Unlocking the Sky

by Seth Shulman

  Unlike hot-air balloons—formerly the only reliable known method for getting aloft—dirigibles like Baldwin’s were big oblong gasbags filled with hydrogen. To fill the bags, the intrepid fliers would pour sulfuric acid on a barrelful of iron filings and then capture the vaporous result, taking pains not to ignite the volatile gas in the process. Perhaps most notably, these aircraft were dirigible—or steerable—thanks to the inclusion of one or more propellers driven by a lightweight motor normally housed on one end of the pilot’s catwalk beneath the hydrogen-filled bag.

  Baldwin’s dirigible was powered by an engine specially designed by Curtiss, who was already gaining acclaim as one of the world’s preeminent designers of lightweight gasoline-powered engines. Curtiss welcomed the opportunity when Baldwin offered him a week’s salary to tend to the airship’s motor between its demonstration flights in Dayton. Thanks to Baldwin, he was beginning to find a whole new airborne market for his engines.

  In fact, Curtiss had agreed to come to Dayton at least partly for the opportunity to pay a call on the Wright brothers, the mysterious bicycle builders who were rumored to have successfully gotten aloft in a heavier-than-air flying machine. Curtiss’s interest was straightforward enough: he was looking for business. Baldwin seemed well pleased with his motors; Curtiss hoped the Wrights might be interested in purchasing them as well. Curtiss had even made this suggestion to the Wrights in a letter he sent prior to his trip to Dayton. As of his departure, he had received no reply.

  By this time, the Wrights have long since undertaken their successful experiments at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and have continued their aeronautical work at Simms Station near Dayton. For more than a year, however, they have suspended their experiments altogether to try to secure lucrative contracts for their flying machine with governments around the world. The Wrights’ plan is badly hampered by their secrecy. Even with the issuance of their broad “wing-warping” patent in the United States earlier in 1906, the Wrights have resolved to keep their airplane locked up and have yet to display it publicly. Although they guarantee their plane will fly, they insist that even the government officials they approach as prospective buyers must agree to purchase their technology sight unseen. It is a stiff requirement coming from two little-known bicycle builders with no advanced engineering degrees or prior record of invention. Except for a $5,000 deposit in a failed negotiation with the government of France, the strategy has yet to earn the Wrights any money.

  Their behavior has also engendered a good deal of skepticism in the fledgling aviation community. Many are persuaded that if the Wrights’ invention really worked, the brothers would have already demonstrated it, or at least the press would have ferreted out the news. As the editors of Scientific American note early in 1906:

  Unfortunately the Wright brothers are hardly disposed to publish any substantiation or to make public experiments, for reasons best known to themselves. If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked…. would not have ascertained all about them and published them long ago?

  Considering the Wrights’ penchant for secrecy, it is not surprising that they disdained the aviation exhibitions that have been hosted with increasing frequency in the earliest years of the twentieth century. Not only do they shun these events as participants; they normally choose not to attend them as observers, either. But they will make an exception for Baldwin’s demonstration. After all, in 1906, Baldwin is arguably the most famous outdoor attraction in the world. In this seminal period in the earliest days of aviation, he has performed death-defying aerial feats around the world—in North America, Europe, and the Far East. Whether ascending in one of his airships or jumping from impossible heights with a parachute, “Captain Baldwin’s name,” as one newspaper report put it, is “always a promise of thrills.”

  On the first day of Baldwin’s visit, as the crowd begins to gather at the fairgrounds for his air show, the weather looks increasingly ominous. The wind has picked up enough that spectators are bracing themselves against it; men are quite literally holding on to their hats while women in the crowd attend their billowing skirts. It looks to Curtiss far too windy to attempt a flight. But the portly Baldwin, looking much like a circus ringmaster in tall boots, a dramatic dark cape, and bowler hat, seems to be measuring the gusty wind against the size of the growing crowd. He is torn. The wind will make it nearly impossible to control the dirigible but he has surely taken greater risks in the past. He decides to make the ascent despite the wind and clambers into the pilot’s catwalk to start the dirigible’s engine.

  Curtiss has yet to recognize them but, sure enough, the Wright brothers have moved prominently to the front of the crowd to watch Baldwin’s flight. They stand straight-backed, and side by side, decked out, as always, in neatly starched collars and fully buttoned suit jackets.

  Almost immediately after Baldwin is launched, it is clear to all that the strong gusts are too much for the airship. The crowd watches dumbfounded as Baldwin and his craft begin to drift swiftly and inexorably away from the fairgrounds.

  Curtiss and other assistants on hand immediately set out on a run. The Wrights, who by this time have had a good deal of experience with airborne mishaps, gamely skirt the cord roping off the spectators and join Curtiss and the others to try to recover the vast runaway airship, its tethering lines now dragging and flailing below.

  What an improbable scene, like one of those parlor games where figures from history are imagined together in farfetched situations. As complete strangers, Curtiss and the Wrights run beside one another across the open fields of the Dayton fairground in common pursuit of a wayward aircraft.

  The restraining ropes are quickly recovered, but the wind is so strong it takes the hard work of Curtiss, Wilbur Wright, and several others to tame the unruly dirigible. And as they tug the cumbersome airship back to its prominent spot at the fairground, a grateful Baldwin, disembarking none the worse for the ride, thanks them all for their indispensable and speedy assistance. After the strange ordeal, the Wright brothers formally introduce themselves to Curtiss as he catches his breath. And Curtiss finally—and eagerly—makes their acquaintance.

  It makes sense that Thomas Baldwin would first bring together Curtiss and the Wrights. We think of the dawn of aviation as belonging to the enshrined airplane pioneers but, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was Baldwin and a handful of others who owned the skies. The vexing work of getting airborne, after all, was mostly shunned by the establishment. Travel in the air—such as it was with a colorful array of balloons, dirigibles, and boldly envisioned (and mostly impractical) heavier-than-air flying machines—was left largely to an extraordinary collection of outsiders, including cranks, charlatans, wealthy eccentrics, and showmen like Baldwin.

  A balloonist and former tightrope walker in a traveling circus, “Captain” Baldwin—the title was a show-business honorific he gave himself—was already world-renowned when he burst into Curtiss’s life in 1904. The avuncular Baldwin, brimming with worldly experience, would become an important influence on Curtiss, and would draw him into the world of aviation.

  Like many others interested in flight at the turn of the century, Baldwin was galvanized by Santos-Dumont’s flight around the Eiffel Tower. Aside from the impressive nature of the feat, Santos-Dumont, heir to a large, Brazilian coffee fortune, led an enticing life of glamour at the height of the Belle Époque in Paris, setting new trends in fashion and dining nightly at a regular table at the swank restaurant Maxim’s. When Santos-Dumont’s balloons and airships would get caught in the trees, friends such as the Rothschilds, would send up champagne lunches for him to enjoy during repairs. Louis Cartier even created the world’s first wristwatch for him in 1901 so that he could tell time while keeping both hands
on the controls of his dirigible.

  For his part, Baldwin became determined to move beyond hot-air balloons to build the world’s finest dirigible. His idea was to top Santos-Dumont’s feat with even more dramatic flights in the United States—ideally before huge crowds of paying spectators. Baldwin financed the scheme with funds from two wealthy backers in California. Based on his balloon work, he had already perfected a formula to make the varnished silk for the gasbag. All he lacked was an engine light and reliable enough to power the machine.

  As Baldwin would tell the story later, Curtiss’s motor suddenly appeared before him like an auspicious omen. One day, in 1904, while Baldwin was building his dirigible on a ranch in California, a young man rode by on a new “Hercules” motorcycle—Curtiss’s brand name at the time. Baldwin was instantly struck by the idea that the compact motorcycle engine was exactly what he needed to propel his new airship. He chased down the rider to learn where it had come from and immediately wired an order for an identical, two-cylinder motorcycle engine to the G. H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company in Hammondsport, New York.

  In 1904, Curtiss’s business was booming. He had only a handful of employees operating out of a cramped wooden factory building, but bicycles were selling briskly and the expansion into a line of motorcycles was nothing short of a sensation. Motorcycle orders were coming in so fast from around the country that customers faced a three-month backlog even with a stepped-up production schedule that included fifteen-hour days at the shop for many workers.

  Around this time, Curtiss’s wife Lena joined him at work, attending to the burgeoning paperwork, doing the bookkeeping, and helping in any way she could. The shop didn’t have a typewriter but once or twice a week, Monroe Wheeler, a prominent local lawyer, let Curtiss or Lena come by to use his. A year earlier, the couple had lost their infant son to congenital heart failure. With Curtiss so busy at the shop, and with both of them deeply saddened by the loss, Lena’s help at work made sense all around. The two seemed happy for the extra time together and it helped having such a competent extra hand at the shop. It was a somewhat unusual arrangement in Hammondsport at the time, but Glenn and Lena Curtiss were both too industrious and practical to ever worry much about social conventions. Lena, the daughter of a local lumberman, was no stranger to work outside the home. She had been a grape picker—the seasonal work common for many teenage girls in the region—when she first met Curtiss.

  By most accounts, Curtiss was always so distracted by things mechanical that he never showed any interest in girls before meeting Lena. But he noticed something about her. During their first encounter, when Lena was seventeen and Curtiss was just a year older, she offered him water while he was taking a breather from bicycling along a hilly country road on the outskirts of town. With brown, wavy hair and big eyes, she seemed as forthright, unpretentious, and basically shy as he was. Oddest of all to Curtiss as he came to know her better, she seemed to genuinely like and admire his interest in mechanical things. They were married within the year and remained unusually close throughout their lives together.

  Five years into their marriage, when Lena began to work at her husband’s manufacturing shop, she understood well that Curtiss’s work was much more than just a job for him. He always seemed to be turning over technical problems in his mind and never seemed happier than when he was building something new. Working beside her husband suited Lena just fine.

  According to one account, before they were married, Lena’s father had been impressed by Curtiss. “That boy is going places,” he liked to say, predicting that someday Curtiss “would have Lena living in a brick house.” Clearly, Glenn Curtiss was going places. But she’d laugh when she would tell the story years later, adding that, for all the adventure she “never did get that brick house.”

  With a deluge of orders for motorcycles from around the country, it is not surprising that Glenn and Lena Curtiss did not pay much attention to an odd letter from a “Captain” Baldwin placing an urgent order for a motorcycle engine to be used in an airship. Baldwin’s reputation as a showman may well have filtered all the way to Hammondsport, but it was not enough to keep Curtiss from being highly skeptical about the prospect of using one of his engines in flight. He did fill the order, however. With no two-cylinder engines on hand, Curtiss actually removed one from a recently minted motorcycle to ship to Baldwin. Curtiss was heard then and for sometime afterward referring to anyone wanting to take his engines aloft as an “aviation crank.” But above all, he was a practical businessman: people could use his engines however they wished.

  If Curtiss had doubts about flying, his views on aviation would change dramatically later in 1904 when Captain Baldwin showed up at his door.

  Baldwin came by train to Hammondsport in the fall of that year directly after a stunning success with his dirigible at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world’s fair held in St. Louis, Missouri. The fair was an enormous event, designed to commemorate the centennial of the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. President Teddy Roosevelt even attended to review the opening parade. With a $100,000 grand prize for the best demonstration of an aircraft, the fair’s organizers had drawn the attention of every aviator in the world, including Santos-Dumont.

  Even the Wright brothers were tempted to display their flying machine. With the urging of their mentor Octave Chanute, the Wrights went so far as to visit the St. Louis fairgrounds and to ask the rules committee to make the contest guidelines more favorable to the inclusion of heavier-than-air machines. But ultimately, even the lavish prize money could not lure the Wrights into a public display.

  With the Wrights’ refusal to enter and with Santos-Dumont’s dirigible unexpectedly damaged, it was Baldwin’s airship—powered by a Curtiss engine—that won top honors after making a controlled flight over St. Louis. Mismanagement led the organizers to rescind their lavish reward, but even this didn’t dim the acclaim Baldwin won. Banner headlines proclaimed him the leading airship designer of the era. And Baldwin attributed his success in great part to the craft’s engine. Determined to meet personally with the manufacturer who had brought him such a triumph, Baldwin arrived in Hammondsport before Curtiss had even heard the news of his flight.

  As Baldwin often explained afterward, he expected to find a big, important-looking industrialist at the helm of the Hammondsport manufacturing operation. He had a hard time believing that the lanky, unassuming twenty-five-year-old Curtiss, who sheepishly presented himself, was really the head of the firm. But if Baldwin was surprised by Curtiss, it is safe to say that Curtiss’s amazement with Baldwin was greater.

  It is little wonder that Curtiss would be enthralled with his world-renowned visitor. A hulking two hundred pounds, with a broad face and winning smile, Baldwin was a celebrity, certainly not the kind of visitor who graced remote Hammondsport every day. He seemed to have been everywhere, while Curtiss had hardly ever left Hammondsport. And best of all, under the circumstances of Baldwin’s recent success in St. Louis, he didn’t even sound too farfetched when he predicted grandly that Curtiss engines would soon power fleets of airships around the world.

  Curtiss immediately invited Baldwin to stay as his houseguest. Lena couldn’t help but be excited. She fretted about the simplicity of their home and made Curtiss wear his good suit to dinner. They were both grateful and relieved at how unpretentious Baldwin turned out to be. But it was his stories that charmed them the most: his seemingly endless stream of tales kept them rapt and often made them quite literally gasp in amazement.

  As Baldwin recounted to the young couple, he had first taken his act to Europe in the late 1880s, after encouragement from world-famous, Wild West showman “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Baldwin’s act was a roaring success and he performed his aerial feats before a long series of wildly cheering, sold-out crowds. On one of his European visits, he was the first foreigner Count Zeppelin ever took through the interior of the aircraft that bore his name. In London, the British Parliament had adjourned to see him perform. Baldwin even wore
a diamond ring presented to him by Queen Victoria “for his daring, skill and aid to science.”

  Baldwin’s personal history was as twisted and exciting as that of earliest aviation itself. Orphaned at the age of twelve, young Thomas Baldwin soon ran away to find his fortune. He sold newspapers in Missouri, worked as a street lamp gaslighter, tried his hand as a railroad brakeman in Illinois and followed that with a stint as a door-to-door salesman throughout the Midwest. After a chance encounter with a trapeze artist, Baldwin joined a traveling circus. He soon mastered the tightrope and received top billing for his fearless performances. In one of his most spectacular feats, Baldwin walked a high wire strung along the coast of San Francisco from the well-known Cliff House to Seal Rocks, some 700 feet long and 90 feet above the ocean.

  In 1887, at the age of twenty-nine, Baldwin teamed up with a balloonist named Park A. Van Tassel and made a parachute jump from Van Tassel’s balloon before some thirty thousand paying spectators in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. From then on, Baldwin was irrevocably hooked on aviation. Before long he began experimenting with his own hot-air balloon and his own design for a parachute with many visionary new features. It was made of pure silk, completely collapsible with flexible shroud lines and an eighteen-inch hole cut in the top for the air to escape through. The design was so effective that, even though Baldwin never patented it, he would long be credited with inventing the collapsible parachute in 1885.*

  Baldwin’s success in St. Louis and his visit to Hammondsport did much to change Curtiss’s cautious skepticism about aviation. With Baldwin’s encouragement, Curtiss plunged into designing engines specifically for use in dirigibles. Curtiss even constructed a land vehicle he called a “wind-wagon,” replete with three wheels and propeller mounted in the rear, to test the power of the new motors and to help design an efficient aerial propeller. He took great glee in testing the machine on the outskirts of town. Much to the horror of his Hammondsport neighbors, the deafening prototype frightened farm animals and raised a cloud of dust in its sputtering wake. They wondered if Curtiss was getting carried away, quite literally, on a flight of fancy.