The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Foulois started his second stopwatch as they banked around the balloon at Shooter’s Hill. Looking down, he saw that the small crowd of spectators gathered near the cornerstone of the great Masonic Temple being constructed on the crest were waving hats, handkerchiefs, and umbrellas in salute. Orville began a steady climb as they headed back toward the Fort. Within a few minutes he achieved a record altitude of 400 feet. With the parade ground in sight, he nosed down to pick up speed and raced toward the finish line. Foulois gave both of his stopwatches a final click as they flashed past the starting derrick. Orville pulled up, circled Arlington Cemetery once, and came in for a landing.

  Wilbur was the first to reach the machine—Foulois later remarked that it was the only time he ever saw him smile. The crowd had grown much larger. President Taft missed the takeoff, but drove over from Washington when he heard that the speed trial was in progress. Now he sent a message of congratulation through the crowd.

  Comparing stopwatches, the members of the official board determined that Orville had achieved an average speed of 42.583 miles per hour—2.583 over the contract requirement. The contract entitled the Wrights to make three attempts, but they elected to stand on the results of this single flight. The purchase price would be $30,000—the contract price of $25,000 plus $2,500 each for the two full miles per hour above the required speed.

  The Wright brothers hit the headlines for completing demonstration flights for the Army contract, but their achievement was over shadowed by Louis Blériot, who had crossed the English Channel in his wing-warping Blériot XI five days before Orville flew with Benny Foulois. It was one of those rare moments when the entire world sensed that something extraordinary had occurred. Wilbur and Orville had flown much farther than the 23.5 miles that Blériot covered that morning, but they had not flown the Channel. Blériot not only crossed an international border; in less than half an hour he conquered a geographic barrier that had shaped the course of European history. For the English, and for all of Europe, the message of Blériot’s flight was clear. As H. G. Wells noted, “this is no longer, from a military point of view, an inaccessible island.”9

  There was other news even more disturbing than the report of Blériot’s triumph: Glenn Hammond Curtiss had sold his first airplane on June 26, the day the brothers had been unwilling to fly for the adjourned senators. The Aeronautic Society of New York had paid $5,000 for a machine called the Golden Flier.

  The Aerial Experiment Association was a thing of the past. The group had met at Bell’s home in Washington on September 26, 1908, the day after the Selfridge funeral, with Edward R. Selfridge representing his son’s interests. Bell offered a rambling history of the AEA, assuring his associates that they had not only avoided infringing on the Wright patents but had developed a few patentable notions of their own. Coming from Alexander Graham Bell, the successful plaintiff in the most publicized patent suit in American history, that was comforting.10

  Mabel Bell contributed another $10,000 and the group agreed to continue operations for at least six more months. Bell hoped that his young colleagues would at last be willing to assist him in developing Cygnet II, the latest of his powered tetrahedral kites. Instead, they returned to Hammondsport to work on the Loon, an abortive version of the June Bug designed to take off from water. In addition, they designed and built a final machine, the Silver Dart, named, as usual, for the color of the wing covering. It would be their most successful aircraft, the only AEA machine that met the criteria established by the Wrights for a practical airplane. Shipped from Hammondsport to Baddeck, Nova Scotia, on January 6, 1909, it was the first machine flown in Canada.

  The members of the AEA, assembled at Beinn Bhreagh on January 29 for the Silver Dart trials, spent a great deal of time discussing patents and money. Curtiss argued that they should put a new emphasis on entering prize competitions and consider giving exhibition flights; the sale of flying machines might also be a possibility. Bell offered to transform the AEA into a business corporation—the American Aerodrome Company—which could legally undertake these and other nonresearch business ventures. Curtiss agreed to think the matter over.

  While in Canada, Curtiss received a telegram suggesting a very different partnership. Augustus Herring had suggested an arrangement similar to Bell’s to the Wrights in 1903, claiming that his own patent materials might serve as the basis for suits against them if they did not agree. But the Wrights could afford to ignore such threats.

  Herring had been forced into the mockery of entering the Army competition to maintain the illusion that he was still an aeronautical contender. Now he had abandoned even that pretense. The Wrights had flown their machines and met the contract requirements; he could not do the same. In the spring of 1909 Herring leaked reports that he had actually flown his proposed entry in the Army competition in secret, but had decided to withdraw his bid and accept a more lucrative offer tendered by mysterious “foreign syndicates.”

  Aware that Curtiss wanted to enter the flying-machine business, he offered a partnership. At best, Curtiss could hope for no more than a share in any patents granted to the AEA. Orville’s letter made it perfectly clear that the Wrights intended to prosecute for patent infringement. Now here was this fellow Herring, who had been around for years and who seemed to know everyone, offering the use of patent materials predating those of the Wrights.

  Curtiss jumped at the chance. It was apparent that Bell was committed to research, and had suggested the formation of a company only in order to continue his association with talented young colleagues. At any rate, Curtiss, the hard-nosed business man, thought that the AEA had an amateurish feel to it that was quite inappropriate when there was money to be made. He had not seen Herring’s supposed patents, but assumed they had to be better than nothing. Moreover, Herring had already put together funding for the venture, convincing Courtlandt Field Bishop, the wealthy New York banker and charter member of the Aero Club of America, to invest over $20,000. Given Herring’s track record, other wealthy enthusiasts might be expected to sign up.

  The Herring-Curtiss Company was officially chartered by the State of New York on February 19, 1909.11 Shocked to read the news in the papers, Bell wired Curtiss, requesting that he clarify his position. Curtiss sent an evasive reply, suggesting that the members of the AEA might prefer to associate themselves with the new firm. Bell and the others declined.12

  The surviving members of the AEA met for the last time at Beinn Bhreagh on the evening of March 31. Curtiss, in spite of Bell’s entreaties, was not present. Without his talent, his energy, and his factory, there was little point in continuing. The group officially disbanded that evening.

  In addition to his own considerable resources, Curtiss brought another useful asset to the new company. In January 1909, without discussing the matter with his AEA colleagues, he agreed to construct a flying machine for the Aeronautic Society, a group of wealthy enthusiasts spun off from the Aero Club of America. The new club rejected the restrained promotional efforts of the Aero Club in favor of active flying. Its first step was to transform an abandoned racetrack at Morris Park, in the Bronx, into a flying field. Now all it lacked was an airplane to fly. Curtiss proposed to fill that need for the rock bottom price of $5,000, including flight instruction for two student aviators.13

  Curtiss unveiled the Aeronautic Society machine, the Golden Flier, with a series of short straight-line flights at Morris Park on June 16. This machine, the first that Curtiss had built on his own, featured straight biplane wings rather than the bowed surfaces drawn together at the tips that marked the AEA aircraft. In an attempt to circumvent the Wright patent, which included a description of ailerons located on the trailing edge of the wing, Curtiss mounted his lateral-control surfaces between the wings, at the midpoint of the outer bay struts. If the Wrights did go to court, he would pray for a literal reading of the patent.

  Ten days after his first outing with the Golden Flier, Curtiss flew his first circle in the presence of five thousand paying s
pectators. Then he shifted operations to a larger open field at a Mineola, Long Island, fairground. There, on July 17, he flew twenty circles over Hempstead Plains, covering 25.002 miles to win the Scientific American Trophy for the second time. As in 1908, the Wrights had refused to compete with a man they regarded as an infringer.

  Curtiss spent the next few weeks teaching Charles Willard and Alexander Williams, the two Aeronautic Society students, to fly. Williams’s career was short-lived. The Golden Flier was a single-seat machine. All instruction was given on the ground, after which a novice was turned loose on a series of lengthening solo hops. Williams froze at the controls on his first attempt. The airplane stalled, fell off on one wing, struck the ground, and nosed over. The pilot survived with a fractured arm and broken thumb, but decided not to risk a second takeoff. Willard, however, proved to be a natural, and went on to a successful career as one of the best-known exhibition pilots of the time.

  The Wrights had had enough. Curtiss had ignored their warnings. Rather than negotiating for the use of their patents, he had forged ahead—winning prize money, charging admission fees for flying exhibitions, and selling airplanes. They were determined to put a stop to it.

  The brothers had spent their earlier years watching their father settle his church-related problems in one courtroom after another. Wilbur had helped Milton prepare legal briefs and had called for a mock family court to resolve his disputes with Orville. Neither doubted that the courts existed to defend the virtuous.

  Katharine and Orville left Dayton for Washington on August 1. A week later, they boarded the Kronprinzessin Cecile in New York, bound for a flying exhibition in Berlin. Wilbur returned home on August 2. Two weeks later he was in upstate New York, filing a bill of complaint enjoining Glenn Hammond Curtiss and the Herring-Curtiss Company from the manufacture, sale, or exhibition of airplanes. He arrived in New York on August 19, where he filed suit to prohibit the Aeronautic Society of New York from operating the Golden Flier on the grounds that the machine represented an illegal infringement of the Wright patents. The case would not come to trial for many weeks. Lawyers must be selected, depositions taken, and arguments prepared. But the process was set in motion—the patent wars had begun.

  On the day Wilbur filed suit, Curtiss was no longer in America. With his first airplane sold and his first student trained, he had left for France, the only American registered to participate in the great flying meet to be staged on the Plain of Bethany, near the ancient cathedral city of Reims, on August 22–29. La Grande Semaine d’Aviation de Champagne, as it was officially known, was conceived and funded by the leading champagne producers of the region. Seven rich prizes totaling 187,000 francs were offered to the winners of the distance, speed, and altitude competitions to be held that week.14

  The prospect of the meet at Reims generated extraordinary excitement. All that spring and summer, the newspapers buzzed with stories of flying machines, yet scarcely anyone had actually seen one of the things in the air. The Reims meet would provide an opportunity to see not one but many airplanes in the sky at once.

  The meet was billed as an international event. In fact, the French dominated the competition. But the Aero Club of America was determined to prove that the United States, the home of the airplane, could still hold its own.15

  Wilbur and Orville Wright, the natural representatives, would not participate. True to form, they had not changed their minds. “I do not compete for trophies,” Wilbur informed journalist Heinrich Adams, “unless I can win them occasionally through those flights I am obliged to make by my contracts.”16 As the inventors of the airplane, the Wrights saw no reason to compete with newcomers to the field—particularly when they regarded most of the newcomers as patent infringers. As Wilbur had once told Chanute, they refused to play the montebank game with montebanks.

  The Wrights would not have admitted it, but there was an even better reason not to fly at Reims. For the first time, they could not be certain of winning. Other aviators had learned their lessons well and caught up with the masters. It would have been foolish to risk their prestige by facing their rivals in an open competition.

  Aero Club of America officials had only one other choice—Glenn Curtiss. No other American had yet flown. The fact that Courtlandt Field Bishop was serving as club president sealed the bargain.

  The meet at Reims was everything that the sponsors had promised—proof positive that the age of flight had arrived. Before December 31, 1908, only ten men in the world had remained aloft for as long as one minute. Eight months later, during the single week of flying at Reims, twenty-two airmen made one hundred twenty takeoffs with twenty-three airplanes of ten different types. Eighty-seven of those flights were at least three miles in length; seven of them exceeded sixty miles. One pilot covered a distance of 111 7/8 miles. The maximum altitude achieved was 508.5 feet; the top speed almost 48 miles per hour. All of the records set by the Wrights in the past year were shattered.17

  Glenn Curtiss emerged as the great hero of Reims, the first recipient of the James Gordon Bennett Trophy for the fastest average speed achieved during a twenty-kilometer run over a closed course. He brought a new airplane to France, the Reims Racer, a short-span version of the Golden Flier powered by a 50-horsepower V-8 engine. He took off on the morning of Saturday, August 28, and flew two blistering laps of the course, turning in an average speed of 47.10 miles per hour. It was a new world record, and the best time of the meet. The fastest man alive as a result of a 137-mile per hour run across the sand flats of Ormond Beach, Florida, with his motorcycle in 1907, Curtiss was now officially the fastest man in the air as well.

  The news that Wilbur had filed suit in New York reached Reims at the very moment of Curtiss’s triumph. It was no surprise. The Wrights had given ample warning, and had discussed the situation with Courtlandt Field Bishop at some length when he visited with them just before their return from Europe that spring. Bishop, now the major stockholder in the Herring-Curtiss firm, took their comments very seriously.

  The Wrights made a persuasive case for patent infringement, pointing to Herring’s presence at Kitty Hawk in 1902, their repeated contacts with Curtiss and the members of the AEA since 1906, and the broad and complete nature of their patent coverage. “They … put things in a very bad light, both on moral and legal grounds,” Bishop remarked to Monroe Wheeler, the Hammondsport judge who was serving as president of the Herring-Curtiss Company.18

  Curtiss and Herring allayed Bishop’s concerns. Together at Reims, Curtiss and his principal backer assured reporters that the mid-wing ailerons of the Golden Flier and the Reims machine were not covered in the Wright patent. The matter was now in the hands of Judge John R. Hazel, of the Federal Circuit Court in Buffalo. Until such time as Judge Hazel either ruled in their favor or issued a restraining order against them, the Herring-Curtiss Company would remain in operation and Glenn Curtiss would continue to fly.19

  Orville and Katharine were in Berlin preparing for a series of demonstration flights to satisfy the requirements of two additional contracts when the news of the patent suit broke. “I have just read in the papers of the filing of suits against Curtiss & Co.,” Orville wrote to his brother on August 24. “I think it would be a good plan to give out an interview in which the announcement is made of suing all who have any connection with infringing machines.”20 Wilbur thought the matter over and filed an additional suit against Ralph Saulnier, a Blériot importer, in the Federal Circuit Court in New York on October 20.

  The first of the agreements that had brought Orville and Katharine to Germany was with Herr Scherl, publisher of the Berlin newspaper Lokal-Anzieger. Scherl’s representative, Captain Alfred Hilde-brandt, a German officer and aeronautical writer, had called on Wilbur not long after he arrived at Pau in January 1909, offering a substantial sum in exchange for a series of flights to be staged in Berlin later that year. The Wrights, anxious to pursue the contacts that they had made in Germany in 1907, accepted.21

  Some weeks later, Ca
ptain Richard von Kehler visited the Wrights at Centocelle. Kehler, whom Wilbur had met in 1907, was the managing director of the Studien Gesselschaft, the Society for Airship Studies which had sponsored the development of the Parseval dirigible.22

  The wealthy members of the Gesselschaft were interested in forming a German company to produce Wright aircraft under an arrangement similar to that concluded with Lazare Weiller and the CGNA. In exchange for the German patent rights, a sales monopoly in Germany, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Luxembourg, and the usual course of demonstration flights and pilot training, the new firm—to be known as Flugmaschine Wright Gesellschaft—would provide the Wrights with a cash payment of 200,000 marks, stock in the new firm, and a 10 percent royalty on every machine sold. It was precisely the sort of agreement that the Wrights had hoped to conclude in Germany. They accepted immediately.

  The Germans, well aware that they did not have a single pilot or airplane capable of competing at Reims, welcomed Orville and Katharine with great fanfare. The meet shaping up in France was very much on Orville’s mind as well—he came within a hairsbreadth of postponing the German flights and rushing to France as a last-minute entry. It required an urgent cable from Will to keep him in place. Orv wrote back to reassure his brother that he would not go to Reims, but added: “if I had gone … I think we would have taken everything.”23

  Orville took every opportunity to prove this during the course of the nineteen flights that he made from military parade grounds at Berlin and Potsdam between August 30 and October 4. He moved the family name back into the record books, recapturing the world marks for altitude, flight duration, and duration with a passenger.24