Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Although he hit the water at high speed, Beachey did not die from the impact or even lose consciousness. He had broken his leg in the crash but was otherwise unhurt. As he sunk into forty feet of water, he clawed desperately at his harness and the tangle of cables and detritus. While Beachey tried to free himself from the wreckage so that he could float to the surface, divers were dispatched from waiting ships. They attempted frantically to locate the plane in the murky waters and attach a grappling hook. But the fuselage was only brought to the surface forty minutes later. In the end, the greatest aviator America has ever seen died of drowning.

  Beachey’s death in March 1915 marked the end of the exhibition era. Europe was at war and the taste for watching pilots die performing stunts seemed to fade in America, when so many young men were dying for more important reasons across the Atlantic.

  That same year saw the end of the participation of the Wright brothers in the advancement of powered flight. In October, after months of negotiation, Orville Wright left the industry he and his brother had been so responsible for creating. He sold his holdings in the Wright Company, including its patents, to a consortium of Wall Street investors. He was titularly retained as “chief aeronautical engineer” at $25,000 per year, but he had in fact retired. With Orville no longer an executive of the Wright Company, changes were made. When the Wright Model K hydroplane and the Model L military scout were introduced in late 1915, stability was achieved by ailerons, not wing warping.

  * * *

  * The Jenny was featured on the nation’s first air mail stamp, issued in May 1918, which depicted an indigo airplane amid a red background and cost twenty-four cents. The “inverted Jenny,” in which the image of the airplane was mistakenly printed upside down on only one sheet, is among the world’s rarest stamps and is valued at approximately $1 million. A block of four, still attached, sold at auction in 2005 for $3 million.

  Orville made a great deal of money on the sale—an estimated $1.5 million—and, financially secure, he immediately created friction with the new owners by doing little to earn his $25,000 annual fee. The arrangement was soon terminated.

  The new Wright Company fared poorly. The K and L models were failures and just one year after the sale, the company merged with Glenn Martin and the Simplex Automobile Company. The merged Wright–Martin Company did not last long; Glenn Martin left in 1917 to once again start up his own company and the remaining entity was reorganized as the Wright Aeronautical Company in 1919.

  Orville’s departure effectively ended the patent wars. Although the litigation continued, it was largely of its own momentum and bore little resemblance to the ferocious legal wrangling of previous years. Even the formality of a lawsuit vanished with America’s entry into the war in 1917. To ensure that the very best American airplanes were available for the war effort, a board was created, headed by W. Benton Crisp, to draft a cross-licensing arrangement that would allow any manufacturer to use any patented process for a modest fixed fee. But the battle between the Wrights and Curtiss had taken its toll. Not a single American airplane design was deemed worthy to be adapted to combat flying. Only after the war was done and Europe was decimated did American aviation once again attain a prominent place in world markets.

  Orville set up a workshop in Dayton and tinkered. He came up with a few workable ideas, such as the split flap, but never again would Orville Wright be in the news as anything other than an elder statesman. He did lend his name to the Dayton–Wright Company, a concern established by close Ohio friends to produce airplanes during the war. But they had no designs so resorted to copying the de Havilland 4 from Britain. The American version was so poorly made that it earned the nickname “flaming coffin.”1

  Orville had never been comfortable in the public eye—be it Wilbur or Curtiss, he seemed always to feel unfavorably compared with someone—and so he began a retreat into reclusiveness. The exception was his perpetuation of the feud with the Smithsonian. Charles Walcott had escalated the dispute by ordering the Langley aerodrome restored to its original design and then exhibited with a plaque that read “The first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.” Orville stewed until 1925 and then announced that he would send the 1903 Flyer, fully restored, to the Science Museum in London. Walcott died in 1927 with the Flyer still on this side of the Atlantic but the new secretary, astrophysicist Charles Abbott, a former Langley assistant, offered only to modify the language on the aerodrome exhibit, not eliminate it. The following year, after completing most of the restoration himself, Orville did precisely what he had threatened to do and the 1903 Wright Flyer became a centerpiece of the London museum. And there it would remain until the Second World War had ended and Orville Wright was dead.*1

  Although he was often asked to comment on the progress of aviation or trotted out to appear with other luminaries, Orville, bitter and vengeful, continued to withdraw into himself. His longtime secretary, Mabel Beck, zealously and jealously guarded his isolation. Beck was almost universally disliked, including by Wright family members. Orville’s niece Ivonette said, “She felt the power of her position and seemed to want to alienate everyone from Orville in order to have his full attention.”2 But Orville needed little help; his animus, even to those closest to him, grew to extraordinary proportions. When beloved Katharine, with whom he had been inseparable for three decades, finally decided to marry in 1926, he accused her of disloyalty, of abandoning him, and refused to attend her wedding. When Katharine lay dying three years later, he had to be dragged by his brother Lorin to her bedside.3

  Katharine’s death seemed to cut Orville’s last link to society. In 1930, a writer for The New Yorker came to Dayton for an interview. “He found ‘a gray man … dressed in gray clothes. Not only have his hair and his mustache taken on that tone, but [also] his curiously flat face … a timid man whose misery at meeting you is so keen that, in common decency, you leave as soon as you can.’ ”4

  Orville continued to meander between his home and his workshop for the better part of two decades. He was awarded multiple honors and admitted to a variety of associations but was mostly only a face in a photograph. He suffered a heart attack, his second, on January 27, 1948, as he was entering his office in Dayton. He died three days later and was buried in the family plot at Woodland Cemetery. There are three graves in his row: Orville is on one side, Wilbur on the other, and Katharine is between them.

  For all his achievements and notoriety, it is difficult to view Orville Wright as anything but a sad and lonely man who never found his calling—and perhaps never even sought it—and who died without ever making one genuine friend.

  The war was a boon to Curtiss, even before America’s entry spurred the cross-license patent pool. Orders came in from Great Britain in such volume that the War Office advanced him $600,000 against future deliveries, funds with which Curtiss opened a second factory in Buffalo. In 1916, he took in a group of financiers, as had the Wrights six years earlier, but Curtiss’s partners were not at cross-purposes with the man they had bought out. The two factories hummed along, turning out trainers and hydroplanes, more than 10,000 before the war’s end. When the Lusitania was sunk, Congress, so pecuniary to that point, suddenly appropriated $640 million for aviation. With part of that appropriation, the navy commissioned Curtiss to design and build a long-range flying boat that could traverse the Atlantic and then carry sufficient ordnance to fly missions against German U-boats. Opinion in Britain and France was that such an aircraft could not be built, but Curtiss had no doubts. He submitted two plans, one for a three-engine craft and another for five. Both airplanes would be huge—the cable-braced tail section alone (a Curtiss innovation) was twice the size of a single-seat airplane. Eventually the three-engine design was chosen and, instead of producing the entire craft under its direct supervision, the navy gave Curtiss full control. The craft was designated the “Navy-Curtiss (NC)-1.”

  Curtiss came up with the initial design but by this time he emp
loyed an entire engineering department to put his ideas to paper and test them out. Former Curtiss pupil Holden Richardson, who had risen to commander and was a senior officer in naval aviation, had as much to do with the finished product as Curtiss himself. Components were fabricated at various locations and assembled at another new Curtiss facility in Garden City, New York. During its first test flight in September 1918, the NC-1 rose from the water off Rockaway Beach with five passengers. It would eventually carry as many as fifty-one. But then the war ended and the contract was canceled.

  Largely at the behest of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, the project was revived. Lord Northcliffe had also renewed his £10,000 prize. On May 16, 1919, three flying boats took off from Newfoundland bound for the Azores: the NC-1, and two improved models, the NC-3, and NC-4.5 The plan was to refuel, then continue on to Lisbon and then to Plymouth. The four-engine NC-4 made it, the other two did not. Both went down in heavy fog two hundred miles from their destination. The NC-1 sank but its crew was rescued by a passing Greek freighter. The commander of the NC-3, former Curtiss student John Towers, rigged a mast and sail to the craft—it really was a “flying boat”—and sailed it to the Azores. The NC-4 landed in Lisbon on May 27 and in Plymouth four days later, the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. But the accolades were short-lived. Two weeks later, Royal Naval Air Force pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew from Newfoundland to Ireland in sixteen hours to claim both the honor and £10,000 for completing the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic.

  The NC-4 was Curtiss’s finale in aviation. The following year, he liquidated his interests and then retired and moved to Florida, leaving behind an extraordinary record. The list of his inventions and achievements is immense and includes the seaplane, retractable landing gear, twist-grip throttles for motorcycles, dual controls, the enclosed cockpit, tricycle landing gear, the step pontoon, the watertight compartment, the airboat, and a number of machines to manufacture airplane components. He created the first civilian flying school and the first military flying school, conducted both the first simulated bombing run and first use of firearms from an aircraft, and delivered the first radio communication from the skies.

  The Wright–Curtiss feud persists to the present day as a proxy war—historians of early flight tend to deify one and demonize the other. Either the Wrights were brilliant visionaries and honest toilers attempting to ward off the incursions of those, particularly Curtiss, who stole their ideas and even perhaps improved on them, but refused to acknowledge their debt in word or banknote; or Wilbur and Orville were rapacious misanthropes who were all too happy to stop progress in its tracks by stifling brilliant innovators, particularly Curtiss, all to stuff their pockets with more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes.

  Both descriptions contain grains of truth but each is mostly beside the point. Whether Curtiss would have discovered the secrets of flight if he had not journeyed to Dayton in September 1906 is also not relevant to the larger issue. Curtiss may not have been an intuitive genius but he was an inveterate innovator; he may have been incapable of a great breakthrough, but he would constantly improve any resultant product. Wilbur Wright was a visionary architect, but Glenn Curtiss was a master builder. One can dispute who was more vital but progress unquestionably demands both. By attempting to neuter Curtiss, even if their accusations were correct, the Wrights stifled the development of American aviation.

  That is, of course, the irony of the patent system. Without patent protection, a competitor can simply replicate an invention and undercut the inventor’s price—which necessarily includes all the time and expense of research and development—so the incentive to experiment and create will be severely inhibited. But if innovators such as Glenn Curtiss cannot build on the progress of others without paying exorbitantly for the privilege, the incentive to continue to experiment and create is similarly inhibited. Finding the proper balance remains difficult. Although pioneer patents have passed from jurisprudence, the patent system remains as difficult to administer as it was in the Wrights’ time as the plethora of suits among Internet providers and device makers will attest.

  Curtiss did not arrive in Florida as the stereotypical retiree. He almost immediately purchased 220,000 acres in Dade County and formed a syndicate that developed the cities of Hialeah, including the racetrack, Miami Springs, and Opa-Locka, intended as a planned community with Arabian Nights architecture. The current Miami International Airport was begun during that period as Curtiss Field.

  In 1918, however, a failure to tie up loose ends almost a decade earlier left Curtiss vulnerable to another of his enemies and that vulnerability was quickly exploited. Augustus Herring arose once more from aviation’s scrap heap to claim that the dissolution of Herring–Curtiss had been the result of a deceitful act by Curtiss against his innocent and well-meaning partner. Curtiss, it seems, had neglected to have his old company legally dissolved after the bankruptcy. Herring called a stockholders’ meeting at which he was the only stockholder present and then resurrected the company, at least on paper, with him as president and a board of directors of cronies. The company then refiled Herring’s previous suit against Curtiss and the other original board members on the grounds that they had connived to cheat Herring out of his stock after obtaining his designs and ideas, and then used those designs and ideas to make a good deal of money. That there had been no designs or ideas was once again omitted from Herring’s brief.

  The trial took five years to come to a verdict and it was in Curtiss’s favor. Curtiss, by then busily developing land in Florida, thought that would be the end of it, but Herring was nothing if not persevering. He appealed, but in 1926, while the appeal was pending, Herring suffered a series of strokes and died. His heirs, however, demonstrated that they were equally persevering and pressed the claim on their father’s behalf. And incredibly, they were successful. In 1928, an appeals court judge in Buffalo ruled that Curtiss had committed “malfeasance and misfeasance” in cheating Herring out of royalties. Curtiss vowed to continue to fight. He didn’t have much use for the Wrights, but he loathed Herring.

  In July 1930, Curtiss was once more called to Buffalo, due to testify in an appeal of the verdict, when he was struck with appendicitis while visiting Hammondsport. Surgery was performed on July 11 in Buffalo and for two weeks, Curtiss’s convalescence was excellent. But on July 23, he unexpectedly lapsed into a coma and the next day he was dead at age fifty-two of a pulmonary embolism.

  Herring’s heirs pressed on and in the end, the greatest fabulist in aviation history won out. With both principals dead, the Curtiss estate settled with the Herring estate for an estimated $500,000.6

  Curtiss might have been spared watching his money being handed over to the Herring family, but he was very much alive in June 1929 to see the Wright Aeronautical Company merge with the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company to form Curtiss-Wright, the largest aviation holding company in America, with assets of more than $70 million. Seven companies affiliated with Curtiss and two with Wright were included in the deal. Neither the Wright nor Curtiss families participated in the transaction beyond lending their names to the new corporation.*2 Nonetheless, the industry that the Wrights and Curtiss begat has become one of the most successful in history. In commercial aviation alone, thousands of aircraft carry millions of passengers billions of miles each year.

  As the saga of early flight becomes more distant, it gains rather than loses fascination. Air travel is now so commonplace, has been so widely experienced, that those who risked their lives every time they took an airplane aloft, who flew in open aircraft totally exposed to the elements and without seat restraints, who took their machines to great heights in freezing cold or in pelting rain, who died and watched their friends die pushing up against the limits of performance, have become almost mythical figures. They were that, of course, but they were also simply young and eager men and women embracing a new technology with the breathless zeal of youth. The fear of deat
h would dissuade them no more than it did the first climber to summit Everest without extra oxygen or the first diver to swim among sharks without a cage.

  But every bit as poignant as the deaths of the many men and women who braved those early airplanes and perished in spectacular fashion is the tragic enigma that was Wilbur Wright. Wilbur seemed as determined to hurtle to his own destruction as Ely or Beachey or Cal Rodgers. But where Beachey, Ely, and Rodgers died doing what they loved, Wilbur died doing something he hated.

  He was driven forward to pursue his aspirations to monopoly with almost religious zeal, and therein perhaps lies a hint to the apparent contradiction between Wilbur’s unflagging insistence that he and Orville toiled only for the betterment of humanity and the Wrights’ obssessive focus on profiteering.

  In St. Louis to visit the 1904 exposition at which Roy Knabenshue piloted the California Arrow to glory if not to riches was a forty-year-old German intellectual named Max Weber. Well thought of in Germany but virtually unknown in America, Weber was to become a titan, brilliant in every discipline, a transcendent philosopher who would blur the lines between sociology, economics, and political theory and be credited as one of the founders of what today is called “social science.” During his stay in St. Louis, he was working on a series of essays that would be published the following year in German and become his most famous work, Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus—or, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

  Weber’s essential thesis was that “ascetic Protestantism,” with its emphasis on the notion that hard work was an activity ordained by God, supported the belief that the manifestation of the fruits of hard work—profit—was indicative of maximum piety. Lest Weber be misunderstood, he emphasized that there was a distinction between financial success as an indication of godliness and simple greed, that amassing money for its own sake has nothing to do with either religion or capitalism. But genuine hard work for profit was seen by the righteous Protestant as a calling for those who sought to please God by their adherence to His dictates and those who would frustrate such an ambition were evil and sinful.