The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
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WOWO
For hours, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, in his capacity as a test pilot, circled Langley Field in a modified DH-4 daylight bomber. Reading over and over from a list of single syllable words into a radio microphone, he transmitted the signal to the receiving ground station below. The antenna, a 100-foot length of wire made of fine phosphor-bronze strands, like gossamer, weighing just an ounce and a half, had been spooled out beyond the tail upon takeoff. The experiment was to ascertain what words would broadcast well from aloft. He repeated, “Maim, maim, main, main, make, make, man, man, map, map, mar, mar, mask, mask, match, match, mate, mate, maul, maul, maze, maze, mean, mean…” Smith did not have a receiver. The engine’s roar and the wind swaddling the open cockpit made hearing anything in return impossible. In the static between the words’ echoing, both the small sizzle produced by the radio and the larger ambient howling swirling around him, he pictured the injection of his stuttering speech into the invisible stream of the space between space. Of course, he had no way of knowing then of electromagnetic troughs and waves, that his broadcast was and would become a component of the leading edge of that initial radio pulse, pulsing still and still expanding outward into the greater galaxy. No, lulled by his recited litany, he imagined something more along the lines of a leaf falling, switching back and forth on some unseen current, still a creature connected to gravity, as he was, and not flying off weightlessly, in all directions, out into empty space.
In April of 1925, Art Smith returned home to Fort Wayne, contracted to advertise the new commercial radio station, WOWO, broadcasting then on 1320 kHz. Chester Keen who also owned the Main Auto Supply Company owned the station, and Smith was paid for the job with parts he would use to customize his airmail Curtiss and his own aeroplane. He employed as an orientating landmark the downtown intersections of the city’s rail lines where the yards of the Pennsylvania and Wabash meshed. There, Smith stitched together the call letters, the double-ues’ undulations mimicking the amplitude of radio waves. Below him, he could see the many steam engines shunting back and forth on the tracks, making their own visible smoke and steam, more telegraphic than sonic, the dots and dashes blooming along the lines as if their semaphoring was a kind of response to his own. But silent, all of this in silence, as his altitude and the constant crash of wind muted the reports of the whistles blowing when the engines picked up speed or changed directions. Seeing the bursts of smoke below him, Art Smith summoned up that sound—that familiar wail of it, its panting exhaustion, its depressed minor key, that accumulating and crashing of the sound, wave after wave after wave.
Scale
From the air, the world, falling away below, grew so small. It always struck Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, how diminished, how minuscule the people in the crowds of people who had come to see him fly became as he climbed. They shrank. Or, more exactly—collapsed, flattened, contracted. Even evaporated. Boiled down to nothing. He was aware of this and other optical illusions flying created. The forced perspective of this new kind of distance was proof that human eyes were not built to see clearly under such circumstances. Our eyes were not like those of the raptors, who could glimpse and target the smallest of the small growing smaller as they soared.
This effect never failed to amaze his passengers back in the early days of exhibition flying. Those observers would have been lucky to have climbed as high as the rooftop of a five-story building or the belfry of a church steeple. They squealed through the prop wash and roar of the engine, “Look, look!” their shouts scrambled and shushed. They gestured instead, squeezing the air between their closing fingers to pinch upon the ever-compressing image of a shrinking spectator below.
Art Smith had met Paul Guillow, a naval aviator, during The Great War, when together with other test pilots and instructors they developed the close comradeship of the airmen’s barracks in Ohio. This intense friendship went so far as to the creation of a tontine whose capital consisted of patent applications, blueprints, and aeronautical drawings of wing, engine, and fuselage design each individual club member had devised. Guillow imagined after the war that there would be a public interest in scale models of the life-sized aeroplanes he and his compatriots had built in barns and backyard sheds at the dawn of powered flight. Far from the war where the exigencies of combat were accelerating design modifications of the new fighter aircraft at the front, Art Smith and Paul Guillow experimented with the miniaturization of aeroplanes from the past, fabricating from balsa wood, tissue paper, dope, thread gauge wire and foil, the replicas of their flying machines.
The war over, Paul Guillow went on to found the company that to this day bears his name. Guillow manufactures model kits of actual aircraft as well as simple penny gliders that when thrown with their pliant wooden wings warped to the proper degree perform rudimentary aeronautic maneuvers, barrel rolls and loops, as they sail through the air. Guillow engaged his former barracks mate and fellow tontine subscriber, Art Smith, to compose, in skywriting, advertising for the new company. Above Wakefield, Massachusetts, in 1925, Art Smith experimented, constructing the message, scaled scales, careful to retrace the schematic he had drawn, s c a l e, on a piece of gridded paper onto an unruled sky. From the ground, his airplane was but a mere speck in the heavens, a pinpoint, the nib of an invisible pen from which the letters billowed forth and then disappeared in an invented distance.
After all these years of “skywriting” it was still difficult for Art Smith to judge how his compositions appeared to the earthbound onlooker. From where he sat, he was lost in a maze of his own invention. He counted out the seconds during the long reach of an “l,” to the point where he felt the stroke should be stopped. The curves and arches and loops were more difficult to produce. He must hold a banking turn while monitoring his compass as it swung through the wide arch of bearings. In the midst of a witty sentiment, he was entangled and enveloped by the clouds, the fog, he himself had generated.
Your eyes can play tricks on you. They seem not to be calibrated to see, to comprehend size over great distance, a perspective now made readily possible by heavier-than-air powered flight. Art Smith would, the next year, mistake a light in a farmyard for the lights of the landing strip in Toledo. One night, he found in the depths of one pocket of his flight jacket a newly minted dime whose obverse bore the profile of Liberty in a winged cap though widely mistaken as portraiture of Mercury, the messenger god. He drew it out, and, out of his pocket, the dime’s silvered surface caught a flash of moonlight. That clear night, flying with the full moon riding on his wing tip, Smith eyed the planetary heft of that moon muscling into the sky and then, like that, he held up the coin, the thin little wafer tweezed between his fingers, held it at arm’s length, and saw it blot out any inkling of another nearby world in all that nearby closing darkness.
Word Cross
In Nara, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was introduced to aviatrix Katherine Stinson, The Flying School Girl, by General Nagaoka, the imperial impresario who had organized the visits, when their separate demonstration tours of Japan intersected in the soggy city south and west of Tokyo. The citizens of Nara had built a temporary open-sided hangar where the pilots and their aeroplanes took shelter during a steady downpour. Smith returned to Japan with the 1915 model biplane he flew during his first visit. He was very interested in Stinson’s craft, a Sopwith biplane, especially its power plant, the Gnome rotary engine salvaged from the wreckage of Lincoln Beachey’s fatal crash into San Francisco Bay. The motor had been recovered along with the body. Art recalled witnessing the dead spin into the bay during the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Beachey’s monoplane disintegrated, flung hundreds of fractured pieces, flying components, gear, wings all around him. Now here was the very Gnome engine powering Stinson’s Pup. What emotions must that somber tableau of the two grounded American fliers have inspired in the throng of curious Japanese citizens huddling there, the rain rattling the canvas roof of the hangar? They were the two survivors of the club, inclu
ding Beachey, that had originated the loop-to-loop. Later, when the weather lifted, the show went on. The two agreed to perform together. Smith rigged a floor oil feed though Stinson’s exhaust, allowing her to skywrite with him. They took off together, splashing through the rain-soaked field, startling the scattering herds of the heavenly sika deer of Nara as they gained speed. Their coordinated aerial acrobatic maneuvers mirrored the “dogfighting” taking place worlds away. On the ship passage to the East this time, Art Smith had been distracted by the back issues of the New York World newspaper in the ship’s stateroom and the new puzzle it featured called “Word-Cross,” where clues led the contestant to enter letters into blank squares of a diamond-shaped template. He was frustrated, however, discovering that most of the puzzles had been solved, the letters left in their spaces by the thoughtlessness of previous readers. Katherine Stinson was also familiar with the new puzzle craze and was eager to contribute to the simultaneous composition. The “O” hinge, created as the two circled each other elegantly over and over, confused the gaping crowd gazing up from below. Who was the pursued and who the pursuer?
Instructions in War Time
Upon hearing the news of the United States entering the Great War in April of 1917, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, immediately presented himself to the Aviation Section of the United States Signal Corps, the branch of the Army charged with organizing the country’s first air force. His attempt to enlist as a combat pursuit pilot failed. He was thought to be unfit for flying, too short at five foot two to reach the pedals of the fighter craft and hobbled by the many injuries derived from his frequent crashes. He walked with a pronounced limp. His right arm at the shoulder demonstrated a limited range of motion. Several fingers of his right hand were numb. A big toe had been amputated after being frostbitten. His ears registered a constant ringing. The Aviation Section recognized the talent of the famous pilot nonetheless, and he was appointed a civilian instructor, reporting to Langley Field in Virginia. Instructor Art Smith quickly modified his Curtiss JN-4 training aircraft to accept his skywriting apparatus. Here, he used the device to simulate the sun in order to teach his new charges the tactic of using the sun’s light to blind the enemy aviators under attack. The new pilots dove repeatedly out of this artificial sun. One was to be aware of where the sun was at all times, to employ it upon attacking, and to be conscious of its danger when on the defensive. Often, the simulation of THE SUN would become unreadable when backlit by the sun, the ethereal letters obliterated and overwhelmed with intense illumination from the higher altitude.
Art Smith, relegated to the pilot instructor role by a skeptical Army Air Force, was not one to contribute only the bare minimum in his new assignment. He, unasked, devoted his genius as a mechanical engineer and his many skills as a mechanic to the emerging obstacles of training aviators and adapting their aircraft to the rigors of aerial combat. For many long hours at McCook Field, he studied the captured specifications of Fokker’s synchronization for the timed firing of Vickers machine gun rounds in intervals between the rotating propeller blades, discovering, at last, a method to add a second forward-firing weapon to the borrowed British Bristol F.2 fighter. Smith is also credited with the ingenious innovation of dual controls, allowing the student and pilot access to two sets of independent control surfaces. He often used his skywriting to instruct. Here the message exhorts his charges to consider the proper aiming at the enemy target sporadically maneuvering ahead of the attacker on “his tail.” Smith would allow the novice to grip the dead stick as he flew the intricate pattern of composition—the attitudes and trims, the angles of attack, the banks and rolls, the dives and climbs—in order to create, in his young charges, the muscle memory of evasion, the attractive grip of gravity, the empty weightlessness waiting at the pinnacle of a loop after the coup de grâce.
Art Smith became an expert handling phosphorus during his nightly aerobatic displays at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915. During the Great War, fleets of German Zeppelins attacked London, arriving over the city at night in what is thought to be the first strategic aerial bombing campaign of a major city. Initially, projectiles from artillery or aircraft had little effect on the massive dirigibles, as the pressure maintained in the gas envelopes was only slightly higher than the ambient air. Punctures had little effect. It was only when incendiary rounds were developed to ignite the flammable lifting gas within did the airships fall prey to the counterattacking airplanes. Here, in a brilliant phosphorous script, Art Smith illuminates the night with a target for his young charges to attack using munitions coated with these volatile jackets of fiery phosphorus.
Years later, while flying with the Air Mail Service in Ohio, Art Smith was one of the first on the scene at the crash of the USS Shenandoah over Noble County. He was able to spot the wreckage. The remnants of shiny silvered fabric of its envelope were strewn on the ground, reflecting the moon’s intense light, radiating full and high overhead, the thunderstorm that had so recently torn the airship to pieces now breaking apart, the storm clouds accelerating away to the northeast, revealing a night sky punctuated by the distant and barely visible stars.
Iced Air
Into the 1920s, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, flew the mail overnight from Cleveland, Ohio, to Chicago, Illinois, in a de Havilland biplane he modified himself to ward off the freezing temperatures at altitude. He rigged the open cockpit with a canvas cowling that he cinched at his neck to deflect the blasting wind, and, at his feet, a shroud taken from an automotive exhaust heater radiated the soothing warmth given off by his 400 horsepower Liberty engine. He flew in relative comfort through the dark nights while during the day he moonlighted, composing advertising messages with his novel skywriting invention.
In the summer of 1922, in the midst of the record heat wave that would last through July, Art Smith climbed through the cloudless but dense tropic inversion over the Cuyahoga to etch in the saturated sky the promise made by the recently formed Carrier Engineering Corporation of mechanical “air conditioning.”
Willis Carrier, the company’s founder, was granted U.S. patent No. 808897 for his invention, which he named an “Apparatus for Treating Air.” Carrier was by then the father of Rational Psychrometrics having first proposed the idea of a “relative” humidity, describing the difference between the actual temperature and the temperature one actually feels. Mr. Carrier had shown great interest in Smith’s innovative skywriting and climate control devices, and they discussed, before the aviator’s launch, the thermic degrees and gradations as one leaves the surface of the earth.
Over a steamy Cleveland, Art Smith dotting the “i” of the “i” in “iced” and the “i” of the “i” in “air” was freezing as he skated through thinning thermal layers. Below, he attempted to warm himself with memory, remembered it was sweltering there on the ground. His pristine calligraphy aloft no doubt was diffused by the oppressive haze hugging the earth. As he worked, his fingers going numb on the wheel and throttle, he imagined the solid column of stagnant air rising up to meet him from below, a thermal swirling, a kind of massive baking cake, and he a pastry chef, spelling out, in a frosty frosting and against his natural inclinations, a wished-for wish.
Influenza
It was once believed the sudden but cyclical reoccurrence of the respiratory disease we know as “the flu” was brought on by the periodic orbiting of heavenly bodies. The Italian word, “influenza” reflected this suspected connection that the radiation generated by the stars “influenced” the health and well-being of its earthbound recipients.
In the early months of 1918, a pandemic influenza swept the globe. It has become known as the “Spanish Flu,” not because of its origin there but because Spain, a neutral country in the Great War, did not censor the morbidity and mortality rates as the disease took hold, creating the appearance that the flu persisted there and not within the borders of its combatant neighbors. In reality, one of the earliest outbreaks occurred in Haskell County, Kansas, i
n March of 1918.
Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, then an instructor and test pilot for the United States Army Air Service, was dispatched from McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio, to Fort Riley, Kansas, where most of the camp was stricken by this novel and deadly strain of the disease.
In an attempt to quarantine the decimated post while at the same time disguising the true nature and extent of the calamity and its casualties, Smith inoculated the sky arching over Fort Riley with this hom-onymic message. In the still pristine air over the prairie, the message persisted, could be read for miles. Unbeknownst to the incapacitated bivouacked below, the chemical makeup of the smoke had been altered, infused with a tincture of antiseptic Listerine in aerosol suspension. Its heavier-than-air hygienic ingredients separated out of the solution of shaped sterile clouds over the time it took to construct the word, rained down silently and invisibly upon the congregation of the ill and their beleaguered caregivers barely surviving on the infected ground beneath Smith’s feverish inscription.
At McCook Field, Art Smith had worked with engineer, Etienne Dormoy, on the early experiments in crop dusting, hauling aloft payloads of lead arsenate slurry to aerially apply the poison over a catalpa tree farm near Troy, Ohio. The target was a hawk moth, the catalpa sphinx caterpillar infesting the grove. The initial results seemed successful, the heavy metal mist being breathed in by the bugs’ accordion-like spiracles, wreaking havoc on its respiratory function, and plating their colorful carapaces with a grimy metallic coating that knocked them from the defoliated branches.