by James Tobin
Scientific American, now among the Wrights’ strongest advocates, called its readers’ “special attention to this contest, among other reasons because we see in it an opportunity for America to win back some of that prestige which she undoubtedly lost when, by her indifference to the claims of the Wright brothers, she drove them to find more appreciative treatment at the hands of people of an alien tongue and race. For there is no denying that our attitude to the new art . . . of flying has been altogether unworthy of a country which claims to be particularly solicitous of the inventor, and ever ready to encourage the man who can present us with a novel and useful idea embodied in practical mechanical form.”
Will arrived in New York with Charlie Taylor early on the morning of Sunday, September 19. Hudson-Fulton officials ferried them out to Governors Island to have a look around. The island had been recently doubled in size with landfill brought over from the excavation of the Lexington Avenue subway. The Army designated the sandy fill, an expanse of about a hundred acres, as a flying field. The view north from the island was one of the most spectacular in the Western hemisphere. From east to west it took in the Brooklyn waterfront, the Brooklyn Bridge, the towers of Lower Manhattan, and the two other islands in the harbor—Ellis Island, the doorstep to the United States for millions of European immigrants, and Bedloe’s Island, home of the Statue of Liberty in her twenty-fifth year. To Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan it was half a mile; to the statue, a bit more.
Any flight from here would be the first that anyone besides Louis Blériot had made over water. And this was not the open water of the English Channel, where an aeroplane with a bad engine might glide down gently wherever it needed to and be rescued by a following boat. Scores of ships and boats plied the harbor on an average day, and the number would multiply many times during the celebration. A flight up the Hudson would be a flight through a canyon, with the skyscrapers of Manhattan on one side, the Palisades of New Jersey on the other, and a spiky floor of battleships beneath. But the earth below was the lesser part of the danger, and at least could be surveyed in advance. The utterly unknown danger was the nature of the wind in this urban wilderness. No one had flown through a city before. No one could know how the man-made escarpments would affect the behavior of the air. In short, these flights would be by far the most dangerous ever tried.
Will said nothing of the danger.
“I have not come here to astonish the world,” he told reporters. “I don’t believe in that kind of thing. . . . I expect to make an average flight and give everybody a chance to see what an aeroplane is like in the air.”
When asked about flying over skyscrapers, he was careful not to commit himself. “That would be quite possible, especially in the lower end of the island in its narrowest part. I do not say that I shall attempt that flight, but there is no reason why it should not be made.”
Would it be dangerous to fly over ships in the harbor?
“An aeroplane should be able to go anywhere.”
TWO IDENTICAL WOODEN SHEDS had been erected by the veranda of the officers’ club at the Governors Island Army post, in one corner of the field designated for launchings and landings. Each shed was about thirty-five feet long, twenty feet wide, and twenty feet high. So the Wright and Curtiss aeroplanes were assembled within a few yards of each other.
Reporters hung around the sheds all week. One of them observed closely, and detected distinctly different atmospheres in the two camps. In the Wright shed only two men did all the work. The inventor was “glum” with the reporters, though “interesting in the extreme; you know he is unusual the instant you see him.” He was “a man who has evidently forgotten how to talk, a man who seems to have no desire to make friends, a man whose whole soul seems to be wrapped up in the strange freak of the air. . . .” Though his sparse hair was turning gray at the temples, Wright looked younger than in his photographs, “thin, supple, graceful, quick upon his feet and evidently quicker still of thought.” He worked in shirt-sleeves, never with overalls or an apron. “You cannot think of him in such togs or with spots of grease or dabs of oil upon him. He is far too neat.” His mechanic was “equally taciturn . . . a man who seems to understand the every thought of Wright and to anticipate his every wish as well as the every need of the strange machine.” Occasionally the reporters heard “strange noises” from inside the shed, but very little talk. They must have wondered about the canoe that was on hand; Will intended to mount it on the flyer’s underside, to keep it buoyant in case of a crash in the water.
In the other shed was “a far different group of men” and “a much smaller and better finished bird.” Where Wright was silent, Curtiss bantered at length with the journalists, and “is the friend of every one of them.” He didn’t put his hands on the machine much. “He has brought men down from his upstate factory to do that for him.” In his features and dress he looked “more like the young English university men one sees spending vacations in . . . the continnental watering places than a man who has done things.” But unlike such idlers he was “usually in a hurry, and . . . thinking about something.” The observer guessed Curtiss to be “the forerunner of the type who will take up real aeronautics within the next year, young men who like difficult and dangerous things because they are difficult and dangerous.”
Curtiss was again in a rush to prepare a suitable machine. The machine he had flown at Rheims was only a couple of miles away, but it was unavailable for flying. While Curtiss was in Europe, Augustus Herring had promised the people at Wanamaker’s department store they could display the aeroplane to customers during the Hudson-Fulton celebration.
CURTISS AND HIS WIFE arrived at Governors Island to find Wilbur Wright already at work, his hands covered in grease.
“How do you do, Mr. Curtiss? You will excuse me from shaking hands, for you see what they are like. How are you feeling since your return?”
“Very good,” Curtiss said.
“Really, you ought to.”
Apparently the two had spoken at a meeting of the Aero Club before Curtiss’s departure for France, for Will now asked if Curtiss had used his “suggestions” for the flight at Rheims.
“Some of them,” Curtiss said.
“Yes,” Will said. “You must have followed some of my advice.”
Anyone who knew Will would have realized he was having some private fun with words.
KNOTS OF ONLOOKERS came as close as they could—mostly Army officers and their families and friends. Among them was a Columbia College boy named Grover Cleveland Loening, first vice president of the new Aero Club of Columbia and a quivering enthusiast for all things aeronautical. His mother had wangled him a pass to the island, and he brought a letter of introduction to Wilbur Wright from his mother’s friend, the banker August Belmont. Loening got through the screen of soldiers around the Wright shed and thrust his letter at Wright, who glanced at it, said nothing, and turned away. Loening stood in one spot watching the work for three hours. Then Wright tossed him a rag and told him to get to work. Loening came back every day, and kept working.
In the formal language of the Hudson-Fulton contracts there was no mention of a competition between Wright and Curtiss. The planners wanted only an exhibition—in fact, two separate exhibitions. It was clear they regarded Wright as the larger draw, at least at the time the contracts were drawn up, before Curtiss’s triumph at Rheims. Wright was to make any flight of his choice of not less than ten miles with awards totaling fifteen thousand dollars. Curtiss was asked to fly from Governors Island up the Hudson River to Grant’s Tomb, at the northern end of the city, and return. This was a distance of some twenty-three miles, though Curtiss’s fee was to be only five thousand dollars. There would be no way of saying which man had won—as long as both men flew. Still, the reporters were acutely aware of the growing rivalry between the two men, and speculation arose even about the practice flights—how long they would be, and how daring. At some point, apparently in the Curtiss camp, rumors began to circulate about
a flight around the Statue of Liberty.
“The winds will probably be rather strong.” Will wrote Orville, “but it will bother Curtiss more than me unless I am mistaken.”
BOTH MACHINES were ready on September 28, but the wind blew at twenty miles per hour or more. The aviators waited until the sun went down, but the wind stayed brisk. Wright said he had to test the flyer with the canoe attached, and he could not do so in any considerable wind. Curtiss quashed the speculation about flying over skyscrapers: “I wouldn’t fly over the buildings of the city if they deeded to me everything that I passed over.”
That night, as usual, Will returned to Manhattan and slept at the Park Hotel. Curtiss spent the night in his shed on the island. He and his mechanics arose early on Wednesday, September 29, and readied the machine. A mist lay over the island and the harbor. But Curtiss whirled the propeller, got in the machine, and trundled off over the landfill and soon was lost to sight in the fog. Several minutes later, the aeroplane could be seen taxiing back to the shed. When reporters arrived on the island a little later, Curtiss’s publicity man told them the aviator had made a short flight, and the afternoon papers reported it.
Grover Loening, the kid from Columbia, was there. He had come to the island early each morning since Wilbur had handed him his rag. Years later, Loening said the breeze that morning was blowing from behind him toward the point where Curtiss rumbled into the mist. To leave the ground, Loening said, Curtiss would have had to come back in Loening’s direction. But Loening neither saw nor heard the aeroplane. He concluded that “Curtiss never got off the ground, because the required run into the wind from where he had vanished in the fog would have brought him right by where I stood, and certainly the plane could at least have been heard. Also Curtiss never could, in my opinion in that morning fog, again have located the landing area on the is land.” Loening was a partisan for Will; no disinterested observer attested that Curtiss actually had made a flight.
When Will arrived on the island shortly before 9:00 A.M., Loening told him what he thought he had seen, or not seen, and “Wilbur was furious at this controversy, openly despised Curtiss, was convinced he was not only faking but doing so with a cheap scheme to hurt the Wrights.” Loening told reporters, too, but no paper repeated the charge. When reporters asked Wright to comment on Curtiss’s early-morning performance, he only said: “I am glad the conditions are so favorable.”
WITHIN MINUTES Will and Charlie and the soldiers in khaki were pulling the machine out of the shed and laying the launch rail straight into the breeze, due west. Across the little strip of water called Buttermilk Channel, spectators waiting on the Brooklyn waterfront saw the stir of activity and pressed close to the water. On the island, soldiers had to warn spectators to clear away to the sides or the aviator would not fly at all.
Will and Charlie took hold of the propellers and yanked. It took them a dozen tries before the engine caught. Then “the blades whizzed round so fast that two blurs of gray were all that the eye could catch at the rear of the machine.” Will listened to the engine for a moment, then turned his Scotch-plaid cap backward, climbed into his seat, and nodded, and Charlie began to push. Within a hundred feet the machine outdistanced him. As the reporter from The New York Press saw it, the flyer was almost at the end of the rail when Wright “gave his forward planes a sharp tilt. The air, striking beneath them, raised the whole machine twenty feet into the air before a man could take a breath.” The machine circled the launching area twice, then “headed straight across in the direction of Buttermilk Channel. The entire garrison of the island was out on the parade ground, and a cheer went up that carried clear over to the Brooklyn shore and was re-echoed by the eager watchers there.”
Over the water, the machine banked and headed north toward Manhattan, then continued in a sweeping circle around the northern end of Governors Island and back down its western edge.
Not many could have been watching, for the flight had been quite unexpected. For all those who happened to be there, it was their first sight of a thing they had perhaps believed impossible or somehow exaggerated. But there had been no exaggeration, they now realized. The machine was flying, and not in a sick and shaky imitation of flight, but boldly, under “the complete mastery” of the “lean, clean-shaven” navigator, his features and movements perfectly visible at a height of thirty or forty feet. “He sat rigid, his legs braced firmly against the narrow rail in front, his left hand on the lever that regulates the forward planes, his right on the one that does the double duty of manipulating the rudder and adjusting the flexible tips of the great wings so that the machine balances itself on curves. He had no time to spare for the cheers that greeted him. It hardly seemed he heard them.”
The crews of nearby tugs and steamers scrambled to their whistles and let loose with salutes. But the signal that something was happening came too late. By the time people at the foot of Manhattan or in the close-in blocks of Brooklyn got to the water, the machine had disappeared, skimming over Castle Williams and back down onto the sand. Will had been in the air for only seven minutes and ten seconds.
WORD SPREAD NORTH from the Battery that Wilbur Wright had flown. People began rushing into Battery Park, crowding against the long seawall and filling the piers. Soon the roofs and windows of buildings overlooking the harbor were jammed, and a carnival of ferryboats, tugboats, and pleasure craft streamed out to find a good spot to watch the next flight.
At 10:17 they were rewarded.
In the induction center on Ellis Island, immigrants waiting in lines were startled by a rising din outside. Interpreters explained in several languages that a machine was flying over New York Harbor. Reporters who learned that much did not say if the explanation tended to comfort the newcomers or increase their sense of alarm.
Boats cut their engines and rocked in the waves. Many tied their whistles open. Passengers and crew members watched the machine heading toward them across the water. It came on and passed over, moving directly toward Bedloe’s Island. As usual, people of farming backgrounds thought it sounded like a threshing machine.
It approached the statue, passed by the head on the Manhattan side, and flew straight on.
On the Jersey shore, people saw the machine bank and sweep into a tight half-circle, then head away, back over the harbor. Now every skipper in the harbor opened his steam whistle. The noise grew deafening. On the ferryboat Queens, five hundred passengers grabbed their hats and waved. Just ahead lay a far greater hulk in the harbor. It was the Cunard liner Lusitania, outbound for Liverpool. Passengers on deck waved white handkerchiefs. The flying machine came on and flew just overhead, and the liner let loose with a volcanic blast of steam.
“A NEW THING CAME TODAY.”
Wilbur circles the Statue of Liberty
A hundred feet up, the roar and the heat enveloped Will. The flyer rocked and flew on.
APPROACHING THE STATUE OF LIBERTY from the west, the aeroplane accelerated to fifty miles per hour. Then Will slowed and went into a banking circle around the waist of the statue.
Reporters heard different responses in different places—or imputed their own responses to the crowds. One at the foot of Manhattan said that while the flight lasted, cheers rose from Battery Park and the rooftops and the windows and merged into a sustained roar. Another said the people around him “stood with mouths open, but silent, as a rule. . . .
“A new thing came today, a thing which New York had never seen before and waiting thousands felt a new sensation, felt their throats tighten, failed to understand why their eyes did not see as well as they have before. . . . Nearly all saw a flying biplane for the first time. It was an absolutely new sensation, one which will not be forgotten for some time by those who experienced it. New sensations are rare in these modern days.”
On Governors Island, photographers sprinted out onto the landfill with a crowd of spectators in their wake. Will, approaching, saw an archipelago of upturned faces where there was supposed to be only open sand. He fou
nd a slim clear spot and slammed to earth much harder than usual.
The New York Times man got close enough to hear a quick exchange between pilot and mechanic:
“Goes pretty well, Charlie.”
“Looks all right to me, Will.”
As more reporters crowded around, he said, “That is the worst landing I have made in years, and it is a wonder I did not smash the machine to pieces.” Apart from that, “he was as self-contained as ever.”
JUST BEFORE 1:00 P.M., Will and a Hudson-Fulton official went by launch to the Battery and passed unnoticed through the crowd, a black derby pulled down tight on Will’s head. Several blocks north, at the Singer Building, they ate a quick lunch and went up to the roof. Curtiss was supposed to meet them; the idea was for the aviators to see the city from above and get a sense for the wind conditions at high altitude. Curtiss was late, so Will surveyed New York without him.
Extras hit the streets. The word now was that Wright would fly up the Hudson and circle the battleships late that same afternoon. From the lunch hour on, nearly every boat that pushed off from the Battery pier was loaded with hopeful spectators, and “the slopes of the old parade ground on the island looked like the lawns of Central Park on a morning in May.”
But the wind came up again. Curtiss’s machine stayed in its shed. At about 5:30, soldiers pulled the Wright machine out to the launch rail. This time, with the wind brisk, Will flew only a short circle. But the view of the aeroplane from the island was lovely, the wings catching the setting sun and turning a silvery-pink.