The Wrights had escaped with their lives and property losses of less than $5,000. Like everyone else they now faced a daunting clean-up effort. One reporter left a graphic description of the scene on the West Side:
The streets are seas of yellow ooze. Garden fences and hedges are twisted or torn away. Reeking heaps of indescribable refuse lie moldering where there were smooth lawns and bright flower beds. The houses that stand are all smeared with dirt that shows the height of the flood. But inside the houses, that is the dreadful thing. The rooms that the water filled are like damp caves. Mud lies thick on the floors, the walls are streaked with slime, and the paper hangs down in dismal festoons. Some pictures may remain hanging, but they are all twisted and tarnished. The furniture is a jumbled mass of confusion and filth. But the worst is the reek of death about the place.40
The things that had remained downstairs at 7 Hawthorn Street and in the bicycle shop were a total loss. Fortunately, the materials relating to the invention of the airplane survived with little damage. Rummaging through the shed, Orville found that some of the emulsion had begun to peel from a few of the glass plate negatives, but none was a total loss. The most important photo—the plate that John Daniels exposed just after the machine lifted off the rail for the first time on December 17, 1903—had lost only a small bit of emulsion in one corner. The image was undamaged.
The records of their experiments were safe as well. The water had not reached the second-floor office, and the fire that swept through other buildings on West Third left the bicycle shop untouched. Even the remnants of the 1903 airplane, stored in the low shed at the back, survived unharmed. The precious bits of wood and fabric, submerged beneath twelve feet of water, were protected from damage by a thick layer of mud.
Of all the surviving reminders of their early work, the world’s first airplane was probably least important to Orville. He and his brother had never given much thought to their old machines. Each of the three gliders had been discarded in turn at Kitty Hawk, as had the 1905 airplane when its career was concluded in 1908. They stored the 1904 machine over a single winter in the shed at Huffman Prairie; the following spring the wings and frame were hauled out and burned to make room for the new machine.
The 1903 airplane was the only one they had saved, stowing the shipping crates away behind the bike shop without unpacking them. Now it had survived the great flood. Orville cleaned the mud off the top of the crates as best he could, and put them back in the shed. Soon he would be very glad that those shattered bits of wood and torn fabric had been preserved one more time.
chapter 33
THE END OF AN ERA
April 1913~October 1915
The Wright factory escaped the flood. Orville called the men back to work on April 10, but only five of them made it to the plant. “There is some prospect that the street railway service will be resumed in the early part of next week,” he told a friend, “in which case I think we will have a fairly full force.”1
As master of those workmen and president of the company, Orville was badly out of his depth. Wilbur had not been especially fond of management, but he had worked hard at it, driven by an ambition that would not permit failure. At the deepest level, he had undertaken the search for a practical airplane as a means of distinguishing himself from the common herd. The opportunity to stand in the spotlight on his own terms and to be accepted as an equal by the industrialists who had invested in the Wright Company was proof that he had achieved his goal. For Wilbur, the stresses of the company presidency were offset by very real psychic rewards.
Orville had almost none of his brother’s restless ambition nor the energy and drive to succeed that came with it. Alone with his friends he was a delightful conversationalist; among strangers he grew silent and withdrawn. He had few illusions about his capacity for leadership. The thought of attending a board meeting, let alone presiding at one, was abhorrent to him. Moreover, with the single exception of Robert Collier, he felt little other than contempt for the rich New Yorkers whom Wilbur had regarded as friends and associates.2
Orville accepted the presidency of the Wright Company because he had no choice. The position enabled him to maintain control over his own financial destiny while at the same time drawing on corporate resources to carry out litigation at company expense.
He would use the power of his office, but he had no intention of reshaping himself into the image of a corporate executive. From the members of the board of directors to the men on the shop floor in Dayton, they would have to take him as he was.
Nor did he make any secret of his distaste for management. Orville physically distanced himself from the factory, maintaining his old office above the bicycle shop. In addition, he insisted on conducting business through intermediaries like Mabel Beck, his forceful and protective secretary, who became a legend in the company.3
Yet there was no doubt who was in charge. Wilbur had never been especially fond of Frank Russell. Orville, who liked him even less, fired Russell less than a year after taking over the reins. He hired a replacement, Grover Loening, during a business trip to New York in July 1913.
Loening, a recent graduate of Columbia, had met Wilbur in New York in 1909. The young man subsequently worked as chief engineer of the tiny Queen Aeroplane Company in New York, and constructed a flying boat of his own design.
Loening’s earlier acquaintance with Wilbur was relevant. Throughout their relationship, Orville would treat him as a younger brother—a young Wilbur, in fact. He enjoyed his company, and tried to lure him into the sort of arguments he and Wilbur had found so productive. For his part, Loening was extraordinarily fond of his employer but not blind to his weaknesses. “Factory organization was pretty rough,” he recalled many years later. “Orville … would delay making an important decision and drive us all nuts trying not to disobey his orders on the one hand and yet not knowing what to do.”4
Loening admired the fact that no one ever put anything over on Orville, but he was puzzled by his apparent lack of vision, saying: “He certainly did not have any big ‘business’ ideas or any great ambition to expand. He seemed to be lacking in push.” Part of the problem, Loening thought, was that Orville missed his brother. In addition, he was battling recurrent back pain resulting from the crash at Fort Myer in 1908.5
The patent suit was the most serious problem, however. Loening described the ongoing court battle with Glenn Curtiss as “the one great hate and obsession” preying on “the minds and characters” of both Orville and Katharine. He saw the patent fight as a two-edged sword. While it might ultimately put the competition out of business, it also monopolized Orville’s attention and discouraged any attempt to incorporate the latest technical advances into the design of Wright aircraft.6
The standard Wright production of 1913, the Model C, was an obsolete machine. Compared to contemporary European aircraft, it was slow, tail-heavy, and unstable. Other flying-machine builders, notably Esnault-Pelterie and Blériot, pioneered a natural control arrangement combining the use of a stick and rudder pedals. Orville retained the cumbersome and confusing system of twin levers developed in 1908.
In part, Orville’s technical conservatism was based on a reluctance to move too far from the classic Wright pattern developed at the start of the century. Until the patent suit was settled, there was a danger that a radical design change might be seen as an admission that the original required improvement. Moreover, Orville was reluctant to adopt innovations pioneered by men whom he had accused of infringing on his ideas.
Take the case of the flying boat. Since the day in 1910 when the French aviator Henri Fabre lifted off the water for the first time, hydroaeroplanes—flying boats—had enjoyed enormous popularity. Recognizing the extent to which the Wrights would dominate the U.S. Army market, Glenn Curtiss made a concerted effort to sell his machines to the U.S. Navy. He offered the Navy a cut-rate flight training program, staged the first takeoff and landing from U.S. naval vessels, and paid close attention as the Navy formula
ted its requirements.
His most important achievement, however, was the development of the flying boat. Curtiss began his experiments in the fall of 1908 with the rebuilt version of the June Bug called the Loon. He continued to develop his ideas with a variety of machines during 1909–11, finally introducing the Model E, his first genuinely practical flying boat, in 1912.
The Model E and subsequent variants were so successful that Curtiss not only dominated the U.S. Navy market but received the first great batch of orders from European purchasers. In 1913 he completed work on the America, a giant flying boat designed to cross the Atlantic. With the advent of war, the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company would become the major supplier of large flying boat patrol aircraft to both the British and American governments.7
Orville could trace his interest in flying boats to 1907, when he and Will had dreamed of a surprise appearance over the fleet during the Jamestown celebration. His first successful water takeoff and landing were made with a Model CH on a secluded stretch of the Miami River in 1913. Essentially a Model C fitted with a 240-pound pontoon, the clumsy machine was a far cry from the sleek Curtiss Model E with its rakish boat hull.
Grover Loening designed the first Wright flying boat, the Model G of 1913–14. Orville did not make it easy for him, insisting that the craft should in no way resemble the Curtiss boats. The result was much inferior and fell short of U.S. Navy requirements.8
The Wright Company floundered through the years 1912–15. New machines developed during this period failed to keep pace with the competition; more important, the standard Model C fell into ill repute with the U.S. Army. Art Welsh and Lieutenant Leighton Hazelhurst were the first men killed in a Model C, dying in the crash at College Park on June 11, 1912. The next fatalities at College Park came on the afternoon of September 28, when Lieutenant Lewis Rockwell drove his Model B straight into the ground at 50 miles per hour, killing himself and his passenger, Corporal Frank Scott.
The death toll continued to mount. Lieutenant Loren H. Call died in a Model B crash at Fort Sam Houston on July 8, 1913. Lieutenant Moss Love was killed in a Model C at the Army’s new North Island, California, facility on September 4. Lieutenant Perry C. Rich died when his Model C nosed into Manila Bay on November 14. Ten days later Lieutenant Hugh Kelly and flight instructor Eric Ellington died in a second Model C crash at North Island.9
Ellington’s death convinced Grover Loening that there was a major defect in the design of the Model C. “He was one of the leading Wright pilots in the Army and was constantly corresponding with us on details of his machine and his troubles,” the engineer recalled. “Finally, one morning I read of his death in the papers and arrived in the office, only to find a long letter from him, predicting that something would happen, as he was feeling sure the Wright Model C was too tail heavy and didn’t answer the controls properly.”10
Orville rejected the notion of a fundamental design problem, maintaining it was a matter of pilot error. The Model C was equipped with a new six-cylinder engine developing 60 horsepower—the aviators simply were not accustomed to so much power.11
Most of the crashes, he was convinced, were caused by stalls. The pilots misjudged the angle of attack, diving and climbing at too steep an angle. He developed an angle-of-incidence indicator—a simple pointer that sensed small changes in the angle of attack and warned the pilot when his climb or dive became too steep.
Orville thought that the automatic pilot on which he had been at work since 1905 would also help to solve the problem. The device, complete and ready for testing by the fall of 1913, was designed to keep an airplane flying straight and level without the intervention of the pilot. It included a pendulum to control the wing warping and a horizontal vane to operate the elevator, both working through servomotors powered by a wind-driven generator.12
He received a patent on the automatic pilot in October 1913, by which time he had installed a prototype system on a special single-seat Model E. He had tested the thing in secret and knew that it worked. The first public demonstration would be a particularly sweet moment, for he had found a way to use the invention to triumph over Glenn Curtiss.
In 1911, Orville’s friend Robert Collier established what was to become the most prestigious award in American aviation. The Collier Trophy was to be presented annually for the most significant contribution to aeronautics made during the year. Curtiss had won the trophy two years running for his flying boats. Orville was determined to snatch the award from him in 1913.
Remembering Wilbur’s stratagem for winning the Coupe Michelin at the last minute, Orville scheduled his first public demonstration of the automatic pilot for December 31. He made a total of seventeen flights before the Aero Club of America observers gathered at Huffman Prairie that day. The most spectacular performance included a takeoff followed by seven full circles of the field with his hands held high in the air.13
Orville was awarded the Collier Trophy on February 5, 1914, but it proved to be a hollow triumph. In the spring of 1913, just as he was putting the finishing touches on his automatic stabilizer, a twenty-year-old engineer named Lawrence Sperry reported to the Curtiss flight school at Hammondsport for pilot training. The son of Elmer Sperry, who had developed a gyroscopic stabilizing system for ships, Lawrence was determined to perfect a similar device for aircraft.
Sperry earned his wings and traveled with the Curtiss crowd to winter quarters at North Island, California, a five-mile-long sandbar separating San Diego Bay from the Pacific, where the work on the gyroscopic stabilizer continued. Like Orville, young Sperry developed a mechanism that would sense deviations from straight and normal flight and apply corrective action.
Rather than using mechanical vanes and pendulums, however, he established a stable platform for two gyroscopes in the cockpit of a Curtiss flying boat. One gyro sensed deviations in the yaw axis and operated the rudder. The other functioned for the roll and pitch axes and controlled the ailerons and elevator.
Sperry unveiled his invention on June 18, 1914, as part of a great safety competition sponsored by the Aéro-Club de France and the French War Department. He took a Curtiss C-2 off the Seine, climbed to altitude, and flew back down the river. At the appropriate moment, his mechanic, Emile Cachin, crawled seven feet out onto one wing as Sperry lifted his hands from the controls and stood up in the cockpit. The airplane flashed past the judges as the crowd went wild.14
Orville’s automatic stabilizer worked, but Sperry had broken entirely new ground. His brilliant solution to the problem rivaled what the Wrights themselves had achieved in the invention of the airplane. Not only did it form the basis for all subsequent automatic stability systems, it opened an entire range of new possibilities. The enormously complex inertial navigation system that guided the first men to the Moon in 1969 was directly rooted in Sperry’s automatic pilot of 1914.
In the summer of 1913, with attention focused on the bottom line of corporate account books and general operations in Dayton, the board of directors of the Wright Company dispatched the company treasurer, Alpheus Barnes, to keep a close eye on the situation. Orville, working through Loening, remained in charge of production. Barnes took over bookkeeping, advertising, and contract negotiation.
Loening remembered Barnes as “a hearty, well-built, and genial character, smoking cigars continually and full of good stories,” who regarded Orville’s Dayton friends as provincial hicks. From Orville’s point of view, the company treasurer was the worst of the New York crowd. That, Loening commented, “did not bother Barnes much.” In addition to his other duties, Loening served as a mediator between the two men.15
Orville and Barnes could not even agree on a response to good news. On January 13, 1914, the United States Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the original decision in the case of Wright v. Curtiss. The Wright patent was valid and Glenn Hammond Curtiss had infringed upon it. This time it seemed that Curtiss had run out of space in which to maneuver. His only possible resort was to the Supreme Court of the Unit
ed States, and there were no apparent legal grounds on which to base such an appeal.
Alpheus Barnes and his New York colleagues were overjoyed. Grover Loening listened for hours as the treasurer spun bright visions of what such a decision would mean to the company—opening the way for a legal monopoly as all-inclusive and remunerative as that granted to the Bell Telephone Company.16
It might have worked. Loening spent considerable time in later years speculating on what might have occurred if Barnes and the other members of the board of directors had been given a free hand to expand production and exploit a monopoly.
There were untold millions of dollars ready in New York to be invested in such a trust. In no time Curtiss and what other companies there were could have been closed down or bought up, and we would have seen a totally different development of flying starting here and spreading to Europe exactly as the telephone monopoly did. When we look back on it, it might have been a better thing for aviation. Many destructive rivalries would have been stopped, and with the World War just getting ready to start, one hesitates to think what a difference a great rich legal trust might have made.17
“At any rate,” Loening concluded, “it did not happen because of one man—Orville Wright. With the winning of the suit, his revenge on Curtiss seemed satisfied, and all he wanted was tribute—royalties from everyone.”18 Badgered by the New York board to take immediate action that would drive Curtiss and the others out of business, Orville refused, announcing that everyone, with the possible exception of Curtiss, would be free to continue doing business so long as they paid the Wright Company a 20 percent royalty on every machine produced.
The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright Page 53