by James Tobin
The brothers went so far as to make tests with floats on the Miami River, in Dayton. But a propeller broke, and the Miami flooded, and the great Jamestown flyover had to be set aside.
And just then, Charles Flint, their agent for European business, asked that one of them cross the Atlantic in hopes of making a deal with the French.
WILL BOARDED RMS Campania, bound for London and Le Havre, in the middle of May 1907. Orville stayed home and prepared several machines for demonstration and sale. For a time their hopes were high that a deal was finally in the offing. But the negotiations that followed proved even more frustrating than the failed efforts of 1906. A plan was developed by which Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, the industrialist who had rewarded Santos-Dumont for circling the Eiffel Tower, would organize a syndicate to manufacture Wright aeroplanes and sell them to European governments, including the French. But the arrangements became ensnared in French politics. For a time, a deal in Germany seemed to be at hand, but that prospect collapsed when Will refused to demonstrate the machine without a signed contract.
Orville joined Will overseas in July, leaving Kate at home to deal with Charlie Taylor, still one of her least favorite men, and with reporters, strangers, neighbors, friends, and her father. “I do hope that you won’t have to stay over there any great length of time,” she told Will. “What will sister do without brothers?”
In fact, the brothers stayed in Europe for many weeks, and Kate spent the summer in rising exasperation. With her family on the verge of considerable wealth—or, if no deal came, more financial uncertainty—she anxiously awaited news. Yet the papers were unreliable and letters from her brothers were scarce and slow to arrive. “It is desperate to be so in the dark.” Another friend of hers got married and settled into “a pretty house on Cambridge Avenue”—one more unwelcome contrast to her own state as an unmarried woman of nearly thirty-three, dependent for companionship on two perpetually absent and absentminded men. She didn’t like what she heard of Charles Flint & Co. and believed “the boys” were going to be swindled. Charlie Taylor was supposed to join them in France if flights were imminent, but the brothers had left virtually no instructions for him, so he called constantly at the house to ask her for news she didn’t have. And her father was driving her crazy.
Finally, after many consecutive days of being “so worried” and “so out of patience,” she blew up:
Sister is sick enough of this proposition of staying here alone. Every peculiarity that Pop ever had is in full blossom now. I can’t leave home even in the daytime without being lectured. The other evening, the Parkhursts invited me over to the Beckel [Hotel] for dinner and you never saw such a scene . . . I never was so much in need of a little company in my life. It is a pathetic state of affairs when going for the cream is treasured up as the chief diversion of the evening! I don’t know what I should do if Lorin didn’t come in every day for dinner. . . . I am sorry for Pop for he is lonesome, too. But he makes every thing so hard. . . . It will be a marvel to me if I ever get through another year of school, after this miserable summer. Do settle up something or we will all be in the asylum before long.
THE BROTHERS HAD FRUSTRATIONS of their own, though they were interspersed with visits to the Louvre, fine dinners with interesting people, and balloon rides. One of the most irritating of their frustrations came whenever the name Octave Chanute arose, which was often. It was well known in France, Will learned, that Chanute was chiefly responsible for the Wrights’ achievements. He heard it said or implied that Chanute had urged them to take up their experiments; funded them; and supplied them with gliders; that they had been in every sense Chanute’s pupils, taking his ideas and “putting them in material form.” Clearly, Chanute’s remarks in France about his relationship to the Wrights, with their subtle implication that friendship had actually been collaboration, had taken root and grown.
But what could Will say? If he corrected the errors with any force, or in public, he would seem petulant and ungrateful. With certain friends, he quietly set the record straight. Otherwise, he kept silent, “though I sometimes restrained myself with difficulty.”
THE SURGE IN FRENCH EXPERIMENTATION that had followed Chanute’s reports of the Wrights’ activities now appeared to be paying dividends. Serious contenders were competing with Santos-Dumont for the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize—fifty thousand francs for the first official flight of one kilometer in a closed circle. One was Henri Farman, the son of an English newspaper correspondent but entirely French in his loyalties. A bon vivant, Farman was already known around Paris as a painter, bicyclist, motorcyclist, and automobile racer. Another aspirant was Louis Blériot, a manufacturer of automobile accessories, who also bought and began to fly Voisin machines. A third was Léon Delagrange, an accomplished sculptor. All three were now flying machines built by Gabriel Voisin and his brother. These were box kite—like biplanes without wing-warping devices, but Farman began to coax his machine into flights of several hundred meters. Orville was in Paris for one of Farman’s demonstrations that fall. He and Hart Berg drove up just after Farman finished one of his flights. They were barely out of the car when Ernest Archdeacon spotted Berg—he didn’t recognize Orville—and rushed over, crying “in his loud squeaky voice,” “Now, where are your Wrights?”
Berg masterfully turned the tables, sweeping an arm toward Orville and an associate, and replied: “Here they are!”
Archdeacon either didn’t believe him or simply didn’t get it, and continued to shout, “Where are your Wrights! Where are your Wrights!” as reporters, who did recognize Orville, swarmed around, hurling questions and taking photographs. Orville survived this scene to see Farman make several more flights. These were not like the Wrights’ flights at Huffman Prairie. Farman’s machine skipped across the field like a stone on a pond. “One could just force it through the air,” another pilot of a Voisin recalled, and turns were long, long, skidding affairs effected by hauling on the box-kite rudder, with no way to bank. But French spectators were thrilled. When a reporter asked Wright why Farman seemed able to make repeated flights like these, but nothing better, “I told him that it would be in poor taste for us to pass criticisms on another’s machine, but that I thought the flights I had seen very ‘nice,’ and that I admired Mr. Farman as an operator in that he didn’t spend his time telling the newspapers of what he was going to do.”
MABEL BELL WAS PROUD of her husband’s reputation but far from in awe of it, and she spoke her mind on scientific matters. Indeed, she often reined in his tendency to carry a theory beyond the bounds of common sense. Once she heard Bell argue that a propeller should exert the same force in the air as it did in water, since “nature makes no distinctions.”
“You can make a boat go with an oar in the water,” she remarked, “but you can’t make anything go with an oar in the air.”
So much for theory.
She perceived and worried over his strange dual tendency to flit from one project to another, yet also to tinker with a thing forever, to sacrifice its usefulness in the pursuit of perfection. The kites at Beinn Bhreagh thrilled her. The tetrahedron as a basis for construction struck her as highly valuable. But she believed her husband would never turn either idea to practical purposes if he continued to work essentially by himself, with only unskilled and indifferent workmen to help him and no one to draw his kaleidoscopic energies down to a tight focus.
Her father had drummed on Bell for leaving so many ideas in his lab books undeveloped. She agreed. Her husband had figured out a way to do away with the cumbersome telephone switchboard, for example. But he told her he had “worked it out far enough to demonstrate its perfect practicability to his own mind, and he did not care to be at the bother of fussing with it further when there remained other problems to be worked out. This in fact is the attitude of his mind towards all the other inventions [he had conceived without developing], and which soon will be his attitude towards the kites and flying machines which [are] now engaging his thoughts.”
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br /> In the 1870s, she believed, the assistance of Thomas Watson had been essential to the hard details of making the telephone a practical device. In the 1890s, Alec had likewise benefited mightily from his small association of scientists and technicians called the Volta Bureau. Now he needed some such man or group of men to bring the tetrahedral kites to the stage of practical application as powered flying machines, and to handle the business side of their application. He needed engineers and businessmen—men who could turn his visions and inspirations into working hardware.
For years [Mabel told him] you have struggled along working under tremendous handicap in the want of intelligent assistants who were able to take your ideas and either carry out your instructions carefully and accurately, or help you by the devising of means of putting your apparatus together. . . . Think of how often your kites were broken by the rough handling they received, of the floats that were not water tight because your workmen had no technical knowledge. You have had common carpenters and slow unskilled, half educated boys when you should have had the best intellect and highly skilled labor obtainable.
In the summer of 1907, Mabel proposed the formation of a dedicated team of skilled technical men with Bell as their leader and chairman, who would pledge themselves to the goal of developing his tetrahedral structures and especially his tetrahedral flying machines to the stage of practical usefulness and marketability. She offered to bear a year’s worth of the costs of such an association herself. “You have tried struggling under the dead load of ignorance and carelessness and indifference, now let’s try what you can do harnessed to knowledge, interest and an established position in the commercial world.”
The right men were already at hand, she said.
The first was Douglas McCurdy, whose father had been a friend and assistant to Bell for twenty years. One day in 1885, the elder McCurdy—a Baddeck businessman and editor of the village newspaper—had been fussing with a malfunctioning telephone when he noticed a stranger watching him through his storefront window. The stranger came in and offered help. He confidently unscrewed the telephone’s earpiece, removed a dead fly, handed the instrument back, and said, “It will work now.” When McCurdy asked the man how he knew so much about telephones, he said: “My name is Alexander Graham Bell.” It was the beginning of a long and close relationship.
McCurdy’s second son, John Arthur Douglas, was two years old when his mother died, shortly after the Bells began to come to Baddeck. By then the McCurdys and the Bells had become close enough friends that the Bells offered to adopt the youngster. The son had stayed with his father, but he became virtually a member of the Bell family, playing with the Bell girls during their long summer stays at Beinn Bhreagh and roughhousing with their father.
At sixteen, Douglas McCurdy enrolled in the mechanical engineering program at the University of Toronto. There he became friends with Frederick Walker Baldwin, four years older and very much Toronto’s big man on campus. Baldwin was a golden boy who might have defined the term. Always called “Casey,” for “Casey at the Bat,” he was “casual, friendly and unworried,” and a superb athlete. As captain, he not only led the university’s football team to the national championship in 1905, he scored the winning touchdown in the final moments of the game. He excelled in gymnastics, cricket, and baseball, and was a yachtsman accomplished enough to crew on a boat that nearly won the Canada’s Cup. Like McCurdy, Baldwin studied engineering at Toronto, and he became interested in aeronautics upon reading Octave Chanute’s Progress in Flying Machines. When McCurdy invited Baldwin to visit Baddeck in 1906, he hit it off with Bell immediately, and built a tetrahedral tower for him.
In 1907, another youngster came to Beinn Bhreagh—Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, a West Point graduate who had distinguished himself in Army rescue work the year before at the site of the great San Francisco earthquake. Selfridge was an associate of Lieutenant Frank Lahm—son of the wealthy expatriate who had investigated the Wright brothers’ flight claims—in the small group of aeronautical enthusiasts in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and he had arranged an official assignment to Baddeck to study and help with Bell’s work. He was reserved, smart, and ambitious.
“MABEL PROPOSED THE FORMATION OF A NEW GROUP.”
The Aerial Experiment Association: Glenn Curtiss, Douglas McCurdy, Bell, Casey Baldwin, Thomas Selfridge
Finally, there was Glenn Hammond Curtiss. He was far from an exact fit with the others. At twenty-nine, with a family and a measure of fame, he was no boy, and he had none of the others’ college-boy charm. Growing up in the small, western New York town of Hammondsport, at the tip of Lake Keuka in the Finger Lakes region, he was no relation to the town’s namesake—Curtiss had taught himself mechanics and engines and developed something like a compulsion for speed, first on sleds, then on bicycles, then as one of the early makers and racers of motorcycles. With a fierce competitive streak, he won many bicycle and motorcycle races, then began pursuing records for speed. In January 1907, he had gunned a souped-up motorcycle of his own design and construction up to 137 miles per hour in a timed sprint at Ormond Beach, Florida, where there were long stretches of hard, flat sand that attracted racers of all sorts. The newspapers said this made Curtiss “the fastest man in the world.” They called him “the hell-rider.”
Curtiss told reporters: “It satisfied my speed-craving.”
His racing renown won him contracts to build engines, and he established a thriving factory at Hammondsport. Motorcycle engines were powerful but light, a combination that attracted air-minded men such as Thomas Baldwin (no relation to Casey), who bought engines from Curtiss and advised him that a huge market was about to open up for engine-makers—in the skies. At the Aero Club show in New York in 1906, he met Bell, who bought an engine for one of his kites and invited Curtiss to visit him in Washington.
At the Bells’ townhouse on Connecticut Avenue, then at Beinn Bhreagh, the tough motorcyclist and the patrician Mabel Bell formed an unlikely friendship, partly, no doubt, because Curtiss’s sister was deaf, and he had learned to speak clearly for the benefit of lip-readers.
Bell liked all these young men—McCurdy and Baldwin almost like sons—but he raised objections to Mabel’s idea for a formal association. They were quite without experience—no more than boys, except Curtiss, who, for that reason, might resist Bell’s wishes and want to go his own way. He worried they couldn’t pay any of them enough.
She ticked off responses to each cavil: the youngsters might not be the best possible choices, but “they are the only ones you know of,” and in fact had “prepared themselves by many years hard and expensive training.” Curtiss could make up his own mind. As for salaries, “It is not a question of dollars and cents but of your long experience and need of help against their youth, enthusiasm, practical training and eagerness to help you and be associated with you. What they want is association with you, quite apart from any salary.
“The whole idea is to have your ideas carried out, your embryo inventions brought to completion according to your own desires as quickly and perfectly as possible and these young men are banded together for this purpose.”
Finally, Bell agreed to found the Aerial Experiment Association. Bell, in a concession he would regret, agreed that each member would take his turn in overseeing a design of his own choice. Curtiss would be the director of experiments, Baldwin the chief engineer, Selfridge the secretary, and McCurdy the treasurer. The cost was to be underwritten by a one-year grant of twenty-thousand dollars from Mabel herself. The group stated its aim simply as “to get into the air.”
The AEA’s first project was to build a man-carrying tetrahedral kite. Some thirty-four hundred cells were quickly assembled into a giant wedge called the Cygnet, which was towed out on Little Bras d’Or Lake early in December 1907. After an unmanned trial, Selfridge climbed into the small seat for a human passenger. At the end of its tow line, the kite was flown up to a height of 168 feet. But as it came down after a seven-minute flight around the lake, S
elfridge could not see how close he was to the water and failed to cut the tow line. The Cygnet was dragged through the water and wrecked. Selfridge was unhurt.
Immediately, the younger members of the AEA told Bell they wished to turn to aeroplanes. So the tetrahedrals were stored away. Bell, in spite of himself, was now in charge of a band of young men who wanted to fly with machines he considered foolish and dangerous.
THE WRIGHTS NOW had serious rivals. Fortunately, early in 1908, just as they were prepared to give up negotiations and begin to build aeroplanes for sale to private individuals, the brothers found themselves with not just one but two major contracts.
In the United States, the right combination of levers finally was touched when Selfridge’s friend Lieutenant Lahm intervened on the brothers’ behalf. Lahm had recently taken charge of the Army Signal Corps’ new Aeronautical Section. After a conversation with Orville in France, he wrote to the chief of the corps. “It seems unfortunate,” Lahm said, “that this American invention, which unquestionably has considerable military value, should not be first acquired by the United States Army.” This led to a meeting in Washington between Will and several key Army officers, which led, in turn, to a solicitation of bids for the construction of an Army aeroplane.
The Wrights had lowered their sights, and the Army was not seeking to buy their patent. Their bid was twenty-five thousand dollars. The Army accepted it, with the condition of successful test flights at the Signal Corps’ headquarters at Fort Myer, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. Augustus Herring submitted a lower bid of twenty thousand dollars; the Army, nonplussed, accepted it, too.
