*2 Two years later, he would be implicated in a plot to foment a revolt in Baja California to install a government more amenable to the American tourist trade.
*3 Curiously, Grover Loening wrote an article for the January 1910 issue of Aeronautics magazine, titled “Description of Successful Types of Aeroplanes,” which provided detailed descriptions of the Farman, Curtiss, Blériot, Voisin, Wright, and Antoinette machines. The issue went to press before Judge Hazel’s injunction and nowhere did Loening, who would later be vehement in insisting that the Wrights’ competitors were all infringers, indicate that the means of “transverse control” were based on the same principles. Rather, he described the systems in a manner that would indicate they were independent in concept and construction. In the February issue, he wrote a follow-up article in which he again treated the Curtiss and Wright methods of transverse control as completely different.
*4 Although science classes at Los Angeles Polytechnic must have been fascinating, neither of those nor any other of the amateur inventions actually flew.
Bowing to the Inevitable
The Los Angeles meet left the Wrights and their investors in a quandary they could hardly have anticipated. With a corporation capitalized at $1 million, their arch-competitor’s business in disarray, and a sympathetic judge issuing a ruling all but lifted from their business plan, they had nonetheless been outflanked. Public opinion was against them, the French were furious with them, and the opportunity to use the courts as a means of intimidation to halt future air shows had largely evaporated. With the injunction withdrawn and the legal issues and aerodynamic concepts so complex that even those in aviation did not fully grasp them, years would likely be required to fully adjudicate their claims. Thousands if not millions of Americans were willing to pay to witness the miracle of flight; exhibitors would be all too willing to risk the future buffets of the judiciary while they stuffed their wallets.
Unwilling to surrender to the unpalatable option of sitting on the sidelines and watching patent infringers steal profits that should rightfully be theirs, and under pressure from their investors, Wilbur and Orville decided to mount an exhibition team of their own. Andrew Freedman wrote to Wilbur on December 21, 1909, urging him to “get underway as soon as possible.” In a subsequent letter, he suggested that “it would be a good thing” to secure the services of the “Curtiss outfit” even “if they were paid very handsomely for their work, so we could get into the field at the earliest possible moment.”1
Working with Curtiss was unthinkable, of course. On January 17, even before the Los Angeles meet had concluded, Wilbur sent a telegram to Roy Knabenshue inviting him to Dayton to discuss managing the Wright team. Knabenshue’s expertise was to that point solely with balloons but his experience with the mechanics of booking and appearing at exhibitions fit the requirements. Knabenshue and the Wrights had corresponded for almost two years, mostly letters from Knabenshue seeking to lease Wright airplanes for exhibition purposes, a proposition Wilbur and Orville had politely declined to consider. Knabenshue had even come to Dayton in 1909 to press the idea. While the Wrights had continued to refuse, they had been impressed with Knabenshue’s sound judgment and solid family values.
Knabenshue had run his own business for four years and was reluctant to become an employee, even of the Wrights, but by March he had signed on. Soon afterward, the Wright Exhibition Team was incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Wright Company.
Wilbur and Orville made the decision to join what they called “the mountebank game” in the midst of an explosive breach with Octave Chanute. After Wilbur’s disparaging comments appeared in The New York Times, Chanute granted a January 17 interview to its rival, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, in which he stated categorically that the Wrights had not been the first to understand that “adjusting lateral margins” was the key to stability, but that they had extrapolated from others, especially Mouillard. Chanute acknowledged that the Wrights had been the first to “successfully” adopt the principle but said they had hardly achieved their success without assistance.
Wilbur was livid. Not only did he consider Chanute’s assertion a lie, but it also cut to the heart of the infringement suits, which Wilbur assumed the old man had done intentionally. Just two weeks earlier, Wilbur had written warmly to Chanute, agreeing to travel to Boston for a dinner in his honor.2 Now his correspondence took a far different tone. On January 20, he posted what has since become a famous letter to his erstwhile friend and confidant. Referring to the New York World article, he noted:
You are represented as saying that our claim to have been the first to maintain lateral balance by adjusting the wing tips to different angles of incidence cannot be maintained, as this idea was well known in the art when we began our experiments. As this opinion is quite different from that which you expressed in 1901 when you became acquainted with our methods, I do not know whether it is mere newspaper talk or whether it really represents your present views.
After scoffing at the notion that Mouillard or anyone else “anticipated our methods,” Wilbur, at his most acerbic, concluded:
It is our view that morally the world owes its almost universal use of our system of lateral control entirely to us. It is also our opinion that legally it owes it to us. If however there is anything in print which might invalidate our legal rights, it will be to our advantage to know it before spending too much on lawyers, and any assistance you may be able to give us in this respect will be much appreciated, even though it may show that legally our labors of many years to provide a system of lateral control were of no benefit to the world and a mere waste of time, as the world already possessed the system without us.3
Whatever his tone, Wilbur was on firm ground. To imply that the Wrights had merely extended the work of others was at the least a gross understatement. None of those whom Chanute—or Farman and Blériot—suggested predated the Wrights’ discovery had come anywhere close to solving the problem or even proceeded beyond some vague conception that wing tips might have something to do with lateral stability. But Wilbur, with unshakable conviction of his own righteousness, failed to countenance that his own behavior might have contributed to Chanute’s rather silly allegations. Nor would he attempt to find a middle ground. Octave Chanute would become just another of the many people who, because of jealousy or some other flaw of character, turned away from his brother and him.
Chanute responded on January 23. He tried to soften his remarks to the World, but did not retract them, continuing to insist that he had made Wilbur aware of other theorists who discussed altering the “angle of incidence” of wing tips. “When I gave you a copy of the Mouillard patent in 1901, I think I called your attention to his method of twisting the rear of the wings,” he wrote. Then he went on the attack.
If the courts will decide that the purpose and results were entirely different and that you were the first to conceive the twisting of the wings, so much the better for you, but my judgment is that you will be restricted to the particular method by which you do it. Therefore it was that I told you in New York that you were making a mistake by abstaining from prize winning contests while public curiosity is yet so keen, and by bringing suits to prevent others from doing so. This is still my opinion and I am afraid, my friend, that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth.4
Accusations of avarice had a particular sting and Wilbur responded with a long, bitter letter on January 29, to which Chanute, in failing health, did not respond. Wilbur would write again in April, seeking rapprochement without concession.
I have no answer to my last letter and fear that the frankness with which delicate subjects were treated may have blinded you to the real spirit and purpose of the letter.… My object was not to give offense, but to remove it. If you will read the letter carefully I think you will see that the spirit is that of true friendship. I think the differences of opinion which threaten trouble are not so much in regard to facts as in regard to forms o
f expression and manner of statement. That is why I have suggested that a joint statement should be prepared which would do justice to both and injustice to neither. We have not the least wish that your helpfulness to us should be kept from the public, as one of the interviews attributed to you seemed to intimate. Our gratitude and our friendship are genuine. It is our wish that anything which might cause bitterness should be eradicated as soon as possible.5
But there would be no joint statement. Chanute replied in May that he would sail for Europe and attempt to regain his health. The two did not correspond again.
Even as Wilbur and Orville made plans for their exhibition team, the Wright Company continued the injunction strategy. On February 17, federal district court judge Learned Hand, sitting in New York City, specifically citing the Westinghouse case, affirmed Judge Hazel’s January 3 ruling and issued an injunction against Louis Paulhan, who was triumphantly touring through the west and south. If Paulhan wanted to continue to fly, he must post a $25,000 bond.*1
Paulhan had taken in thousands and was dazzling spectators wherever he went. As superb as was his flying, his panache was its equal. The little Frenchman with the mustache was a national sensation, traveling by rail from one city to the next, then soaring, swooping, and diving in a manner most who saw him could not have dreamed possible. On January 25, for example, the San Francisco Call reported, “Paulhan Rivals Birds in Cross Country Flight,” that his Farman biplane “Conquers Storm; Rises Easily in Half Gale with Daring Frenchman in the Saddle.” The Call also dutifully ran a column on page one purportedly written by Paulhan, although the paper neglected to mention the aviator’s unfamiliarity with English. On February 1, in Denver, Paulhan had a “Close Call for Life: Machine Crashes into Fence, but Daring Aviator Comes Up Smiling.”6 And on it went.
Finally, in Oklahoma City the marshal who had been trailing Paulhan caught up with him and served him with Judge Hand’s injunction. Paulhan balked at the outrageous sum asked as a bond. He canceled the remainder of his tour, loaded his entourage into their private railroad car, repaired to the Hotel Knickerbocker in New York, and booked passage on the next ship home. Although the judge later stayed the injunction and reduced the bond to $12,000, Paulhan continued to refuse to either pay or fly. Edmund Cleary denounced the Wrights as “cuckoos of the atmosphere.”7 After Paulhan sailed for France, the marshal seized the two Farmans and the two Blériots. Paulhan was unconcerned. The airplanes were not his, but had been loaned to him for promotional purposes by the manufacturers.
Although their investors had wanted to leave them free to supervise production and develop new aircraft, both by necessity and inclination Orville and especially Wilbur began to become immersed in the legal process. Both submitted depositions in Dayton on March 7, after which Wilbur left for New York to submit an affidavit on March 12, then continued to Buffalo to submit another affidavit on March 19. Wilbur’s willingness to absent himself from research, the one activity that might provide insurance against the vagaries of the legal system, would prove a good deal more costly to Wright Company fortunes than would Curtiss or any other competitor.
While Wilbur was filing legal papers, Charles Hamilton was tearing up the skies, and often the ground as well. He flew in high wind, over mountains and water, testing the limits of Curtiss’s airplane to the thrill of ever-larger audiences. In San Diego, for example, he made “some wonderful flights through the canyons, over the ocean, and into the wilds of Old Mexico … the daredevil feats made the hearts of the spectators stand still.”8 But in Seattle, he dove from three hundred feet to the surface of a pond in the Rheims Racer with the intention of skimming the surface. Instead, one of his wing tips touched the water and the aeroplane “turned a somersault and fell, a mass of wreckage, into the water.” Hamilton broke no bones—a rarity for him—but collapsed after he was rescued and taken to the hospital with “a serious head injury.”9 He was back flying within the week.
Although he was not billed as specifically flying for Curtiss, that Charles Hamilton flew Curtiss aircraft was in every news article. But Curtiss’s casual approach to team management allowed the headstrong Hamilton to assert an increasing degree of independence. Hamilton took the view that the aviator was a good deal more important than the airplane and that therefore the contracted percentages he was obliged to turn over to Curtiss were exorbitant. (Of course, as will be seen, if he had flown for the Wrights, he would have received much, much less.) Hamilton began his rebellion by becoming inconsistent in reporting his earnings to Hammondsport. By the end of April, he had ceased filing reports at all. Once again Curtiss had chosen to go into business with a partner who turned out to be difficult, egocentric, and unreliable. Unlike Herring, however, at least Hamilton could do his job.
Distasteful as Wilbur and Orville may have found it, Paulhan and Hamilton—and Curtiss—had helped create an atmosphere bristling with commercial promise. The growing public obsession with exhibition flying could not help but spur the sale of airplanes. Unlike Curtiss’s peek-over-the-shoulder approach with Hamilton, the brothers’ commitment to the Wright team was rigorous and planned in detail. In April, Wilbur returned to Dayton to build “aeroplanes for exhibition purposes.” Although the Wrights had “twenty-five to fifty machines on orders already booked,” those sales would have to wait. “The first lot of biplanes to come through will be turned over to Orville Wright, Roy Knabenshue, and other aviators employed by the exhibition company.”10
Immediately after he joined up, Knabenshue offered Lincoln Beachey a place on the team. Beachey had never flown a fixed-wing aircraft in his life, but that didn’t stop him from insisting on a good deal more money than the Wrights were willing to pay. The Wrights never negotiated with employees, nor in this case did they have to. By May, they had twenty-five applicants from whom to choose. Some were recruited from close to home. Walter Brookins was a local product whom Wilbur and Orville had watched grow up. As a boy, he had been a student of Katharine’s at Central High School and now became a student of her brothers, the first man taught personally by Orville to fly. With Beachey out of the picture, Knabenshue signed up two other Californians, race-car driver Archibald Hoxsey and bicycle trick rider Ralph Johnstone, who were more amenable to Wilbur and Orville’s terms.
How Hoxsey came to the team is illustrative of the mood of the times. “I’d been selling automobiles out in California,” recalled Beckwith Havens, who would later fly for Curtiss. “I managed to make quite a bit of money selling Haines cars. Out on the coast, I would run into Arch Hoxsey and he was driving racing cars for John W. ‘Bet-a-Million’ Gates.*2 I met him on the street one day in Pasadena and he said, ‘I’ve lost my job. I’m looking for a new one.’ ”
Havens asked Hoxsey to give him a hand preparing a Stanley Steamer he was getting ready to race. “All Hoxsey could talk about was the [Dominguez Field] air meet. He said, ‘Did you hear about the prizes? My heavens, they give $10,000 for a prize. I don’t think it would be any harder to fly those things than to drive a racing car. That’s for me.’ Of course, his old boss had put up some of the original money for the Wright brothers, so he just went to the boss and the boss slid him in on the Wright team. Things worked fast in those days, and within a few months, he was their top flyer.”
As always, Wilbur and Orville intended to maintain total control of the product. “We propose to train enough men in aviation to make us independent of the foreign contestants in case they do not respond to the invitation to participate in our meets,” Wilbur stated in a newspaper interview. Aviators would be trained in the Wright method of flying both in Dayton and in a training facility Orville had established in Montgomery, Alabama.
The terms under which Wright team members signed on were severe. “The Wright Company,” related aviator Frank Coffyn, “sent the members of the exhibition all over the country … to make money for the Wrights. And I’ll tell you why.” Coffyn’s father was vice president of a New York bank who had participated in financing the Wright Company and
had obtained an introduction to Wilbur for his son. Young Coffyn joined the team early in 1911. “The Wright Company gave us a base salary of $20 a week, and $50 a day for every day we flew.” This was when the Wrights were receiving $1,000 per day for each aviator who performed. “In those days, I was able to do quite a lot of exhibition dates for them and I was able to make six or seven thousand dollars a year.” Team members were forbidden to drink, smoke, or swear, and there was no flying on Sunday. The Wrights provided the equipment, of course, which few of the team members could afford.
While the Wright Exhibition Team was training, Wilbur and Orville were the objects of a rising wave of hostility throughout the aviation community. They were surprised at how widespread the bitterness was, although they should not have been. Where Thomas Hill’s article in Aeronautics might have been passed off as steeped in self-interest, Octave Chanute’s criticisms could in no way be viewed in a similar light; Chanute was perhaps the most universally beloved figure on the aviation scene. In March, all the European aero clubs informed Cortlandt Field Bishop that no European aviator would agree to appear in the United States until the Wrights’ suit against Louis Paulhan was settled. Promoters stood to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in the boycott.11 The Wrights’ proposal to cover the shortfall in famed European aviators with their own newly trained flyers—at $1,000 per day—did not endear them to exhibition sponsors.
The following month, Wilbur announced a solution—or, more accurately, a victory. In a deal brokered by Andrew Freedman, although Wilbur didn’t say so, the Aero Club of America agreed to refuse to sanction any meet or exhibition in which the promoters had failed to obtain a license under the Wright patents.12 Foreign aviators would thus be allowed to fly in sanctioned meets. Once again, the terms were steep—the Wrights demanded 10 percent of the gross receipts of any meet with an Aero Club sanction. Since few meets would clear that much, Wilbur and Orville had more or less ensured that anyone promoting an exhibition would be working for them.
Birdmen Page 20