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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  W. Starling Burgess, a wealthy yacht designer turned aircraft builder, was among those who jumped at Orville’s offer. Glenn L. Martin of California was another. But those men ran very small operations compared to the Curtiss Aeroplane Company.

  By the early spring of 1914, Curtiss was the largest and most successful producer of aircraft in the United States, the only firm that could compete with leading European manufacturers. Glenn Curtiss was a man of few illusions. He knew that the offer made to other manufacturers would not be available to him. The Wright Company would take legal action to shut him down. Not long before, Henry Ford had been caught in just such a situation.

  When Ford entered the automobile business before the turn of the century, the Selden patent had dominated that industry. Unlike the Wright brothers, George Selden was not an inventor in any important sense, but he had taken note of the rapid development of lightweight steam and internal-combustion engines during the years after 1870 and had drawn some conclusions. The day of the “road engine,” the self-propelled vehicle, was not far distant. He filed for a patent in 1879, describing his “invention” in such broad terms that it would be virtually impossible to build a “road engine” without infringing upon it. His plan was to wait until someone else built such a machine, then launch a patent infringement suit that would make his fortune.

  Selden kept his patent application pending until 1895, by which time there were, at long last, a handful of auto builders to sue. When the preliminary decisions were handed down in his favor, most of the manufacturers caved in and agreed to pay a royalty for use of the patent. Henry Ford was the only major auto builder to fight to the end, emerging victorious just months before the Selden patent would have lapsed.

  There was an enormous difference between the Selden case and that of Wilbur and Orville Wright. The Wright patent covered a brilliant achievement that deserved protection under the law. Selden had simply found a legal loophole to exploit the system. Henry Ford, however, was unable to distinguish between the two situations. Convinced that this was a repetition of his own experience, Ford offered Curtiss the services of W. Benton Crisp, the lawyer who had finally broken the Selden patent.19

  With Crisp’s assistance, Curtiss devised a new strategy. Accepting the fact that the combined use of wing warping and rudder was fully covered in the Wright patent, and that his ailerons were analagous to wing warping, he announced that henceforth he would construct machines designed to use only one aileron at a time. That is, he would disconnect the ailerons on the right and left wings so that simultaneous action would no longer be possible. While that might make his machines more difficult to fly, it would also place them outside the bounds of the Wright patent.

  In fact, a comparable situation was covered in Claim 1 of the Wright patent. Unfortunately, Claim 1 had not been cited or included in the earlier suit and had yet to be adjudicated. Curtiss had found his loophole. The Wright Company would have to bring suit all over again.

  Orville was outraged but strangely indecisive. He recognized that the whole business was nothing more than a ploy to buy time, yet he refused to take action.

  The board of directors were as angry at Orville as they were at Curtiss. Quick legal action on the basis of the original ruling might force Curtiss out of business, preserving the dream of monopoly. By dragging his feet, Orville allowed his rival to catch his breath and devise a fresh legal gambit.

  The Wright-Curtiss feud had become a public relations disaster. While the Wright Company had its defenders, it was increasingly portrayed as a cutthroat organization, determined to smash honest competitors by fair means or foul. The fact that Curtiss continued to prosper throughout the period of the patent suits was generally overlooked. Moreover, there was a growing assumption that the patent suits had retarded the development of American aeronautics, enabling European competitors to forge ahead.

  It is impossible to gauge the impact of the patent wars on the growth of aviation in America. Clearly other factors, including government subsidies, prize competitions, and international rivalry, provide a full explanation for the rapidity of European advance during 1906–14. At the most basic level, the situation was proof of the old adage that it is sometimes better to be a fast second. The French, having lost the race for the invention of the airplane, had swept past the Wrights and everyone else by sheer momentum.

  At the same time, the Wright-Curtiss feud did create serious divisions within the American aeronautical community. As Grover Loening noted, these divisions extended into the tiny band of U.S. Army aviators:

  The army at this time had Curtiss pusher planes that, if anything, were more dangerous than the Wrights’. And to make matters worse, the vicious Curtiss vs. Wright rivalry that existed in the commercial flying game had, like an insidious disease, fastened itself on the army flyers. What was at first good-natured kidding (such as sending messages from one hangar to another not to fly their planes over the former, please, because so many things fell off them in the air as to endanger the people on the ground) grew into deadly serious jealousy and spite, affecting everyone, even down to the mechanics.20

  But the rivalry was the least of their problems. On February 9, 1914, Lieutenant Harry Post was killed while flying a Wright Model C at North Island. The Army had originally purchased six Model C aircraft; five of those machines had now killed six men. One half of all the Army pilots who had died in air crashes to date had met their end in Model C aircraft. Selfridge, Rockwell, Scott, and Call had been killed flying earlier Wright machines. So far as Major Samuel Reber, the officer in charge of Army aviation, was concerned, that was enough.

  Reber called for a board of investigation, which determined that the design of the Model C, not pilot error, was primarily responsible for the accidents. The officers suggested that the rear elevator was too small and weak to enable a pilot to recover from a rapid descent.21

  Orville disagreed with their conclusions but did his best to cooperate. After a series of conferences with Reber, Thomas Milling, and others in Dayton, Oscar Brindley, the leading instructor at Huffman Prairie, was dispatched to North Island to study the training situation. His initial report noted that aircraft maintenance was a major problem. Reber responded by advertising for a civilian engineer to oversee the airworthiness of machines in the Army inventory and organizing a small research and development unit.

  Loening, who “did not see much of an immediate future with the Wright Company the way things were going,” applied for the job and was hired. For years thereafter he was convinced that Orville regarded him as disloyal and ungrateful. Loening’s first step after arriving at North Island was to declare all the Wright and Curtiss pushers unsafe to fly. “The pusher planes were not only easily stallable,” he explained, “but in a crash the engine generally fell on and crushed the pilot.”22

  Loening and the group of pilots and mechanics who were assisting him went a step further, rebuilding one of the antiquated Burgess tractor machines into an adequate training aircraft that reflected the latest European developments. The engineers at the Curtiss Company scarcely needed that lesson, being already involved in the development of a modern tractor machine of their own. The Curtiss Model J, unveiled later in 1914, was the first step toward the immortal JN-4D “Jenny” of World War I.23

  Curtiss now had an entire staff of engineers and designers. Orville had no taste for that sort of corporate expansion and no desire for personal power. Even more surprising, he had little interest in managing a research and development program that would keep him at the forefront of aeronautical advance. Uncomfortable with the pressures of the job, he was fully aware that the company fortunes had dived under his leadership.

  He knew precisely what had to be done. In the early spring of 1914 he began to buy up the company shares held by members of the board of directors. The project was risky—most of his own capital was tied up in the company. For the first time in his life, Orville was forced to borrow very large sums of money.24

  The atte
mpt to gain full control of the company helps to explain Orville’s behavior during these months. His refusal to file a new suit against Curtiss was almost certainly part of a carefully considered plan to discourage and alienate his own board. The New Yorkers were dumbstruck when he vetoed their request to hire a new lawyer with close connections to the Wilson administration, a man who could bring high-level influence to bear against Curtiss. It was a clear signal that Orville would stop at nothing in his efforts to frustrate the company board and encourage them to sell out.

  The strategy worked. Orville bought up the stock held by every member of the board with the exception of his friend Robert Collier. But the takeover was expensive. In order to close the deal, he had to guarantee a 100 percent profit on each man’s investment, exclusive of dividends. The problem now was to make good on his enormous investment.

  In full control at last, Orville’s indecision vanished. His first step was to fire Alpheus Barnes. With personal business out of the way, he brought suit against the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company on November 16, 1914. Over the next few months he spent long hours with the company lawyers preparing depositions to be used against Curtiss when the new case came to trial. In addition, he filed for a new patent incorporating changes and improvements developed since 1906.25

  Orville was now ready to reveal the final step in his plan: putting the Wright Company up for sale. In spite of the reverses suffered in 1913–14, it remained a going concern. In addition to the factory in Dayton, the Wright name was still worth a great deal to anyone interested in manufacturing airplanes. Moreover, by renewing his pursuit of Curtiss in the courts, Orville underscored the continuing value and importance of his patents.

  In the end, Orville proved to be a very successful businessman. His handling of the negotiations for the sale was masterful. The final agreement with a group of New York financiers was signed on October 15, 1915. Although the full amount of the purchase price was not disclosed, the New York Times reported that Orville received roughly $1.5 million, plus an additional $25,000 for his services as chief consulting engineer during the first year of the new company’s operation.26

  The reorganized Wright Company made a valiant effort to keep pace with advances in aeronautical technology. The first models developed under the new management, the Wright K and L, were tractor biplanes that bore little resemblance to the old Wright pattern. Ultimately, however, the effort was unsuccessful. The Wright Company continued to lose money until 1916, when it merged with the Glenn L. Martin Company and the Simplex Automobile Company of New Brunswick, New Jersey, to create the Wright-Martin Company. The new organization transferred operations to the Simplex manufacturing plant and obtained a major contract from the French government for the production of 450 Hispano-Suiza aircraft engines.27

  Wright-Martin prospered as an engine, rather than airframe, producer. Dissatisfied with that orientation, Glenn Martin left the firm to reestablish his own Glenn L. Martin Company in 1917. The Wright-Martin Company was reorganized once again in 1919 as the Wright Aeronautical Company; it would emerge as the most innovative and successful aeronautical engine company in the nation during the 1920s.

  With the sale of the company in 1915, Orville walked away from the entire business. He did not have much serious involvement in developing the last of the Wright Company machines, nor did the new management feel that he had done much to earn his contract salary. The arrangement was not renewed and Orville broke his final connection with the firm that he and his brother had founded only five years before.

  The patent suit was no longer his problem. Orville accepted the appellate court decision of January 1914 as his final vindication. The Wright Company continued to pursue the matter in court, but there would never be a firm legal resolution of the remaining issues. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Curtiss, which now held a number of significant patents of its own, began to threaten other companies with infringement suits.

  With American entry into World War I in April 1917, the government took steps to resolve the entire patent mess. Representatives of the concerned companies formed a Manufacturers Aircraft Association. As part of a plan developed by W. Benton Crisp, who was still working as a Curtiss retainer, the members of the new organization entered into cross-licensing agreements permitting a member firm use of the patented technology after payment of a blanket fee. In exchange for that agreement, the principal patent holders, Wright-Martin and Curtiss, resolved their differences and received $2 million each. Seven years after Wilbur brought the original suit against Curtiss, the patent wars died.28

  The extent to which the old animosities were left behind was evident in 1929, when Clement M. Keys merged Wright Aeronautical and Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor to form a giant new combine, Curtiss-Wright, the second-largest manufacturer of aircraft and engines in the nation. Scarcely anyone noticed the irony.

  chapter 34

  CARRYING ON ALONE

  November 1915

  Orville Wright was forty-three when he sold the Wright Company in the fall of 1915. The arrangement freed him from burdensome duties and left him a very wealthy man. He paid off the loans that had financed the company takeover and spread the profits through a program of investments that gradually increased his fortune and enabled the family to live well for the rest of their lives.

  Orville broke one more tie with the past soon after disposing of the company. In June 1916, he began work on a one-story laboratory at 15 North Broadway, just down the block and around the corner from the bicycle shop.1

  He and Will had long dreamed of a specialized workshop where they could recapture the thrill of discovery. The brothers had purchased the lot in 1909, when they were too involved with business problems to plan the laboratory. Now it would be Orville’s building alone. He moved in that November, finally giving up the lease on the old shop at 1127 West Third that held so many memories.

  Orville was not certain what sort of research he would pursue, but he did have several ideas he was anxious to explore and a group of friends willing to invest in him. Those friends—Edward A. Deeds, Charles F. Kettering, and the Harold Talbotts, a father and son team—were long-time associates and business partners.

  Deeds and Kettering earned their reputations while working under John H. Patterson at the National Cash Register Company. They founded a company of their own in 1914, the Dayton Engineering Laboratories (DELCO), to produce an automobile self-starter developed by Kettering in Deeds’s barn. The profits of that venture were plowed into a second firm, the Dayton Metal Products Company, which they founded with the Talbotts, local building contractors.2

  The Dayton Airplane Company was their next joint project. The new firm was organized immediately after the Wright-Martin Company shifted production from Dayton to New Jersey in March 1917. The original Wright Company factory buildings had been leased to another firm, but some of the department heads and many trained workmen were reluctant to move. Orville believed that the availability of this pool of skilled labor inspired Edward Deeds “to start a small company to carry out some experiments in connection with some ideas of mine which he wished to see brought out.”3

  Whatever Orville’s ideas were, the new company did not pursue them. War had raged in Europe for over three years and, in spite of President Wilson’s assurances, America was being drawn into the conflict. Deeds and his associates knew nothing about airplanes but they were convinced that their experience in solving production problems could be helpful when there was a fortune to be made in military contracts.

  Moreover, they had several major advantages over potential competitors, including their friendship with Orville Wright, who not only loaned his name to the enterprise but signed on as consulting engineer. Other friends were even more useful. Howard Coffin, president of the Hudson Motor Car Company and an old friend of Deeds and Kettering, was the new head of the Aircraft Production Board, an agency charged with mobilizing American industry to produce enough airplanes to darken the skies over
the battlefields of Europe.

  With American entry into the war, Deeds was commissioned a colonel and placed in command of aircraft procurement for the Aircraft Production Board. He divested himself of his financial interest in the firm, which had been reorganized as the Dayton-Wright Company in April, then awarded his old associates two contracts for the production of 4,400 aircraft, 4,000 warplanes, and 400 trainers. Dayton-Wright operated out of a series of buildings constructed at South Field, near Dayton, on land owned by Edward Deeds.4

  Orville was commissioned a major in the Aviation Section of the Signal Officers Reserve Corps, but he did not wear a uniform or refer to his rank in correspondence. He told his English friend Griffith Brewer that there was some talk of calling him to Washington for the duration. Instead, he was ordered to remain at home, working with the engineers at Dayton-Wright.

  Air Service officials decided that the time lost in designing and testing new American aircraft could be saved by contracting with U.S. manufacturers for the production of proven European models. A sample De Havilland 4, a British-built two-seat observation and bombing aircraft, was delivered to Dayton-Wright in April 1917. The company had a contract to produce four thousand of those machines, and four hundred J-1 trainers designed by an American firm, Standard Aircraft.

  The task of building the DH-4s was more difficult than Dayton-Wright officials had supposed. The first problem was to prepare a complete set of new drawings, including the basic design changes required to accommodate an American-built Liberty engine power plant rather than the Rolls-Royce original.

  Orville was heavily involved in these preparations that spring, summer, and fall, but he was far more interested in another project—the Kettering Bug. Designed to be sent against targets far behind German lines, the Bug was an unmanned flying bomb powered by a four-cylinder engine. Orville went to work on the project in the fall of 1917 and remained with it for the next year. The Bug showed promise, but was still in development when the Armistice was signed.5