Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  After Arch Hoxsey had crashed, Parmalee had told reporters, “There goes another. It won’t be long before it gets all of us. We ourselves do not realize the chances we take. Even if a warping wire were to break, we would fall like a stone. When a man gets into this business, he knows what he is up against and must be prepared to take the final chance.”12

  Turpin, recovering from injuries suffered in his own crash, nonetheless insisted on taking charge of Parmalee’s body. “It’s the way of the game,” he insisted. Parmalee had weeks before been betrothed to Turpin’s sister and both men were about to quit flying with their hides intact. “We’d been at it two years and a half,” Turpin explained, “and that’s more than most.” Parmalee had recently told his fiancée that he believed his good luck in avoiding injury was about to run out. After Parmalee’s death, Turpin vowed never to fly again.

  Orville Wright remained at home in Dayton after Wilbur’s death, spending most of his time with Katharine, but the performance tests for the Wright C continued without him at College Park. Orville received telegraphed reports on this newest version of the Flyer, which he had worked on for more than a year and newspapers had reported was “regarded by the late Wilbur Wright as the best craft he and his brother had ever built.”13 By June 11, the machine had met the speed and endurance criteria handily and all that was left was to climb to two thousand feet in less than ten minutes carrying 450 pounds of dead weight in addition to gasoline, oil, and water. Just before 6:30 P.M., Art Welsh took his place at the controls with Lieutenant Hazelhurst at his side.

  Welsh took off and circled. He must have doubted the machine’s ability to make the climb because instead of attempting it straightaway, he took the C to about 250 feet, signaled the army officers and other spectators on the ground that he was ready, then began a dive to gain speed and create momentum once he turned upward. But he never did. The airplane seemed to quiver when it reached the horizontal about thirty feet above the ground and then pitched forward and crashed, killing both men instantly.

  Orville received reports from the officers present and knew what had happened. He wrote to J. William Kabitzke, another Wright aviator, that Welsh died as a result of making his dive at too sharp an angle, which was “so unlike Mr. Welsh, who had always displayed so much caution.”*3 After a careful examination of the wreck and hearing the testimony of eyewitnesses, the army’s investigators agreed.

  Katharine accompanied Orville to Washington for Welsh’s and Hazelhurst’s funerals. Welsh, né Welcher, was buried at Adas Israel Cemetery in Anacostia, Virginia, in a Jewish ceremony, which was completely foreign to both the Wrights and the army officers in attendance. Katharine observed that “all of his family and all of his wife’s family show their Jewish traits much more than Mr. Welsh did.” The following day, Hazelhurst was interred at Arlington. Hazelhurst’s pallbearers included Spuds Ellyson, Paul Beck, Benjamin Foulois, Hap Arnold, and Charles deForest Chandler, who, although no one knew it at the time, represented an honor roll of the future of American military aviation.

  Attending two more funerals just two weeks after Wilbur’s did not add to Orville and Katharine’s grief. Rather, as she wrote to Milton, “The change has done us both a great deal of good. I am sleeping fairly well now. We are both tired but feeling better than we did.”

  Curtiss was not spared tragedy during the Wrights’ run of misfortune. Julia Clark, who had been fascinated by the flying at the 1911 Chicago meet, traveled to San Diego and refused to leave until Glenn Curtiss personally taught her to fly. Curtiss, whose experience with Blanche Stuart Scott had not convinced him that women should be in the air, finally acceded. Clark showed sufficient aptitude to become the third woman to obtain an aviator’s license, after which she immediately announced her intention to join an exhibition tour. Curtiss didn’t think she was ready and told her to practice more before joining the circuit. Clark wouldn’t hear of it.

  Six days after Welsh crashed, on June 17, 1912, during her first flight at an exhibition in Springfield, Illinois, Julia Clark flew into a tree and was killed instantly. She was the first American woman to die in a crash and aviation’s 146th fatality.

  In the 1,369 days since Thomas Selfridge had been killed at Fort Myer, an aviator had died roughly every ten days.

  Two weeks later, on July 1, at a meet in Boston, Harriet Quimby took off for a flight around Boston Harbor with William Willard, the exhibition’s organizer and Charles Willard’s father, in the passenger seat.

  Quimby had become every bit the star she had aspired to be onstage. On April 16, she had made headlines around the world when, dressed in her trademark one-piece, hooded purple aviation suit—which “by an ingenious device can be converted into a traditional walking skirt”—she became the first woman to fly across the English Channel. She left Dover at 5:30 A.M. in her Blériot two-seater, disappeared into the fog, emerged thirty minutes later, flew over the French coast, made two circles over Boulogne, and then landed at the tiny village of Hardelot. (After she landed, the Armour Company wasted little time in signing her up to replace Cal Rodgers as the face of Vin Fiz. The logo for the drink was changed from a bunch of grapes to an attractive young woman in a purple flying suit and goggles.)

  At the Boston meet, Quimby was flying the Blériot monoplane painted “pure white.” After circling the lighthouse at about seven thousand feet, she flew past the field at approximately eighty miles per hour, and then circled back to land a quarter mile farther on. For reasons never fully explained, the craft pitched violently forward at fifteen hundred feet. First Willard then Quimby were ejected. Five thousand spectators watched the two turn over and over before landing in the shallows. Both bodies were described as “terribly crushed.” The Blériot recovered its equilibrium after its occupants were ejected, “gliding off gracefully into the wind,” and settled into the water, where it was recovered substantially undamaged.14

  After the crash, there was some question as to whether Quimby and Willard had been belted in. Glenn Martin, another aviator, claimed there had been no restraints in Quimby’s Blériot. “If they had been strapped in, the accident would not have happened,” he said. But others claimed that she had buckled a broad strap across a space less than a foot in front of her, and from behind and on either side, hollow tubing ran to a vertical mast on the fuselage to which support wires fastened. “How Miss Quimby could have been thrown from her seat without herself unbuckling the strap is a mystery, especially since the tubing converged to a point directly in front.”15

  Blanche Stuart Scott provided the most apt testimonial. She had been circling the harbor at five hundred feet and witnessed the fall. Although distraught at the death of a friend and fellow pilot, when asked if Quimby’s death would cause her to reconsider flying, Scott replied, “Certainly not.” She added later, “All aviators get it sooner or later. If they stay in the game it is only a question of time before something goes wrong and they are killed. We all realize that. All aviators are fatalists; they realize that what is to be will be.”*4

  André Haupert, who had taught Quimby to fly at the Moisant school, had a different take. “You ask me if aviation is safe. My answer is that it is safe for the man who is safe. You take Sopwith and Grahame-White. They are not killed. But they do not go out in a machine if they are not certain of its soundness and they make no specialty of spectacular flights.”

  Lincoln Beachey was also asked to comment. “They were going 80 to 100 miles an hour. Miss Quimby was coming down from some 5,000 feet with full power on. She was a light, delicate woman and it could easily have happened that the terrific rush of air was too much for her and that she became weakened and unable to control her levers.” Beachey eventually retracted those remarks and said instead, “What caused this and other accidents similar, no one will ever know.” Later examination of the wreckage revealed that a cable to the rudder fouled in the lever that controlled the warping mechanism on the Blériot, which might have caused the craft to pitch forward.

 
Beachey remained an enigma. Held sufficiently responsible in the press for the deaths of fellow aviators to be labeled the “Pacemaker for Death,” he had also become perhaps the nation’s leading advocate for aircraft safety. He tried constantly to dissuade other flyers from attempting stunts that were beyond their ability to complete safely. He always wore a shoulder harness, made certain to scrupulously check every airplane in which he flew before each ascent, and was always recommending improvements in equipment to increase safety. On more than one occasion, he mercilessly excoriated the War Department for refusing to invest in aviation and accused the generals of killing young flyers by requiring them to go aloft in second-rate airplanes.

  But Beachey continued to embrace the outrageous as well. At the 1912 Chicago air meet in August, he once again bragged that he had trained a female pilot, this time a Frenchwoman, one Clarice Lavaseur, and, sure enough, a short, dowdy woman with rouged cheeks, dressed in a long skirt and coat and large hat, took the controls of Beachey’s plane.*5 Ascending unsteadily, Lavaseur appeared as if she would never survive. Dipping erratically then ascending, then diving toward the crowd of one hundred thousand now-scattering spectators, Lavaseur eventually made her way to Michigan Avenue, where the plane lost altitude until the wheels were literally bouncing off the roofs of automobiles. “Police reported cases of watchers toppling out of automobiles in the paddock.” At one point, the out-of-control aircraft seemed certain to ram a ferry on Lake Michigan. Passengers on a launch all ran to one side to watch and tipped the boat over, necessitating a rescue in Lake Michigan.16 Eventually the woman found a way to land the plane directly in front of the center of the grandstand. As they had in Los Angeles, the stunned crowd suddenly erupted in cheers and applause when Beachey whipped off the hat and wig underneath and stood before them.

  As Beachey was careening about, Beckwith Havens was having an incident of his own. He had been cajoled to go aloft with a film company director in a small hydroplane built for one person. He took off at the lakeside, did a lap in the air, and then landed on the water. But the plane lacked the power for a water takeoff with the weight of two passengers, so Havens persuaded the director to jump overboard close to the shore. The director was unfazed but the police didn’t take kindly to Havens ditching his passenger.

  “Next thing, a police launch was alongside and they had me by the collar and hauled me up in front of hundreds of thousands of people. Lincoln Beachey had a trick he used to pull at the shows. He’d come out dressed as a woman and take off and fly as if he was crazy, all over the place, and everybody’d be screaming and yelling. He saw what was happening while he was doing this act so he took a dive at me, just over my head … very amusing.”

  Once again, spectacle coexisted with death. Eight days earlier, Wright aviator Howard Gill had been killed in a midair collision at the opening of the meet.

  * * *

  *1 Whether or not this bit of dialogue is true is unclear. Ely was quite possibly already dead when rescuers reached him.

  *2 Some recent literature suggests Mabel Ely goaded her husband into his foolhardy flying with taunts accusing him of being “not as good as Beachey,” but this seems preposterous. Mabel Ely was her husband’s biggest supporter and they were as close as any couple could be.

  *3 Kabitzke graduated from the Wright school the day before Wilbur died. That October, during a two-hour endurance test of the Wright C at College Park, he would be thrown from the craft after plummeting two thousand feet but miraculously escape injury. He later became head of the Wright school himself and lived until 1944.

  *4 But Scott, in the end, did not “get it.” She quit flying in 1916, went to Hollywood as a screenwriter, and lived until 1970.

  *5 The state of national news at the time was not such that Beachey’s similar stunt earlier in the year at Los Angeles would have been known by more than a handful of people in Chicago.

  A Reluctant Steward

  Milton Wright estimated that within two days of Wilbur’s passing, more than one thousand telegrams were received at the Wright home, including one from Glenn Curtiss. On June 1, twenty-five thousand people filed past his coffin at Dayton’s First Presbyterian Church before Wilbur was taken for a private graveside service and buried in the family plot in Woodland Cemetery. President Taft said that Wilbur “deserves to stand with Edison and Bell,” comparisons that were also made in a great many newspapers.

  Aeronautics wrote, “Strange as it may seem, few have commented on him as a Man, though his work has been lauded to the skies. He was generally misunderstood; he realized this but apparently cared little of what the world thought of him. This is unfortunate. Those who knew him best were scarcely able to pierce the veil which seemed to surround his intricate nature. Suffice to say, however, that the better one knew him, the more he was loved. The world never obtained the proper perspective.” The New York Times added, “Wilbur Wright was not a martyr. His life, if it means anything, shows that a man can carry a great work to success, not only without credit from his fellows, but with supreme indifference to their opinion.”

  Most but not all of the eulogies mentioned Wilbur as one half of a team and few implied that his contribution was greater or more significant than Orville’s. Nowhere was it noted that Wilbur was president of the Wright Company while Orville served as one of either two or three vice presidents, depending on the year. But the disparity of the brothers’ standing in the business was made clear in Andrew Freedman’s condolence letter to Orville. “While my association with [Wilbur] was more intimate than with yourself, I trust you will appreciate the feeling I must naturally have for you as his brother, co-laborer, partner, and successor.” Freedman added that a board of directors resolved “that in the death of Mr. Wright, this company has suffered the irreparable loss of its chief inspiration and guiding spirit,” phrasing that doubtless caused Orville conflicting emotions.

  Orville traveled to New York for a board meeting after the Welsh and Hazelhurst funerals and was elected as the new Wright Company president. It was an unlikely marriage, as Grover Loening understood. “Orville was good at business, I thought, in that very few people could put anything over on him, but he certainly did not have any ‘big business’ ideas or any great ambition to expand. He seemed to be lacking in push.”1

  Once again, Orville was a victim of comparison. Wright Company treasurer Alpheus Barnes told Grover Loening, “Ever Since Orville succeeded [Wilbur] as president, we really have no boss. He takes forever to make a decision … nothing like the quick-acting, quicker-thinking Wilbur. Maybe the breakup of the team has had a bad effect.”2 Tom Crouch added, “Wilbur had not been especially fond of management, but he had worked at it, driven by an ambition that would not permit failure.… Orville had almost none of his brother’s restless ambition nor the energy and drive to succeed that came with it.… The thought of attending a board meeting, let alone presiding at one, was abhorrent to him. Moreover, with the single exception of Robert Collier, he felt little other than contempt for the rich New Yorkers whom Wilbur had regarded as friends and associates.”3 Still, as Orville and Katharine saw it, Wilbur had been killed by the “scoundrels and thieves” who refused to acknowledge the Wrights’ invention, and they would expend whatever energy necessary to avenge their brother. “Orville sued Curtiss for revenge and prestige,” Grover Loening stated flatly.

  In that quest, Orville began with a disappointment. As a result of Wilbur’s death, Curtiss’s lawyers requested yet another adjournment of Wright Company v. Herring–Curtiss, this until the fall term, a move Orville opposed but the judge granted. In an attempt to speed up the process, Wright lawyers decided to suspend the lawsuit against the Aero Club and fold it in with Herring–Curtiss, which made the trial in Buffalo before Judge Hazel the one that would determine the course of American aviation. Judge Hazel, who had been so sympathetic to the Wright cause, also seemed less likely to allow the case to drag on interminably.

  Curtiss would try to keep stalling regardless; he
had nothing to gain by allowing the trial to go forward. For him, the best legal outcome was to be allowed simply to continue to do what he was already doing—building and selling airplanes. Every week that passed, the Curtiss Aeroplane Company grew richer and, perhaps of greater importance, more entrenched with the military, especially the navy. Orville, however, could only gain by bringing the trial to a positive resolution and, as Wilbur had noted in his letter to Frederick Fish, every postponement decreased the value of their patent.

  Each time the Curtiss legal team came back, there was a different reason for the delay; the need for further testimony, a desire to refine their brief, even misunderstandings as to the scope of their defense. By November, however, their options had run out and on the eighteenth of that month, the trial in Wright v. Herring–Curtiss was finally completed before Judge Hazel in Buffalo.

  During this process, Orville showed that he had no intention of being a mere figurehead, nor would he be a pushover. When Freedman telegraphed to tell him that “the annual meeting of the Wright Company has been called for the thirteenth of November at the offices of the company, and I think it would be well that you are here at that time,” Orville replied, “I have decided not to come to New York until after the trial at Buffalo, which begins Monday.” His reasons were good—he thought it better that he be able to report to the board about the trial—but he was also telling Freedman that as president of the company he would set the calendar, not be a slave to it.

  Orville also demonstrated that, despite all the criticism, he might be a more measured chief executive than his brother. Wilbur had pursued the suit against the Aero Club for the Belmont meet receipts of $15,000 with the same unflinching commitment as he had everything else. At first, Orville continued the quest, even in the face of adverse rulings in court. Eventually, however, he began to resist attorney Pliny Williamson’s advice to continue appeal after appeal. On June 29, Williamson informed Orville that Wilbur had authorized the case be taken to the court of appeals if necessary, and Orville agreed to let his brother’s decision stand. But one month later, when Williamson noted that “in addition to lawyers’ fees, there are court costs which go to the opposing party when the moving party is defeated,” Orville began to wonder if he would be throwing good money after bad. He also expressed surprise that Wilbur would have approved such a course. Williamson, who was receiving hefty fees, assured Orville that Wilbur had been adamant about continuing the case, even wanting to file a second action, and that “there were certain reasons, which I do not care to write in a letter but which I will give you when I see you.” Orville reluctantly allowed the case to go forward, but in December he called a halt to the second action. Although he didn’t hold out much hope for a favorable decision, he agreed to allow the appeal to run its course since so much money had already been spent. Then, in a sentence Wilbur never would have written, he told Williamson, “But if we cannot win on our present case, I think we had better abandon the claim.”