Unlocking the Sky

by Seth Shulman

  With one of his motorcycle motors safely packed in the baggage car, Glenn Curtiss gazes out the window of a northbound train at the open blue sky. It is a cloudless morning in early July 1907. Curtiss will spend most of the next two days on trains, including many stops and changes, but he is happy for the solitude. It is his first stretch alone for a while, and the remarkable nature of his voyage has put him in an uncharacteristically pensive mood. He is quite sure he is either losing his common sense completely or embarking on one of the most exciting adventures of his already eventful life. He just cannot decide which.

  Curtiss is en route to Alexander Graham Bell’s summer estate on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. It will be one of the farthest voyages from Hammondsport that Curtiss, at age thirty, has ever taken. He has left his successful, growing motorcycle and engine manufacturing business in the capable hands of Henry Kleckler and Harry Genung. The shop now boasts more than two dozen employees and its operations have steadied out considerably by this time; the orders keep coming at a startling rate, but now they are more speedily and reliably filled. Nonetheless, Curtiss wonders, is this a time to get involved in something new, risky, and untried?

  As the train turns eastward from Montreal toward the Atlantic Ocean and Canada’s easternmost province, Curtiss lets his mind wander. He thinks about his entry into the motorcycle business. Years earlier, Curtiss had first sent away for a set of castings with which to make a gasoline engine. They had arrived with no instructions. Through trial and error, Curtiss had machined the pieces and assembled his first makeshift engine. Tomato cans had served as both carburetor and gas tank.

  An almost imperceptible smile crosses Curtiss’s face as he remembers his first trip to the post office after rigging the engine to a bicycle, using a leather strap to drive the wheels. He had to pedal all the way across town while Hammondsport shopkeepers stood in their doorways and laughed at his awkward contraption. But, as he liked to recount later, the engine finally began to spark and pop; then it was his turn to laugh. Before long, everybody in Hammondsport wanted a motorcycle from Curtiss, and orders began pouring in from all over the country.

  If Curtiss prides himself on anything, it is his readiness to adopt and work with new technology. In 1901, in the days before electricity had come to town, Curtiss had installed acetylene gaslights in many of the shops around Hammondsport’s town square. And he had designed a clever system with tin cans and a few dabs of solder to make them burn more efficiently.

  For as long as he could remember, Curtiss had never sat on his hands in the face of opportunity. As early as age fourteen, he displayed this trait, in one of his first jobs at the Eastman Kodak works in Rochester. Along with many other boys his age, Curtiss stenciled the numbers on the film that would show through the red window in the camera’s back. Soon after taking the $4-per-week job, Curtiss went to his boss with a plan. He asked the company to pay him and his coworkers by the piece, at a rate of 25 cents per 100 strips. With the workers averaging 250 strips a day, the piece rate he proposed was roughly equivalent to their $4 wage.

  As soon as the company accepted his proposal, Curtiss brought in a rack he had designed that could hold a pile of a hundred strips, a hinged mechanism to hold the stencil, and a fat new brush with which to dab on the ink in one stroke. He then showed his mostly teenage coworkers the way to riches. Before long, Curtiss had upped production tenfold. He and the other boys were going so fast, they earned more than some Kodak managers. Even when the company renegotiated the deal down to 9 cents per 100 strips, Curtiss’s ingenuity still meant that the team had almost tripled their weekly wage.

  Now the eminent inventor Alexander Graham Bell has asked Curtiss to join forces to engineer a heavier-than-air flying machine. But Curtiss wonders whether he can bring his ingenuity to bear in any meaningful way in a complex and unknown field like aeronautics. His engines helped Thomas Baldwin and his dirigibles in ways Curtiss never anticipated. Bell might open similar new horizons. But the prospect of making heavier-than-air flying machines a practical reality seems far-fetched, despite the Wright brothers’ claims and Bell’s enthusiasm.

  There is also the question of Bell himself. He and Curtiss first met a year and a half before, in January 1906, at the New York City Auto Show. It was hard not to be impressed with Bell, a charismatic and warm man with bushy, white whiskers, a booming baritone voice, and a gentle, learned demeanor.

  For years, Curtiss had found the auto show a good forum for drumming up motorcycle business. That year, though, the show had notably changed when organizers invited the city’s fledgling Aero Club to participate. Curtiss had prepared his customary exhibit, adding emphasis on dirigibles in honor of the new participants. But, if anything, he had underestimated the crowd’s newfound interest in aviation. The exhibits committee had appealed to Langley, Chanute, and Bell for examples of their aeronautical work, and all had lent gliders or models to the exhibition. No fewer than four dirigibles, including Baldwin’s latest, hung suspended from the ceiling of the large exhibition hall. The committee had also appealed to the Wrights, but, not surprisingly, the brothers sent only the tiniest offering: the exceedingly plain crankshaft and flywheel of their 1903 engine. “It would interfere with our plans,” they wrote the committee, “if we should make public at once a description of our machine and methods.”

  At the 1906 show, no one was more in demand than Bell. He mounted a large exhibit of the striking, multi-celled, tetrahedral kites with which he was experimenting as a way to carry humans into the air. Bell also gave the keynote address at the Auto Club’s banquet, declaring that the age of what he called “the aerodrome” was at hand. It wouldn’t be long, he said, before aircraft would fly across the Atlantic. The day will come, he told the mostly skeptical crowd, “when we will leave New York City in the morning and be in London at night.”

  During the show, Bell visited Curtiss’s exhibit. He was deferential and enthusiastic as he closely inspected the motors on display. The machinery clearly captured the older man’s interest, and he would make special note of them in his diary following the show. Not long after, he began to refer to Curtiss as “the greatest motor expert in the country.”

  Curtiss was unaware of it, but Bell was hatching a plan to gather together a team to try to build a workable flying machine. Sixty years old, Bell had learned a lot about the process of technological innovation, but, given his age, he also knew any team he established would have to include the best young and energetic talent he could find.

  Bell hinted at his plan when Curtiss met him the following spring at Bell’s stately home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. In town on business, Curtiss had come calling and received a warm and enthusiastic reception. Bell treated him to a long and animated discourse on heavier-than-air flight that left Curtiss fascinated despite himself. Curtiss had long been wary of believers in flying machines, and even his experience with Baldwin hadn’t fully shaken him of the prejudice. Yet Curtiss was enticed by the encyclopedic Bell and his mostly unfamiliar, firsthand stories of the aviation pioneers Maxim, Langley, and Chanute.

  Curtiss had been exposed to the world of aeronautics through Baldwin, and he had even met the reclusive Wright brothers. But he had little idea of the extent of flight research that was being conducted around the world. It was hard not to be seduced by Bell’s enthusiasm for the subject. To hear Bell tell it, the airplane’s time had come, and it would soon burst upon the world the way the automobile and the telephone had only a few years before.

  Not long after their visit in Washington, Bell came to Hammondsport to try to clinch a deal with Curtiss. As he purchased one of Curtiss’s most powerful engines, he formally requested that Curtiss hand-deliver it to his summer laboratory in Nova Scotia. That way, he said, Curtiss could see his operation and help him and his assistants learn to operate and maintain the engine and adapt it to their needs. As a further enticement, Bell offered to pay Curtiss $25 per day, plus expenses, for his services, a handsome consulting fee
at the time.

  During that brief, introductory visit to Hammondsport, Bell thoroughly charmed Glenn and Lena Curtiss. Bell was a notably unpretentious person, especially considering his extraordinary accomplishments. That quality particularly appealed to Lena. She was both proud and a little taken aback that such a famous inventor would think so highly of her husband’s motors that he would come to buy one personally for his aeronautical experiments. After all, this was a man who had utterly transformed the world once already with his invention of the telephone. Might he do it again, she wondered, with a Curtiss motor at the heart of his invention?

  Bell’s enthusiasm and generosity left little question that Curtiss would accept his invitation. He felt honored by Bell’s interest and he would be well paid for his time. No harm could come, Curtiss decided, from taking a few days away from business to see for himself what Bell was up to. Like Lena, Curtiss enjoyed Bell’s attention and appreciated his worldly experience. The effect of his visit was much like that of Baldwin’s several years before, but even more heady. Where Baldwin was flamboyant, Bell seemed substantial. Ever the showman, Baldwin, when he prepared to leave town, liked to broadcast the fact that he was off to perform at some distant fair or exhibition. Bell was different. Upon his departure from Hammondsport, he only reluctantly divulged that he had to make a detour to England before returning to his beloved estate in Nova Scotia. When Curtiss asked about the British trip, Bell explained, almost sheepishly, that Oxford University was awarding him an honorary degree.

  After endless stops and changes of train, Curtiss arrives at a little wooden station in a town that makes Hammondsport seem like a metropolis. Two ruddy, casually dressed young men greet him heartily, full of smiles. They are F. W. “Casey” Baldwin—no relation to Captain Baldwin but rather the son of former Canadian Premier Robert Baldwin—and Douglas McCurdy, the son of a neighbor and old friend of Bell’s. As Curtiss soon learns, both young men are Bell’s technical assistants, recent graduates of the University of Toronto with master’s degrees in engineering. Much like their mentor, they are filled with enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity, and technical knowledge. They make a winning welcoming committee and, from the start, ply Curtiss with all manner of questions about himself and his motors.

  The two eagerly help Curtiss haul his engine off the train and carry it a few blocks to a rickety pier. From here, a small steamer ferry takes them across the vast Bras d’Or Lake to Bell’s one-thousand-acre estate called Beinn Bhreagh (from his native Gaelic for “beautiful mountain”). The boat sets off as soon as they board.

  The Bras d’Or, a large, salty inland sea, covers much of the interior of Cape Breton Island. Even though he grew up in the beautiful Finger Lakes region, Curtiss can’t help but marvel at the scale of the unspoiled scenery. After about a half hour, the ferry approaches a small pier that juts out from pine woods into the lake. Through the trees, Curtiss can see the windows and gables of a great rambling house rising high on the hillside above him like a big, shingled castle with turrets and parapets.

  On the path leading up to the house, Curtiss passes some of the buildings that make up Bell’s summer laboratory. Long, equipment-filled sheds stand close behind the boathouse. A long, narrow building is called the Kite House. Through its barn doors, Curtiss sees a baffling assortment of large kite-like structures hanging from the rafters, many covered in deep red silk.

  Leaving the motor on the pier, the three make their way farther up the hill to the great screened-in front porch of the mansion, a lovely, breezy room with a majestic view across the water. Casey Baldwin and McCurdy introduce Curtiss to the household. All its members have gathered and now rise from comfortable wicker chairs to welcome him. Curtiss is greeted warmly first by Bell and his wife, Mabel. Also visiting are Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, a U.S. Army aviation expert, invited by Bell to observe his aeronautical experiments; Bell’s two daughters, Elsie May and Daisy; Daisy’s husband, a botanist named David Fairchild; and their two lively grandchildren.

  They graciously set Curtiss up in one of the finest guest quarters, a circular room in one of the corner towers. Baldwin and McCurdy escort the visitor and his small suitcase up to his room, and, as he sets it down next to the bed, Curtiss pauses to gaze wordlessly at the breathtaking view of the huge, sparkling lake below.

  That evening, after an animated dinner in the Bells’ cozy, wood-paneled dining room, the group gathers before the immense front hall fireplace for a lively session of talking and singing the likes of which Curtiss has never before encountered. Bell loves to sing and has an excellent voice; both he and Mabel play the piano. But even more than the jovial atmosphere, Curtiss is taken with the breadth and erudition of the conversation.

  In this regard, no one amazes Curtiss more than the lady of the house, Mabel Gardiner Bell. Mabel is every bit as intellectually alive as her husband, and she fully holds her own on almost all the wide-ranging topics of the evening. She is also a suffragette: as early as 1901, she helped convince Alec, as she calls her husband, to champion the idea of universal suffrage—for women and blacks. And she is as adventurous as she is well educated. Some years earlier, she even went underwater in a diving bell as Alec watched in admiration from the surface, flatly refusing to try it himself.

  Curtiss can see that Mabel clearly adores her husband and humors him in many ways. But she also teases him mercilessly, a trait that only adds to the evening’s relaxed intimacy. At one point she humorously warns the others about their host: on their honeymoon, she recounts, her new husband took all the sugar cubes at the table and dropped them, one by one, into his coffee because he got curious about the tiny bubbles they produced.

  Mabel is also deaf, having lost her hearing to scarlet fever when she was a small girl. In fact, it was Bell’s desire to build an electrical device to help her that led to his invention of the telephone. As a good speaker and excellent lip reader, her handicap hardly slows her down.

  Curtiss is particularly sensitive to her situation because his own sister Rutha had lost her hearing to meningitis as a young girl. As a result, Curtiss had learned both sign language and the habit of clearly enunciating his words so that his lips could be easily read. This knowledge proves useful before that first evening is over. At one point, Curtiss notices an unhappy expression creeping onto Mabel’s face, and he realizes that she has lost the thread of the conversation. Quietly turning toward her, he deftly signs the missing words with his fingers. Her eyes light at once with surprise and gratitude, and the two form a special bond from that time forward.

  So begins a week of exploration and camaraderie that is a revelation to Curtiss; Bell’s home provides a creative atmosphere that falls somewhere between the rigors of a fast-track engineering laboratory and the playful pleasures of a child’s summer camp. During the day, Curtiss works closely with the rest of the tight-knit group, running propeller tests and teaching them about the functioning and maintenance of his engine. The time passes swiftly as the men work in the lab, talking incessantly about airplane design and testing Bell’s tetrahedral kites. Ultimately, Bell hopes to install Curtiss’s engine in a large version of the kite in an effort to fly it on its own power with a pilot.

  Around sundown, the group normally retires to the porch or the great hall to play with the children and drink hot tea. Evenings mean long and stimulating discussions punctuated, at the Bells’ irresistible urging, by singing. The group talks about everything from atmospheric pressure and the inherent strength of tetrahedral construction to the mechanics of propeller torque. As often as not, Bell draws upon his vast intellectual passions, bringing into the mix everything from his early experiments with the telephone and telegraph to genealogical deductions about gender and disease drawn from his card-indexed classification of seven thousand members of a randomly chosen family called the Hydes.

  As the evening hours wear on, some indefatigable subset of the group invariably adjourns to the study where Bell, smoking his pipe, opens his voluminous notebooks crammed w
ith wide-ranging ideas and sketches. Bell always retires last; his preference is to work in the quiet of the night and sleep until noon. As a result, he also frequently chooses to muffle his telephone with towels, though it invariably manages to wake him nonetheless. “Little did I think, when I invented this thing, that it would someday rise up to mock me!” he exclaims to Curtiss one disgruntled morning on a separate occasion.

  While Curtiss is the only team member at Beinn Bhreagh without an advanced degree, his mechanical genius and practical engineering experience offer a vital and formerly missing element. In this sense, Bell’s plan begins to come to fruition. In anticipation of Curtiss’s visit, Bell had noted in his journal that Curtiss’s input would create a group with the “ideal combination for pursuing aerial researches.” Now, during Curtiss’s stay, his journal entries reiterate the sentiment more emphatically. His elation is clear: “I now have associated with me gentlemen who supplement by their technical knowledge my deficiencies; in this combination I now feel that we are strong, where before we were weak.” Best of all, he writes, all members of the group are united by a common desire: “to get into the air.”

  On Friday, July 19, Bell invites the group into his study after a morning of experiments to formally discuss the possibility of forming an aviation enterprise. He has already broached the plan with each of them individually, but this is the first time they meet together to consider the matter in detail. With only a brief break for dinner, the lively meeting continues late into the evening.

  For his part, Bell offers to conduct the experiments under his auspices and to raise the seed money necessary for the task. As Bell explains, Mabel has generously offered to sell a piece of property she owns in Washington, D.C., in order to supply the business with $20,000 in start-up capital. Further, Bell offers the use of his labs and guarantees to supply another $10,000 of capital, if required. In return, he proposes that he and Mabel will share a controlling interest in the new association.