The Toast of France
Orville remained bedridden in Fort Myer Hospital for six weeks and Katharine was with him every day. “Your sister has been devotion itself,” Chanute wrote to Wilbur. “Fearing that he might lack something she stayed up at the hospital every night and deprived herself so much of sleep that I ventured to remonstrate with her about it. She then said that, as the danger of complications seemed to be over, she would take better care of herself, go down to Washington to sleep, and return to Dayton as soon as she felt that she could do so.”
His injuries would cause him great pain for the rest of his life, but Orville was determined that neither discomfort nor infirmity would slow him down. He left the hospital in late October in a wheelchair. By sheer force of will, within days he was walking with two canes, within weeks with one. In January 1909, despite being sensitive even to slight vibrations, he set sail for Europe with Katharine to join Wilbur. During the voyage, the ship rolling and bouncing on the waves, he charmed his fellow passengers with his affability and good spirits.
Wilbur had intended to return by Thanksgiving, then by Christmas, but finally realized he would need to remain in Europe well into 1909. His and Orville’s dream was finally coming true and he simply could not abandon it. In this he had Orville’s full support.
If Wilbur’s achievements had inspired awe before Orville’s crash, in the wake of the accident he became positively Olympian. Four days after his brother was taken to the hospital, he flew for more than ninety minutes, covering more than forty miles. Three weeks after that, he flew for more than an hour with a passenger. He set an altitude mark in November, flying to ninety meters. Scientists, government officials, other aviators, and royalty were among those who witnessed the incredible exploits of Wilbur Wright and his flying machine. He was given gold medals, honors, and testimonials; he won prizes and received congratulations from luminaries across Europe. He dined with Paul Painlevé and Auguste Rodin. Photographs, descriptions, and caricatures—most emphasizing his emaciated frame—filled the newspapers. Through it all, Wilbur never ceased being Wilbur. He was gracious but modest; appreciative but unimpressed. He tolerated the attention but was never either swayed or spoiled by it. Royalty impressed him not in the least. He wrote to Orville on October 9, “Queen Margherita of Italy was in the crowd yesterday. Princes and millionaires are as thick as thieves on the ‘Flyer.’ ”
What pleased Wilbur more than the accolades was the rush of business. The impediments that had beset the contract with the French syndicate evaporated and in late October Wilbur began to train his first pupil, a French-Russian aristocrat, Charles Alexandre Maurice Joseph Marie Jules Stanislas Jacques, count de Lambert, whose family could be traced back to 1287. The following month, an official French subsidiary was established, La Compagnie Générale de Navigation Aérienne (CGNA). Initial indications were that more than one hundred airplanes could be sold for at least $5,000 each. The Germans, who had resisted establishing a syndicate, now solicited Wilbur, money bulging from their pockets. “Herr Loewe … offered $25,000 and a ¼ interest in the business for our German interests. I merely smiled,” he wrote to Orville.1 Italians, Russians, and Britains sought Wilbur out. Officers of the Spanish and even the Argentine military made their introductions. In November, the Wrights were offered $500,000 by an Italian syndicate and Wilbur finally realized he was not coming home for the holidays. Instead, he decided to establish a winter training facility in the resort city of Pau, in the south of France near the Spanish border.
Soon afterward he asked Orville to join him in Europe “for a couple of months.” Ten days later, he became more insistent. “I very strongly suggest that you and Kate, and Pop if he will, should come over to Europe immediately. It is important to get machines ready for the spring business.… I do not see how I can get home, and yet I am crazy to see some of the home folks and to have some consultation with you. I believe it would be the best thing you could do.”
Orville and Kate booked passage immediately. Milton, who had just turned eighty, could not make the trip. On January 11, 1909, they landed in Plymouth, and they were in Paris the following day.
Working with the AEA convinced Curtiss that the future was in fixed wings, not balloons. Although he and Baldwin would remain close, Curtiss threw his energies and vision to improving airplanes. His first idea was to rig an airplane to take off and land on water. The Wrights had made a cursory experiment with a water takeoff in March 1908 but quit after the initial attempts failed badly. Curtiss decided to use June Bug as a vehicle for real experimentation. He attached pontoons of various weights and configurations to the undercarriage and tried lifting off from Lake Keuka. The June Bug, now renamed the Loon, failed to become airborne. The pontoons, even at their lightest, added too much weight for the thrust generated by the motor. But Curtiss had a baseline from which to work and he would soon revisit hydroplanes.
Toward the end of 1908, the AEA produced its fourth and final design, this one McCurdy’s, which was dubbed Silver Dart. The craft did not contain any great innovations, but featured a water-rather than air-cooled engine, larger ailerons, and sturdier construction. It was test-flown constantly, perhaps for as many as one thousand miles.
The AEA weren’t the only ones making strides in aircraft design. Santos-Dumont had moved from the lumbering Bird of Prey to a light, exquisitely designed monoplane he called Demoiselle (Damsel). Constructed of bamboo and silk and with a two-cylinder motor, the Demoiselle had a span of only seventeen feet, was nineteen feet long, and weighed only 265 pounds. In his tiny craft, Santos-Dumont made speeds of more than fifty miles per hour. Henri Farman, flying a craft designed with the Voisin brothers, continued to make impressive shows of speed and distance. Louis Blériot, short and dumpy with a wide handlebar mustache and a shambling demeanor suitable to the Comédie Française, had entered the lists as well. After making a good deal of money by inventing acetylene headlamps for automobiles, Blériot had begun to dabble in flight in 1903. His first construction was an ornithopter that could not get off the ground; his glider collaboration with Gabriel Voisin had met with an equal lack of success. Finally, in 1907, he built a monoplane, the Blériot VII, a clumsy, poor-handling affair that nonetheless could more or less sustain flight. By late 1908, he had moved four models further on and his untested Blériot XI seemed to hold great promise.
The Wright patent seemed to deter no one. Early in 1909, Glenn Curtiss proceeded to take the very steps he had assured the Wrights he would not—exploit aviation commercially and in exhibitions. To facilitate his move, he joined forces with a man who assured him that together they could not only produce the most advanced airplanes ever seen but also keep any legal maneuvers by the Wrights at bay.
Having been repeatedly shunned by the Wrights, Augustus Herring had initiated a telegram exchange in which he persuaded Curtiss that he held patents on airplane stability that preceded the Wrights’ and insisted that the time was ripe to enter the market “before the Wrights took to the courts with their patent and tried to monopolize the business.” To sweeten his ultimate offer of partnership, Herring told Curtiss that he had financial connections in New York who were just itching to capitalize on the commercial possibilities of airplane production. At one point, Herring wired, “Best possible backing. Small company first. Way clear to million each.”2 It took Curtiss almost a month to decide but the deal seemed simply too good to pass up. And so, on March 3, 1909, the new partners met the press and announced that the G. H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company would become the Herring–Curtiss Company.
It was a colossal blunder. In order to obtain Herring’s patents, or rather the promise of Herring’s patents since Curtiss didn’t ask to see paperwork in advance, Curtiss put up almost all of the money, and the corporate structure was so ill-considered that Herring ended up with most of the stock. When asked at the press conference why he had yet to fly publicly, Herring replied that he could not make public demonstrations because his patents were only pending, but
even then Curtiss did not feel the need to demand more details.
Curtiss wasn’t alone in his stunning gullibility. Cortlandt Field Bishop became a stockholder and director of the company, although his $21,000 investment was a good deal less than Curtiss’s outlay of more than $82,000, which represented almost his entire net worth.3 Bishop’s brother invested an additional $16,000 and the Bishops were supposed to attract other New York millionaires, which never happened. Thomas Baldwin was made a director and would head the “airship division,” which would never exist. Curtiss assigned plant, property, and goodwill of the G. H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company to the new venture. Herring’s outlay, as can best be determined, was less than $6,000 and might not have exceeded $1,000.4
The arrangement, of which Curtiss had not informed his AEA partners in advance, strained his relations with the other members, although, oddly, Bell himself always remained on good terms with the man who walked out on him. McCurdy and Baldwin released a statement just after the announcement in which they speculated with obvious irony that Herring must have provided some very strong evidence that he wasn’t a fraud to get Curtiss to team up with him. The Herring–Curtiss Company was incorporated on March 19; on March 31, the Aerial Experiment Association officially disbanded in a solemn little ceremony in Bell’s home. Glenn Curtiss, who had been entreated by Bell to make the final trip to Baddeck, was not in attendance.
Before the ink was dry on their agreement, Herring was off, supposedly dividing his time between preparing his airplane for the 1909 Fort Myer trials and rounding up customers and investors for Herring–Curtiss. As Curtiss would later learn, he was actually doing neither.
Orville and Katharine joined Wilbur in Pau, where large, opulent living quarters and workspace had been specially built for the famed Americans at a cost to the city of $15,000. In return, the Wrights made the city the official site of their training school. There Wilbur and Orville were “inundated” with requests from Europe’s elite. They flew for Edward VII of England, former prime minister Arthur Balfour, and King Alfonso of Spain. (Alfonso had wanted to be the first monarch to make a flight himself, but his wife had wheedled a promise from him to remain on the ground. The king kept to his vow but muttered while he watched Wilbur fly figure eights that airplanes were safer than automobiles. Katharine later praised Alfonso for being “a good husband” for not breaking his word and going aloft.)
The Wrights were the most noted Americans in Europe, written about in newspapers across the Continent, often either in hyperbole or outright fiction. But unlike articles in previous years, these exaggerations were all flattering, or would have been if Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine hadn’t found them so silly. That none of the Wrights had their head turned would be an understatement. “Kings are just like other nice, well-bred people,” Katharine remarked to a reporter.5
At the end of March, Wilbur traveled to Italy in response to an offer of $10,000 to fly demonstrations and train two aviators. He spent almost the entire month of April flying on a plain outside Rome before the likes of King Victor Emmanuel and J. P. Morgan. As the month drew to a close, the Wrights were forced to return home to prepare for the Fort Myer trials. Wilbur had not set foot in the United States for almost a year. Instead of sailing from France, however, the brothers made a stopover in Great Britain, where there had been a good deal of discussion at the War Office about developing an air fleet. They left without coming to a licensing arrangement but instead contracted with a private firm to produce six airplanes for sale with the possibility of a good many more in the future.
The three Wrights sailed into New York Harbor on May 11, 1909, as national heroes. Of far more importance to them, they seemed to be on the verge of becoming as wealthy and powerful as Rockefeller or Carnegie.
Also in May 1909, Curtiss produced a radically new airplane. Dubbed the Gold Bug for the color of the varnish used over the “Baldwin rubberized silk” wing fabric, the craft was a biplane, with parallel wings instead of the AEA’s bows, a twenty-nine-foot span and 4.5-foot chord, and a double front elevator and double vertical rudder with a horizontal panel halfway up. Control was generated by a movable steering wheel rather than a lever, and the landing gear was Curtiss’s usual tricycle design with a brake on the front wheel. But the feature that made the Gold Bug unique was the placement of “movable surfaces at either extremity of the main planes, each movable surface being half within the main cell and half without.” In other words, Curtiss had for the first time devised a system of true ailerons, independent surfaces that would enhance stability and maneuverability. For speed, always a Curtiss priority, he produced a newly designed motor, lightweight, four cylinder, and water cooled, which Curtiss claimed “develops more power per square inch of piston area than has ever been secured in a gas engine.”6 An eight-cylinder motor was under construction.
The Gold Bug, which Curtiss renamed Golden Flier, had an additional distinction. After failing to buy a machine from the Wrights, the Aeronautical Society of America, a group of wealthy aviation aficionados, had ordered the airplane from Curtiss and had agreed to pay $5,000 for it, the first commercial sale of an aircraft in the United States.*1 The deal included the training of two men. As Herring had insisted that his “contract” with the Signal Corps predated their agreement and was thus his alone, Curtiss applied the same standard to the Aeronautical Society sale. When the Wrights learned of the transaction, which they viewed most correctly as a blatant violation of Curtiss’s promise, they immediately began to lay the grounds for a lawsuit. But with an aileron patent pending of his own and Herring’s patents now at his disposal, Curtiss was confident he could withstand any legal assault.
Also in May 1909, Augustus Herring was granted yet another extension on delivery of his airplane to the Signal Corps, one month, this time because “public exhibition might invalidate two of his foreign patents.” Still, Curtiss pushed on, remaining oblivious to the possibility that Herring would offer him no protection at all.
In mid-June, as a condition of the sale, he flew the Golden Flier at Morris Park in the Bronx, the first public flight of an airplane in New York City. The machine handled wonderfully and Curtiss decided to make a run for the second leg of the Scientific American trophy, which would go to the entrant making the longest flight during the calendar year of at least twenty-five kilometers. The magazine’s editors and the Aero Club officials had expected the Silver Dart to enter, but McCurdy and Bell pulled out.*2 The Wrights once more declined, particularly since as they now saw it they would be competing against their own invention.
On July 17, at Mineola, Long Island, Curtiss made nineteen circuits of the 1 ⅓-mile course, more than forty kilometers, to claim the prize. Anyone with knowledge of airplanes would have noticed something else of significance about Curtiss’s flight. His system of ailerons was more efficient than the Wrights’ wing warping. (Later, opponents of the Wrights’ patent claims would wonder why, if the Wrights had actually anticipated ailerons, they hadn’t used them.)
For the Wrights, the Mineola flight was the final indignity. Only weeks later, Wilbur would meet with attorneys in New York to file suit. At about the same time, the army refused Herring’s request for yet another extension and canceled his contract.
Upon their return from Europe, the Wrights, who had yet to sell a single airplane in their native country, were treated like conquerors. On June 10, President William Howard Taft personally presented them with the Aero Club medals and the following week they were feted with a huge two-day presentation in Dayton. Bishop Milton Wright gave the invocation on the first day and in a grand ceremony on the second, General James Allen of the Signal Corps presented the brothers with a Congressional Medal, Governor Judson Harmon presented them with the Ohio Medal, and Mayor Edward Burkhart presented them with the Dayton Medal. Through it all, Wilbur and Orville stood in obvious discomfort at the spectacle and not at all pleased that they had been drawn away from their work. In fact, they were in the shop both mornings, leaving only to
take part in as little of the hoopla as possible. Both brothers’ speeches were restricted to “Thank you, gentlemen.” The following day, they left for Washington to complete the Fort Myer trials.
The Wrights remained at Fort Myer for more than a month. Despite constant hectoring that they get on with the tests—at one point, the Senate adjourned to watch, only to have Orville refuse to go aloft in a 15-mph wind—the Wrights were determined to be cautious, thorough, and painstaking, and that there be no repetition of the 1908 disaster. They tested, they fine-tuned, they monitored the weather as never before. As Aeronautics delicately phrased it, the Wrights’ approach “certainly should serve as an object lesson in patience and perseverance to both inventors and experimenters.” When they finally felt comfortable that the conditions were right, both brothers decided that Orville should do all the flying. There was perhaps no activity that would be more painful for him than being launched down a rail and then sitting in front of an airplane motor, but Orville intended to bury the previous year’s crash forever.
On July 27, Orville took army lieutenant Frank Lahm as a passenger on a record-breaking flight of more than one hour, twelve minutes. Ten thousand spectators crowded the airfield to watch, including President Taft and most of his cabinet. Taft personally congratulated Orville after he landed. With the army’s requirement for a one-hour, two-man flight fulfilled, all that remained was a five-mile flight with a passenger at forty miles per hour, which Orville undertook three days later. With the 130-pound Lieutenant Benjamin Foulois next to him, Orville flew to Alexandria and back, almost ten miles, averaging 42.58 miles per hour, and thus earned a $5,000 bonus for the additional two miles per hour, bringing the army contract to $30,000.
Gone was the whispering about the Wrights’ years of silence and their month of delay at Fort Myer. Orville and Katharine returned to Dayton the following day while Wilbur remained in Washington to finalize the contract to sell airplanes to the army and train aviators, an agreement that they had sought for four years.
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