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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  Landing in New York on November 22, Wilbur went straight to the Flint offices for a conference with Frank Cordley. The following day he caught the train for Washington, where he spent a rainy weekend waiting for government offices to open on Monday. General William Crozier, senior officer of the Board; General James Allen, Chief Signal Officer; and Major Lawson M. Fuller met with him on the morning of November 25.2

  For the first time, Wilbur recognized that the Army was seriously interested in his invention. And the Wrights were ready. They had, in fact, decided that their rock bottom price to the U.S. government would be $25,000, a figure Will mentioned at this first meeting. The officers demurred. They could draw up to $10,000 from an existing experimental fund, but a $25,000 price tag would require a congressional appropriation. Will left the meeting convinced that the Army would not take effective action before he and Orv flew in Europe in the spring. A second meeting in Washington did not alter that assessment.3

  But Wilbur underestimated his own impact. The Board, impressed by his presentation, reached into a small fund left over from the Spanish-American War to obtain the required $25,000. On December 23, General James Allen issued a solicitation for bids for the construction of an airplane.

  The “Advertisement and Specification for a Heavier-Than-Air Flying Machine” required that the machine carry a pilot and passenger a distance of 125 miles at a speed of 40 miles per hour. It must remain aloft for at least one hour, land without damage, “and also be capable of dismounting and loading on an Army wagon to be transported.” Moreover, it should be designed to permit “an intelligent man to become proficient in its use within a reasonable length of time.”4

  The release of Signal Corps Specification No. 486 drew much negative comment from the press and the aeronautical community. A writer for the New York Globe remarked that

  A machine such as described in the Signal Corps specifications would record the solution of all the difficulties in the way of the heavier-than-air airship, and finally give mankind almost as complete control of the air as it now has of the land and water. It … would, in short, be probably the most epoch-making invention in the history of civilization. Nothing in any way approaching such a machine has ever been constructed—the Wright brothers claim still awaits public confirmation—and the man who has achieved such a success would have, or at least should have, no need of competing in a contest where the successful bidder might be given his trial because his offer was a few hundred or thousand dollars lower than that of someone else.5

  The American Magazine of Aeronautics, unofficial mouthpiece of the Aero Club of America crowd, argued that “there is not a known flying machine in the world which could fulfill these requirements.” James Means, editor of the Aeronautical Annuals which had so influenced the Wrights, remarked to Chanute that while Minerva sprang “fully fledged from the head of Jupiter … I hardly think that the perfect flying machine will appear in such sudden fashion.”6

  Wilbur recognized the truth. Major George Squier had taken the Wrights at their word, drafting a specification that described the performance of their machine. “When I first learned that the Board was advertising for bids I doubted its good faith,” Wilbur told Chanute, “but am now inclined to think that I did them an injustice in suspecting such a thing.”7

  Orville arrived home from Paris on December 13. The brothers spent the next few weeks corresponding with the Board to ensure that they understood all of the requirements. On January 27, 1908, they submitted their formal proposal to sell a flying machine as described in the circular for $25,000. It was the only bid that the Board expected to receive. In fact, there were forty-one proposals when the competition closed on February 1.

  They ranged in price from a bargain-basement $850 to $1 million. One fellow, a federal prison inmate, valued his machine at $45 to $65 a pound, depending on the model selected; another bidder promised speeds of up to 500 miles per hour. Nineteen of the bids were dismissed out of hand. All but three of the remaining competitors were disqualified by their inability to post the required 10 percent of the bid price as a bond.

  The successful low bidder, J. F. Scott of Chicago, priced his nonexistent machine at $1,000 because he had only $100 to offer as a bond. Embarrassed by his unexpected success, and recognizing his complete inability to meet the specifications, he withdrew. The field was now reduced to two bidders, the Wrights and Augustus Herring. Technically, Herring had won the competition with a low bid of $20,000. The officials of the Board were in a quandary. They did not believe that Herring could fulfill the contract. Still, he was a well-known figure with a long-standing reputation in aeronautics; they could not simply discount his offer. The only way to save the situation was to find an additional $20,000 that would permit them to accept both surviving bids.8

  Why had Herring entered the competition? He had long since ceased active work in aeronautics—the Wrights knew that, the Army knew it, and Herring knew it. Yet he was convinced that he had accomplished something significant prior to 1900 and that he ought to be rewarded for his efforts. As the low bidder, Herring would at least remain in the public eye. There might yet be a way to turn the situation to his advantage.

  For their part, the Wrights were fully satisfied. They saw Herring as a harmless comic figure who could do them no ill. More important, after more than two years of effort, they had a contract. Two contracts, in fact.

  Hart Berg had closed a deal with the French. Wilbur traveled to New York on March 15 to check out the particulars. The new contract would be signed not with the government but with a syndicate headed by the financier Lazare Weiller, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, and other French capitalists. La Compagnie Générale de Navigation Aérienne, as it was to be called, would purchase the Wrights’ French patents and the right to manufacture, sell, and license Wright airplanes in France. After providing a series of demonstration flights, the Wrights would receive 500,000 francs upon delivery of the first machine, 50 percent of the founders’ shares in the company, and 20,000 francs apiece for each of four additional aircraft to be delivered to the company. Although the deal was not quite as sweet as they had hoped, the Wrights agreed to the terms. Will would return to France to fulfill the new contract with the syndicate, while Orv remained in America to fly for the Army.9

  It would be a busy spring. The machine to be flown in France still sat in a crate at Le Havre. Bariquand et Marre had won the contract to produce an engine for that craft. Now the Wrights must rush a second machine and engine to completion for the Army trials. Moreover, they had not flown since the fall of 1905. Before attempting to do any flying in public, they would retire to Kitty Hawk with the refurbished 1905 machine, complete with upright seats and an improvised control system.

  The Wrights knew that they would not be the only ones in the air in 1908. Farman continued to stretch his time and distance aloft, finally capturing the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize with a circular flight of 1,500 meters in 1 minute, 28 seconds on January 13. It was obvious that Farman, Delagrange, Blériot, Esnault-Pelterie, and others had matured; by midsummer, these Europeans were flying more than fifteen minutes at a time, and covering many kilometers. Farman flew at Ghent, Belgium, that spring, then visited the United States where he made a number of disappointingly short hops at Brighton Beach, New York, in July.

  But the real excitement was generated by a group of newcomers who called themselves the Aerial Experiment Association. The AEA was born on September 30, 1907, when six people filed into the office of the American consul in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sign articles of agreement. They were a diverse group, drawn together by Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel.10

  Thomas Watson, his assistant and friend, later recalled that Bell had spoken of the possibility of heavier-than-air flight during the course of their early telephone experiments. On one occasion Watson had stood well upwind and watched as Bell examined the wing structure of a very dead gull washed ashore on the beach.

  As early as 1891, Bell, now a world-famous i
nventor, had conducted flying-machine experiments at his estate, Beinn Breagh,* near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. But it was his friendship with Langley, and his minor involvement in the Smithsonian Aerodrome program, that fired Bell’s aeronautical interests. Encouraged by Langley, he began his own program of aeronautical research in 1896. Fascinated by kites since his childhood, Bell developed a series of new designs that would enable him to study the problems of aircraft stability.

  Like the residents of the Outer Banks who had long puzzled over the antics of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the sturdy Cape Breton fishermen looked askance at Bell’s kites. One local citizen reported:

  He goes up there on the side of the hill on sunny afternoons and with a lot of thing-a-ma-jigs fools away the whole blessed day, flying kites, mind you!

  He sets up a blackboard and puts down figures about these kites and the queer machines he keeps bobbing around in the sky. Dozens of them he has, all kinds of queer shapes, and the kites are but poor things, God knows! I could make better myself. And the men that visit him—old men—that should have something better to do. They go up there with him and spend the whole livelong day flying kites. It’s the greatest foolishness I ever did see.11

  By 1902, that foolishness had produced the first of Bell’s famous tetrahedral kites. Loosely based on the Hargrave box kite, these large craft were built up of individual cells, constructed with triangular faces, arranged in great tetrahedral banks. Beginning with relatively simple single-cell assemblies, the kites grew to enormous multicellular aggregations, some twenty-six feet wide. The giant Frost King of 1905 contained 1,300 cells arranged in twelve layers. It once carried a man thirty feet into the air.

  Bell was less interested in how much weight his kites would carry, or in how high they would fly, than in stability. For Frost King he sought absolute stability in a machine which, if powered, would be capable of flight with a man on board. Like Langley, he hoped to launch the craft from water, and immediately forged ahead with a series of hydrofoil tests.

  Bell’s wife Mabel, a partner in the fullest sense, followed his experimental program from the outset, offering suggestions that shaped his work. It was Mrs. Bell who volunteered to put up $20,000 to create an experimental association comprised of the young men her husband had drawn into the aeronautical project.

  John Alexander Douglas McCurdy and Frederick Walker (“Casey”) Baldwin were the first two employees. McCurdy, the son of Bell’s secretary and photographer, came home for a visit from the University of Toronto in the spring of 1906 with his friend, Casey Baldwin. Bell liked the two young men, recognizing the talents needed for his burgeoning airship program. Baldwin, a gifted young engineer, was persuaded to enter Bell’s employ after his graduation in the fall of 1906; McCurdy joined the team after his own graduation the following spring.

  Thomas Etholen Selfridge was the next recruit. A native of San Francisco, Selfridge graduated from West Point in 1903. After distinguished service as a troop commander during the San Francisco earthquake, his decision to pursue aeronautics seemed odd to his superiors. Bell recognized it for a carefully calculated career move:

  [In the spring of 1907] a young man called upon me in Washington, an officer of the U.S. Army, who turned out to be Lieut. Thomas E. Selfridge. He showed a great deal of interest in the whole subject of aerial locomotion, and expressed a desire to witness our experiments with tetrahedral structures in Nova Scotia. I found that he had devoted a great deal of attention to the subject of Aeronautics, and what was being done in relation to heavier-than-air machines in all parts of the world with the idea that sometime or other the U.S. government would require flying machines in the army and that, when that time came, the services of an officer who had made an expert study of the subject would be in demand, and he would be sure of promotion into a field of great usefulness.12

  Bell wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt, seconding Selfridge’s official request for temporary duty at Beinn Breagh. By December 6, Selfridge was a full-fledged member of the team, having ascended to an altitude of 168 feet during a 7-minute flight aboard a new kite, the Cyqnet.

  The final, critical, member of the AEA arrived at Baddeck in July 1907. Glenn Hammond Curtiss had sold Bell an engine at the New York Aero Club show the winter before. Curtiss promised to deliver the engine in person and to instruct Bell’s engineers in its operation. Bell easily persuaded the quiet, competent Yankee mechanic to stay on as chief engineer of the new organization.

  Loyalty to Bell ensured that the first AEA effort would be the completion and testing of the tetrahedral aerodrome Cyqnet. Then “Bell’s Boys,” as they became known, were eager to move into the mainstream of world aeronautics. Operations shifted to Hammondsport during the winter of 1907–08, where Curtiss workmen were already putting the finishing touches on a variant of the old Chanute-Herring glider.

  Test-flown from mid-January through March 1908, the little glider gave the younger members of the AEA their first real opportunity to skim through the air. It also convinced them that kites were not the future. Outvoted by his associates, Bell withdrew to Beinn Breagh to continue the kite work on his own.

  The members of the AEA knew where to turn for advice. Curtiss wrote to the Wright brothers late in December, describing the creation of the AEA, and offering to furnish, “gratis,” a 50-hp Curtiss engine for their own experiments. Selfridge followed with a letter of his own on January 15, 1908. He put a series of straightforward questions to the brothers. What was their experience with the travel of the center of pressure on a wing? What was “a good efficient method” of constructing light, strong ribs that would maintain their camber? How should fabric be applied? Could the Wrights offer any general advice on aircraft construction to a group of first-time builders?13

  The Wrights answered the questions, directing the newcomers to their patents and published papers for additional details. They assumed that the AEA could not pose a threat. Bell’s involvement with the group spoke well for the program—he had always defended their claims in the press and seemed to be an honest man. So long as Bell was in command, the AEA would prefer pure research to commercial enterprise. At any rate, all the information they offered was protected by their patents.

  Work on the Red Wing, the first powered AEA machine, began at Hammondsport late in January. Selfridge, who had been among those pushing hardest to switch from kites to conventional aircraft, was the designer. Named for the red fabric (left over from the Cygnet) that covered its wings, the first AEA venture into powered flight displayed all the external Wright characteristics so familiar on French aircraft. It was a pusher biplane with a canard elevator and a rudder at the rear. There was no attempt at wing warping. The upper and lower wingtips were trussed so close together that they almost touched. Selfridge hoped this pattern would improve lateral stability.

  Selfridge was recalled to active duty before the Red Wing was complete. That did not deter Curtiss, McCurdy, and Baldwin. After some preliminary runs across the frozen surface of Lake Keuka, they transported the little machine to a smooth patch of ice five miles from Hammondsport on March 12. The first test, with Baldwin at the controls, was to be a high-speed run down the ice. To the surprise of the small crowd of observers, the machine rose into the air some 200 feet from the start and flew a short distance forward until the tail buckled, sending the craft into a sharp descending turn to the right. It struck the ice with some force, breaking a runner and damaging a strut on the right wingtip. The distance from takeoff to touch down was 318 feet, 11 inches.

  Far from being discouraged, the members of the AEA immediately set to work on their next project—White Wing. Casey Baldwin designed this craft, which was complete and ready for testing by May 9. Except that it featured wheels rather than sled runners, White Wing appeared to be a virtual replica of its predecessor. There was one significant difference: Baldwin had mounted two small ailerons at the upper wingtips.

  The ailerons functioned like the warping wings of the Wright machine. The Wrights h
ad, in fact, recognized that lateral control could be obtained with such surfaces—a description of them was in their patent. Bell suggested the need for a lateral-control mechanism after the crash of the Red Wing. Whether he first encountered the idea of the aileron in the Wright patent, or in the work of Santos-Dumont, Esnault-Pelterie, or Samuel Cody, all of whom had used them earlier, matters little. The important thing was that the ailerons transformed the AEA machine into a flyable airplane.

  Casey Baldwin made the first successful flight with White Wing at the Stony Brook race track near Hammondsport on May 17, covering 285 feet. Selfridge tried his hand the next day: he flew 100 feet on one flight and 240 feet on another. It was Curtiss’s turn on May 21. From the outset it was apparent that the skills honed in bicycle and motorcycle racing were transferable to aeronautics. On his first attempt he covered an incredible 1,017 feet. McCurdy flew 720 feet later that day, but wrecked the machine in landing. The men of the AEA abandoned White Wing and moved confidently toward better things.14

  The Wrights paid scant attention. On March 23, Lazare Weiller had agreed to terms for the French rights to their invention. Two weeks later, on the morning of April 6, Wilbur caught the train for Norfolk. Memories must have come rushing back. As before, he bought lumber in Norfolk, then proceeded to Elizabeth City where he laid in a stock of supplies and registered at the Southern Hotel to await the arrival of “Little” Spencer Midgett, now skipper of the Lou Willis, which would transport the lumber over to the Banks.15

  This time Will himself crossed the Sound in relative comfort and safety aboard Captain Franklin Midgett’s gasoline launch, the B. M. Van Dusen. It was a wise decision. A few days later the Lou Willis once again lost her sails in a gale off the mouth of the Pasquotank, and was forced back to port for repairs. At the time, she was ferrying another load of the Wrights’ lumber.