The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Crouch, Tom D.

  The Wrights concentrated on making headway with the American government. Just this once, they gave serious thought to shock treatment. Later that spring, elements of the Atlantic Fleet would steam through Hampton Roads and up the James River as part of a great celebration marking the three hundredth anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Thousands of spectators would attend the festival at Jamestown, which would include a small aeronautical exhibition and meeting. Suppose an airplane appeared out of nowhere, circled the fleet at anchor, and disappeared to the south—surely that would catch the attention of American officials, and most of the rest of the world as well.8

  On March 20, Will and Orv appeared near the foot of the main bridge over the Miami with a strange contraption—an engine and propellers mounted on pontoons. The idea was to see whether they could take off safely from the shallow waters of Currituck Sound. The experiment was a fiasco—operations from the water were out of the question. The Jamestown scheme, which would require flying for a relatively long distance over the Sound, foundered.9

  Less than a week later new hope appeared. During their visits to New York the brothers had become friendly with Courtlandt Field Bishop, the current president of the Aero Club of America. Bishop called the attention of his brother-in-law, Republican Congressman Herbert Parsons, to the Wrights’ problems with the U.S. government. Parsons wrote to the brothers in early April asking to see copies of their 1905 correspondence with the Board of Ordnance and Fortification.

  Having read the letters, Parsons resolved to do what he could to help. He sent a short note and copies of several recent favorable articles on the Wrights to President Theodore Roosevelt. Intrigued, Roosevelt forwarded the package to Secretary of War Taft with a recommendation that action be taken to investigate the Wright claims. Taft referred the matter back to the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, complete with his own recommendation for a favorable response and the attached notes from Parsons and Roosevelt.

  The secretary of the Board wrote to the Wrights on May 11, requesting additional information on their invention and its capabilities. Orville would have to deal with this on his own—the day before the letter arrived they had received a cable from Flint. Hart Berg, superintending the marketing operation in Europe, did not share the home office enthusiasm for a supposed flying machine designed and built by two Midwestern bicycle makers. To build his confidence for the difficult months of negotiation ahead, Flint requested that the brothers travel to Europe for meetings with Berg and potential buyers.

  With work under way on a new airplane and engine, it was impossible for both brothers to make the trip. Wilbur insisted that Orv should go. As he explained in confidence to his father several months later, it was a calculated move.

  When the telegram came from Flint’s asking that one of us go to Europe at once, I saw instantly what was involved, and asked Orville to go. I did this for two reasons: (1) Because I wished the job of putting the final touches to the engines, and preparing the machine for shipment. I am more careful than he is, at least I think so. (2) Because it was evident that the man who went to Europe would have to act largely on his own judgment without much consultation by letter or cable. I felt that I was more willing to accept the consequences of any error in judgment on his part than to have him blaming me if I went.10

  Orville disagreed, insisting that Wilbur would make the best impression. Setting his compunctions aside, Wilbur left Dayton on May 16, stopped for a day in New York, and boarded the R.M.S. Campania for Liverpool on May 18. Orville would follow once the work on the new airplane and engine was complete.

  The Board’s letter of inquiry arrived as Will was preparing to leave. Orv responded on May 17, noting that he and his brother had “some flying machines in the course of construction, and would be pleased to sell one or more of them to the War Department, if an agreement as to terms can be reached.” Each machine was capable of carrying an operator and an observer, together with enough gasoline for a flight of 200 kilometers. The Wrights were willing “to make it a condition of a contract that the machine must make a trial trip before Government representatives of not less than fifty kilometers at a speed of not less than fifty kilometers an hour, before its acceptance by the Department, and before any part of the purchase price is paid to us.”11

  The secretary replied on May 22, requesting that the Wrights submit a definite proposal for the sale of a flying machine to the U.S. government. Orv offered to provide the aircraft described in his previous letter, together with flight instruction for an officer to be named by the Board, for $100,000. He pointed out that, “since many of the features of our flyer are secrets … it would not be prudent to show the machine in advance of a contract,” but stressed that no payment would be required until after the promised demonstration flight.12

  On June 8, another letter asked whether the quoted price would include sale of exclusive rights to the invention. Orv replied that an exclusive sale was no longer possible. The exchange was followed by a long silence—there would be no more letters from the Board until early October. The members, disappointed by the high price tag and the refusal to offer an exclusive sale, had decided to sit back and wait.

  Things were moving more rapidly in Europe. Wilbur had arrived in London on the afternoon of May 25. Hart Berg had little difficulty picking out his new client on the crowded platform of the train station—“To begin with, it is always easy to spot an American among Englishmen.” Even if other Americans had been there, Berg was certain he would have known Wilbur Wright. “Either I am Sherlock Holmes,” he wrote to the home office the next day, “or Wright has that peculiar glint of genius in his eye which left no doubt in my mind who he was.”13

  As was so often the case, Berg’s initial skepticism vanished after a few minutes of conversation with Wilbur. Convinced that the man meant what he said, Berg became a believer who would devote all his energies to the Wright cause.

  Berg lost little time in bringing Wilbur up to date on the situation in various nations. Isidore Loewe had sent word that in Germany things were not promising. “The officials are afraid of the possible consequences of a blunder,” Will wrote home. “From all accounts, every official near the Emperor is in constant terror of losing his standing.” Russia, it seemed, would follow the German lead. The prospects were bleak in England as well. Only a few days before Wilbur’s arrival, Lady Jane Taylor had received word from R. B. Haldane, Secretary of State for War, that “the War Office is not disposed to enter into relations at present with any manufacturer of Aeroplanes.”14

  Berg thought that Wilbur could be most useful in France. The Wrights had dominated French aeronautics from a distance for five years. The French had read about the brothers, argued the merits of their claims, and used the Wright gliders and powered machines as a jumping-off point for their own designs. Through it all, Wilbur and Orville had remained mysterious figures. The sudden appearance of one of them in Paris might help to resolve French doubts and lead to a reopening of negotiations.

  Both Wilbur and Berg recognized that any talks with the French would have to be handled with care, but they disagreed on strategy. Wilbur was convinced that the best course was to deal directly with the government. Berg offered a counterproposal. Preliminary discussions had revealed that Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe was interested in creating a syndicate to produce Wright machines for sale to the French Ministry of War. That was the direction in which they should move. If they began with the government and were unable to strike a bargain, all other avenues would be closed to them. But if the notion of a syndicate failed to materialize, they could still approach the government directly. At any rate, the support of the powerful Deutsch de la Meurthe would be an important selling point when dealing with the government.

  Together with Frank Cordley, who arrived from New York that weekend, Wilbur and Berg left for France on Monday, May 27. They met with Deutsch the following day. Both parties were very serious about doing business. Before finaliz
ing any arrangements, however, Deutsch approached the new Minister of War, General Georges Picquart, about government interest in the purchase of flying machines.

  Picquart spoke to Commandant Bonel, who had visited Dayton the year before, and glanced through the reports and the correspondence covering the earlier negotiations. Confident that the Wrights were all they claimed, he told Deutsch that the government would be interested in doing business, providing the machines could operate at an altitude of 1,000 feet and fulfill the other conditions discussed in 1906.

  With the promise of a major French contract in hand, Deutsch returned to negotiate an arrangement with Wilbur and the Flint representatives. Together, they worked out a plan for the creation of a syndicate that would manufacture Wright aircraft for sale to European buyers. The firm would be capitalized at $700,000. The Wrights would receive $350,000 for their efforts—$250,000 in cash and $100,000 that would remain in the company treasury as their contribution to working capital. In return, they would control roughly 47 percent of the stock. Flint & Company would deposit its entire commission in the treasury of the new firm in exchange for one-fifth ownership. Deutsch would purchase one-fifth ownership, and would handle the negotiations with the government. A consortium of other small stockholders rounded out the venture.15

  There were serious political problems on the horizon, however. Bonel learned of the new initiative through General Picquart, and told Arnold Fordyce that Wilbur was in Paris negotiating with a completely new group of associates. Fordyce passed the news on to his employer, Henri Letellier.

  Letellier was outraged. Only a year before he had sponsored an initiative that might have succeeded but for the last-minute recalcitrance of the government. Now he learned that Deutsch de la Meurthe, of all people, might succeed where he had failed. The two men were bitter rivals. Letellier’s father owned the Paris daily Le Journal, while Deutsch had an interest in Le Matin.

  Letellier called on General Picquart, reminding him that the previous minister had granted him the exclusive right to organize an aeronautical syndicate involving the Wright machine, and insisting that the prior commitment remained valid. General Picquart was no stranger to political intrigue. Caught up in the Dreyfus Affair less than a decade before, he had been falsely accused of forgery and served part of a prison sentence. He was promoted for his trouble, but had no intention of risking involvement in a new controversy. Legally, the 1906 agreement had expired, but it seemed to Piquart that Letellier was more likely to cause trouble. Deutsch was informed that the old arrangement stood. Flint & Company and the Wrights would have to deal with the government through Letellier and the Le Journal faction. Deutsch stormed off in disgust.

  It did not take long for Wilbur, Berg, and Cordley to realize how much they would miss Deutsch de la Meurthe. The support of the “Standard Oil King of France” would be far more valuable than any assistance from Letellier, who, as Wilbur noted, was “too much interested in the personal and political game to suit us.”16

  Berg advised approaching the French government through Letellier’s connections with the same proposition that they had worked out with Deutsch de la Meurthe. They would sell one airplane capable of flying for 50 kilometers and attaining an altitude of 300 meters with the pilot alone (10 kilometers with a pilot and passenger), for 1 million francs. The price included six months exclusive use of the invention, after which the syndicate would be free to sell additional airplanes to other nations.

  On June 24, Arnold Fordyce presented the deal to Senator Charles Humbert, an associate of Letellier’s who served as secretary of the Chamber of Deputies budget committee. Humbert asked that they raise their price by 250,000 francs. The additional money would be used to grease the appropriate palms along the way. Appalled, Berg and Wilbur insisted that if the original proposal was not immediately forwarded to the Ministry of War, they would pack their bags and leave for Berlin.

  Humbert backed down, assuring the Americans that he would press the matter with all dispatch. It was the beginning of a period of confusion, false promises, and discouragement. They had no direct access to the government and no faith in Humbert. One conflicting message followed another, until they had not the slightest idea where they stood.

  In spite of the uncertainty, Wilbur made at least a halfhearted attempt to play the tourist. He was disappointed. The problem, he explained to Katharine after visiting Notre Dame, was that “my imagination pictures things more vividly than my eyes.” The reality of the great cathedral could not compare with the image planted by Victor Hugo in the mind of a young reader rummaging through the books in his father’s library. “The nave is seemingly not much wider than a storeroom,” he complained, “and the windows of the clerestory are so awfully high up that the building is very dark.”17 It was the same with the paintings in the Louvre. The Mona Lisa, he noted, was “no better than the prints in black and white.”18

  The aeronautical events did interest him. After attending several balloon races as a spectator, he was invited to make an ascent with a visiting American aeronaut, Allan Hawley, and two friends. The four men launched from the Aéro-Club grounds at Saint-Cloud at four-thirty on the afternoon of July 17. They reached a maximum altitude of 3,000 feet, and remained in the air for three and a half hours, finally landing some twenty miles west of Orléans. The trip convinced Wilbur of the futility of ballooning, in which “a few glorious hours in the air are usually followed by a tiresome walk to some village, an uncomfortable night at a poor hotel, and a return home by slow local trains.”19

  From the roof of his hotel, Wilbur had already seen the 200-foot-long Lebaudy airship La Patrie fly over the Arc de Triomphe, down the Rue St. Honoré, and directly over the Hôtel Meurice. He estimated that the actual speed of the craft was not more than 15 miles per hour. Even in the relatively light 8-mile an hour wind, the craft had difficulty making headway. He was not impressed.20

  “As I have been very busy,” he told Chanute, “I have aimed to avoid social engagements, but have met most of the leading men interested in aeronautics.” Generally, the French were much more impressed with Wilbur than he was with them. Ferber could scarcely restrain his enthusiasm. “As to my impression,” he told Georges Besançon,

  it was profound, and I grasped his hand and looked upon him with great emotion. Just think that without this man I would be nothing, for I should not have dared, in 1902, to trust myself on a flimsy fabric if I had not known from his accounts and his photographs that “it would carry”! Think that, without him, my experiments would not have taken place and I should not have had Voisin as a pupil. Capitalists like Deutsch de la Meurthe would not, in 1904, have established the prize you know of. The press would not have spread the good idea on all sides.21

  Wilbur for his part regarded Ferber with open contempt. He was “infected with ambition,” and, for all of his admiration of the Wrights, had apparently worked hard to scuttle the 1906 negotiations. “Since then,” Will commented, “he has done all he could to prevent us from doing business here.” In the privacy of his diary he noted that “Ferber evidently is double-faced, but at bottom bitterly hostile.”22

  Most of the other experimenters whom he met—Tatin, Besançon, de la Vaulx, Esnault-Pelterie, Archdeacon, and Voisin—doubted his claims. Frank Lahm and his son, Frank Jr., a West Pointer (Class of ’01) and the winner of the first James Gordon Bennett balloon trophy in 1906, were his only close friends.

  On July 3, Fordyce told Wilbur and Berg that he would soon introduce them to a representative of the Ministry of War. Several days later, word came from the ministry that a one-year period of exclusivity would be required rather than the six months that had been offered. Wilbur would not give way. When they finally met with Major A. L. Targe of the ministry on July 9, however, he led them to believe that the original six-month period would be quite satisfactory.

  Returning to the ministry for a second meeting on July 19, they met with a General Roques, who insisted on a three-year period of exclusivity for hi
s government. The two Americans made it perfectly clear that their proposal was a take it or leave it one. The general then asked them to rewrite their proposal as a formal contract, complete with the six-month exclusivity clause.

  Berg and Wilbur passed the document on to Fordyce, who offered to translate and forward it to the ministry. They assumed that the government would give a clearcut answer. Instead, when Berg called on Fordyce at the Le Journal offices on July 25, he discovered that substantial changes had been made to the text of the contract during translation. Wilbur spoke to Fordyce that afternoon, calling a halt to the entire process until his brother arrived in Paris.

  As Wilbur feared, the long separation and the complexity of the negotiations placed an enormous strain on his relationship with Orville. He did his best to keep his brother informed through letters and frequent cables, but confusion was inevitable. Wilbur would cable a new bit of information and ask for comment. Orville would attempt to respond, his answer invariably arriving too late to have any impact. By the end of June the combination of slow mail and unavoidably cryptic cablegrams led to misunderstanding between them.

  “I have had only one letter a week from you (these very short) in the last month or more,” Orv wrote on July 11. “I have practically no information of what is going on. When you cable, you never explain anything so that I can answer with any certainty that we are talking about the same thing.” Nor was he happy with Flint & Company. “They surely have had advices of what was going on,” he complained, “but they have not sent me one word.”23

  Orville feared that his brother was discussing an exclusive sale of their invention to the French, something to which he was absolutely opposed. Moreover, he was concerned about a story in the New York Times suggesting that Wilbur had offered to sell flying machines to the French for only $500 apiece. By July 1, no longer able to stand the uncertainty, he cabled his brother: