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

by Crouch, Tom D.

  It was Orville Wright’s last word on the subject. He would not require the Smithsonian to admit that the 1903 Aerodrome was incapable of flight. A simple admission that the Smithsonian statements relating to the 1914 tests were untrue would do. Abbot did not respond to the proposal.

  Lindbergh, both fascinated and puzzled by the controversy, offered a thoughtful assessment in a 1939 diary entry. The fault, he believed, lay “primarily with the Smithsonian people. But Orville Wright is not an easy man to deal with in the matter. I don’t blame him much, though, when I think of the way he was treated for a period of years. He has encountered the narrow-mindedness of science and the dishonesty of commerce.”22

  The tide of public opinion was clearly running in Orville’s favor. During the next eight years Abbot was bombarded with scores of petitions, most of them the result of a drive sponsored by the aviation magazine Contact, asking that the Smithsonian take the requisite steps to get back the 1903 Flyer. Bills were introduced into Congress calling for an investigation and the creation of a committee to resolve the dispute. A new organization, Men With Wings, was established to support the return of the airplane from England. Private citizens and aviation leaders offered to mediate a solution.

  Liberty, Collier’s, and other national magazines took up the cry with articles entitled “Bring Home the Wright Plane,” “The Road to Justice,” and “Bring Back Our Winged Exile.” With the exception of the acerbic English editor C. G. Grey, the aviation trade press was almost exclusively pro-Wright. Some of these journals, notably Earl Findley’s U.S. Air Services, the oldest-surviving American aviation magazine, waged editorial campaigns against the Smithsonian.

  It was an extraordinarily difficult time for Abbot. By the mid-1930s, the feud threatened to do irreparable damage to the reputation of the Institution. Orville was portrayed as the oppressed citizen beset by a powerful government bureaucracy blind to justice.23

  By 1940 both men had given up hope of reaching an agreement. In response to a letter from the president of the National Cash Register Corporation asking that he make one more attempt to negotiate a solution, Abbot replied: “I regret that the Institution’s experience on this subject during the past ten years, when it has made many efforts to compose these differences, has been so unpleasant and discouraging that without trustworthy assurances of success, the Institution would now hesitate to move at all … lest it should only arouse renewed misrepresentation.”24

  From the time of his entry into the controversy, Charles Abbot had labored under a delusion. He expected to negotiate a solution. It was a misunderstanding that everyone else at the Smithsonian shared, including Paul E. Garber, the Institution’s resident aeronautical expert, who found it hard to understand why his boss and Orville Wright could not “put their legs under the same table” and talk the situation out.25

  Orville had no interest in reaching a compromise. The Smithsonian had lied about the 1914 tests of the Aerodrome, and would have to make amends or face the consequences. In preparing his will in 1937, he stipulated that the 1903 airplane should remain in London after his death unless the will was amended by a subsequent letter from him indicating a change of heart.

  The controversy with the Smithsonian represented the most publicized challenge to the priority of the Wrights, but it was by no means the only attempt to obtain some measure of posthumous credit for a flying-machine pioneer at Wilbur and Orville’s expense. The specter of John Montgomery, for example, refused to be laid to rest.

  In 1917 Montgomery’s widow Regina, together with his mother, brothers, and sister, brought suit against the Wright-Martin Company, holders of the original Wright patents, and the U.S. government, which had arranged the joint license agreement that ended the Wright-Curtiss patent suit. The plaintiffs argued that the Wrights had infringed on an essential provision of the patent granted to Montgomery in 1906 for the glider design that killed Dan Maloney. The Wright patent referred to the wings of the airplane as “normally flat.” The Montgomery patent, however, described wings with a parabolic curve, as in the arc of a circle. As a Montgomery attorney noted, everyone knew that practical airplanes have curved wings.26

  Harry Toulmin’s use of the phrase “normally flat” had nothing to do with camber. He was referring to the fact that in normal flight the wings were flat across the span. When warped to turn or bank, they had a helical twist. Toulmin did not refer to camber, reasoning that the increased efficiency of arched wings was so well known that it was not patentable. A precise description of the Wright wing camber had no value in the patent, although it would reveal important proprietary information on the wind-tunnel studies.

  Orville offered depositions on behalf of Wright-Martin in 1920 and 1921. He also assembled the 1903 airplane in January 1921 for a complete set of photographs to be used in the trial. The Montgomery heirs dropped the Wright-Martin suit as a hopeless cause that year. Many years later, Orville’s friend Fred C. Kelly edited his 1920–21 depositions into a short book, How We Invented the Airplane, which remains the best first-person account of the Wright story.27

  The Montgomery suit against the federal government continued until 1928, when the court handed down a final decision in favor of the defendants. The judges in the case noted: “It seems to us idle to contend that Montgomery was a pioneer in this particular field.” Yet the Montgomery legend continued to grow. Family members and enthusiastic Californians refused to let his story die.

  Publicist Victor Lougheed led the way, making totally unfounded claims for his one-time business associate. James Montgomery did his part, telling and retelling the story of his brother’s early work, extending the number and length of his flights in the process.

  The process of enshrinement was complete by the mid-twentieth century when Hollywood took up the cause of this “forgotten” California pioneer. Glenn Ford portrayed Montgomery in the film Gallant Journey, while Walt Disney opened his cartoon history of flight with a comic version of the story. Monument builders and the anonymous bureaucrats responsible for naming schools, highways, and airfields followed, enthusiastically endorsing Montgomery as the man who “opened the skies for all mankind.”

  The strange case of Gustav Weisskopf, or Whitehead, first came to public attention through an article published in Scientific American on June 8, 1901. Written by Stanley Yale Beach, son of the editor of the magazine, the story provided a detailed description of a monoplane “built after the model of a bird or bat,” by a Bavarian immigrant named Whitehead living in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Ten days later the New York Herald followed up with a well-illustrated piece entitled “Connecticut Night Watchman Thinks He Has Found Out How to Fly.” The article included Whitehead’s offhand remark that he had already flown his machine for a distance of a half mile.28

  On August 18, 1901, the Bridgeport Sunday Herald carried what purported to be an eyewitness account of yet another half-mile flight. In another article published in the American Inventor for April 1902, Whitehead claimed to have made flights of two and seven miles over Long Island Sound in January of that year.29

  The stories created a brief flurry of excitement, but interest quickly died when no corroboration followed and no further flights were announced. Langley dispatched a Smithsonian employee to Atlantic City when the Whitehead machine was exhibited at Young’s Pier. He returned with the comment that the craft did not appear to be airworthy.30

  Whitehead remained on the scene for a number of years. In 1904 he built and flew gliders vaguely reminiscent of the Chanute craft of 1896. By 1911 he was working on an unsuccessful helicopter design featuring sixty rotors. He also constructed an unsuccessful flying machine for Stanley Beach, who remained a major supporter.

  Whitehead exhibited photos of his machines, including a fuzzy image reputed to be the 1901 or 1902 machine in the air, at the two New York Aero Shows of 1906, and later in a Bridgeport store window. He also displayed his line of aeronautical engines at exhibitions in New York and St. Louis. The engines apparently worked
better than the flying machines; at least one of them powered a pioneer aircraft built by a New Yorker.

  Never part of the mainstream, Whitehead became a laughingstock when he announced plans to fly the Atlantic in an outlandish machine after World War I. He died a pauper in 1927.

  The first serious retelling of the Whitehead story came in an article published by Stella Randolph, an aspiring writer, and Harvey Phillips, an aero history buff, in the June 1935 issue of Popular Aviation. Two years later, Ms. Randolph offered a more complete account in her first book, The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead.

  Ms. Randolph told the compelling story of a poor inventor who had achieved great things only to have his work forgotten. “If this tale is true,” the Los Angeles Times noted, “the little be-moustached Bavarian … sped farther, faster and better than the Wrights.” The Washington Herald added that “the history of aviation may move back a page from the Wright brothers flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. to the experimental flights of Gustav Whitehead at Bridgeport, Conn.”31

  It did not take long for the first holes to appear in the Whitehead yarn. In 1935, John Crane, a young Harvard Ph.D., inspired by the Randolph and Phillips article, traveled to Bridgeport to investigate the story. He began with the original news article of August 18, 1901. Three alleged witnesses were named in the account. One, Richard Howell, the editor who had written the piece, was dead. Another, Andrew Cellic, could not be located. No one remembered a local resident by that name, nor did he appear in any of the turn-of-the-century Bridgeport directories.

  Crane did find the third man—and James Dickie offered unequivocal testimony. He remembered Whitehead, but denied ever having seen him fly. He had not been present on the morning in question, and regarded the entire story as a hoax concocted by Howell on the basis of planned flights that Whitehead had described during an interview.

  Crane also talked to some of the reputed witnesses whom Stella Randolph had interviewed. One man gave her a particularly detailed account after having been promised a financial interest in her book. Most of the other testimony fell apart in similar fashion. Even the members of Whitehead’s family could not recall his having specifically mentioned the long flights of 1901–02 at the time.32

  The evidence continued to accumulate. Financial supporters, especially Stanley Beach, who had originally convinced his father to underwrite Whitehead’s work, rejected the claim. “I do not believe that any of his machines ever left the ground,” Beach commented, “in spite of the assertions of many people who think they saw them fly. I think I was in a better position during the nine years that I was giving Whitehead money to develop his ideas, to know what his machines could do, than persons who were employed by him for a short period of time, or those who have remained silent for thirty-five years about what would have been an historic achievement in aviation.”33

  Orville believed that Crane’s evidence, and the evidence of common sense, would prevail. If Whitehead had really flown one half mile in 1901 or seven miles in 1902, why did he abandon that machine in favor of gliders designed by other men almost a decade before? If he had flown in 1901, why could he not do so thereafter?

  In October 1937, Orville remarked to writer Fred Black that he suspected Stella Randolph’s book had “originated in the mind of A. F. Zahm, of whom you already know. He has been quite active in this matter, as I have learned from several sources.” This was not a case of paranoia on Orville’s part. In May 1935, a month before Ms. Randolph’s first article appeared and two years before her book was published, Zahm wrote to Emerson Newell, a leading member of the Curtiss defense team at the time of the Wright-Curtiss suit, requesting any information collected on Whitehead for use in court.34

  Zahm, who was now employed as an aeronautical expert by the Library of Congress, continued his search for material that would support the Whitehead claim, offering a reward to anyone who could provide proof of the story. Such proof was never forthcoming, but Zahm seldom missed an opportunity to argue that the tale was true. In his own self-serving history of early aeronautics, Early Power-plane Fathers (1951), he commented that Stella Randolph’s book “evinces notable research,” and concluded that Whitehead “must either be credited with a real flight or denounced as a charlatan. The latter course would be ungracious, indeed repugnant to the code of honor prevailing among reputable men….”35

  Like the Montgomery story, the tale of Gustav Whitehead refused to die. It resurfaced again in 1945 when a radio announcer introduced Charles Whitehead as the son of the man who had invented the airplane. Liberty Magazine included the story in an article on the broadcaster, which was reprinted in the July 1945 issue of Reader’s Digest.

  “The Gustav Whitehead story is too incredible and ridiculous to require serious refutation,” Orville commented to Alexander McSurley of Aviation News in 1945. Nevertheless, he responded to the new round of publicity with an article of his own, “The Mythical Whitehead Flights,” published in the August 1945 issue of U.S. Air Services. It did not lay the Whitehead issue to rest.

  The Whitehead supporters are still with us—livelier than ever. A more militant generation took up the cause in the early 1960s, determined to obtain what they regard as a fair hearing for their case. They found and interviewed the last group of Bridgeport residents who claimed to have seen Whitehead fly six decades before, and scoured local newspapers for additional information. In spite of their effort, the story has not been materially strengthened since 1937. The tale was not true then and it is not true today. The voices have simply grown louder and more strident.

  In recent years, partisans have built and flown a “replica” of the Whitehead machine. The fact that the original drawings and engineering data required for an accurate reproduction no longer exist does not seem to have deterred them. Ironically, the Smithsonian Institution is charged with being so pro-Wright as to refuse to consider the possibility that there might be a kernel of truth in the Whitehead story. That would have tickled Orville.36

  By the end of his life, Orville realized that he would never be able to lay the rival first-flight claims to rest. The problem involved psychology rather than historical truth. However persuasively he might argue, whatever the courts might rule, there would always be someone anxious to defend the cause of yet another candidate for the honor of having been first to fly. The fact that none of those claims has ever been proved does not seem to matter. A. F. Zahm would have been tickled at that.

  He would be less pleased by the fact that no one has ever come close to stripping Wilbur and Orville Wright of their title as the inventors of the airplane. The various claimants have had almost no lasting impact on public opinion. The great mass of Americans have never doubted the priority of the Wrights. Nor should they.

  chapter 36

  OF MEN AND MONUMENTS

  1920~1940

  The twenty-five years during which Orville faced challenges from the Smithsonian, Zahm, Montgomery, and Whitehead also saw him permanently enshrined as one of the great heroes of American history. Medals and awards—among them the American Distinguished Flying Cross and the French Legion of Honor—flowed in from every direction. Between 1915 and 1947 he received a grand total of eleven honorary degrees from colleges and universities in Europe and America, including Harvard, Yale, the University of Michigan, the University of Cincinnati, Earlham, and the University of Munich.1

  Distinguished visitors to Dayton were obliged to call at Hawthorn Hill. The celebrities ranged from Carl Akeley, the big-game hunter and showman, Nobel Laureate Dr. Robert Millikan, poet Carl Sandburg, and physicist Michael Pupin, to such aviation personalities as General William Mitchell, Admiral Richard Byrd, and the great scientist/engineer Theodore von Karman.

  The two most memorable visitors were Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Roosevelt. Lindbergh came to Dayton at Orville’s invitation on June 22, 1927, less than a month after he had flown the Atlantic. The stopover was a signal honor. Lindbergh, on his way back to St. Louis for the first time since his triumph
ant return to New York, had promised his financial backers he would make no further public appearances before returning home.

  He landed the Spirit of St. Louis at Wright Field, the new Army Air Corps research and development facility just outside the city limits, where Orville and General William Gilmore were waiting with a car to take them along a parade route through downtown Dayton. When Lindbergh explained his promise, Orville ordered the car driven straight to Hawthorn Hill.

  Thousands of Daytonians waiting to catch a glimpse of their hero streamed out to Oakwood. “Dinner was about to be served,” Ivonette Wright Miller recalled,

  when from nowhere people began to appear on the front lawn. Soon the front lawn was crowded, then the side lawns and the hillside at the back. It was not a crowd but a mob, pushing and shoving, trampling the flower beds and bushes, climbing trees, all clamoring for a look at Lindbergh. When people came up on the porch, the occupants of the house took refuge on the second floor. But the mob persisted, demanding at least a glimpse of their hero. Finally, Orville Wright, more to save his house from ruin than to gratify the crowds, appealed to Lindbergh, and he made a brief appearance on a little balcony of the front portico, tall and boyish, with Orville Wright at his side. The crowd seemed satisfied and dispersed.2