was, according to the brothers, only because the rest of the aviation community were a bunch of craven patent infringers.

  That they were beset by problems on all sides increased their isolation. Even without the Chicago meet, the exhibition business was one long headache with receipts almost never justifying the expense. And then, after all the fuss, the Wright team did not fare well in Chicago, their early successes more than eclipsed by the likes of Beachey and Sopwith. Whatever notoriety Wright airplanes did achieve was garnered by independents, most notably Cal Rodgers. Other meets yielded equally unsatisfying results. In September, Orville wrote to Wilbur of the team’s travails and said, “We won’t be in it next year.”1

  Manufacturing was also not running smoothly. Frank Russell, the Algers’ nephew, was proving to be imperious and not particularly competent and was constantly at odds with Charlie Taylor. In April 1912, Wilbur would write that in a meeting, Russell “immediately assumed a look of a dog about to be whipped. I suspect he is up to some scheme that he is rather ashamed of.”2 Russell would eventually be dismissed by Orville and replaced by Grover Loening. Loening was a brilliant hire. Still in his early twenties, his loyalty to the Wrights unquestioned, Loening had published late in 1911 Monoplanes and Biplanes: Their Design, Construction, and Operation. The Application of Aerodynamic Theory, with a Complete Description and Comparison of the Notable Types, a comprehensive and authoritative treatise 340 pages long, with 278 illustrations. But Loening remained in the position only one year, after which the Wright Company would again lack adequate management.

  Licensing was another problem area. Although a number of exhibition flyers and many promoters paid the Wrights royalties, albeit never what the brothers thought they deserved, the only significant contract was with the Burgess Company & Curtis, a Massachusetts concern that paid the Wrights $1,000 per aircraft. The problem was that the basic principles of aviation had become so commonly known that they had spawned legions of manufacturers and almost none of them bothered to purchase licenses from the Wrights.

  Even worse, there was an abundance of information readily available to allow an interested amateur to build his own airplane. Trade magazines regularly contained long, detailed articles on how to build a Curtiss airplane, or a Blériot, or a Wright. Aeronautics counted 759 machines built in 1911, only 200 of which were products of “aeroplane manufacturers,” such as Wright, Curtiss, or Moisant.3 In the space of four months, for example, trade journals contained detailed descriptions, schematic drawings, and/or how-to-build instructions for, among others, the Curtiss biplane, the Valkerie monoplane, the McCurdy headless biplane, the Nieuport monoplane, the Willard headless biplane, the Kirkbride all-steel biplane, the Burgess–Curtis “Baby,” the two-seat Deperdussin monoplane, the Queen monoplane, and even the Wright Model B.*1

  The journals also contained instructions for building a dizzying array of components including lubricators, turnbuckles, “gyromotors,” carburetors, propellers, laminating presses, pressure equalizers for ailerons, clutches, stabilizers, and a plethora of construction aids. For those components that could not be easily built, there was no shortage of manufacturers happy to provide motors, radiators, wire wheels, aeronautical cloth, bamboo framing, and magnetos cheaply, on credit, or delivered to your door. The notion that even with complete success in the courts a monopoly could be imposed on an industry so anarchic, where innovation had such a brief half-life, was almost comical.

  Although Wilbur continued the fight with unbroken ferocity, he was beginning to despair of the business he had been so desperate to establish. “My position for the past six months,” he wrote in a long, bitter, and remarkably frank letter to Orville on June 30, 1911, “has been that if I could get free from business with the money we already have in hand I would do it rather than continue in business at a considerable profit. Only two things lead me to put up with responsibilities and annoyances for a moment. First, the obligations we are under to the people who put money into our business, and second, the reluctance a man naturally feels to allow a lot of scoundrels and thieves to steal his patents, subject him to all kinds of troubles, or even try to cheat him out of his patents entirely.”

  There is little doubt as to whom Wilbur is most ref
erring. He was determined to vanquish Curtiss, to ruin him. His focus had become so personal, so obsessive, that the substantive issues on which the feud had begun were forgotten. Wilbur never seemed to grasp that his crusade to destroy his nemesis could destroy him as well.

  Not that Curtiss alone was the source of his anger. “I do not feel we are in debt to either the French or German companies. We have had not a square deal from either of them.… I hate to see the French infringers wreck our business and abuse us and then go unscathed. And I hate to see these Rathenaus succeed in their knavish plans without a scratch on their faces. But so far as making money is concerned I am going to quit worrying myself to death in order to get more than I have already got.”

  But he did not quit. Wilbur remained home in Dayton less than two weeks before returning to to New York for Wright Company v. Herring–Curtiss Company.

  A letter of triumph to Orville on September 18, 1911, after an exchange involving a Curtiss witness, epitomized Wilbur’s growing monomania. The incident occurred during Harry Toulmin’s questioning of Augustus Post, who was near the completion of five days on the witness stand. Toulmin was “no good at cross examination,” according to Wilbur, but “just before the end, Post, of his accord, dug a hole, jumped into it and under direction of his own attorney, floundered around till he absolutely ruined his value to the defense.”

  As Wilbur related the events, lawyers for the defense intended to continue to emphasize “the bold statement that regardless of all theories, the machine in the test with the fixed tail at Hammondsport did not swerve from a straight path nor turn on a vertical axis, although Curtiss worked the balancing planes [ailerons] to the limit and caused the machine to tilt to a great degree and restored it to position again several times during the flight” and that, during these flights, Curtiss “never at any time for any cause moved his rudder even though he lost lateral balance and regained it again during such flights,” and that “the rudder was merely a means of turning right or left,” and finally “that he knew by practical experience that there was no co-relation of any kind between the results of moving the wing tips and rudder.” Here of course was the crux of Curtiss’s defense, that the Wrights’ patent was limited to a three-axis system of control, whereas with ailerons instead of warping, the rudder was not needed to maintain lateral stability. In fact, Curtiss or his aviators had demonstrated as much many times.