Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Not just the Wrights failed to be overjoyed by Curtiss’s notoriety. On the very day the Hudson Flyer took off from Rensselaer Island, Byron Newton, editor at The New York Herald, wrote to Andrew Freedman about “an interesting talk” he’d had with Charles Hamilton. When Hamilton heard that Curtiss would try for the World prize, he had rushed to New York from Jacksonville, Florida, hoping to use Curtiss’s own Rheims Racer to steal the $10,000 out from under his employer, but the airplane did not arrive in time. Newton described the diminutive daredevil as “destined to be one of the greatest aviators in this country, possibly the world,” and that Hamilton “may soon be detached from Curtiss.” Newton offered to arrange for Hamilton to make flights for the Wrights as Hamilton was “eager to do some stunts that will make the N. Y.–Albany flight look like the hop of a toad.”5

  The day after Curtiss landed on Governors Island, The New York Times announced an offer of $25,000 for the first man to fly from New York to Chicago. Hamilton immediately announced his intention to win the money. Hamilton had already suggested a New York to Chicago flight to Byron Newton, an offer Freedman had passed along to Wilbur, noting that “under every condition you ought to engage this man … at any price or percentage he may demand for his work.” Freedman added, “It is absolutely essential that the Wright machine be shown in its true capacity,” particularly in view of the public image of Curtiss’s airplanes.6 But if there was a paradigm for the type of man the Wrights would not employ, the hard-drinking, profane, and insubordinate Hamilton was it. Wilbur categorically refused. Freedman wrote back that while he understood Wilbur’s decision, he regretted it.

  Those regrets would multiply in the weeks ahead.

  In early June, the Wright Exhibition Team, supervised personally by Wilbur, made its debut at an air meet at the Indianapolis Speedway. Curtiss may have gotten the glory in New York but the Wright Company would make the money in Indianapolis, as Wilbur was quick to point out to Freedman. He noted that the Wright team would receive half the gross receipts with a $25,000 minimum guarantee. Knabenshue, who cut the deal, was described as “a good hustler.”

  Eleven aviators participated, six of them Wright team members. One of the remaining five was former aeronaut Lincoln Beachey, registered in a “Beachey monoplane,” which was actually borrowed from a Los Angeles Aero Club member and previously flown—and crashed—by Beachey’s older brother Hillery. After Knabenshue had been unable to meet his price, Beachey had remained in California and taught himself to fly fixed-wing aircraft. Whether he chose Indianapolis to make his debut specifically to impress Wilbur Wright is not known, but if he did the choice was in vain. Beachey was far too independent for the Wrights’ taste and, as with Hamilton, Wilbur wanted nothing to do with him.

  In truth, there seemed to be little need for either man. To inaugurate the Wrights’ entry into exhibition flying, Walter Brookins set a new altitude record of 4,384 feet. To make the achievement sweeter, the previous mark had been set in Los Angeles by Louis Paulhan, who was by then launching a steady stream of attacks on the Wrights’ patent suits. The straightlaced, teetotaling Brookins also set an unofficial record by rising to 1,000 feet in less than seven minutes. Two days later, he broke his own record flying to 4,503 feet and, when his engine conked out on the way down, glided to a landing in a wheat field.

  Of the five other entrants, four, including Beachey, never got airborne; the fifth, G. L. Baumbaugh, crashed just after takeoff, never getting higher than ten feet off the ground. After Wilbur had again declined to hire him, Beachey continued east, to Hammondsport, to meet with Curtiss. Like the Wrights, Curtiss had established a formal flight school with the intention of expanding his exhibition team. Although Beachey crashed the first two planes he took up, Fanciulli persuaded Curtiss to keep him on.

  Regardless of the Wrights’ success, Indianapolis was not New York, and in the wake of the New York Times’s beatification of Curtiss for his flight down the Hudson, the Wrights’ reluctance to aggressively embrace the exhibition phenomenon in the media centers of the East—and to employ the brilliant Hamilton—began to try the patience of their partners.

  It didn’t help that on June 10, again in a Curtiss machine, Hamilton had won $10,000 for a round-trip from Governors Island to Philadelphia, another of the prizes hastily offered by newspapers in the wake of Curtiss’s Hudson flight.*2 Then, on June 15, a federal appeals court in New York vacated Judge Hazel’s preliminary injunction, ordering that Curtiss’s $10,000 bond be returned, thus allowing Curtiss to fly unencumbered until the case was actually decided. Wilbur immediately left for New York to help plead for a reinstatement of the bond, a task that should have been left to the lawyers. Wilbur’s presence did not help; the court stuck to its decision.

  On July 8, 1910, Freedman’s patience ran out. He wrote to Wilbur: “I have heard very little mention of the Wrights or their progress. Had expected to hear that you had a machine down here for the Atlantic City Meet, but so far have heard nothing of it.” Then Freedman took a tone that Wilbur had likely only previously experienced from his father. “I think that in justice to the men who have gone into this enterprise with you that you should give a demonstration of some kind in this section of the country before long. Our people here will lose interest in the Company for the reason that flights of all descriptions are being made by everybody, excepting the Wrights. Some little consideration is due them for the practical endorsement of the Company.”7 Freedman was particularly irritated because the Wrights had signed a contract to participate at Atlantic City, for which they would receive a guarantee of $20,000 against 20 percent of gross receipts, and the meet had been widely advertised as “the first contest between the Wright and Curtiss machines.” (The advertisement noted, “It is also expected that Charles K. Hamilton, the great long distance aviator, will be present and race from July 7 to July 11.”) If the Wrights were unrepresented at the meet, observers might well interpret their absence to a fear of competition.

  Wilbur replied to Freedman’s chiding with uncharacteristic contrition. He explained that he hadn’t been certain a Flyer could be prepared in time for the Atlantic City meet but now he would promise to “overhaul one of our newest machines so as to have it in first class condition and will send it next week.”8

  The decision turned out to be sound. In Atlantic City, in front of 100,000 spectators, Walter Brookins bested the altitude mark he had set in Indianapolis, soaring to 6,175 feet, thus winning the $5,000 prize promoters had put up for anyone who could ascend a mile or more. The promoters were stunned at having to fork over the funds; ascensions of that altitude were widely considered impossible. Of course, Brookins did not get to keep the money; he had to turn all but the regular $50 daily stipend over to the Wrights. Brookins was so loyal to Wilbur and Orville that he never stated publicly where the prize money actually went.9

  “The Wright Company never let us keep any of the prizes we won,” Frank Coffyn noted. “The company kept them and we just got our $50 a day. No bonuses. Nothing. It was a very sore kind of project with us because the Curtiss Company allowed their pilots to keep fifty percent of all the prizes they won. We used to get furious about it but it didn’t do us any good. The Wrights wouldn’t let us have it.”

  When asked if the Wright aviators might have done better as a group if they’d been paid prize money, Coffyn replied, “Maybe so, but it didn’t make any difference to me because I used to try and do the best kind of flying I could anyhow.” But Coffyn also admitted that, without incentive to make extra money, he was extremely conservative. “I did my flying in a careful manner. [The other flyers] did stunts and things. I was just careful enough not to overtax the strength of the plane and that’s how I got through it, I think.”

  Curtiss had a successful meet as well. He won $5,000 by flying fifty miles in the Hudson Flyer, virtually all of it over water. He also won prizes for the quickest start and the quickest climb to one thousand feet. But with money being thrown about so loosely, exhibition flying wa
s about to become both a good deal more competitive and a good deal more dangerous.

  * * *

  *1 Baldwin, who took off whooping, “Albany or Bust!” was in the air less than ten minutes before a piece of wood snapped off in the high wind and jammed his steering apparatus, sending Cap’t Tom unceremoniously into the river. He was rescued by a navy cutter.

  *2 The sponsors were The New York Times and the Philadelphia Ledger. Curtiss and Hamilton must have had at least a temporary rapprochement as Curtiss removed the propeller from the Hudson Flyer and loaned it to Hamilton when Hamilton’s propeller was discovered to have a crack.

  Mavericks

  Among the two thousand Americans who witnessed Glenn Curtiss win the Coupe Gordon Bennett at Reims in September 1909 was one Joseph Jean Baptiste Moisant, the fourth and youngest son of French Canadian parents who had emigrated from Quebec to Illinois. Determined to be American to the core, the boys, although not their three sisters, had anglicized their names and so “Joseph Jean Baptiste” became “John Blevins.” John Moisant was something of an international celebrity and had come to Reims after a rather busy year. Just one month before, he had narrowly evaded capture and possible execution after a third failed attempt to lead an invasion of El Salvador.

  By any standard, the Moisant family was exceptional. They left Illinois for California in the 1880s and within ten years had amassed a fortune in lumber, real estate, mining, and a variety of other enterprises. In 1895, led by eldest son Alfred, the Moisants bought a sugarcane plantation in El Salvador so vast that it was a day’s ride from one end to the other. Alfred also oversaw the purchase of a salt mine and a bank.

  For more than a decade, the Moisants, tightly knit and fiercely protective of one another, extracted enormous profits from Central America, ensured by Alfred’s willingness to provide financial support to friendly governments. In 1907, however, an old-fashioned jefe, General Fernando Figueroa, was elected president of El Salvador, although vote counts in military dictatorships are always subject to question. Figueroa took a dim view of the gringos who had become accustomed to telling Salvadorians in power how to behave. That the Moisants supported his opponent, Prudencio Alfaro, was also not in their favor. Finally, and likely most important, Figueroa owed a good deal of money to the bank Alfred owned and had no real desire to pay it back. He began to put pressure on the Moisants to forgive the loan and perhaps even cede a portion of their empire to the government.

  Alfred Moisant was content to work through official and unofficial diplomatic channels to outflank Figueroa, but for John, described by a biographer as “driven by an uncontrollable desire for adventure and wealth and an almost adolescent need to be seen as a swashbuckling hero,” only direct action would do.1 John traveled to Nicaragua to meet with its president, General José Santos Zelaya, who at that moment was attempting to make his dream of reuniting Central America a reality.*1 Not surprisingly, Zelaya saw himself at the head of the proposed five-nation federation. The idea did, in fact, enjoy a good deal of support in the region, but not in El Salvador. Zelaya and Figueroa were not mutual admirers.

  John proposed ousting Figueroa by landing an expeditionary force on the beach that would then fight its way to the capital. The force would consist of Nicaraguans and Salvadorian dissidents, including two generals, one of whom would be installed as puppet president. Zelaya agreed and left John to make the arrangements. Left unclear was which of the two generals would sit in the president’s chair and also whether Moisant would be subordinate to them in the invasion or their superior.

  When Figueroa heard of John’s plotting in Managua, he clapped the two middle Moisant brothers in jail for inciting revolution and demanded a hefty indemnity for their release. Alfred refused and instead persuaded a reluctant United States counsel to summon the navy. Figueroa gave in to gunboat diplomacy and freed the brothers.

  On June 11, 1907, just when tensions were easing slightly, John’s expeditionary force landed at Acajutla, the coastal city nearest the Moisant plantation. After initial success, the two Salvadorian generals took to bickering, which halted their advance sufficiently to allow government troops to regroup and force a retreat and then a rout of John Moisant’s army.

  This political theater went on for two more years. John Moisant was jailed, hunted, and threatened by both Salvadorian officials and the U.S. State Department, all the while establishing a reputation ordinarily reserved for the likes of Captain Kidd. His third and last invasion took place in April 1909. His forces never reached shore, intercepted by two U.S. Navy cruisers who promised to fire on him if he attempted to land. Moisant steamed away, this time facing arrest by his own government as well as by Figueroa, although only one of the two would have had him put to death. After yet more diplomatic wrangling, John B. Moisant, plantation owner, gun runner, mercenary, and impeccable dresser, was allowed to return home a free man if he foreswore Central American politics. In July, John Moisant stepped off an ocean liner in New York and never visited Central America again.

  Forced to eschew leading invasions of foreign nations, John was left desperate for an outlet for his obsessive audacity. On a whim, he traveled to the Reims meet and instantly turned his attention to aviation. Exhibition flying seemed perfect for his idiom, something he could attack with a buccaneer’s flair.

  John Moisant might have been headstrong and narcissistic but he was far from stupid. Along with his sister Matilde, he had long observed birds in flight, and tried to grasp the same principles that Wilbur Wright had deduced. After Reims, he stepped up his efforts and when he thought he had solved the problem, before he had ever flown, he set to designing and building an airplane. His plan was to become the world’s greatest exhibition flyer in an aircraft of his own creation. It is typical of the Moisants that stodgy, conservative Alfred fully supported his younger brother’s plan and provided all the necessary funds to carry it out.

  John, fluent in French of course, repaired to Issy-les-Moulineaux, a Paris suburb, and got to work. He was convinced that maintaining the best possible weight-to-strength ratios was the key to success, so instead of using wood, he built the world’s first airplane made entirely of metal, and instead of the V-engines mounted in most American airplanes, Moisant employed a 50-horsepower Gnôme seven-cylinder rotary. The Gnôme spun with the propeller around a fixed crankshaft and weighed only 176 pounds. Moisant mounted his propulsion system in the front of his aircraft, as did Blériot, but Moisant mounted the propeller behind the motor. To minimize frame weight, Moisant employed steel only for the support tubing; for the body and wings, he chose the new miracle metal, aluminum.

  Although it was the third most common substance in the earth’s crust, not until 1886 was a commercially feasible electrolytic process developed to extract the metal from aluminum oxide.*2 In the two subsequent decades, aluminum—light, malleable, corrosion resistant, and in alloys almost as strong as steel—was employed in a dizzying variety of industrial operations. The metal was even used to line the interior facing of the dome in the rotunda of the Library of Congress.

  That the metallurgy of aluminum was not sufficiently understood before it was thrown willy-nilly into manufacturing would have dire consequences in subsequent years, but for John Moisant it turned out to be merely an inconvenience. He built his “aluminoplane,” L’Ecrevisse (“The Crayfish”), then, without bothering to take a lesson, seated himself behind the engine, signaled his mechanic to start the engine, and lifted off. The apparatus performed wonderfully, perhaps too wonderfully. L’Ecrevisse climbed at a steep angle at speeds approaching eighty miles per hour. That was too much even for Moisant, so he cut his engine, causing the aircraft to turn nose down and return to its starting point. Moisant wasn’t hurt in the crash, but the airplane was ruined. He immediately started on another but this time took some lessons from Louis Blériot before venturing once more into the skies. His second airplane, Le Corbeau (“The Crow”), fared little better than the first. Moisant gave up on that portion of the plan,
bought a Blériot, and turned his attention solely to flying.*3 If aviation hadn’t welcomed a new designer in John Moisant, it had, as it would soon learn, acquired a comet.

  In a meet in Asbury Park, New Jersey, in August 1910, the Wright Company finally introduced a new airplane. Although the Flyer B, as it was called, contained some improvements over the previous model—the elevator had been moved to the rear and for the first time wheels had been mounted under the skids—the basic wing-warping and control technology remained the same. A racing model was also in the works—the Flyer R, or “Baby Grand.” The Asbury Park meet spotlighted the Wright machines’ strengths and provided a glimpse into what would be their greatest weaknesses.

  Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone showed the Flyers at their best. Hoxsey took the governor of New Jersey up for a jaunt and on August 19, he and Johnstone flew at night, the first such flights in the United States. In between they soared long and gracefully before cheering crowds.

  But on August 10, the first day of the meet, Walter Brookins suffered a mishap that both evoked the death of Thomas Selfridge two years before and provided a grim snapshot of the future. Brookins crashed a Flyer A when photographers crowding the field caused him to change his descent and then lose control in high winds. Headed directly to the spectators, Brookins swerved at the last moment, missing the grandstand by a foot, and crashed in an alley crowded with program boys, policemen, and National Guardsmen. Those present realized he had put his own life in peril to save others. Carried away semiconscious, Brookins told the National Guard commander, “I did the best I could.” All agreed that his flying saved many lives. Ten, however, were caught under the crushed Flyer, one boy suffering a fractured skull and another a broken arm. Brookins himself was first reported as killed but only suffered bruises and a broken nose.2 Wilbur arrived the following day to try to determine the cause of the calamity. When he heard that his favorite and most trusted aviator had flown in 25-mph winds, he told reporters, “Brookins ought to be hanged for attempting a flight in such circumstances.” Still, the accident was said to double admissions sales the following day.3