Wright Brothers, Wrong Story

by William Hazelgrove

  Wilbur turned back to the building they had built in 1900. It was small against the giant dunes. A few cans were on the ground. A few boards of better times. The wind. It never stopped. It was always blowing. That's why he came here. This place, this magical outpost in the middle of nowhere, had wind for lift and sand for a soft landing. It had the isolation he craved. The great silence to think into. Like any artist, he needed solitude to create, and he had found it when he had arrived at Kitty Hawk.

  He turned again and stared where it had happened. Yes, the first flight had happened in a 25 mph wind five years before. December. It was cold. There was ice on the dunes. Christmas was just eight days away, and it was now or never. If they didn't fly on that day, then who knows what would have happened. He had won the toss, and then it was Orville's turn. Wilbur felt his eyes water. It was 1903.

  The sheriff knocked on the door of the Herring-Curtiss Corporation. The door swung back, and the sheriff asked the man to identify himself. He then handed Glenn Curtiss an injunction that would basically freeze his company. It was January 3, 1910. Curtiss had just come out with his newest plane, the June Bug, in 1909. It was superior to anything the Wrights had come up with: “a biplane with parallel wings instead of AEA bows, a twenty-nine-foot span and 4.5-foot chord and a double front elevator with a horizontal panel halfway up. Control was generated by a movable steering wheel rather than a lever.”1

  But the thing that broke the mold was “movable surfaces at either extremity of the main planes, each movable surface half within the main cell and half without.”2 In modern language, Curtiss had just created a plane with ailerons. Every modern jetliner today has ailerons—the lower flaps on the wings that move up and down. No more wing warping. Ailerons were more efficient, faster, and mechanically more sound. They were the future. Glenn added a lightweight, newly designed motor that “develops more power per square inch of piston area than has ever been secured in a gas engine.”3 Then he sold it for $5,000 to the Aeronautical Society of America after they passed on a Wright flyer.

  This was the last straw for Wilbur, who saw it as a violation of the promise Curtiss had made not to infringe on their patent. Curtiss had believed Augustus Herring when Herring told him that he held patents that predated the Wrights’. That patent ownership was the basis of the incorporation of the Herring-Curtiss Corporation, and Curtiss proceeded thinking that legally he was on firm ground. Herring had a contract with the army to deliver a plane while Glenn entered race after race with his planes and won. Promoters had found that people would come to see these races of daredevils with experimental planes, so they offered substantial prizes. The Wrights, meanwhile, met with their lawyers in New York. Curtiss and Wilbur had tried to settle it, but the truth was that Curtiss did not want to pay the Wrights for what he felt belonged to all men who flew. The airplane could not be held hostage to the whims of someone just because he happened to discover something first. So, in the end, he declined to pay, and that brought a final letter from Wilbur:

  The negotiation was initiated at your request and now seems to be similarly closed by you. As I stated in one of our conferences, an agreement, in order to be effective must possess sufficient elements of advantage to each party to make both satisfied. If you do not consider that such advantages exist so far as you are concerned, it is well for both parties to revert to the established mode of settlement. We are compelled to push through a test case anyway against someone, and there is nothing in our former affidavits in this case which will do us harm or embarrass us when the case comes up for regular trial. Although I entered upon the negotiations without enthusiasm, I have endeavored in good faith to reach a mutually satisfactory basis of settlement and disarranged my plan to give you time to consider the matter carefully…. I must consider the negotiation at an end unless you do something at once.4

  He did do something. Curtiss entered a race at Rheims, France, with a new plane, the Rheims Racer, with an 8-cylinder 50-horsepower motor and ailerons on the wings. It was light, maneuverable, and fast. The day of the race, Curtiss learned that the Wrights had filed a patent-infringement suit against the Herring-Curtiss Corporation and the Aeronautical Society in New York and himself in Buffalo. Curtiss quipped, “I should like to ask the Wrights if they really believe my machine is an infringement of their patents. It is quite absurd to say.”5 Curtiss raced his plane and won, thereby becoming the fastest man on Earth and in the air. Quentin Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt's youngest son, congratulated Curtiss and told him his victory was “bully.” “The Star-Spangled Banner” played at the field in France. The Wright brothers, on the same day, had Curtiss's wife served papers in Hammondsport.6 In their view, Curtiss had won at Rheims with technology stolen from them.

  Curtiss returned from France as an American hero being sued by two other American icons. The papers made little note of it until Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss ended up in hangars side by side on Governors Island, preceding flights to Grant's Tomb in New York and back. Wilbur saw this as a chance to demonstrate to the world who the real inventors of flight and the real aviators were. Curtiss made a point of strolling into the hangar with the Wright plane and chatting with Wilbur.

  Newspapers reported that they discussed Curtiss's win at Rheims and that “no ill feeling exists because of the suit which the Wright brothers have brought against the Herring-Curtiss Corporation for alleged infringement of patents. Wright asked Curtiss if he found the information given him by the Wrights before he sailed of any value to him. Mr. Curtiss replied that he had and they exchanged further pleasantries.”7

  But Grover Loening, an engineering student who ended up working for the Wrights and who was allowed into the hangars, overheard things not intended for the press. In his eyes, it was all a lie: “Wilbur was furious at this controversy and openly despised Curtiss and was convinced he was not only faking but doing so with a cheap scheme to hurt the Wrights and here on this very occasion was the first public appearance of that vicious hatred and rivalry between the Wright and Curtiss camps.”8

  Loening saw Curtiss as merely a promotor and cited a moment when he asked Curtiss about the tail assembly of his plane, where Curtiss answered offhandedly, “Oh I don't know but if it isn't right the boys will fix it.”9 Loening saw this as further evidence that Curtiss was a not a real aviator but a walking publicity stunt. Wilbur, on the other hand, would have explained in detail about the tail, and then some. Loening went further and recalled that “one of the interesting things about Wilbur…was the hours of practice he would put in on the controls of the plane, sitting in the seat, hangar doors all closed, no one around, quietly sitting there imagining air disturbances and maneuvers and correcting the rudder and warping wings and elevator to suit.”10

  Wilbur understood the danger of flying, and so he practiced. Curtiss was an intuitive flier who was always onto the next thing, faster, better, bigger. Loening recalled what it was like to fly the early planes and gave more understanding as to why Wilbur would practice in a closed hangar:

  The modern aviator has no conception of what those early planes were like. The stability was nil—flying them felt like sitting on the top of an inverted pendulum ready to fall off on either side at any moment. The speed range was nothing at all. High speed, landing speed, climbing speed were all within one or two miles an hour, because the planes got off into the air with no reserve whatever, and only because of the effect of the ground banking up of which was not then understood…. Turns had to be carefully negotiated because the excess power was so low that the plane would often sink dangerously near the tree tops.11

  A fog rolled in, and Curtiss took off the next day for Grant's Tomb, but no one saw him make his flight. Loening, among others, said he was lying about having made the flight to Grant's Tomb and back. “Curtis never got off the ground,” he later wrote. “The required run into the wind would have brought him right by where I stood…. Also Curtiss never could, in my opinion in that morning fog, again have located the landing ar
ea on the island.”12 The press didn't pick up on it, but Curtiss had wheeled his plane back to the hangar and left for his hotel.

  Wilbur saw an opportunity and took off. He flew around Long Island to test the winds, then flew to the Statue of Liberty and circled the beacon of liberty, then banked over the giant ocean liner Lusitania as thousands cheered and foghorns echoed off the skyscrapers. Wilbur then made another flight up the Hudson River and then shot back to Governors Island. There are many famous photographs of his flight, and they are the earliest pictures of a plane over a major American city. People in New York stared up in wonder at the plane that had a canoe tied underneath. The canoe was there in case Wilbur was forced to land on water. For the first time, the publicity-hungry Curtiss was pushed off the papers and Wilbur was declared the king of aviation.

  Then the Herring-Curtiss Corporation descended into chaos when, in an October board meeting, Herring was ordered to produce the patents that he had previously told Curtiss he had in his possession. During a recess, Herring snuck off with his lawyer and hightailed it to New York. The company was broke, and their only chance was to sell some airplanes in order to remain solvent. Then came the sheriff, who knocked on the doors of the Herring-Curtiss Corporation. A district-court judge had granted an injunction “enjoining the Herring-Curtiss Corporation and Glenn Curtiss and Augustus Herring personally from selling or flying airplanes for profit.”13

  It was a death knell for Curtiss. Generally, defendants in patent suits can continue to do business. Here, however, US District Judge John R. Hazel was “preempting the decision, effectively putting Curtiss out of business in advance, denying him the opportunity to sell his airplanes and thereby perpetuate the income stream necessary to defend himself in court.”14 The decision put all airplane manufacturers on notice of potential litigation, but it put Glenn Curtiss out of business.

  Curtiss sat in his office and shook his head. He really didn't understand Wilbur Wright. How could he claim for himself that which came from the air? When Curtiss built his first motorcycle, he didn't claim that technology for himself. He would never think of it. Something that came to him in the dust and grime of his own shop was not his. It belonged to everyone. Wilbur wanted to claim what really belonged to God, the divine inspiration of the heavens. If man was to fly, he could not be paying a toll every time he ascended to the skies. That simply wasn't fair; and now the Wrights were trying to put him out of business. Glenn sat in his quiet office and shook his head again. He had to find some way around the Wright patent if he was ever to make a living again.

  It burned deep down in his stomach. He had been wronged. The world had wronged him again, much like it had wronged him as a young man, when absolute evil took away his life. Wilbur went to bed thinking about it, and it was the first thing that occupied his thoughts in the morning. It was the itch that couldn't be scratched. The legal process was like that. It moved at a glacial pace. And even though he and his brother had been granted the patent, he still believed that Glenn Curtiss and others were stealing from him.

  Wilbur had visions of himself in court, dressing down Glenn Curtiss, many times. In his fantasy, he would shame Curtiss in front of the world. That would give him satisfaction. He nodded as he sat in the darkened hangar in his airplane. He moved the elevator and then the wing warping and rudder control. He envisioned one problem after another. He thought of down drafts, bumpy air, rain, the engine dying, dips, ascending, descending, turning, taking off, and landing. He went through it all in a silent pantomime. But this time he wasn't thinking of flying; he was thinking of Glenn Curtiss, and he felt the pain down in his stomach. He felt the headache, the gritting of his teeth. It happened whenever he thought about the way people were stealing from him.

  That is what Curtiss was doing. He was stealing his money by stealing his patent. He was taking what he had invented and using it to make money and not paying a licensing fee or royalties. He had just told Curtiss that they would settle in court, but everywhere he looked now he saw infringement. It was not only that Curtiss was stealing from him; really, anyone who flew a plane was stealing from him. The judge said it. Anyone who flew an airplane was using his technology, his three axes of control that encompassed an elevator, wing warping, and a hinged rudder that moved in tandem with the wings. Everyone owed him licensing fees and royalties, and yet hardly anyone was paying him.

  Take Curtiss, who had asked his price in a letter. Wilbur gave him a fair licensing fee of $1,000 per plane sold and $100 on every event where he flew a plane. That was fair, but Curtiss wouldn't even do that; and, even though he had an injunction against his company, Curtiss kept forming other companies with other people to get around Wilbur. They just had to launch another suit when he tried to say that separately controlled ailerons were not derivative of Wright technology. It was all a lie, and Curtiss knew it.

  Wilbur sat in the darkness. He hated the feeling of being a victim. Just three years before, in Le Mans, close to Paris, in 1908, Wilbur had proved to the world that he had invented the first machine capable of flight. The French were the first to recognize his accomplishment—even before his own country. This was after the plane had been nearly destroyed by customs officials and he had to take two months to rebuild the machine, during which he was scalded by radiator steam. Then he flew at Le Mans, and the world stood at attention. The crowds kept coming to Le Mans by train and automobile and from increasingly farther distances. “Every day there is a crowd of people not only from the neighborhood,” Wilbur reported to Orville, who was still recovering from injuries sustained in his crash at Fort Meyer, “but also from almost every country in Europe.”1 He would fly for over 200,000 people in the end.2 He flew with women, men, princes, and millionaires. They all wanted to have their picture taken with him. He had become an international celebrity, and for once the world stood at moral attention in recognition of his accomplishment.

  At the Aéro-Club de France's banquet, he received the gold medal and a prize of 5,000 francs. It was a celebration of Wilbur, not Orville. This was the man who had flown; and, to the world, this man had invented the airplane. As Major Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell wrote after flying with Wilbur, “Mr. Wright, with both hands grasping the levers, watches every move, but his movements are so slight as to be almost imperceptible…. All the time the engine is buzzing so loudly and the propellers humming so that after the trip one is almost deaf.”3

  The Wright brothers were mentioned in the press, but the French looked upon Wilbur as the man who had flown. Louis Barthou, the minster of public works, said in a speech at the Aéro-Club banquet, “Mr. Wright is a man who has never been discouraged even in the face of hesitation and suspicion.”4 It had the feel of the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago, where people listened to the man who had gone down to Kitty Hawk and were barely aware of his brother. Then Wilbur rose and addressed the crowd. After thanking the French for his warm reception, he gave his own vision of man's quest to fly: “I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across the trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air…. Once again, I thank you with all my heart and in thanking you I should like it understood that I am thanking all of France.”5

  And then he was toasted, written about, celebrated, and feted from one ceremony to another. Kings came to see him fly, as did princes and other royalty. Then his sister came over with Orville, and he took her for a seven-minute ride on a cold February day. When asked if she felt like a bird, she replied, “I don't know exactly how a bird feels. Birds sing…but like the birds I sang best when the flight was over.”6

  France changed everything for Wilbur. David McCullough wrote in The Wright Brothers, “At Le Mans and Pau he had flown far more than anyone ever had and set every record for distance, speed, altitude, time in the air, and made the first flights
ever with a passenger and all this after so many years of the near secrecy…. The whole world now knew.”7 And he had made $200,000 between contracts and prizes. The four months he spent in Europe had portended only good things on the horizon. In this moment, people saw the inventor of the airplane, and Wilbur Wright doffed his hat to their praise.

  But this was now years ago, and since then he had become increasingly bitter at the turn of events. In France alone factories were opening rapidly to produce airplanes. As Lawrence Goldstone cited in Birdmen, “On April 25 the New York Times reported that no less than fifteen factories were now in operation” in the United States and France.8 Wilbur hated feeling like people were reaching into his pocket and stealing the diamond he had found down at Kitty Hawk. He alone had risked everything. He alone had flown down in Kill Devil Hills and fought the elements and froze and baked and walked through the pouring rain while pulling a glider with his brother. He alone had emerged out of a three-year depression and pursued flying like a man possessed. He alone had written almost five hundred letters to Octave Chanute to work out all of the mind-numbing data that had to be changed. He had built the wind tunnel when he realized that the data was wrong and he would have to start over. He had designed a motor lighter than anyone else could have manufactured, and he alone had flown when no one else could. No one had suffered like he had. He had put his business on hold and had tracked down the men of science who could help him, from the Smithsonian to Octave Chanute, and now they wanted to take it all from him.