by The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (retail) (epub)
Flying over Kansas, Art Smith watched as, in the great distance, clouds piled up into the spectacular anvil-headed vaporous mountain ranges of an approaching front, the silent lightning within it tripping a telegraphy of bright bursts throughout the long line of relentless weather. Indeed, the dead and dying below were “under the weather.” And above it, in the thick occluded air, Art Smith, a devout Christian Scientist, circled and banked and dove and dipped, composing his kind of prophylactic prayer, an efficacious message to intercept and countermand the ill influences of that heaven domed above him. Seeded within the smoke, backlit by the green sunset filtered through the storm, sanded phosphorus ignited and oxidized, glittering as it burned within the words, creating a kind of smokescreen as the letters smeared into one another, propelled by the wind before the front. The writing became a silt of smoke, a fine flashing osmotic canopy of dust, another cloudy riddle absorbed into the approaching mass of clouds.
Still
In 1915, on the eve of his departure from San Francisco to Japan for his first tour there, the news broke that Aimee Cour, the wife of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, had left California, returning home via train to her parents in Indiana. His three-year marriage in shambles, Art took to the air in pursuit of his retreating wife, tracing the railroad right-of-way until he overtook the consist near Truckee as her train approached the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada. There, in the thin mountain air, Smith composed a message in the hope his estranged wife would catch a glimpse of the missive out of her parlor car window.
Leap-frogging across the Great Central Plains, Art Smith followed the Overland Route of the Union Pacific, its crack express train bearing Aimee Cour eastward. Flying ahead of the speeding engine, Smith continued to skywrite this cryptic message at intervals that many on board, looking out from the open observation platform, believed mimicked, as it faded in the distance, the parade of telegraph poles, disappearing, as well, in the wake of the onward speeding train.
In Chicago, Aimee Cour changed trains, boarding the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited to Fort Wayne. Art Smith flew between the city’s tall buildings, etching in vapor the single word again, the same one he had inscribed over and over upon the open sky of two thirds of the North American Continent. His estranged wife must have spied the ghostly aerial letters sliced apart by the sculpted airspaces the skyscrapers created as her taxi, in lunchtime traffic, transferred her from the North Western Terminal to Union Station where she barely made her connection.
Years later, Art Smith, returned to Lake James in the northwestern corner of the state of Indiana. It was there, years before, drifting in a rowboat with his future wife, Aimee Cour, on the lake’s placid surface that he confessed his love for her and his desire to fly, drawing her attention to the lazily circling hawk in the distance. As he hovered above the site, steering his smoke emitting aircraft to compose, once again, his plaintive message, Art Smith thought he remembered the moment that marked the beginning of his life. He once again spelled out the plea from years before. The letters overhead were reflected in the green waters of the lake and seemed to sink as they dissipated, disappearing below the jagged horizon of pine, the only sound that of his machine’s echoing engine.
Mayday, Mayday, Mayday
It is not known if this message that appeared over farm fields near Muncie, Indiana, in the spring of 1923, was actually meant to be a distress signal, but it is confirmed that Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was at the controls of the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” that applied it to the cloudless skies.
Earlier that year, Fredrick Mockford, the senior radio officer at London’s Croydon Field, popularized the phrase, a corruption of the French venez m’aider, as a verbal equivalent of telegraphy’s SOS. The proper procedure was to pronounce “mayday” three times in succession, MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY, to distinguish it as an actual declaration of an emergency and not a message about a MAYDAY declaration. In any event, only one MAYDAY appeared that day in white smoke against the background of the azure skies of Indiana.
Art Smith had, by this time, crashed many times while piloting various aircraft, most famously his elopement flight and the botched landing at Osaka, and survived. At this point in his life, he was routinely flying mail between Cleveland and Chicago. It will be three more years before he mistakes the lights of a farmhouse for that landing field at night and plows into a copse of trees and perishes in the resulting fire.
That May Day, he flew in Troy, Michigan, during Fort Custer’s Americanization Day parade, dropping confetti on the troops of the recently repatriated Russian Expeditionary Force as they passed in review. He performed his old aerobatic maneuvers for the appreciative crowd—endless loop-to-loops, traced by the curlicue of ragged smoke that might have looked as if he was in some kind of distress, stalled, on fire, and about to lose all control.
We lose track of Art Smith after that until he reappears again in our records, skimming over Indiana at treetop level. Below him, a ground fog of dust aroused by farmers breaking open the soil for spring planting. Beasts of all sorts scatter and stampede through the pastures beneath the Jenny, propelled by the engine’s persistent trill. Perhaps the smell of the earth reaches the altitude, finds its way into the cockpit, freshening the thick stench of burnt engine oil and paraffin. It is a kind of accident that he is here now at the confluence of the seasons, of history, on his way home or off on some new adventure. The new leaves in the stretching trees just catching the sun are almost ready to explode.
O
In the spring of 1916, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, embarked for Japan. Invited by the Emperor’s government, he was to conduct a series of flights in that country, demonstrating the capabilities of the new flying machines. At the Panama Pacific Exposition, the year before, he had taken a Japanese flag with him on one of his many flights over the fair, commemorating, he announced, the ascension of the Mikado to the Imperial throne the next day. At 3,000 feet, in honor of the coronation taking place across the Pacific, he launched the banner. Attached to a “parachute,” a new device of his own design, the flag unfurled, the banner floating to earth in an impressive diplomatic display. A year later, back in San Francisco, Art Smith circled above the Embarcadero, composing this farewell message as on the ground below his second biplane was loaded aboard the Chiyomaru along with a half dozen miniature racers he christened his “baby cars.” In Japan, he would employ the speeders on the ground as part of his presentations. He completed several other aerial maneuvers that day, tracing with a trail of smoke as he emerged from the massive fog bank at the bay’s entrance, an arch that, years later, would be realized with the span of the Golden Gate Bridge. Art Smith landed his plane on a nearby dock and proceeded to disassemble the craft, packing it carefully for safe storage aboard the steamer for the voyage.
O
During the lengthy voyage across the Pacific, Art Smith kept busy preparing for the exhibition that lay ahead. Several times, he tore down and rebuilt the mechanism that produced the smoke needed to generate skywriting, adjusting the apertures of the various nozzles, calibrating the coiled heating elements, and experimenting with new formulas of dyes and paraffin. In the early morning, the sun rising roundly in the ship’s wake, he might be found on the fantail, launching any number of kites and gliders into the stiff prevailing headwind. The experimental craft, tethered to the ship’s stern, performed startling aerobatics, guided by the sure touch of Smith’s piloting, only to be reeled in later so as not to interfere with the late morning skeet shooting. Souvenir postcards were produced of Art Smith motoring one of his miniature race cars around the promenade deck of the Chiyomaru; copies would be sold later at the appearances in Japan. When not writing letters home, Smith busied himself sketching the schematics of his upcoming aerial compositions, reproduced here from the undated pages of his journal:
O
Sketched roughly on one page
o
and then revised on the following one.
0
And this image was found later in his notes.
This scribble above was thought by many to be an innocent doodle, though it could represent an attempt to visualize some heretofore unrealized aeronautic maneuver.
Fellow passengers reported that they witnessed Smith transfixed at the ship’s rail, observing through the circular frame of the ship’s life-saving buoy the framed image of the apparently stationary but roiling mountains of ashy clouds emitted by the many active volcanoes of the Hawaiian Island chain hard by the ship’s stately passage.
Upon landing at the Port of Yokohama, Art Smith oversaw the unloading of his crated biplanes. After the initial cursory customs inspections of the crates, the tarped and netted pallets of his cargo, Smith entertained a brief ceremonial welcome conducted by representatives of the prefecture’s government, presenting The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne with feathered leis, laurel wreaths, and nosegays of local flowers while a local industry band played a far eastern rendition of “On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away.” The welcoming crowd did not disperse but remained to watch the American aviator assemble one of his airships on the milling dock in the shadow of the Chiyomaru. Night fell as Smith worked to rebuild his craft, acquiring through such exertion his “land legs” once more. Upon completion of the task and after sufficient fuel was procured and delivered via a makeshift bucket brigade, Smith reviewed the working order of his engine in a static test there on the dock, the propeller revving loudly. And as the night came on, he decided to take a short shakedown sortie over the bay. In the gloaming overhead, Smith initiated his skywriting mechanism and in one continuous loop inscribed on the sky an O in a white smoke that appeared, to the amazed onlookers below, as black, backlit by the setting sun.
Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was given special permission to fly over the Aoyama Itchome. Tradition in Japan held that no mortal could be “higher” than the Emperor who with the Crown Prince and his brothers admired Smith’s initial letter as it appeared overhead. That letter “O,” to the surprise of Westerners in the party, was the only one forthcoming. In the pristine air it floated there, expanding slowly above the imperial grounds while Smith went on to perform various other loops and rolls no longer punctuated by a trail of smoke. At one point dropping perpendicularly 1,000 meters and pulling up at an altitude where he could easily be seen, he tipped his hat to the enthralled royal party a stone’s throw below.
Immediately apparent to the enthusiastic and appreciative local audience, the circle of smoke was not a letter at all but a Japanese word, the enso, meaning circle itself and used in meditative calligraphy of zen to symbolize an “expression of a moment.” One continuous brushstroke, usually drawn with black ink on silk paper, was done here with the same elegance and grace in oily smoke upon the bleached blue sky over the Mikado.
The night sky in Kyoto was alive with fireflies. There above the sparks, Art Smith composed a new enso. This time he deployed the skywriting apparatus that used phosphorus to trace a blinding white circle in the inky sky. Later, it was reported in Asahi shimbun that Smith had said he performed the act while his eyes were closed. He had been blinded that night by the battery of searchlights on the ground following his every move.
This enso appeared over Osaka.
In Sapporo after inscribing an enso in a cloudless sky, Smith plummeted earthward in a “dead dive” from 400 meters, leveling overhead to race with the four midget cars jockeying below him when, suddenly, his engine seized. Gliding now, Smith attempted to steer clear of the crowd, avoiding injuring the startled spectators. His propeller stopped, Smith lost all control, and a gust of wind turned the biplane over into the ground. The fracture of his left leg would be a clean one. General Nagoake, his host, rushed to the disintegrated craft, scraps of the plane’s canvas skin skidding along the new mown grass of the field caught up in the wind as it freshened.
Thin
The make of the altimeter used by Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was a Tycos. The inscription on its face read: SHORT & MASON, LTD. LONDON. Art Smith modified the instrument, soldering wire on the back of the case to create loops allowing for a leather strap to be threaded through the openings so that the device might be worn on his wrist. The altimeter measured altitude by means of gauging the atmospheric pressure, the vast mass of the air weighing down upon the earth. Art Smith referred to the air at the altitude where he did his work skywriting as “thin.” Up there, he said many times, he felt a great weight lift off of him. He would float, he reported, as he nosed his airplane earthward whilst attaining the highest point on the arc of the terminal “n.”
Often, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, would attempt to map the density of the various layers he would sense embedded in the wind stream. Flying through the clear clean air, he marked the gradients of the many transitions through the thinning atmosphere with the tell-tale epitaphs of smoke generated by his skywriting machine, mirroring the wispy strands of cirrus clouds floating even farther above the diminishing messages, a kind of airy moth-eaten parchment written upon by disappearing ink.
Art Smith would many times trace the seam between the high and low pressure systems he found aloft, a topography through the clouds, a vector demarcating the leading edge of the front’s face often traveling for miles to the point that the fuel feeding his skywriting apparatus ran out. On one such occasion upon the exhaustion of that fuel, Art Smith noticed that the plane itself was producing a similar airy vapor from the vortices of wind his wings created. He dubbed the thin trails of smoke “contrails,” a kind of elongated cloud generated by the moisture in the air, condensed when forced over the wing at high altitudes and high speed. He thought then of course of the aerial combat of the Great War, its Armistice recently concluded, and another kind of cursive line airplanes emitted—the oily smoke of burning fuel ignited by machine gun fire, the spiral punctuation mark written with gravity’s grave hand, the emphatic gesture underlining this withdrawn miracle flight in the transparent medium of the sky.
At great heights and at such distances, the inviolable laws of perspective dictated the appearance of this skywriting over Fort Wayne in the summer of 1922. The hairbreadth needle pointer of Art Smith’s altimeter swept over the instrument’s inner dial. That face was scaled to a barometer, measuring pressure in pounds per square inch. The outer dial’s scale, meshed with the bezel, was calibrated in feet and was rotated to score the elevation of the launching at the time and place of take off. Fort Wayne is 810 feet above sea level. Smith’s altimeter, its crystal cracked and its case scorched from the fire of his final flight, was recovered along with the locket containing a strand of his mother’s hair, slightly singed. The altimeter was found, upon its repair in 1950 by James Wigner, to be miscalibrated, off by nearly three hundred feet.
Birth
This movie still was taken from the silent film short documenting the release of the major motion picture The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was hired by Epoch Productions, the film’s distributor, to advertise its release and grand opening in Los Angeles with this display of the new skywriting. D. W. Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation as well as its documentary short, is considered a pioneer of American cinema and an inventor and innovator of many film techniques including panoramic long shots, iris effects, night photography, color tinting, panning, and staged battle sequences where hundreds of extras are made to look like thousands. He was impressed upon hearing of Art Smith’s creation of the aerial effect of skywriting and was anxious to use it in his film’s promotion and to film the actual event of its application. The short documentary, now lost, is thought to be the first filmed evidence of skywriting as it is being written.
Nothing
In 1902, Dr. Charles Otis Whitman, a zoologist of Chicago University, in an attempt to reverse the catastrophic collapse of the wild passenger pigeon population, sent a captive breeding pair to the Cincinnati Zoo in the hope that a rock dove there would foster the distra
cted passenger pigeons’ eggs. In 1910, Professor Whitman, working in his laboratory attempting to describe Columbicola extinctus, a louse thought at the time to be unique to the passenger pigeon and disappearing as the host species disappeared, caught a chill and died. Four years later, Martha, one of Dr. Whitman’s birds, died in Cincinnati, becoming the endling of her species. Shortly before that, the zoo, in a vain hope, commissioned Art Smith to survey the Wabash and Maumee watersheds of Indiana, serving as a scout in what was to be the final wild passenger pigeon round-up. For several weeks, he scoured the river valleys in search of any evidence of a tattered covey of the pigeon that was thought to have numbered in the billions only half a century earlier. Then, Audubon lost count of the number of flocks, flocks made up of millions of individuals, when he attempted to record their passage near Louisville. “The air,” he writes in Birds of America, “was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose…” The skies over Indiana were now empty as Art Smith flew through them. As he banked his airplane, composing the O, he thought, perhaps, of the egg he had been shown, preserved in the collection of fossils and feathers at the funereal zoo. Years later, in 1947, long after Art Smith had died and was buried, the naturalist Aldo Leopold would compare the disappeared flocks to “a living wind.” Art Smith began to climb, climbing by means of a spiral ascent, in long wide-open circles. Leveling off at last, he could see the horizon all around him. He was high enough to make out the initial warping off in the distance, the curvature of the earth, its promised declivity. As he lined up his craft again and began the application of smoke to cross the T, he experienced, suddenly, a patch of rough air, a turbulence, invisible, that, nevertheless, from its sheer force of downdraft, aberrated his plotted course, spoiling the capitalization, abrading the message he was attempting to send through all that empty emptiness.