To Conquer the Air

by James Tobin

  AT THE PARIS STATION the two arriving Wrights were greeted by a minor mob scene—French and American reporters; Hart Berg and his stylish wife; and there, among “a lot of others,” and dressed, astonishingly, in silk hat and evening clothes, their beloved brother, “old ‘Jullum.’” Old, yet new, too. Quiet and cool as ever, the gray eyes focused and shrewd, he was slightly fuller in the face after eight months of French cuisine. But that wasn’t the difference. It was the realm he occupied. He was no longer just Kate’s to admire and appreciate, an obscure man of hidden talent and character. Now he was recognized and celebrated on the streets of a great foreign capital; pointed out and fawned over; admired and revered—a hero. And she was being drawn into that realm. There were telegrams of welcome, photographers’ flashes in her face. Arnold Fordyce, a sleek Frenchman who had visited Dayton on behalf of his employer, the publisher Henri Letellier, presented her with a great bouquet of American Beauty roses surrounding an American flag. “It was to smile,” she said.

  FOR THREE MONTHS KATE lived like an American heiress on the traditional Grand Tour of Europe. After “a strenuous week of shopping” in Paris, led by Mrs. Berg, whom Kate thought “pretty as a picture and about the best dressed woman I ever saw,” she was whisked to the spa town of Pau in southwestern France and welcomed at the Grand Hôtel Gassion, next door to the chateau where the French king Henry IV had been born four centuries earlier. While her brothers taught three French Army officers to fly, she strolled the town’s mile-long promenade and gazed across foothills to the southern horizon, where the snow-crested Pyrenees marked the Spanish frontier. “I never saw anything so lovely.” For two hours each morning she took lessons from a French tutor, and soon was fluent enough to take tea with the mayor and attend a soirée for a thousand in the Wrights’ honor. She met Arthur Balfour, the British statesman; dined with Lord Northcliffe, the portly young publisher of the London Daily Mail, who had founded his fortune on the bicycling craze; and practiced her French each day for a week with the son of Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, who afterward sent her a giant box of candied fruit. A French count took her up in a hot-air balloon, and on February 15, 1909, not to be outdone, her brother seated her next to him for a seven-minute ride in his aeroplane. She thus became one of the first women ever to fly in a heavier-than-air machine, and in the classic Wright slang for anything deemed very good, she reported to her father, “Them is fine.”

  Five days later, very early in the morning, she was introduced to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. She stood with the king as he watched Wilbur fly, then breakfasted with him. “The King was very enthusiastic and was wild to go with Will but he had to promise that he wouldn’t.” It was the king’s mother, it turned out, who refused to let him fly.

  After six weeks of social calls by day and gaiety by night, she forced herself to stay in her room for most of two days. “I have had too much excitement seeing people.” Then King Edward VII of England arrived with his retinue to view the spectacle. “The weather was fine and the show was a great success,” Kate reported. “Jullam made a flight alone and then took me.”

  Next, Paris again, to be feted by the Aéro-Club and to see the sights; then Rome, where the mayor—“a Jew!” she told the bishop—personally guided Kate and Orville through the Capitoline Museum. Will assembled the demonstration flyer in an automobile shop on the Flaminian Way, Julius Caesar’s route to Gaul, and flew it over a long, sloping plain strewn with stone ruins of ancient aqueducts and villas. As at Le Mans and Pau, crowds came to watch and notables sought introductions to the three Ohioans. Half-laughing at the comedy of it, Kate now found the company of dignitaries quite commonplace. J. Pierpont Morgan and his family were merely “very pleasant people,” while Lloyd Carpenter Griscom, the American ambassador, was “a nice sort of man.” Duke “What’s-His-Name” was forgettable, and when King Victor Emmanuel XX of Italy asked to see flights at 8:00 A.M., she teased her anti-monarchist father: “The Kings are a nuisance all right. They always come at such unearthly hours.” While “His Gracious &c.” snapped dozens of photos of Wilbur in flight, Kate kept company at the flying field with a young German captain, who was observing on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The captain, too, sent her a dozen American Beauties.

  Wilbur Wright was suddenly a full-fledged European fad. Imitiations of his cap turned up in stores across the continent. His face was caricatured in newspapers, magazines, and picture postcards. Inevitably, songwriters began to envision the opportunities the Wrights had presented to young men intent on impressing their sweethearts. One French lyricist visualized the delicious things that might happen “Dans mon Aéroplane”:

  Not long ago little old Suzanne

  Said to her lover

  Oh! How bored I am

  I don’t like cars any more,

  I don’t like horses

  I want something new.

  He answered: Darling,

  The other day

  I got you a gift.

  It’s something really swell

  That I bought from Monsieur Wright.

  Oh! Come, oh! Come,

  Come up in my aeroplane

  It’s just like a bird

  It stays up in the air as it should.

  Oh! Come, oh! Come,

  Come on, little old Suzanne

  You’ll go crazy, honey

  When you’ve seen my little bird.

  EVENTS BROKE in staccato succession.

  In the middle of June, Dayton honored the brothers in a two-day “gala.”

  On June 26, Glenn Curtiss made his first sale—a “Golden Flyer” purchased by the Aeronautic Society of New York, an offshoot of the Aero Club of America. The Wrights sued, charging patent infringement.

  Three days later, Orville began a series of spectacular flights at Fort Myer, fulfilling the terms of the Wrights’ contract with the Army.

  On July 25, Louis Blériot flew his monoplane 23.5 miles across the English Channel, electrifying the world. Blériot had barely landed when he began to prepare for the first great aviation meet, to be held in France in less than a month.

  “THERE ARE NO ISLANDS ANY MORE.”

  Louis Blériot crosses the English Channel, July 25, 1909

  THE GRANDE SEMAINE DE L’AVIATION DE LA CHAMPAGNE was to be the major international sporting event of 1909, eclipsing even the great automobile races that had captured sporting attention each summer since the turn of the century. Among its organizers was Ernest Archdeacon, on the lookout as ever for France’s next chance to regain primacy in flying. He and his friends persuaded the Aéro-Club to sanction the event and the region’s great champagne producers—Mumm, Veuve Cliquot, and Möet et Chandon among them—to pay for it. Near the ancient cathedral town of Rheims, a hundred miles northeast of Paris, thousands of acres on the Plain of Bétheny were cleared and groomed to create a gigantic rectangular course ten kilometers long. Special trains were assigned to carry aviation enthusiasts from Paris to Rheims, and new tracks laid to take them directly to the flying course. A temporary village was constructed to greet the expected crowds, and sponsors’ champagne was stocked to quench their summer thirst. The president, the premier, and several Cabinet members made plans to attend. So did statesmen and soldiers from as close as Britain and as far as Japan. While her husband stalked big game in Africa, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, first lady of the United States until only a few months earlier, arrived with several of her children.

  The grandstands, bedecked with hundreds of French tricolors, held fifty thousand, but many thousands more gathered to watch from the perimeter of the field and the low hills nearby. In all, some five hundred thousand tickets would be sold during the week. Even in the days before the meet itself, crowds came to watch the preparations, and went home bitterly disappointed whenever conditions forced the officials to cancel practice flights. They had to be told repeatedly that despite all the preparations, successful flying depended entirely on the whims of the weather. “A horse race, an automobile contest, and even a r
egatta can be held in pelting rain and a tearing wind,” the Times of London explained, “but the aeroplanes . . . cannot live in a storm. The automatic stability of the various descriptions of flying machines is doubtless much greater than was that of the first aeroplane which astonished the world 18 months ago, and the device of twisting the wings or of using ailerons to keep the machine on an even keel has proved most useful; but the stability problem has not yet been satisfactorily solved.”

  The classic biplane designs of the Wrights and the Voisins had been thought superior in stability to the new monoplane machines. But now, with Louis Blériot’s wildly acclaimed flight across the Channel, monoplanes were all the buzz at Rheims, for speed and stability as well as for beauty. In fact, Blériot raised a ruckus when officials changed the rules to allow more contestants to compete in the evening, when the winds tended to abate. His new monoplane could fly in a stiff wind, he claimed, and he did not care to surrender that advantage by allowing his rivals to let hours of daylight pass as they waited for the dead calms of evening. Blériot won the point, and evening flights were restricted. Nonetheless, Blériot stayed on the ground when the wind blew.

  Seven aeroplane competitions were planned. The richest prize, and the most coveted, was the Coupe Internationale d’Aviation Gordon-Bennett. James Gordon Bennett was not just the publisher of the New York Herald and a notorious transcontinental rake; he also published the Herald’s European sister, the English-language Paris Herald, forerunner of the International Herald-Tribune. This prize, to be awarded to the fastest machine at the meet, was said to represent the world’s championship in aviation. The publisher set the purse at ten thousand dollars and commissioned an elaborate silver trophy—a winged child bearing a Wright flyer over its head. That was the plum that attracted Glenn Curtiss’s eye. Though the Wrights stayed at home, three French pilots were to fly machines manufactured by the Wrights’ French company. For Curtiss to defeat those machines and carry home the trophy bearing their likeness would make an especially savory triumph.

  Curtiss arrived on August 12 with the parts of a brand-new biplane packed in four small crates. James Gordon Bennett himself eyed this meager load and asked in disbelief, “Those few packages?” But French aviators who saw the assembled Curtiss machine pronounced it “a dangerous competitor.” It was a sleeker version of the Golden Flyer, with every unnecessary scrap of weight removed. Curtiss fitted it with a water-cooled eight-cylinder engine capable of fifty horsepower. Yet its capabilities were quite uncertain. The machine had been thrown together in Hammondsport at the last possible minute—“the greatest rush job I have ever undertaken”—with no time for even a single test flight before Curtiss had to race to New York to catch his ship. The rush continued upon his arrival in the port of Cherbourg, where he found out there wasn’t even enough time to send the machine to Rheims by normal freight. In a burst of charity toward the cause of international aviation, French railway officials allowed him to haul the crates aboard the train as personal luggage, so long as he shared a compartment with them.

  The event was billed as international, but Curtiss and George Cockburn of Great Britain were the only non-French entrants. The key French competitor would be Louis Blériot. The French were intensely curious about Curtiss, especially after learning of the Wrights’ lawsuit against him, and they were inclined to favor his position. “For the time, at least, he is quite as popular as the Wrights were, if not more so,” an American reporter said, “for they declined the issue when they were invited to take part in the grand tournament, while Curtiss pluckily accepted it. . . . When the Parisians learned that Curtiss had come there practically at his own expense, and that he had been doing a lot of hard work in obscurity while the Wrights got all of America’s praise, they warmed up to him more than ever.”

  When Curtiss learned that Blériot had installed an eighty-horsepower motor in his feather-light monoplane, he concluded that “my chances were very slim indeed, if in fact they had not entirely disappeared.” In fact, his speeds in test flights were impressive. But Blériot and his fellow Frenchmen had machines in reserve. If they cracked up in one contest, they could enter new machines in the next. Curtiss had only one machine built for one purpose—speed. If he entered an early contest and anything went wrong, he might forfeit his chances for the entire meet. So he staked everything on the final event, the speed challenge he cared for most—the race for the Gordon Bennett Cup—and kept his name out of all the others. Americans attending the meet wanted to see their flag entered for every competition, and they told Curtiss so with increasing vehemence. He resisted. He had only to point to the field to show them why he had to be cautious. It was littered with wrecks every day. On one practice flight Curtiss counted twelve broken aeroplanes on the ground below him.

  HENRI FARMAN won the one-hundred-thousand-franc distance prize with a long, slow drone of nearly 112 miles in just over three hours.

  Curtiss was allowed a trial run before the speed contest. He made it on a windless day, and was startled to find himself bumped and jolted as if in an automobile on a dirt road. Curtiss concluded that rising columns of heated air were responsible. His time was the best turned in during the trials and he concluded that this “boiling” or turbulent air actually enhanced his speed.

  When his turn came for the official run, he took the machine up to an altitude of five hundred feet. He borrowed the trick from bicycle and motorcycle racing—he would start at the highest point on the track, then take advantage of gravity while shooting downward to cross the start line. He whipped around the course twice in fifteen minutes and fifty seconds, cutting around the pylons at extremely small margins of error, for an average speed of more than forty-six miles per hour.

  Blériot flew last. Curtiss thought he was hitting sixty miles per hour. Perhaps on the straightaways Blériot did fly that fast. But when the final times were announced, Curtiss’s screaming turns had won him the race by six seconds. Newspapers proclaimed him “CHAMPION AVIATOR OF THE WORLD.”

  FROM RHEIMS, Curtiss hurried to Brescia, Italy, where he made several demonstration flights, including his first with a passenger. This was the flamboyant Italian poet and novelist Gabriele d’Annunzio, who climbed out of the aeroplane all but overcome: “Until now I have never really lived! Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business. It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements. There is the exquisite smoothness of motion and the joy of gliding through space—It is wonderful! Can I not express it in poetry? I might try.”

  “ ‘CHAMPION AVIATOR OF THE WORLD’”

  Glenn Curtiss winning the Gordon Bennett Cup at Rheims

  RHEIMS INAUGURATED a series of great aviation meets. Attitudes toward aviation on both sides of the Atlantic moved directly from disbelief and astonishment to visions of an aeronautical paradise just around the corner, with aeroplanes replacing automobiles and “aerial buses” to convey commuters. There was a sudden sense of epochs shifting. In postcards, posters, and advertisements, commercial artists seized upon the beauty of the new monoplanes. Thinking back over the year since Wilbur Wright’s first flights at Le Mans, a Paris journalist wrote: “Everything that has happened astonishes you, surprises your imagination, leaves you deeply moved and disconcerted, your head a bit dizzy as if you’d had too much to drink.”

  That was hardly an uncommon sensation at Rheims, where the sponsors made back twice their investment in prizes on champagne sales alone. Yet some kept a clear head and watched more closely.

  One such observer was Julien Ripley, a friend of Alexander Graham Bell. Bell had asked Ripley for a full report on the Rheims meet, and he gave it shortly after the meet ended. Standing out in Ripley’s memory was a plain fact that others already were forgetting amid the hoopla and excitement—that aviators and spectators alike had had to wait for endless hours for the wind to die down. Flights, when they occurred, were wonderful. But they could not occur at all in the atmospheric conditions that prevailed in most pla
ces at most times. “It is evident the serious effect that the slightest breeze has on all the aeroplanes,” Ripley told Bell. “When Curtiss flew for the cup there was no apparent stirring of the air. . . . Yet Curtiss said that when he got going the air seemed boiling and he was nearly thrown from his seat.”

  IN AN AGE OF WORLD’S FAIRS that lasted for months and years, the two-week Hudson-Fulton Celebration, planned for the fall of 1909 in New York, seemed comparatively modest. Its purpose was to mark the progress of American civilization since the explorer Henry Hudson’s voyage up the Hudson (then North) River in 1609 and the inventor Robert Fulton’s navigation of the river by steam power in 1807. If the anniversaries did not coincide exactly, it was close enough for the New York state legislature, which appointed a commission in 1905 to organize naval exhibitions, “great land parades,” pageants, and festivals stretching from Staten Island two hundred miles north to Troy and Cohoes. All events were to be educational—“the most careful pains were taken to avoid anything of a commercial tincture”—and open to the public free of charge. It was not to be a celebration of victory in war, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission declared, but a celebration of peace, “civil concord,” and “material prosperity.”

  In the spring of 1908, the flurry of news stories about flying machines led William Berri, a member of the Commission, to suggest it would be “striking, even dramatic,” to mark “the climax of three centuries of progress” with the first aerial navigation of the Hudson. His fellow commissioners agreed, and a Committee on Aeronautics was established. Efforts were made to organize an international aviation meet, but Farman, Blériot and Delagrange demanded “enormous sums” to take part, so the committee entered negotiations with two American exhibitors, Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss. Both agreed to participate, though on different terms. Wright agreed that, conditions permitting, he would “give at New York a full illustration of the possibilities of flight through the air by his aeroplane.” Curtiss’s agreement was more specific; he would attempt to fly from Governors Island in New York Harbor up the Hudson to the northern tip of Manhattan, a distance of roughly ten miles, where he would turn around at Grant’s Tomb and fly back to the island.