by James Tobin
Curtiss had his eye on more immediate gains. Government contracts in the United States were unlikely, he said, as “the Wrights will no doubt be in on the ‘ground floor.’” But prize offerings were mounting. In London, the Daily Mail’s one-thousand-pound prize for the first flight across the English Channel still stood unclaimed. The publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr., of the New York Herald, was offering five thousand dollars to the machine that reached the highest speed in a grand aviation meet to be held in the summer of 1909 in France.
Other aeronautical prizes were being planned by the organizers of a great exhibition much closer to home, in New York. This was the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, a two-week pageant to commemorate Henry Hudson’s entry into New York Harbor in 1609 and Robert Fulton’s voyage up the Hudson in 1807. And clearly there was money to be made by flying the AEA aerodromes for the sensation-seeking public. “These cash prizes looking very alluring,” Curtiss told his colleagues. “I think prize chasing and exhibition work should go hand in hand.” But that would be merely spadework to prepare for large-scale manufacturing and sales. “Probably by another year the machines will become more standardized and a certain amount of business may be expected from private parties for machines for sport,” he said. “Perhaps an Aerial Development Company could be formed to look after Government contracts, prizes, etc., and to get in shape to handle the large volume of business which is bound to come later.”
Bell said there was no point in organizing a manufacturing company in the United States without patents for protection. Investors would come nowhere near it. As an alternative, the AEA might start a company with money they contributed themselves and raised from a few friends. Curtiss could manage the concern. When the Patent Office acted on their applications, they could decide how to proceed. Meanwhile, with the risk of patent litigation spread around, Bell was willing to allow flying exhibitions by the June Bug and Silver Dart. Money would be set aside for “a moderate amount of litigation.”
As the AEA’s discussions were going on at Beinn Bhreagh, Curtiss was exchanging private telegrams with New York. Not enough evidence survives to allow one to know how much about these exchanges, if anything, he related to his AEA comrades. He may have mentioned that Augustus Herring had presented him with a major business proposition. Or he may have kept it to himself.
ICE COVERED the Brasd’Or Lakes “like a flat tabletop of gigantic dimensions.” That meant, of course, that no boat could tow the tetrahedral Cygnet II into the air. Still, Bell itched for a trial before spring. So the experimenters attached sledge runners to the underside of the machine. McCurdy’s Silver Dart was prepared for trials, too.
Neither Alec nor Mabel felt much faith in Curtiss’s new engine for the big kite. Bell always professed to be undaunted by the prospect of a failed experiment, saying a failure could teach as much as a success. “Alec is not discouraged,” Mabel once wrote her mother, and added, “I don’t believe he ever will be.” On that day, at least, she did not feel so resilient. “It is a great disappointment that the new engine is too heavy and not powerful enough to do much for his aerodrome. . . . Probably nothing will happen and then there will be the old round of experimental drudgery to be gone over again.” Still the promise of stability seemed strong, and the lovely geometry of the form evoked faith. Alec knew full well the tetrahedral design lacked the lifting power of an aeroplane, Mabel said, “but it is so beautifully steady in the air. You can’t conceive what a beautiful object these great big red silk kites are in the air. They are so solid and substantial and seem just glued to one place in the sky while all round the wind is whirling past making tall trees bend. I am sure it will come out all right in the end and there’s no question but that this is the steadiest and strongest form.”
On the ice, Bell, all in fur, sat off to one side with his pipe, utterly still as younger men fussed with his machine. He had issued strict instructions. The idea was only to see if a manned machine would rise, and if so, if it would maintain its balance. Then the operator was to come down immediately. On the first attempt, with McCurdy squeezed into a V-shaped spot for the operator, the Cygnet II got away from its attendants and skittered along for a hundred feet or so before the engine sputtered out. On the second try the gas line broke. The men tried again and the propeller twisted off its shaft and shattered. “Although at times it seemed about to do so,” Mabel said later, with all the faith she could muster, the Cygnet II never raised itself so much as an inch off the ice.
When McCurdy flew his aerodrome the next day—the first flight ever in the British dominions—Mabel thought Bell “almost as pleased . . . as if the Silver Dart was absolutely his own machine and so proud of Douglas.” Yet she admitted to her daughter that “Papa feels down this evening although he knew the chances of success were of the slimmest.
“The drome is such a beautiful sight it goes to Daddysan’s heart.”
Bell immediately began to supervise changes to the Cygnet II, including new safety features to protect “the aviator.”
DOUGLAS MCCURDY made many fine flights in the Silver Dart over the next several weeks, “circumdroming” the lake, as Bell put it, for distances of up to twenty miles. In the meantime, the little AEA convocation broke up. With affectionate farewells all around, the Curtisses, bound for home, were put on the steamship at the little Baddeck pier.
Several days later, the Bells learned that their friend Curtiss, Augustus Herring, and Courtlandt Field Bishop had appeared at the Aero Club of America on East Forty-second Street to announce the formation of the first company in America to manufacture aeroplanes for the commercial market.
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COURTLANDT BISHOP had made efforts to broker a deal between the Wrights and the Army. When the efforts fell through, he gave up in disgust—more at the Wrights, for their stubbornness, than at the government—and went off to race balloons. Now Bishop realized the Wrights were no longer the only game in town. Augustus Herring, Bishop’s fellow member of the Aero Club, enjoyed the credibility that came with holding a U.S. Army contract for a flying machine—one still to be delivered, it was true, but the contract alone made Herring’s a bankable name for the time being. More important, Herring was saying he held patents (or perhaps just patent applications—he was never quite clear about this) that not only predated the Wright patents but also would guarantee the great prize of automatic stability in a flying machine. He said he had invented gyroscopic devices that would keep an aeroplane safe even in strong winds.
Curtiss made an obvious target for the entrepreneurs. Thanks to his flights in the June Bug, his name as an aviator was now well known, and he had manufacturing experience and a factory to throw into the bargain. If he could bring the great name of Bell with him, so much the better.
Herring used each man to bait the other. To Bishop, he confided that he had Glenn Curtiss in the bag, and to Curtiss he said Bishop was in, with other wealthy friends on the way.
The negotiations began in New York and continued via telegram while Curtiss and his wife were staying at the Bells’ home. Herring’s wires brought heavenly promises to the upstate mechanic: “BIG FUTURE” . . . “BEST POSSIBLE BACKING. SMALL COMPANY, FIRST. WAY CLEAR TO MILLION EACH.” Curtiss was salivating. “PROPOSITION AGREEABLE,” he replied. When his suitor asked if Bell could be brought in, Curtiss tossed cold water on the idea. “I do not think Mr. Bell would consider making any connection with this company as he has a plan for a big organization, and I think best not to mention this at present; however, if I should come with you I think the other scheme would be given up.”
Curtiss weighed his options. The Wrights already had invented a practical aeroplane and patented it. If he wished to sell his own aeroplanes without paying the Wrights for the privilege, he had three choices. He could use the Wrights’ system and instantly incur a lawsuit for violating their patent rights. He could adapt or improve the Wrights’ system—this was what the AEA claimed to have done, but with no assurance of escaping patent probl
ems. Or he could find some wholly new system of controlling an aeroplane. This was what Bell hoped to do with tetrahedrals, and what Herring said he could do with gyroscopes. Only this option offered an escape from the shadow of the Wrights. Curtiss had watched Bell’s lumbering kites straining on their ropes, overwhelmed by the forces of wind resistance, and he was convinced they represented a dead end. When Herring came to Curtiss with promises of an alternative system of balance, the younger man glimpsed long vistas of speed, fame, and wealth.
And none of these could be won as long as he was in league with his old comrades. Herring said later that Curtiss regarded the AEA members as “unprogressive, particularly Dr. Bell, and that he couldn’t see that there was much of a future for him in the A.E.A.; that he thought there was more money outside of it, operating independently.”
Arriving in New York, the Curtisses were met at Grand Central Terminal by Captain Thomas Baldwin, the dirigible man, who was in on the scheme, too. Baldwin offered a new enticement: The Aero Club would sponsor Curtiss in a bid for the sterling silver Gordon Bennett Trophy and five-thousand-dollar purse at the great aviation meet to be held that summer in Rheims, France.
When he had heard the final details, Curtiss jumped in.
“America has taken the lead in the development of aviation,” Bishop told the press. “We have lost the Wright brothers, and we do not intend to let the foreigners take every one else of prominence in developing aerial flight. If Congress will offer no incentive to inventors to remain in their own country, the next best thing is to keep them here by private enterprise. This has now been done. . . .
“This matter of air navigation, especially with aeroplanes, is no longer a fad or a joke, and wide awake men in New York with means realize that fact.”
HOW MUCH, if anything, Curtiss had told his AEA colleaguges about Herring’s proposition is not clear. The evidence suggests he said something to McCurdy. But he must have said little if anything to Bell, for soon after hearing the news, Bell wired Curtiss: “PLEASE WRITE FULLY CONCERNING YOUR ARRANGEMENT WITH HERRING AND HOW IT AFFECTS YOUR RELATIONS WITH THE A.E.A.” Curtiss’s reply made an attempt at diplomacy. But he left no doubt that he was breaking free not only from the AEA, but from Bell’s obsession with the tetrahedron. “Mr. Herring showed me a great deal, and I would not be at all surprised if his patents, backed by a strong company, would pretty well control the use of the gyroscope in obtaining automatic equlibrium. This seems to be about the only road to success in securing automatic stability in an aeroplane.” It must have been painful indeed for the Bells to learn of this tacit but final rejection of the tetrahedral dream by the cleverest of their protégés.
Trying to preserve the warmth between himself and his patrons, Curtiss wrote to Mabel in her role as “little mother” of the AEA, telling her that he and Herring “would like to have Mr. Bell and the boys with us if they care to come.” But he would have known perfectly well that Bell had no use for the controversial Herring, whom Samuel Langley had written off years earlier as “a bumbler.” Casey Baldwin, who had soured on Curtiss’s vaunted skills as a master of engines, openly scorned the deal in the next issue of the AEA Bulletin, which he knew Curtiss would see: “That level-headed American business men should back Mr. Herring has created quite a furor in aeronautical circles. It probably means that Mr. Herring has some more convincing arguments than he has ever made public, or—is it really the Curtiss Company with Mr. Herring’s patents to flourish in the eyes of bewildered capitalists? So far as we actually know, the Herring patents are only talking points at present.”
The three-member remnant of the AEA took consolation in the impressive flights of the Silver Dart and the hope of cutting a deal of their own with the Canadian government. The Cygnet II was tried again, and again it failed to fly. Bell fired off a stiff telegram to Curtiss, virtually ordering him to appear for the valedictory meeting of the AEA at Beinn Bhreagh on the last day of March: “HAVE YOUR BUSINESS ARRANGED SO AS TO BE HERE 31ST SURE. VERY IMPORTANT AND YOU WILL REGRET IT ALL YOUR LIFE IF NOT.” Curtiss apparently meant to comply. He left Hammondsport en route to Nova Scotia. But then, whether from cold feet or genuine need, he allowed the pressure of new business to detain him in New York. So, regret or no, he failed to show.
From the beginning, Bell had led the AEA with the sense that history hung upon its every move—thus the careful minutes of every meeting and the full records of every experiment. So it was at the end, when he timed the final conclave to go right down to the stroke of midnight on the final day. With him in the Great Hall were Baldwin and McCurdy, their young wives, and a couple of friends. The final motion expressed the group’s “high appreciation” to Mabel Bell—who was in Washington with her daughter Daisy, who had given birth to her second child two weeks earlier—for “her loving and sympathetic devotion without which the work of the Association would have come to nought.”
“The Aerial Experiment Association is now a thing of the past,” Bell wrote a few days later. “It has made its mark upon the history of Aviation and its work will live.”
ON THE EVENING after the AEA’s forlorn finale in Nova Scotia, Katharine Wright was across the Atlantic, sitting in an elegant hall in Paris and watching in delighted amusement as diplomats, scientists, and heirs to ancestral fortunes spoke her family’s name again and again. The occasion was the monthly banquet of the Aéro-Club de France. She was the first woman ever to attend a club affair. As she listened, French sophisticates were raising goblets of champagne and toasting her teetotaler father for the aviator sons he had given the world. Six months earlier, teaching fifteen-year-old Ohioans to conjugate Latin verbs, she could not have imagined a less likely scene. Yet it summed up the transformation that had taken place in the life of her family. On two continents, people were reading newspaper stories about what she looked like and what she wore, how she spoke. And if she was famous, her brothers were something more than famous.
She was in France because her brothers, again, had needed her. Wilbur, in a fit of homesickness, had asked them all to come over—Kate, Orville, and Milton. He had hoped to be home by Thanksgiving 1908, then by Christmas, but there had been simply too much still to do. New machines had to be built for European exhibitions and races in the flying season of 1909. There was business to conduct with the governments of Germany and Italy, work to supervise with their affiliates. And Will’s French contract required him to train other aviators in the use of the machine. Daily flying would be impossible at Camp d’Auvours in the wintertime; he had barely endured the cold in the December flight that took the Michelin Prize. But in the south of France, he could complete his training in balmy conditions and provide his family with a rest.
“Can’t you come over for a couple of months?” he pleaded in a letter to Dayton. “I do not see how I can get home, and yet I am crazy to see some of the home folks.” At the resort town of Pau, he learned, he could find good grounds for flying and a quiet haven for his family. “I know that you love‘Old Steele’ [High School],” he coaxed, “but I think you would love it still better if the briny deep separated it from you for a while. We will be needing a social manager and can pay enough salary to make the proposition attractive, so do not worry about the six per day the school board gives you for peripateting about Old Steele’s classic halls.”
In fact, she needed no coaxing. All her life she had been reading about the cities and museums of Europe, and she yearned to see them herself. She was more than ready for a break from life at 7 Hawthorn. Her father, just past his eightieth birthday, had come home from a Church trip exhausted and “very dull” in the mind. Orville, still on crutches, was too frail to get around alone. So she went along at his side twice a day as he hobbled to the shop to look in on Charlie Taylor. But it was too cold there for him to sit for long—“he can’t stand a bit of cold”—so back they would come to Hawthorn Street, where “we keep the house like a bake-oven the whole time.” For an hour every evening Kate massaged Orville’s legs—until
they imported a powerful Swiss masseur from the YMCA—and because Orville said he was too weak even to dictate correspondence, she spent a good part of each day “thumping off letters for brother till I am black and blue in the face.” Yet Orville, submerged as usual in his own concerns, seemed puzzled that she was not returning to work. Six weeks after the crash at Fort Myer, just before Will’s invitation, she was at the end of her patience. “I wish you would come home, Jullum. Nobody else takes a particle of responsibility. They leave everything on me. I am about played out but Orv doesn’t realize it a bit.”
Nor, now, would Orville make up his mind about the trip to Europe. Just in case, Kate checked schedules for trains and ocean liners and ordered a new dress made, all the while managing the house and caring for her brother and checking on her father and maintaining ties at Steele High. “I am so tired I want to weep the whole time!” Then, at last, Orville exchanged his crutches for a cane and said he was well enough to go. Kate rushed to buy tickets, pack trunks, and make arrangements for Carrie Kayler and her husband to stay with Milton. Just after New Year’s she and Orville raced to New York to catch the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in its first voyage of 1909.
And then her life changed.