Chasing Icarus

by Gavin Mortimer

  Brookins, like Drexel, no longer flew. Hoxsey’s death had made him realize that Charles Hamilton was right when he’d said, “We’ll all be killed if we stay in this business.” As for news of other aviators, Brookins informed Grahame-White that Eugene Ely and Tod Shriver were dead, and Hamilton had suffered a nervous breakdown.

  The purpose of the lunch was to hear the men’s thoughts on the future of aviation, and the World’s reporter listened intently as the aviators chatted over their food, frequently pausing to smoke cigarettes “with the long drawn inhalation of the devotees.” The question that the newspaper wanted them to answer above all others was, would transatlantic air journeys happen? “I would like to make a bet with anyone that in twenty years’ time we will be flying across the Atlantic Ocean in fifteen hours,” said Grahame-White, taking a sip from his wineglass. “Fifteen hours?” replied Brookins in what the newspaper described as a doubtful tone. “Yes,” asserted Grahame-White, “and by that I mean also that it will be a regular service carrying passengers back and forth between London and New York. It will surely be done long before that time.” Brookins remained skeptical, and later, over dessert, when Grahame-White began talking about airplanes traveling “175 miles or thereabouts an hour,” Brookins “halted the flights of fancy with observations along strictly practical lines.” Further good-natured disagreement occurred when the reporter steered the discussion toward aviation’s role in any future war. Brookins considered the latest German Zeppelin dirigible a most “dreadful” weapon, but Grahame-White reckoned it would soon be rendered obsolete, adding that he was “so optimistic about the airplane in warfare that I fear my views do not agree with most people of today. In fact, I have made it a rule of late to avoid speaking about the uses of the airplane in warfare to avoid being laughed at. People don’t realize the importance of this branch of the military service. It is enough to say that the airplane’s field in military and naval work is unlimited.”

  “It’s incredible,” said the old man in a voice unscratched by the passage of time, “that here we are sending up sputniks to the moon, and yet the first airplane flight in Europe was as recent as 1906.” The writer agreed, and in an unobsequious tone pointed out that much of the startling progress was down to men like him, Claude Grahame-White, and the other brave pioneers. Who was left now? he asked, and Grahame-White’s memory traveled slowly back over the years. Not Armstrong Drexel, who had died a few months prior in March 1958, after a life abundant with achievement. A decorated war hero (the First World War, in which Grahame-White had flown bombers against German targets, and in which Roland Garros had distinguished himself as a fighter ace), Drexel had for many years been one of London’s most successful bankers. Walter Brookins had passed away not that long ago, too, in 1953, but the rest were long dead.

  Like Garros, Count Jacques de Lesseps had flown in the French air force during World War I, but unlike Garros, de Lesseps had survived, for a few years at least. In 1927 he’d vanished during a survey flight over the Gulf of St. Lawrence; his body was recovered some weeks later, so at least his wife—Grace McKenzie—and his two children had a body to mourn. René Simon and René Barrier had both died in flying accidents in the 1920s, but not Monsieur Le Blanc—dear old Alfred—who never did manage to get his hands on the International Aviation Cup, and who succumbed to illness in 1921. Glenn Curtiss had also died in his bed from complications following appendicitis surgery in 1930. The Wrights’ bêtenoir went to his grave with a reputation as America’s greatest aircraft manufacturer, having founded the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. He had been a pioneer of the seaplane, and his H-12 flying boat was used by the British during the war. Then, in 1919, Curtiss’s NC-4 flying boat became the first aircraft to successfully cross the Atlantic, in a voyage that included a stop in the Azores. Although Curtiss’s involvement in the aviation industry effectively ceased in the 1920s, his company merged with the Wrights’ to become the Curtiss-Wright Corporation in 1929. During World War II they produced, among others, the Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando transport plane and the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter.

  Tuberculosis had claimed Charles Hamilton in 1914, but in truth he’d been dead long before that, since the day he’d been admitted to the madhouse. And Hubert Latham, with whom Grahame-White had enjoyed such a splendid dinner at Sherry’s, had never flown again after Hoxsey’s death. Instead he had returned to his first love, big-game hunting. The odds were better. But in the summer of 1912, deep in the Congo, Latham was trampled to death by a buffalo.

  Latham’s legacy was the same as that of all the other aviators who had been killed in the nine short years since Orville and Wilbur Wright had proved it possible that man could fly: their courage had silenced the world’s skepticism and proved that the air was indeed conquerable—in an airplane. Perhaps it was tragically appropriate that as news of Latham’s death reached the United States, Melvin Vaniman embarked in the Akron on another attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airship. The dirigible had just crossed the New Jersey coastline when it exploded. Neither Vaniman nor any of his four crew members survived.

  Despite his vigorously stated belief in the efficacy of the airship in the days following the America debacle, Walter Wellman never again took to the skies. The rest of his days passed by uneventfully, though the happy occasions—such as the marriage of his daughter Rebecca to Fred Aubert— were balanced by spells of misery, such as his short prison term in 1926 for failure to pay a $250 debt. Wellman died of liver cancer in 1934, the same decade in which the world decided that dirigible aviation had no serious future.

  Two years after Wellman’s death, Alan Hawley died at age sixty-eight. His passion for balloon flight had cooled after his experiences in the Canadian wilderness, but in its place had grown an intense ardor for the airplane, following his visit to Belmont Park. Hawley was elected president of the Aero Club of America in 1913, and over the next six years he was at the forefront of the drive to incorporate aircraft into the U.S. military. As well as being one of the organizers of the Lafayette Escadrille—the squadron of American airmen who flew in the French air force during the First World War—Hawley also campaigned for the establishment of an aerial reserve corps of the National Guard.

  Right up until his death in 1936, Hawley remained good friends with Augustus Post, who, like his former pi lot, had shown no inclination to continue ballooning after the 1910 victory. Instead Post, once he’d got his divorce out of the way, wrote and lectured extensively on aeronautics, and for a while in the 1920s, he edited a journal called Aero Mechanics. In November 1949 his photograph appeared in the newspapers when he led a campaign for the resurrection of the International Balloon Race, ten years after its demise. The goatee was still there, though with a seam of gray, the eyes shone with vitality, and age hadn’t withered his turn of phrase. “There’s really no sensation in the world like that of floating between the earth and the heavens with the winds of the world,” he explained to a reporter, having enjoyed a brief flight in a free balloon as part of his campaign. “Some of my friends claim you can create the same feeling by partaking of four very dry martinis on an empty stomach— but I don’t believe it.” Post died three years later aged seventy-eight, and though the balloon race wasn’t reestablished in his lifetime, it has been held annually since 1983.

  Grahame-White died in August 1959, two days before his eightieth birthday, and a few weeks before the publication of his biography. His death went largely unreported around the world, most notably in Britain, where he had long since been forgotten. For years he had lived in Monte Carlo—enjoying the sun and the sea, and the casinos—and his involvement in aviation had ended shortly after the war when he sold the Hendon aerodrome to the British government for approximately $2 million. He’d never needed to work again, but he went into the real estate business with spectacular results.

  After his death Grahame-White’s vast collection of scrapbooks were donated to the Royal Air Force Museum, and among all the clippings and photographs w
as a column from the Chicago Daily Tribune, published two days after Ralph Johnstone’s death in November 1910. It wasn’t written as an epitaph for Johnstone, but it could have been, just as it could have been an epitaph for Grahame-White, Hoxsey, Moisant, Latham, Le Blanc, de Lesseps, and all the other pioneers who, in the early years of the twentieth century, set sail from earth to explore a new world.

  The love of excitement, of fame, of money; the desire to step softly around a sleeping danger, to place a hand on death and vault over it, to tiptoe over destruction and have a multitude watch the act; the ambition to go into the unknown, to test sensations which timid persons could never know—these were the incentives mixed with others governing quiet men of no spectacular accomplishments, seeking merely the perfection of a new science, the full outlines of a new discovery.

  Such men were on the five vessels of Fernando Magellan when they cast off from their moorings in the Guadalquivir on Aug. 10, 1519. Such men were on the solitary Victoria when that surviving and circumnavigating ship dropped anchor in Seville on Sept. 9, 1522.

  Such men were with Vasco da Gama when he sailed from Lisbon to find his way around the Cape of Good Hope and on the Malabar coast; such men were with John Cabot when he found the Newfoundland coast; were with Jacques Cartier when he sailed up the St. Lawrence; were with Drake when with the loot of Spanish ships in his hold he found the northern Pacific coast and took the western route home.

  Such a crowd as that which saw Johnstone’s fall gathered along the banks of the Guadalquivir on Aug. 10, 1519, when Magellan’s ships got under way, a wonder-stricken crowd, prepared for new astonishments, gaping wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the men who were to feel their way through the unknown into new worlds. Such crowds in Cadiz, Seville, Lisbon, saw the straggling return of ships with strange treasures and wonderful narratives.

  The parallel should not be forced, but one finds the characteristics of an earlier age of daring and discovery reproduced in the present one, the same desires and ambitions controlling with results not dissimilar. The martyrdom of the victims may not be conscious and thinking, but the failure which sends one aerial navigator to his death may point to an undiscovered defect in his mechanism, a flaw at which inventiveness has hesitated until stimulated.

  The dead, whatever may have been the incentives which sent them into danger, are giving themselves to the cause which seeks ultimate control of a new highway.

  * A fortnight after the crash Wilbur Wright told reporters Johnstone’s death was caused by a “weak wing,” and in the opinion of some historians, this accident, so soon after Brookins’s crash at Belmont Park, confirmed that “high noon had come and gone in the careers of the Wright brothers,” partly because they channeled so much of their energy into lawsuits, they neglected the developmental side of their business. They dissolved their exhibition team in 1911, and the following year Wilbur died of typhoid, aged forty-five. Orville died in 1948, aged seventy-six.

  † In September 1911 Johnstone’s widow began flying lessons, telling newspapers that her husband had left little money and she needed to “clothe, feed and educate” her son, and she intended to do so by becoming one of the world’s first female aviators. However, this ambitious idea came to naught. In 1920 Ralph junior was found shot dead in Florida; local police said it was suicide, but after a four-year campaign by Mrs. Johnstone, a man was convicted of her son’s murder.

  * Arch Hoxsey’s death was later attributed to heart failure, and it was assumed he was dead by the time his airplane hit the ground. His mother, who had received $50 a month from her son, was given an annuity by the Wrights.

  * Chase married into a wealthy British family in 1914, swapping the stage for the home and raising three children. She died in England in 1962 aged seventy-six.

  † Not until January 1914 did the Wrights finally win their patent suit against all other aircraft manufacturers. However, companies such as Glenn Curtiss’s exploited several legal loopholes without prosecution, and in 1917 (by which time Orville Wright had sold his company), when the USA entered World War I, the American aviation industry finally forgot its differences and began to work together.

  * Sears never married but devoted her life to sporting attainments, winning nearly 250 trophies. As a tennis player she reached the third round of the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1923, and in 1928 she became the first women’s squash champion. She died in 1968 aged eighty-seven.

  † Grahame-White won his appeal on the grounds that the original rules had stated that every competitor must have flown for one continuous hour prior to entering, which neither Moisant nor de Lesseps had achieved. He collected the check for $10,000 (plus $334 interest) from President Taft at a dinner of the Aero Club of America in January 1912.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Researching a book from an era with no living eyewitnesses is lonely. With no friendly folk happy to talk over a cup of tea and a slice of cake, my only companions are my fellow researchers, silent and serious, in archives and libraries around the world. Nonetheless, the time I spent in the National Air and Space Museum Archives in Suitland, Maryland, was enlivened by the lunchtime conversations with all the staff, whom I found to be not only convivial, but courteous and knowledgeable. Likewise, the staff at the RAF Museum in Hendon, London, went out of their way to be of assistance. My heartfelt thanks to these two venerable institutions.

  My research was also aided by the diligence of the staff at the New York Public Library, the Colindale Newspaper Library, the British Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Kristin Ecuba warrants special praise for translating several documents from German into English with such rapidity and skill, and my agent, Gail Fortune, deserves a hearty pat on the back for her conviction and sound advice.

  Lastly I thank my publisher, George Gibson, and my editor, Michele Lee Amundsen, who with their faith and foresight allowed this book to take wing.

  Gavin Mortimer

  Montpellier, August 2008

  NOTES

  Prologue: The Biggest Events Are Yet to Come

  “mere zephyr of breeze that floated”: Ogden (UT) Standard, January 10, 1910.

  “An understanding of what holds an airplane”: Chicago Daily Tribune, September 26, 1910.

  THE BIGGEST EVENTS ARE YET TO COME: Weekly Sentinel, January 19, 1910.

  “dissipated any doubt that the fragile”: Ogden (UT) Standard, January 10, 1910.

  “We can’t do anything with that Frenchman”: Indianapolis Star, January 11, 1910.

  “there was a sudden shout and out of the gulley”: Ibid.

  “Paulhan was cheered madly”: Boston Daily Globe, January 11, 1910.

  COMPANY READY DISCUSS EXHIBITION BUSINESS SERIOUSLY: “Ladies & Gentlemen, the Aeroplane,” Air & Space, May 1, 2008.

  “That the bidding will be high”: Oakland Tribune, January 21, 1910.

  “They are ennui”: Weekly Sentinel, January 19, 1910.

  Chapter One: It’s Europe or Bust

  “Perhaps we’ll make a trial flight first”: Fort Wayne Daily News, October 15, 1910.

  “Not much you won’t!”: Ibid.

  “The crowd, constantly augmented in numbers”: Ibid.

  “That there is in it some risk to life is apparent”: Walter Wellman, The Aerial Age: A Thousand Miles by Airship over the Atlantic Ocean (Keller, 1911), 272.

  “Lightning may strike the ship and fire the hydrogen”: Ibid., 273.

  “Our lifeboat is hung with”: Ibid., 274.

  “now let those landlubbers who are afraid”: Murray Simon’s log, quoted in Well-man, Aerial Age.

  “greatest all-round aviator in the world”: New York Herald, September 15, 1910.

  “ascetic, gaunt American with watchful, hawklike eyes”: Graham Wallace, Claude Grahame-White (Putnam, 1960), 32.

  “It’s a flying machine, isn’t it?”: Ibid., 41.

  “I’ve no time to waste on duffers”: Obituary of Pauline Chase, Daily Mail (London), January 5, 1962.
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  “rather massive but handsome”: Penny Illustrated Paper, November 26, 1910.

  “gave in and took-off in a foul mood”: Wallace, Claude Grahame-White, 81.

  “I am confident of being able”: Ibid., 96.

  “is possessed of a fine athletic figure”: Wallace, Claude Grahame-White, 98.

  “If you want your lady-loves’ hearts”: Ibid., 102.

  “the society girl who plays polo”: Chicago Daily Tribune, September 9, 1910.

  “had to play tennis in the broiling sun”: Ibid.

  “It was perfectly heavenly!”: Wallace, Claude Grahame-White, 107.

  FROM BOSTON FRIENDS, IN ADMIRATION: Ibid., 107.

  “If I should say what I really think”: New York Sun, October 17, 1910.

  “I hate to make a prediction”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 16, 1910.

  “The credit is due to the biplane”: Globe-Democrat, October 16, 1910.

  “It may be that the Wrights have succeeded”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 16, 1910.

  “He is quite the most ‘showy’ in his personality”: Ibid.

  “Stardust Twins”: New York Sun, October 28, 1910.

  “It is a beastly work of art”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 15, 1910.

  “In the midst of the tumult”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 16, 1910.

  “The airplane is doing great things”: Globe-Democrat, October 16, 1910.

  Chapter Two: Let’s Stick by the Ship

  “All did nobly”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 16, 1910.

  “ran about shouting and yelling”: Wellman, Aerial Age, 297.

  “out of the darkness and mist”: Ibid., 299.

  “I don’t suppose they had heard about us”: Ibid., 346.