Unlocking the Sky

by Seth Shulman

  Ultimately, the case would cripple the development of the youthful aviation industry, especially in the United States. The effects are obvious in retrospect. The field was torn into rival factions. Experimentation was discouraged; investment tied up and, most notably, as the Wrights waged a total of nearly three dozen lawsuits, the legal wrangling siphoned energy away from building airplanes and tangled the field in knots of accusations and uncertainty. Many of these effects were felt at the time. As an editorial in the Boston Transcript newspaper put it after Orville Wright’s assertion of “absolute control” over the industry: “The effect of the Wright decree will beyond question numb what little life remains today in aviation in America.”

  Aviators, in particular, resented the bitter and litigious climate that had engulfed their fabulous new flying machines. Charlie Hamilton, a student of Curtiss’s who would earn a place in the history books for his flights of unprecedented duration, quipped that the field had added a new prerequisite. As he put it, “A man has to have ten years in law school before he has a chance of becoming an aviator.”

  Consequently, by 1914, anti-Wright sentiment ran high—not only in Hammondsport. Curtiss’s workers, like most aviators around the world at the time, resented the legal action the Wrights had instigated and saw Orville as a spoiler. Even Aeronautics, one of the most widely read periodicals in the field, ran a lengthy article by a prominent patent attorney analyzing the basis of the Wright lawsuit and claiming that their case was overblown. A close reading of the Wright claims, the lawyer asserted, showed that they “do not cover supplementary surfaces,” namely the separate, adjustable wing flaps called ailerons. The interpretation surely influenced the attitude of flyers toward the case even if it did not ultimately sway the courts.

  As another outspoken editorial noted, Orville Wright “will never suffer for want of this world’s goods. His name and fame will suffer, however, if, instead of contributing his future interest and enthusiasm to the further conquest of the air, he sulks in his tent and blocks the game of other people on account of his parsimonious concern for an old patent.”

  With the fate of an emerging industry literally in the balance, and with the prospect of a high-stakes spectacle, the aerodrome case soon drew front-page headlines in the press, moving to center stage in the bitter, ongoing drama over the control of the emerging aviation industry. The appearance of a conflict of interest on the part of Curtiss and the Smithsonian team, not to mention the existence of the bitter lawsuit with Orville Wright, soon led to a full-blown imbroglio.

  Unfortunately, the posturing and name calling obscured an underlying issue of historical significance. After all, at its heart, the aerodrome restoration raised profound issues of precedence and posterity. About how technological change occurs and how history remembers it. As a New York Times editorial observed, the Wright suit “was won upon the fact that no other aeroplane had ever maintained itself in air with human freight, and inferentially could not. What effect Mr. Curtiss’s aerodrome restoration project might have in modifying the recent decision of the circuit Court in favor of the Wrights’ connection no one can now tell.”

  THREE

  AMERICA OR BUST

  The Atlantic Ocean, one of these days, will be no more difficult to cross by air than a fish pond.

  —GLENN H. CURTISS

  On a warm spring evening in 1914, several days after the arrival of Langley’s aerodrome, Glenn Curtiss waits on the open-air platform of the Hammondsport station beside scenic Lake Keuka. From his perch there at the edge of town, he can see the familiar and sparsely populated wooded hills that slope down to the Lake’s distant bank. All is quiet. He hears only the murmur of crickets and occasional wafting voices from far across the water until the raucous clatter and roar of the approaching train rises to drown them out.

  As the train shatters the evening’s tranquillity, so will its arriving passenger presage jarring changes for Hammondsport in the spring and summer to come. On board is Albert Zahm, a dapper man in a carefully pressed suit and straw boater hat. Zahm, the liaison from the Smithsonian Institution, is coming to town to oversee the particulars of the aerodrome’s reconstruction.

  Zahm’s arrival will mark the start of a swirl of activity unlike anything the residents of Hammondsport have ever seen. Aviation luminary Charles Manly, Langley’s former assistant, will soon join the restoration effort as will Charles Walcott, head of the Smithsonian Institution. Many others with no connection to the aerodrome project will descend upon Hammondsport as well. Elmer Sperry Jr., for instance, comes to town to perfect the automatic airplane stabilizer Glenn Curtiss helped him develop. Earlier in the year, Sperry stunned crowds in Paris with the invention, as he left his airplane’s controls in mid-flight over the Seine while his mechanic climbed out onto its wing. Like many others interested in aviation, Sperry chooses Hammondsport as the best place to advance his aeronautical work.

  In the months to come, interest in the Curtiss Aeroplane Company will reach new heights. Curtiss is hamstrung by his lawsuit with the Wrights, but he has managed to continue nonetheless, with orders for Curtiss airplanes and so-called flying boats—the single-hulled seaplanes that Curtiss had invented—arriving from as far away as India, Russia, and Japan. At home, flying boats will increasingly draw the attention of well-heeled executives. Henry Ford makes the pilgrimage to Hammondsport to marvel at Curtiss’s latest invention. Harold F. McCormick, vice president of the International Harvester Corporation, comes to purchase a flying boat on the spot. He says he wants to use it for the commute from his Lake Michigan estate to his office in Chicago. And activity at Curtiss’s flying school will boom as never before with eager new pilots venturing out each day, weather permitting, to practice over Hammondsport’s Lake Keuka.

  As Zahm steps from the train, Curtiss spots him at once and approaches to greet him warmly. But there is, on both sides of their formal handshake, a mixture of admiration and apprehension. No amount of cordiality can overshadow the dramatic differences between them. Curtiss has spent his whole career learning by doing. He has had no formal schooling in aeronautics and does not easily translate his remarkable grasp of aviation principles into words. Zahm, a distinguished professor of aeronautics, has written the field’s most widely read text. Yet Zahm has had remarkably little firsthand experience with aircraft.

  The two men differ in temperament as well as training. Curtiss is intuitive and spontaneous; Zahm is formal and methodical. And, of greater significance to the restoration, Curtiss, swamped with the demands of a burgeoning business, has thought little about the fine-grained details of the restoration project; Zahm has, for more than a month, thought of little else.

  Bridging this divide is not easy. But after a formal, even awkward, exchange upon Zahm’s arrival, he and Curtiss will build an enduring friendship. In addition to their mutual love of aviation, the fact is that each comes to hold the complementary talents of the other in particularly high regard. Zahm writes much later that, from the first, he marvels at Curtiss’s natural way with his associates and workers, calling it a gift that manages somehow to inspire their most “enthusiastic efforts.”

  The buttoned-up Zahm marvels too at Curtiss’s unnervingly casual manner about his dog Terence—who Zahm describes as “a Scotch roustabout.” Beloved throughout Hammondsport, Terence enjoys the free run of town and has no greater joy than jumping excitedly into Curtiss’s automobile or those of the local champagne merchants to go for a ride.

  In the months to come, Zahm will help guide Curtiss through a reconstruction effort that could well alter aviation history. For his part, Curtiss will draw Zahm out of the ivory tower and fully into the tumultuous, emerging aviation business. That summer, with Curtiss’s encouragement, Zahm will even become a pilot. After his first outing with Curtiss’s lead flight instructor Francis Wildman, Zahm calls it a thrill to “couple the practical with the theoretical” after studying the mechanics of flight for so many years.

  The morning after Zahm’s
arrival, most likely over breakfast at Curtiss’s home, the two begin to hammer out the particulars of the aerodrome restoration.

  When Charles Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, first formally broached the possibility of restoring Langley’s aerodrome, Curtiss promptly sought the opinion of Alexander Graham Bell. “I should like to know what you think of this plan,” Curtiss wrote to Bell in February, “as it would be an easy thing to do provided it is worthwhile.”

  But while Bell and others agreed the project had merit, Curtiss is now coming to realize that the task—fraught as it is with serious historical weight—will not prove so easy after all. As he listens to Zahm’s detailed concerns, Curtiss confronts the tangled complexities involved in trying to remain unimpeachably faithful to Langley’s original design.

  The first thorny problem is the aerodrome’s method of takeoff. Curtiss says he is prepared to try a newly designed catapult like the one Langley employed. But, after some discussion, both he and Zahm agree that such a scheme is too dangerous, untested, and costly. The assessment leaves two alternatives: trying to launch the aerodrome from land, or from water.

  Given that Curtiss recently won the Langley Medal for the hydro-aeroplane, not to mention his frequent reliance on Lake Keuka for testing his new designs, it is not surprising that Curtiss favors a water launch. His plan is to attach pontoons to the bottom of Langley’s otherwise unchanged design and see if they can get it to rise from the lake’s surface on its own power.

  Curtiss makes it sound like a simple, straightforward procedure, but the addition of pontoons will mark a dramatic change for the aerodrome. First of all, pontoons are heavy. The 1903 aerodrome is not long on thrust to begin with and the pontoons will inevitably add hundreds of pounds to the aircraft as well as increase its wind resistance. In addition, retrofitting pontoons to the aerodrome will almost certainly require additional bracing to accommodate the added weight and air pressure. Will the changes they contemplate preclude an accurate test of Langley’s aircraft?

  Decisions like the one to add pontoons pull the project deeper and deeper into uncharted terrain. As the work progresses, critics, including a near-livid Orville Wright, will as much as accuse Curtiss and Zahm of conspiracy and fraud: making secret changes to the aerodrome to improve its chances of flying. But the shrill charges do not bear up under close scrutiny.

  As Zahm later recounts, he and Curtiss agree upon a two-phase set of experiments. In the first phase, their goal is to undertake a meticulous restoration with as few changes as possible to the original aircraft to see whether the aerodrome, as originally constructed, is capable of sustained free flight with a pilot. In a second, separate effort, they contemplate making some significant changes—including the addition of a modern Curtiss engine—to more comprehensively test the aerodynamics of Langley’s tandem-wing design. Many of the charges that will soon be leveled by Orville and Brewer will conflate these two clearly separate goals.

  Curtiss and Zahm do authorize changes in even the initial reconstruction phase. But most of these, as Curtiss will put it later, do nothing more than ensure that Langley’s machine will be “not quite as good as new” by the time they are finished. Most of the changes they sanction, like the pontoons, worsen the plane’s prospects to get aloft. For example, the aged motor, producing only 40 of its original 52 horsepower, cannot turn the propellers at the requisite 950 revolutions per minute stipulated by Langley. To compensate for this problem, Curtiss and Zahm opt to trim the propeller blades to allow them to spin faster. Critics will rightly charge that the tapered ends they create alter Langley’s precise design and take advantage of aeronautical knowledge Langley never possessed. But, such quibbles aside, even the critics reluctantly acknowledge that, in the end, the rebuilt aircraft will have less thrust than the ones Langley originally designed.

  Throughout, Curtiss and Zahm argue strenuously that the changes they authorize do nothing to hinder their ability to fairly test the aerodrome. As Zahm will note, getting the aerodrome to fly with pontoons is like trying to get an eagle to fly “with a child in its talons.” Should the eagle fly under such circumstances, he explains tersely, a scientist ought to be able to accurately infer that the bird could fly at least as well unfettered.

  Nonetheless, given the highly polarized state of the emerging aviation industry, it is not surprising that any change from Langley’s exact design provides fodder for controversy and dissension. As scrupulous as Curtiss, Zahm, and the rest of the team may try to be, nothing can refute the Wright camp’s charges of a fundamental conflict of interest. After all, Curtiss, longtime adversary of the Wright brothers in court, is now helping to restore an aircraft that could cast doubt on the Wrights’ standing as the first with a viable, piloted airplane.

  For his part, Smithsonian Secretary Walcott contends that his and Zahm’s supervision of the effort ensures that it is an unbiased scientific experiment. Of course, Walcott certainly realized that Curtiss was involved in a lengthy patent dispute with the Wrights when he chose Curtiss to oversee the work. But, at least at the outset of the reconstruction process, he didn’t view Wright v. Curtiss as a problem. As Walcott jauntily tells the New York Herald, he “never gave the patent situation a thought” when he commissioned Curtiss to restore the Langley machine.

  Of course, Walcott’s long association with Langley can be seen to undercut his claims of neutrality as well. Not only is he Langley’s successor at the Smithsonian but, in his former position at the U.S. Coast and Geological Survey, he played a key role in persuading President McKinley to appoint the board that authorized Langley to build the full-scale aerodrome in the first place. A successful restoration project will thus, in some sense, vindicate him as well as Langley. Still, it is one thing to have allegiances, quite another to engage in outright fraud. And there is no evidence of fraud or conspiracy on the part of Walcott or any member of the distinguished and reputable team engaged in the restoration project.

  Nonetheless, once the restoration work is under way, Walcott and the rest of the team will contend with cries of foul from the Wright camp, including many accusations that have never been fully settled a century later. In fact, long years of acrimony so cloud the issue of the aerodrome’s reconstruction it is difficult to strip away the charges and countercharges sufficiently to gain a clear picture of what transpired.

  Thanks to the intense interest of the press in the matter, however, it is clear that charges of secrecy in the restoration process are unfounded. Even a cursory look shows that newspapers carried reports on the aerodrome restoration as it went along, replete with detailed descriptions of the alterations Curtiss and Zahm authorized as the process moved forward. It is to their credit that Curtiss and Zahm kept the work open to the press and other interested parties. But, when they embarked on the project, they surely had no idea about the amount of interest the story would ultimately generate.

  In the spring and summer of 1914, the reconstruction of the Langley aerodrome is big news and the daily happenings in Hammondsport suddenly make their way to the front pages of newspapers everywhere. Reporters descend upon the town from as far away as London. Some, like J. Clarke of the New York Sun, Herbert Swope of the New York World, and Joe Toy of the Boston American, file almost daily updates on the progress of the aerodrome. The interest of these members of the press—well-traveled representatives from the bustling world beyond the Finger Lakes—lends a sense of interest and self-conscious pride that pervades the town.

  By 1914, with the breathtaking antics of stunt fliers like Link Beachey and a series of air meets and exhibitions around the country, the American public is enthralled with the airplane. And now Curtiss, with the blessing of the Smithsonian Institution, is undertaking nothing less than to try to rewrite its brief history.

  As the warm spring days give way to summer, there are easily enough journalists in Hammondsport to field a baseball team. And as they await the latest news from the Curtiss factory, they even take advantage of the fact, pl
aying several spirited ball games against the aviators in a nearby cow pasture before scores of local spectators. After all, like airplanes, “America’s pastime” is young and popular; that summer, in fact, a young rookie named Babe Ruth has just signed with the American League.

  In Hammondsport, the Curtiss team boasts some competent hitters, but the journalists are the stronger team overall, even though their talent is wildly uneven. In one incident, highlighted in the local press, Charlie Stiles of the New York Tribune is so startled when he finally hits the ball he forgets to run to first base.

  As noteworthy as the aerodrome reconstruction is, the reporters do not remain in Hammondsport for that story alone. The fact is, Curtiss makes good copy. Even though Orville Wright has done everything in his power to shut down Curtiss’s operation, the reporters marvel that Curtiss somehow manages to remain unflaggingly optimistic and committed to his pursuit of aeronautical engineering.

  In the spring of 1914, Curtiss vows to take his case against Orville Wright to the U.S. Supreme Court. But it is hard to see what legal grounds he might use to convince the high court to actually hear the case. Posturing aside, Curtiss stands in an extraordinarily precarious position. With few remaining options, the prospect of caving in to Orville Wright could mean his company’s demise. As J. Clarke explains in the New York Sun: “The patent situation gives Orville Wright a practical monopoly of the aeroplane industry in the United States and no manufacturer has yet been given a license.” In Curtiss’s case, Clarke reports, “the back royalties demanded by Wright would amount to more than the capital stock of the Curtiss Company and the Wright Company taken together, according to a statement of Orville Wright to the Sun representative in New York recently.”