Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Post, according to Wilbur, appeared initially “to be a much more foxy and capable witness than I expected and always evaded answering the questions Toulmin asked him by beginning to answer about something he had not been asked. He had Toulmin completely beaten.” But then Post made his “fatal error.” He “accidentally said that in his experience if the balancing planes were turned as to tilt the machine making the left wing rise and the other fall, the machine would swerve and turn to the right in a saucer shaped course without any movement of the rudder whatever.” Wilbur wasn’t present for this exchange and “Toulmin never noticed that [Post] had betrayed himself.”

  Wilbur pored over the transcript that night and instructed Toulmin to do nothing, confident that Emerson Newell, Curtiss’s attorney, would raise the issue the next day. “Sure enough,” Wilbur exulted, “he did so.” Post responded that to correct for the effect, Curtiss would in fact sometimes “turn his rudder toward the high wing … thus flatly contradicting his assertions he had previously made over and over again that he never moved his rudder.”

  While certainly this admission does contradict Curtiss’s statement, Wilbur’s sense of victory is overdone. In order to demonstrate that the three-axis system was necessary, the rudder would always need to be turned to maintain stability in a bank, not just occasionally. Otherwise the necessity to employ the rudder in specific instances might have been the result of a shift in wind or change of pressure, which Wilbur more than anyone would have known. The evidence remained that Curtiss’s system of ailerons was, for the majority of the time, sufficient to maintain stability without employing the rudder. Wilbur was so elated that Curtiss was caught in what he saw as a lie that the lack of real significance eluded him.

  While the trial proceeded, Orville decided to return to Kitty Hawk.

  The one genuine innovation to come out of the Wright camp since wing warping was a system of automatic stabilization and it was Orville’s. The first man to discuss automatic stability had been Herring. He had postulated vaguely that a system could be based on gyroscopes, but as with virtually all of his ideas, nothing had ever found its way onto an actual airplane. Langley and the dihedral proponents had also advocated automatic stability, but theirs was built into a wing design that came at the expense of maneuverability.

  Orville’s notion was to employ a pendulum and vane that would sense a change in any of the three axes of attitude and engage the wing-warping controls using canisters of compressed air. Orville had been working on it for three years but his concept was still largely theoretical and untested, even in prototype. On the trip to Kitty Hawk, he intended to mount the apparatus on a glider. Before he left, Wilbur wrote and instructed him to file an injunction against Walter Brookins to prevent him from flying in exhibitions without paying a licensing fee. He also instructed Orville to try to determine exactly how much money Tom Sopwith had won in Chicago so that a lawsuit for damages might be pursued.

  Orville arrived in North Carolina at the beginning of October and remained a bit more than three weeks. His stay was oddly unproductive. While he did establish a record for remaining in the air unpowered—nine minutes and forty-five seconds, which was not matched for ten years—he never tested his automatic stabilizer and suffered two crashes from which he was lucky to walk away unscathed. In the end, Orville did little more than experiment with an outmoded technology, doomed to obsolescence before he began.

  But obsolescence doesn’t come all at once. There were still triumphs to be had for the Flyer and the greatest was to be by Cal Rodgers. As soon as the Chicago meet concluded, the nation’s largest aviator announced that he intended to win aviation’s largest prize—$50,000—for the first man to fly from the Atlantic to the Pacific in less than thirty days.

  William Randolph Hearst had first offered the prize in October 1910, which at the time seemed like nothing but a ploy to hype his newspapers. To win, a flyer would have to cover twenty times the distance that Glenn Curtiss had in his Albany-to-New York flight the previous May and no airplane was remotely up to the task. Hearst got a good deal of publicity for the offer, which distressed him not at all, and was even given a medal by the Aeronautical Society for his vision, all the while hanging on to his $50,000. But after Chicago, flying across the United States did not seem so ridiculous. During the very weeks that Beachey, Rodgers, and the rest were flying before hundreds of thousands over Lake Michigan, another Huffman Prairie–trained Wright aviator, Harry Atwood, set a record of 1,266 miles on a twelve-day, eleven-stop journey from St. Louis to New York. The month before, Atwood had flown from Boston to Washington, D.C., landing his Flyer on the White House lawn.

  But a cross-country flight would involve complex, extremely expensive logistics. Airplanes couldn’t fly very far in 1911 and they broke down and crashed often. To succeed, an aviator would need not only a run of extraordinary luck, but an entire support team carrying fuel, spare parts, and possibly a backup airplane mirroring his progress on the ground. With automotive technology almost as formative as aeronautics, the only way to reliably keep the support staff positioned properly was by rail, and since no one knew how much or little progress the airplane might make at any given time, that meant a private train.

  Rodgers was wealthy but not that wealthy. To defray costs, his business manager approached the Armour meatpacking company to ask for sponsorship. Armour agreed. In return for supplying the train and paying Rodgers for each mile he flew, Rodgers agreed to use the trip to promote the company’s new grape drink, “Vin Fiz.” He renamed his specially made Wright EX model Vin Fiz, and the private train was dubbed the “Vin Fiz Special.”*2 Armour had the Vin Fiz logo painted on the front and rear stabilizers and the words on the underside of the wings and gave Rodgers a bottle of the vile-tasting stuff to carry with him on the journey.*3

  As he prepared for the flight, Rodgers told a reporter, “It’s important, because everything else I’ve done before was not important.” On September 17, the third anniversary of Tom Selfridge’s death, Rodgers took off with great fanfare from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn and landed in Middletown, New York, for the night. While taking off the next morning, the airplane’s wing clipped a tree and Rodgers crashed. He wasn’t seriously hurt but the Vin Fiz was almost totally wrecked and had to be rebuilt. Rodgers called Charlie Taylor, who had become so disgusted at working with Frank Russell that he had moved his family to California and was planning on following them there. Taylor agreed to help and when he told a stunned Orville he was leaving, Orville persuaded him to call his departure a “leave of absence.”*4 Rodgers paid Taylor a per diem and Taylor remained for five weeks, making repairs and adjustments.

  Taylor earned his money. On September 21, Rodgers was off again, only to crash again. And so it went. Rodgers crashed at least five times, had an engine explode twice, frequently became lost in the vast plains without a compass, survived a death spiral over the desert, and was almost electrocuted in a thunderstorm. In the train below were his wife and his mother, who loathed each other and were not shy about showing it, even when Rodgers was with them on the ground.

  The thirty-day limit came and went—Hearst would never be forced to pay out the money—but Rodgers never quit. As tales of his perseverance were reported in the newspapers, he became a national phenomenon, hundreds and then thousands gathering at each of his landing spots. On November 6, Rodgers flew by Mount Wilson and landed at Pasadena. Even then, his travails were not over. Taking off for the short hop to the Pacific Ocean, Rodgers crashed yet again and was knocked unconscious and sent to the hospital with a concussion. His airplane was wrecked. By the next day, he was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigar, and vowing to complete the race, which he did in early December at Long Beach, when he taxied into the surf of the Pacific Ocean before a cheering crowd of fifty thousand. Hearst offered him a cup in lieu of the prize money. Rodgers refused the offer, adding some choice words for reporters about Hearst’s parsimony.

  Cal Rodgers draped with an American flag and flow
ers upon his arrival in Pasadena, California.

  While Rodgers’s flight was gratifying to Wilbur and Orville, it did not deter them from their focus. In November, the brothers obtained a Curtiss airplane and brought it to Dayton for tests. They decided, not surprisingly, that the Curtiss was a poor imitation of the Flyer. Milton wrote in his dairy, “The boys try a Curtiss machine and break it.” A few days later, he added, “Wilbur went out to try a Curtiss machine. It was hard to fly with.” It was Wilbur Wright’s final flight, at the controls of his rival’s machine.

  In late November, the Wrights submitted a deposition in the Herring–Curtiss case and in early December responded to similar depositions by Herring, Curtiss, and George Spratt, the young physician with whom they had developed such a close friendship at Kitty Hawk. To Spratt, who claimed that only certain aspects of the Wright system had been developed independently, the brothers were generous. Since he was “an excellent companion, the most wonderful raconteur we ever met, and an earnest student of birds and of the principles of flight,” his contentions must only have been lapses of memory. Of Herring, their reply was sneering, dismissive, and dead on the mark. “He speaks of having made certain ‘discoveries’ regarding the superior lifting qualities of arched surfaces, but though we are familiar with the literature of the subject and with a great number of living experimenters, we have never anywhere found anyone who attributed either of these ‘discoveries’ to Mr. Herring, except Mr. Herring himself in his present affidavit.”4

  But Wilbur and Orville saved their most withering vitriol for Curtiss. They opened, “The present affidavit of Mr. Curtiss is a most remarkable one and of itself constitutes an impeachment of his powers of correct observation and shows his incompetence to give expert testimony as to what actually occurs in his machine.” The Wrights based their statement on their study of the Curtiss machine they obtained. But nowhere was it made clear what age the airplane was, what model, and whether or not it had been altered or repaired to Curtiss’s specifications. So, when Curtiss testified, “At present our balancing surfaces are flat,” which by then they were, as ample photographs and drawings in trade magazines would confirm, the Wrights insisted that the surfaces were arched. Arched ailerons would, according to the Wrights, become lifting surfaces, although why that would be more significant for application to their patent was unclear. The Wrights’ strategy seemed to be aimed more at so undermining Curtiss as an authority (a drumbeat that Grover Loening would later pick up) that the court would find it inconceivable that he could have developed a groundbreaking innovation on his own.

  On another occasion, Curtiss had asserted that “there was no appreciable turning tendency” when the weight of the passengers was unevenly distributed across the center line of the aircraft. The Wrights countered that the statement was “as if Mr. Curtiss should say, ‘When I am in flight there is no appreciable attraction of gravity.’ Such a statement would not establish the fact that gravity had ceased to exist, but only that Mr. Curtiss was an incompetent or willfully blind observer.”

  At first blush, the ad hominem approach might have seemed odd. Curtiss, after all, was a world-renowned pioneer and innovator and no one outside the Wrights’ intimate inner circle would have suggested he was a fraud. A string of experts, including Paul Beck and Theodore Ellyson, military officers whose veracity was beyond question, had confirmed all of Curtiss’s assertions. But the trial was being played out before a judge who had demonstrated both a lack of scientific sophistication and a predisposition toward monopoly interests. Still, while Wilbur and Orville were waiting for the judicial system to finally, after endless delays, smite their enemy, the enemy continued to build and innovate, increasing both his profits and his reputation.

  In December, the Wrights won a skirmish in the courts but not against Curtiss. In the infringement case against Claude Grahame-White, Judge Learned Hand, in district court, ruled that the British aviator could not fly in the United States unless he used a Wright machine and paid royalties and even then not without permission of the Wrights. The decision was narrowly drawn, however, not applicable to the broader case against Curtiss. Hand also ruled that White was liable for damages for the hundreds of thousands he had earned since November 1910, but that award was reduced to a paltry $1,700. And the courts could take from the Wrights as well. Herring–Curtiss was again adjourned until at least February and probably longer.

  Through the court battles, Curtiss successfully pushed his business forward. Although land-based aircraft continued to sell briskly, Curtiss’s new product focus had turned almost exclusively to waterborne aviation. His first major success was the Triad, an amphibious “flying boat” developed in 1911 to fulfill a contract with the navy. The specifications: “A hydroaeroplane, capable of rising from or landing on either the land or the water, capable of attaining a speed of at least fifty-five miles an hour, with a fuel supply for four hours’ flight. To carry two people and be so fitted that either person could control the machine.” Curtiss fashioned a biplane and mounted floats in the center and one on each of the wing tips. Spuds Ellyson successfully flew the Triad from Keuka Lake in June, and the navy purchased two of the craft.*5 Curtiss later fashioned a launch system in which a cable was stretched on a downward incline from the boat deck to bow to allow the machine to be launched from a battleship. In January 1912, he introduced the first true hydroplane, the two-engine Flying Fish. Unlike the Triad, which employed only pontoons, the Flying Fish had a stepped hull that rested on the water, essentially a hydrofoil that actually produced lift as the aircraft gained speed moving through the water. Foreign navies found the hydroplane irresistible; Russia purchased two and Japan three, the first foray into naval aviation for the erstwhile combatants of 1905.

  Although others, including Orville Wright, experimented with mounting floats under their aircraft, Curtiss was the acknowledged leader in the field. Only he, as one commentator put it, “thought from the water up, rather than from the air down.”5 Due almost exclusively to his efforts, the United States, which had been supplanted as the leader in land-based aviation by the French, Germans, and even the Russians, still held the lead on the water. In addition to possessing the most advanced designs, Curtiss’s training of military aviators such as Ellyson and John Towers gave aviation a cadre of young, talented officers for naval planning that was lacking in other countries.*6

  Glenn Curtiss and Theodore Ellyson at the controls of an Al.

  Although military leaders only contemplated using aircraft for communication and reconnaissance, bomb-dropping contests had become a part of almost every air meet and the use of the airplane as an offensive weapon of war seemed imminent. Here too, Curtiss more than the Wrights seemed to sense the future. Despite trying to sell airplanes to the army and navy, Wilbur and Orville had not substantially moved from their belief that aviation would be primarily a sporting pursuit, perhaps with commercial applications down the road. Curtiss’s innovations, on the other hand, would all be applicable to the use of airplanes as a means of attack. In November 1911, Secretary of the Navy George von Lengerke Meyer contributed an article to Aircraft magazine in which he praised Curtiss, did not mention the Wrights, and predicted that within a year the navy would purchase large numbers of aircraft that could be launched from warships by means of the cable system. The prospect of Curtiss securing the bulk of those orders put that much more pressure on the Wrights to conclude their infringement suit soon and successfully.

  Training aviators was another ongoing source of revenue for Curtiss as well as the Wrights. In 1911, the Wrights opened a new training center in Long Island and Curtiss opened a second winter facility in Miami. He billed his schools as the only ones where a student could learn to fly both “a standard aeroplane and a hydroaeroplane.”

  On the exhibition circuit, Curtiss’s aviators fared a good deal better than the Wrights’ and not just because of Beachey. Jerome Fanciulli proved more aggressive than Roy Knabenshue and Curtiss flyers barnstormed on a regular sched
ule, performing in smaller cities such as Wilkes-Barre, Wichita, Joplin, Fort Wayne, and Little Rock, maintaining a steady if unspectacular income stream for both the team members and Curtiss.

  The Wrights watched their enemy grow richer and more established while waiting for the court case to inch forward. Their urgings to Toulmin and their other attorneys to fight any further delays came to naught. In December 1911, the AEA was awarded a patent for a device that “maintains or restores lateral balance of a machine having rigid supporting surfaces by means distinct from the supporting surfaces themselves,” in other words, ailerons mounted on the struts between the wings. The patent was distinct from “supporting surfaces made flexible for the purpose of warping the extremities to preserve balance.” The AEA transferred this patent to Curtiss. Curtiss also obtained a patent for the shoulder harness that he used to control the ailerons, although the mechanism was not very different from the hip cradle the Wrights had initially employed.

  The Wrights were furious but publicly brushed the new patent off as unimportant. Wilbur wrote a letter to Roy Knabenshue in January 1912 responding to Knabenshue’s complaint that the Wright patent was providing no protection in exhibitions. Wilbur first noted that the Wrights had prevented Grahame-White and Tom Sopwith from competing in the United States—Judge Hand had issued restraining orders within days of the Curtiss patent acceptance—then insisted that the Curtiss patent “amounts to nothing at all and does not get around our 1906 patent.”*7 Wilbur tried to gloat about Curtiss’s discomfort at the trial. “I think that if you could have seen his face and his actions when recently on the witness stand you would not take much stock in his confidence in winning this suit.”