That the Wrights’ achievements could exist in such uncertainty is not surprising; the news media of the early 1900s were fragmented and often contradictory. Rumor and falsehood often masqueraded as fact; two opposing versions of the same story appearing in different newspapers in the same city would arouse no curiosity from readers. Thus while the paucity of hard evidence of the Wrights’ flying would arouse skepticism in some, a wealth of anecdotal evidence would persuade others, particularly those with some knowledge of aviation. The Aero Club of America, for example, a group of wealthy and influential balloon enthusiasts who had established their organization as an offshoot of the Auto Club, attested to the Wrights’ claims.
Sufficient was the word of mouth about the brothers from Dayton that in May 1906, Glenn Curtiss wrote to the Wrights in an attempt to persuade them to mount a Curtiss motor on the Flyer. As he was scheduled to be in Columbus for a balloon exhibition with Baldwin, he offered to travel to Dayton to discuss the matter. Although the light and powerful Curtiss motor would make the Flyer more attractive to the military, the brothers were not about to deal with outsiders. They declined.
In early September 1906, Curtiss and Baldwin returned to Ohio for another balloon exhibition, this time at the Dayton Fair. The Wrights were curious about Baldwin and the four met at the fairgrounds. Wilbur and Orville even helped Baldwin retrieve his airship when a wind blew it from its mooring. The Wrights and Curtiss were each impressed with the intelligence and acumen of the other. Wilbur and Orville invited Curtiss to visit their shop. What followed was the most important and controversial meeting in early aviation history.
Not in dispute was that Wilbur and Orville showed Curtiss photographs of their machine in flight—the same photographs that had been offered to the British and the French—but not an actual airplane. The three also had a long and amicable discussion in which they exchanged a good bit of expertise. Curtiss was justly proud of his lightweight motors and the Wrights of their Flyer. But was Curtiss pumping the brothers for technical information that he could then use to create his own airplane? Had he even considered trying his hand at fixed-wing flight? Or did the discussion never go beyond means of propulsion? None of those questions has ever been definitively answered and in the dispute that followed the fault line runs directly through whichever interpretation of that meeting one ascribes.
On September 22, Curtiss wrote to the Wrights from Hammondsport, noting that he had achieved efficiencies by cutting away a bit of the inner surfaces of propellers “so as to reduce the resistance and allow it to speed up.” Wright advocates claim this suggestion was gleaned from the Wrights, although it would appear from the wording that Curtiss was experimenting on his own. They also cite this letter as proof of Curtiss’s nefarious intent, evidence that he was contemplating a move to fixed-wing aircraft, although, again, nothing in the letter gives any such indication. What is more, Curtiss supporters assert that had his intention been to steal the Wrights’ ideas, he certainly wouldn’t have rushed to inform them of it. And Curtiss also wrote, “Mr. Baldwin spoke of you yesterday and mentioned that he meant to write you and thank you for interest and services at his first opportunity. Expect that he will be pretty busy, however, for a few weeks yet.” And Curtiss closed, “Hoping to hear from you at your convenience.”1
It would seem that the most that can be inferred from this letter is that the Wrights and Curtiss discussed propeller design, which no one has questioned, and that Curtiss wanted to keep the channel of communication open. He viewed the Wrights at that point as potential customers and so his tone was polite and as warm as possible for men who had known one another only briefly. The claim that Curtiss was announcing a theft of ideas, in effect declaring war, seems absurd.
But, as future events would bear out, Curtiss must have walked away from that meeting with something. That over the next two years he would simply conjure up the designs that were to make him one of the world’s preeminent figures in aviation without any impetus from what he saw and heard in Dayton seems equally absurd.
The difficulty here has been the propensity of aviation historians to extrapolate from the later feud and assume an equally adversarial relationship in 1906. Far more likely, what took place in the wake of the Dayton meeting was grounded in the same clash of philosophies that manifested itself in the patent wars. The Wrights were convinced they owned lateral stability and that anyone who developed any system based on the notion of redirecting airflow in opposite directions on either side of the aircraft—“altering lateral margins”—had stolen from them. Curtiss believed, as did most others at the time, that fundamental ideas, even great scientific insights, were public domain and that only mechanical devices or specific applications were proprietary. Curtiss doubtless learned of the fundamentals of lateral control from the Wrights, perhaps even the details of wing warping, but believed that he had every right to create a system that was competitive—or superior—even though based on the same abstract principles. Unlike some of the other great pioneers, Curtiss never employed wing warping, never even experimented with it. Thus both Curtiss and the Wrights could be equally convinced of their own rectitude and, at least to this point, no deceit or malfeasance need be assumed.
Baldwin remained above the fray, convinced at least for the moment that the future of aviation lay in balloons. For his shortsightedness, Cap’t Tom was rewarded when the War Department bought a dirigible for the U.S. Army Signal Corps for $10,000.
Baldwin’s belief in dirigibles was a mixture of the fanciful and the prescient. “It is no idle dream to prophesy that in future years people will have their airships, just as they have had their bicycles and automobiles, for a period of practical development is at hand when the construction of airships will be so simplified that the cost will be greatly lessened. I have a son twelve years of age, and I believe he will live to see the day of airships under perfect control, floating over the cities. What a revolution all this would make in industrial projects, and what a revolution it would make in our roads—no one can obtain title deeds in the blue sky or right of way to the milky way, it will be free alike to the poor man, as well as to the wealthy autocrat, a universal byway of communication between the countries of the whole world.” Although he may have had the vehicle wrong, his view of the future was correct. “I am led to believe that within the next quarter of a century great things will be achieved in the line of aerial navigation, and that we shall have not only airships for rich men’s pleasure, but that they will also be utilized as a means of transport for both passengers and goods, utilizing a right of way in the sky and the ‘high seas’ of the infinite space.”2
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* Toulmin had been correct: The Wrights had asked that references to motorized flight be reinserted and the examiner ordered them removed.
The First Brazilian Aloft
Aviation had become the rage in France, and any number of young engineers and mechanics built gliders and even tried motorized devices, but it was to fall to Alberto Santos-Dumont to again capture the imagination of Europe. On October 24, 1906, five years after his Eiffel Tower triumph, before an adoring crowd of socialites and reporters, he persuaded an awkward, lumbering aircraft called 14-bis to rise three meters off the ground and remain in the air for sixty meters. (Like Langley, Santos-Dumont numbered his efforts. His first twelve were balloons, as was fourteen. Number thirteen was his first heavier-than-air machine and it didn’t leave the ground.) The ungainly apparatus, which either he or the newspapers giddily dubbed “Bird of Prey,” was a glorified box kite with an engine thrown on, but Santos-Dumont was nonetheless hailed as the first man to achieve heavier-than-air flight.*1 He even won a $10,000 prize for doing so. Three weeks later, he once more dazzled onlookers by flying his contraption two hundred meters across the Bois de Boulogne, this time adding a rudder that he maneuvered with his shoulder.
French pride soared and deep satisfaction permeated the war ministry, where they saw themselves as not only saving almost one million
francs but also as showing faith in an adopted countryman over a pair of arrogant Americans.
Unlike the Wrights’ Kitty Hawk flights, Santos-Dumont and his “perfected airplane” were reported on in virtually every newspaper in America. Octave Chanute used these accounts to renew his urging that the Wrights go public. He wrote to Wilbur, “I fear he is now very nearly where you were in 1904.” Unlike his correspondent, however, Wilbur knew precisely what Santos-Dumont had and hadn’t done. “From our knowledge of the subject, we estimate that it is possible to jump about 250 ft. with a machine that has not made the first steps toward controllability and which is quite unable to maintain the motive force necessary for flight.” Wilbur scoffed at the initial report of a one-kilometer flight. He told Chanute that from what he and Orville had read of 14-bis, “We predict that his flight covered less than 1/10 of a kilometer,” an estimate that turned out to be accurate. But Wilbur was less accurate about the future. “When someone goes over three hundred feet and lands safely in a wind of seven or eight miles [per hour] it will be important for us to do something. So far we see no indication that it will be done for several years yet.”
In addition, what Wilbur failed to appreciate was that even if Santos-Dumont’s aircraft was a technological dead end and might not compare to the Wrights’ vastly superior design, its very presence provoked a threat to the brothers’ already questionable strategy of playing a pat hand. Santos-Dumont’s success was certain to further inspire other designers and with sufficient knowledge of aerodynamics now available, competing machines that could compare might be completed quite a bit sooner than the Wrights’ estimates. In fact, when he decided to move from balloon technology to fixed-wing, Santos-Dumont had consulted with a talented young French engineer named Gabriel Voisin. After working for a few months with Santos-Dumont in 1905, Voisin continued to explore the technology on his own, eventually teaming up with another engineer, Louis Blériot. The two formed an aviation company but split up after Santos-Dumont’s flight in 14-bis and Voisin joined his brother Charles. Blériot continued to experiment independently.
Fixed-wing aviation was suddenly big news in America as well, but Wilbur and Orville, rather than dominating the headlines—which they could have done with ease and thereby made sales a good deal simpler—chose to remain shadowy figures. The general situation was summed up in an article that ran in The New York Herald on November 24, 1906. “The mystery of the Wright brothers and their doings has been considerably increased by the interviews this week, which have been widely quoted all over the country. ‘We must suspend judgment on the Ohio inventors till we actually know more of their doings,’ said a member of the Aero Club of Great Britain. ‘Some people discount the doings of the Wrights, others swear by them, but no one seems able to prove anything on their behalf.’ ” In a greater irony, the Bureau of Ordnance and Fortification was reported the following week to have contacted the Wright brothers “with great interest” because the army believed their “aeroplane experiments were on the verge of success.” In fact, newspaper reports almost always mentioned the Wrights in a way that virtually begged for the brothers to provide some verification of the rumors of their success. The nation was eager to make them heroes. But Wilbur and Orville would not be moved. They had decided on their strategy, and that, as far as they were concerned, was that.
Others, however, were eager to seize the opportunity. Five days after the Herald article appeared, the Wrights were visited by Ulysses Eddy, a stringer for Charles Ranlett Flint, a venture capitalist who had negotiated so many mergers and acquisitions that he was later called “the Father of Trusts.”*2 Eddy arranged a meeting in New York with Flint & Company and on December 17, three years to the day after the first Kitty Hawk flights, Orville went east. The Wrights had still not sold a single Flyer and when Orville returned to Dayton, he told Wilbur that they should hear Flint out.
The Wrights were, as always, deeply distrustful of anyone proposing to become their partner, but Charles Flint was equally leery of engaging in business with two men who refused to demonstrate their product. Flint wrote to Octave Chanute, whom he had met professionally, and asked for a character reference. Chanute, whom the Wrights had begun to view with suspicion, wrote back, “From somewhat intimate acquaintance, I can say that in addition to their great mechanical abilities I have ever found the Wright brothers trustworthy. They tell the exact truth and are conscientious, so that I credit fully any statement which they make.” On the strength of Chanute’s words, Flint decided to move forward. He sent a senior member of the firm to Dayton to make a deal.
Negotiations went on for almost four months. The Flint Company made a number of proposals to represent the Wrights in Europe; United States representation was never discussed. First, they offered to buy the rights, which the brothers refused, and then tried to find an agency and royalty arrangement that would satisfy both sides. Even if a formula were found, sales would not come easily. Flint’s European agent, Hart Berg, requested one or both brothers sail to the Continent to establish subsidiary companies and help impress potential customers. Wilbur asked to stay home and work on improvements to the Flyer but Orville insisted that his older brother was more fit for the task. So in May 1907, Wilbur crossed the Atlantic.
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*1 He was initially reported to have flown a one-kilometer loop at ten meters, but the report turned out to be substantially inflated.
*2 Flint’s greatest coup would come in 1911, when he merged three data processing companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which would later become International Business Machines, or IBM. In his last years, however, Flint became tabloid fodder. In 1927, when he was seventy-seven years old, he married a woman in her mid-thirties. He declared before departing for his honeymoon that “greed was the impelling force that made millionaires go on after more money. Ambition and thirst for power have a part but greed and greed alone is the reason for a man wanting to swell his ward.” After his return, his behavior became erratic and at one point, he disappeared for twenty-four hours, wandering about in bathrobe and slippers. At his death in 1934, Flint’s fortune was estimated at between $100 million and $200 million, roughly $3 billion in current value.
Langley’s Legacy
Samuel Langley’s health deteriorated after his failures on the Potomac and in two years he was dead. The aerodrome had gone from being a scientific marvel to epitomizing the crackpot invention. One of the few serious members of the scientific community who did not lose faith in Langley was Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell had his own theories of flight, which, like Langley’s, saw propulsion as the key. Obviously, the heavier the craft the more robust the power source required, so Bell’s formula revolved around massive kites constructed of thousands of small “tetrahedral cells.” Bell was fascinated by these three-dimensional pyramids, thought them one of nature’s miracles. The tetrahedron was particularly suited to flight as the weight-to-strength ratio was such that massive airfoils could be constructed with a minimum of bracing and thus create maximal lift per pound. In 1903, three months before Langley’s aerodrome made its first dive into the Potomac, Bell published an article in National Geographic, “Tetrahederal Principle in Kite Structure,” in which he wrote, “Of course the use of a tetrahedral cell is not limited to the construction of a framework for kites and flying machines. It is applicable to any kind of structure whatever in which it is desirable to combine the qualities of strength and lightness. Just as we can build houses of all kinds out of bricks, so we can build structures of all sorts out of tetrahedral frames.”1
Also like Langley, Bell thought aerodynamics the tail to propulsion’s dog. Bell conducted a number of experiments with tetrahedral kites but all were unmanned and unpowered.
Late in 1906, Bell decided to assemble his own team of talented young men to attack the flying problem. He was convinced flight could be achieved by merging Langley’s notions of propulsion with his tetrahedral kite.
His first re
cruit came from an unlikely source. In February 1907, he received a letter from a young United States Army lieutenant, Thomas Selfridge, who sought to meet with Bell to discuss both his experiments and manned aviation in general. Selfridge, grandson of an admiral and graduate of West Point (where his classmate was Douglas MacArthur), had an impeccable reputation and was by all accounts one of the brightest young officers in the army. He was also one of the few who saw military aviation as an essential component of future warfare and had gotten himself assigned to the Signal Corps’ fledgling aeronautical division.*1
Before communicating with Bell, Selfridge had solicited the Wrights. He had written to Wilbur in January, asking permission to “come to you next summer and work as a mechanic under your supervision and instruction.” Selfridge was aware that Wilbur would “at first probably regard [the proposal] with a great deal of suspicion.” But Selfridge insisted his motives were simply to learn about the new science of aviation since “there is no one in the United States Service who has yet made a specialty of this subject” and observed to Wilbur that “it would be to your advantage, as I think you’ll admit, to have a government officer in a position to report intelligently on your work provided you intend to submit your machine to the War Dept.” Selfridge added, “Of course any secrets that I may learn I should consider as given me in confidence and need hardly assure you would never be divulged without your permission.”
Wilbur did not reply for six weeks and then penned a curt letter refusing Selfridge’s request. “As Americans,” Wilbur wrote, “we naturally feel a national as well as a personal pride in having mastered the art of flight, and therefore greatly regret the relations now existing between the war department and ourselves, for which we are in no way to blame, but which prevent the first use of the art at home.” By this, of course, Wilbur meant the army’s refusal to buy the technology for $100,000 without witnessing a demonstration.
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