The moving-picture people couldn’t have chosen a better day to visit Belmont Park. It was, in the opinion of the New York Herald, the greatest flying exhibition the world had ever known. It started with Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone performing a selection of their aerial stunts for the masses, including Johnstone’s heart-stopping loop-the-loop one thousand feet from the ground, during which, as he momentarily hung upside down, he could hear “the struts straining and . . . the singing of the winds through the wires shrilling higher in key.” Then came the extraordinary sight of “ten airplanes in simultaneous flight” competing in the day’s first discipline, the Hourly Distance contests. Up went the Frenchman Emile Aubrun, then Hubert Latham in his Antoinette monoplane; Armstrong Drexel slipped on his flying helmet, shook hands with his brother, and shot off in his Blériot. The debonair Englishman Grahame-White, reported the World, “with a bow and a smile, cut off an animated conversation with Miss Eleonora Sears, that dashing young sportswoman, and took to the air in his Farman biplane.” Then out of the hangar came the machines of Jacques de Lesseps; Eugene Ely and John McCurdy of the Curtiss team; and finally Walter Brookins, not in the Wright racer, but in another new model that had been brought to New York from Dayton by Orville Wright. No flier remained aloft for the full hour but Drexel circled the two-and-a-half-kilometer course twenty-seven times in fifty-four minutes, Aubrun twenty-six times, Johnstone twenty-one, and Hoxsey and Grahame-White finished even on eighteen laps.
That was the end of the day’s flying for Grahame-White, who returned his borrowed machine to Clifford Harmon. Grahame-White had no interest in the next event, the hourly altitude contest; that wasn’t his forte. The Farman biplane* wasn’t the right airplane in which to go climbing to the heavens, and anyway Grahame-White preferred distance to height. He alone had already qualified for Thursday’s Statue of Liberty race, and with the International Aviation Cup two days later, he was loath to run any further risks similar to the one he had taken on Sunday. John Moisant, meanwhile, was grounded after the wreck of his machines, and his hopes were pinned on the Lovelace-Thompson Company, which had taken charge of his Blériot with a promise to have it repaired by Wednesday.
Walter Brookins took off and made a couple of slow laps, increasing his height as he began to deviate from the course. He was flying a Baby Wright, a machine similar in design and dimensions to the Baby Grand—the plane introduced to the press by Wilbur Wright on Saturday—although the Baby Wright had inferior power.
The spectators in the grandstand began moving down to the front lawns to get a better view as Brookins started to climb. They craned their necks, the men clamping a hand on their straw boaters and looking over their starched collars, the women using their programs to shield the sun from their eyes as he rose higher, leaving behind Emile Aubrun and James Radley, one of the British fliers, who had started out on the second Hourly Distance competition. That event had suddenly become humdrum, compared to the sight of Walter Brookins’s small Wright biplane disappearing into the sky. Then someone gave a shout and pointed to the southeast. Look, over there, isn’t that another machine? For several minutes the identity of the mysterious biplane was unknown. Press and public searched the hangars with their field glasses to see who was missing. “It was Count de Lesseps,” wrote the correspondent from the New York Sun, “who to get room to circle wide in and also to give Brookins some air acres of his own for maneuvering had gone off toward Meadow Brook and Hempstead to take his running jump at the sky.”
Higher and higher the two aircraft climbed, sometimes vanishing momentarily behind the few cotton clouds in the warm blue sky, watched all the while by ten thousand astonished people, but not by Viola Justin, the society correspondent for New York’s Evening Mail. This was her first visit to the aviation show, though she had watched many a horse race at Belmont Park, and as she observed the wealthy onlookers standing on the tips of their patent leather shoes, a thought struck her. How best to describe it? She mused in print, “The Four Hundred had at last discovered a new sensation and a new expression . . . a human thrilled look of intense, absorbing interest . . . faces that have become so hardened from years of immobility that they look like plaster casts relaxed and wrinkled.” While New York’s high society scanned the sky, Justin stood on the lawn scanning them with their “straining lines of necks and double chins . . . faces so foreshortened and out of perspective that only the tips of teeth were visible to those directly under the boxes.” It was, she told her readers, “a strange new angle of society.” The “airplane stare” had been born. But even Miss Justin lifted her mordant eyes when the hordes began to puff and blow and point to the heavens. Brookins and de Lesseps, their aircraft resembling what the Sun called “elongated postage stamps,” appeared to be heading directly toward each other thousands of feet above the ground. Men gave a strangled cry and women’s hands went to their mouths as it seemed the inevitable was sure to occur. The correspondent from the World wasn’t fooled, however; he knew that “the crowd watched fascinated and motionless for the meeting which might—which might, you know—mean a collision. And then the two specks merged until the specks were patterned one upon the other and had become just one speck. They separated in a moment and for minutes afterwards the discussions about the ‘collision’ took eyes off the specks which necessitated a refocusing of the eyes.”
Now the planes were circling each other with de Lesseps’s machine above the square biplane of Brookins. How close do you think they are to one another? children asked their fathers with a mix of fear and excitement. The airplanes dived and rose and drifted for what seemed like hours to the crowd. Necks began to stiffen and heads began to throb as spectators concentrated on the drama high above their heads.
Over at hangar row Orville Wright was standing with his brother and their sister, Katharine, watching the show. “Well, Brooky seems to have caught him,” said Orville to Wilbur, fully aware that the two machines were hundreds of feet apart. Nearby the correspondent from the New York Herald laughed at a rare Orville quip, then resumed his stare. Brookins suddenly broke off and began to dive. The onlookers applauded the aviator’s audacity, but the Wrights knew at once that something had gone wrong. The New York Herald reporter saw that “the softly moving lips of Wilbur Wright were framing a silent prayer for the boy who was taking such desperate chances.”
Walter Brookins’s engine had cut out without a warning, and now he sat at the controls—without a seat belt—gliding back down to earth in wide spirals. At two thousand feet he knew the wind wasn’t going to take him close to Belmont Park, so he singled out some fields two miles to the north as the best chance for a safe landing.
Brookins had previously suffered engine failure thousands of feet up in the air. During an air show in Indianapolis the previous June, he had reached forty-two hundred feet when he heard a tearing noise from the engine behind him and the motor died. Unable to turn around to investigate the cause of the sound, Brookins started to drop out of the sky. At least he had broken the world’s altitude record, he told reporters later, “and if my luck held, I’d break the gliding record, too. If it didn’t, I’d probably break my neck.”
He had landed without trouble on that occasion, and now as he glimpsed Belmont Park away to his left, the twenty-two-year-old calmly slid out of the sky. Passengers waiting for a train at the station one stop before Belmont Park jumped down onto the line and tracked the machine’s descent. The Wright brothers commandeered an automobile and told the driver to “follow that airplane.”
They found Brookins in a field. The biplane had its nose in the mud, like a pig with its snout in a trough, but the aviator was unharmed. Dressed in a two-piece, green tweed suit and brown boots, he might have passed for one of the bystanders who had reached the downed machine from the railroad station, were it not for the patina of black grease on his young face.
Upon landing, Count de Lesseps unfastened the small aneroid barometer from his wrist and handed it to an officer from the Signal Corps.
Its reading of 5,615 feet was impressive, provided it was corroborated by the official barograph now being removed from the Frenchman’s plane. A corpsman passed both instruments to an official, who handed them to the judges’ box. The glass lid on the barograph was lifted and a strip of paper peeled from the cylinder on which was a frenetic scribble of red lines, each one indicating approximately 165 feet in height. It took the official several minutes to count and recount the lines, but at the end he was satisfied that Count de Lesseps had climbed to 5,615 feet.
Brookins reappeared with the Wrights a little later, and his barograph indicated that he’d reached 4,882 feet, way inferior to his personal best of 6,175 feet, established at Atlantic City three months earlier.
At four o’clock Peter Prunty roared through his megaphone that it was time for the second hourly altitude contest, but only Armstrong Drexel signaled his desire to try to outdo de Lesseps. Having watched the earlier aerial duel as he lunched from a picnic hamper on the grass in front of his hangar, Drexel now fancied going up in the air. Dressed in black oilskins, and with his queer-looking helmet, he rose at a rapid rate until once more the spectators’ heads and necks began to feel the strain. Then the black dot to the northeast became slowly bigger as he descended. He had none of the problems that had afflicted Brookins; it appeared to the press and the public that Drexel had climbed and dropped in thirty-two effortless minutes. His brother outsprinted the French mechanics in a race across the grass to congratulate Drexel on what Peter Prunty told the crowd (subject to official confirmation) was an altitude of 7,105 feet, a height only ever bettered by two men.* Anthony Drexel reached the machine, expecting his brother to jump into his arms in triumph, but Armstrong remained in his seat, literally frozen to it. Eventually, said the World, Drexel was assisted down by his brother and mechanics, and he “plodded unsteadily over the field to his hangar. His face was marked with oil that had flowed from his motor. His teeth were chattering.” Someone suggested a swig of brandy, but Armstrong shook his head, saying he wanted only water. He gulped down two large goblets while a lady’s fur coat was wrapped around his shoulders and reporters gathered around for a quote from the normally garrulous aviator. Confirmation came through the megaphone that Armstrong Drexel had indeed reached a height of 7,105 feet.
Prunty built to a crescendo as he screamed into his megaphone. Or put it another way, folks, that’s “more than a mile and a third up in the air.” To think, aviation fans told each other, that this time last year the altitude record had been a puny 508 feet.
The house saluted a new American altitude record, but the millionaire flier’s arms were too stiff to acknowledge the applause. How cold was it up there? he was asked. “It was beastly cold,” he replied. “Hell was high.”
One more event was scheduled for Monday—the grand speed contest. But after the drama of the altitude competitions, the organizers thought it best to first lay on a comic interlude for the crowd, the equivalent of the aviation clown entering the big top in his spluttering automobile to hoots of laughter. Roland Garros and his mechanics wheeled his Demoiselle from its hangar and the Frenchman jumped up onto what the correspondent from the New York Sun likened to a good-size umbrella. The propeller was engaged, and a ripple of giggles swept the grandstand as the engine started up with a pfut, pfut. He’s not really going to go up in that, is he? people asked one another as Garros began to hop across the grass. “When she first leaves the ground one is minded of a rubber ball,” wrote the Sun. “She bounces back to brush the grass blades for just a moment and then she is off for good.” But once up in the air Garros picked up speed, and he was soon zipping around the course, taking the corners with far more ease than the big biplanes, then ripping along the homestretch at a pace that startled the spectators. He returned to earth after a few minutes, his machine wreathed in its exhaust fumes. “No policeman in Central Park would stand for the way a Demoiselle smokes for a minute,” wrote the Sun, as Garros touched down with a bump and a bounce, waving to the crowd, who stood and cheered and roared with laughter.
For the final event of the day, the crowd pushed and shoved for the best view of the three machines that were being shouldered one by one across the wide infield from the hangars to the sandy racetrack in front of the grandstand. Peter Prunty announced the names of the three entrants in a speed race open only for biplanes: John McCurdy and James Mars in their Curtiss machines, and the little-known American John Frisbie in an invention of his own. Then Prunty explained the rules of the contest: the race would be over ten laps of the two-and-a-half-kilometer inner course, but each airplane was obliged to cover the twenty-five kilometers in under forty minutes or their time would be annulled. The three machines would take off one after another, from a standing position at the starting post used in horse races. At a shot from the timekeeper’s pistol the engine would be engaged while mechanics held the machine in place; a second shot fired from the timekeeper’s pistol sixty seconds later would be the signal for the plane to start moving. The second machine would start to run its engine only when the first was safely in the air, and likewise the third craft.
Hundreds of spectators pressed against the white rail in front of the grandstand as John McCurdy’s aircraft was placed on the sandy track, its nose just nudging the white canvas strip that was the starting line. McCurdy settled back into the seat and bent down to hear a final set of instructions from Glenn Curtiss as the first pistol shot rang out. A mechanic spun the propeller but the engine didn’t catch. There was a groan from the crowd. Someone yelled out words of encouragement. The mechanic tried again, and this time the engine started. McCurdy shouted something to Curtiss, who fumbled around in the pockets of his jacket and handed the flier his goggles. The timekeeper was staring intently at his watch, shouting down the seconds as the machine coughed out black smoke. The mechanics began to edge themselves into positions from where they could safely let go of the machine. Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . bang! The reporter from the New York Sun was up out of his seat as McCurdy pushed down the throttle and the “plane was dancing right down the middle of the track as clean away as a thoroughbred and then up, to a path it liked better.” Frisbie was up next, and then Mars, who rose into the air just as McCurdy negotiated dead man’s turn for the first time and tore down the home straight. The timekeeper told Peter Prunty the time for McCurdy’s opening lap—two minutes and 141.5 seconds. The crowd roared its approval, and they did so with even more gusto when the same aviator dipped under two minutes on his second lap.
Frisbie wasn’t as quick but he seemed to be picking up speed as he scooted down the back straight toward the western end of the field, then past the high fence along which the contentious canvas screens had been erected. A few of them had been dismantled earlier in the day on the orders of Allan Ryan, but not all. As Frisbie passed the fence, a gust of wind rushed through “and sent the airplane crashing to the grass on its beam ends, smashing a wing and rolling Frisbie along the sod for yards.” The aviator staggered to his feet mouthing obscenities at the fence and kicking great lumps out of the grass. “He’s up!” Prunty cheerfully informed the crowd, whose eyes reverted to the two remaining contestants, both of whom took note of Frisbie’s fate and increased their height.
The crowd reluctantly began to take their leave of Belmont Park once McCurdy had beaten Mars to win the speed race. Ten laps, twenty-five kilometers, in nineteen minutes—the feat sent the ten thousand spectators home in high spirits. One of them, Mrs. Florence Langworthy Richmond, wrote next day to a friend in Warren, Pennsylvania, describing her emotions at what she’d witnessed: “Aviation is so contrary to all our hitherto conceived ideas of the boundaries of man’s power and endeavors. I understand the sensations of the Indians when they first saw steamboats . . . I cannot begin to tell you of the fascination which these new air creatures have for us poor earth-bound things . . . I felt that we were looking upon the dawn of a new era of which I could not live to see the full light. The airplanes were
apparently perfectly guided and controlled; they rose, they dipped, they held a straight course, they turned with no visible effort. They stand for much done, but they are only pioneer craft after all.”
Those durable enthusiasts who dallied over their picnic hampers under a saffron sky had the unexpected pleasure of seeing Charles Hamilton try out his formidable Hamilton racer, with its 110-horse power engine. To the reporter from the Evening Sun still filing his copy in the press stand, the airplane “roared around the course twice like an eighteen hour train to Chicago hitting a wagonload of loose rails at 2 o’clock in the morning.” Pleased with her? he asked Hamilton later. Not too bad, replied the flier, “but I didn’t dare let her out.” That would happen only on the day of the International Aviation Cup race.
As Hamilton limped toward his automobile, he passed one of the Wrights’ hangars, its canvas walls illuminated by the lanterns that were still burning inside. All the other aviators had retired for the night; Claude Grahame-White was in the front row of the audience watching Pauline Chase in Our Miss Gibbs, John Moisant was dining with his brother, Alfred, in the Hotel Astor, and in the private banquet room of the Knickerbocker Hotel, Hubert Latham, Alfred Le Blanc, and two balloonists, Jacques Faure and Walther de Mumm, were enjoying the hospitality of James Regan, the hotel’s proprietor, at an extravagant party to celebrate his establishment’s fourth birthday. But Orville and Wilbur planned to burn the midnight oil this evening, tuning up their Baby Grand racer. On Tuesday, Orville intended to stun Belmont Park, and the world, with the first public demonstration of his new machine.
Chasing Icarus Page 18
