Unlocking the Sky

by Seth Shulman

  Kleckler, like the others, is skeptical. They roll the damaged machine back to its tent and start to debate the matter in earnest. Curtiss ignores the heated discussion, beginning instead to work quietly and furiously to repair the damage. His determination is infectious. Soon all are working in a frenzy, racing to and from the shop to repair the June Bug’s broken parts. With help from Kleckler and from Curtiss employees at the shop, the AEA actually restores the aircraft, completing a week’s worth of repairs in just twelve hours.

  By day’s end, the team is confident that the June Bug is once again functional, but they can’t risk flying it untested. So, in the last light of a very long day, they once again roll the aircraft onto the racetrack. Despite some trepidation lest he cause further damage, Curtiss gets the machine aloft for a one-minute flight.

  It is too dark to fly the full kilometer in the refurbished aircraft. Nonetheless, after a perfect landing, Curtiss greets his teammates on the racetrack with a broad smile. He can’t account for it, he says, but the June Bug seems to fly better than ever before.

  The impression is not just his imagination. As he realizes later, the group, faced with a shortage of material, gave the updated version a slightly smaller elevating rudder, which made the craft easier to handle in the air.

  As they roll the June Bug back to its tent, the AEA members all tiredly agree they would feel better having had a smoother and more thorough day of testing. But there is little they can do about the situation now. The aeronautical delegation is en route by train to Hammondsport. And the esteemed visitors will pass judgment on the AEA’s machine. On the eve of the official trial for the Scientific American Trophy, the group has little assurance that the June Bug can meet the challenge. But thanks to their last-minute efforts, they take some comfort that the aircraft is at least intact for its debut.

  For months, the Scientific American Trophy, established by the monthly science magazine, has been a major subject of discussion in aviation circles, especially at the staid, wood-paneled headquarters of the Aero Club of America where the shiny and substantial prize physically resides. At the start of the year, not long after the formation of the AEA, Curtiss personally admired the trophy on a trip to the club on Forty-second Street in New York City. It stood prominently displayed in a glass cabinet—a large and elaborate silver sculpture of an airplane resembling Langley’s aerodrome circling the earth above a pedestal ringed by flying horses.

  To Curtiss, and to all AEA members, the trophy has come to assume a significance far beyond its monetary worth: a tangible and much coveted validation of their efforts. They badly want their names engraved on the cup for posterity. In late June, when the team sees how well its newest prototype flies, the first thought is to notify Scientific American immediately that the Aerial Experiment Association is ready to compete for the trophy.

  Curtiss and his friends are so eager, in fact, that Selfridge telephones Charles Munn, publisher of Scientific American (and also president of the Aero Club), on June 24, before the June Bug has even flown the requisite distance in tests. On behalf of the group, Selfridge proposes to make the official flight ten days later. He asks Munn to send a delegation of judges to Hammondsport.

  Unexpectedly, Munn is somewhat hesitant about the AEA proposal. In particular, he balks at the team’s desire to make the demonstration in Hammondsport. Despite Bell’s reputation, Munn knows relatively little of the AEA, and he is reluctant to send a group of judges hundreds of miles to such a rural locale.

  In retrospect, it seems clear that Munn had hoped the trophy would lure the Wright brothers into a public display. When he had first announced the new prize in the pages of Scientific American in the fall of 1907, Munn wrote that he hoped the trophy would spur innovation in the aviation field. But his editorial also complained that, four years after word broke about their work at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers had yet to publicly demonstrate their alleged invention. The Wrights’ secrecy, Munn said, raised doubts about what they might have accomplished. Actually, Munn’s editorial was far more measured than some in this period. As one newspaper editorial had already challenged, for instance, the Wrights “were either fliers or liars” and without proof it was beginning to look like the latter.

  Munn had followed his goading editorial with a personal letter to Orville Wright, encouraging the brothers to try for the trophy. When he received word of the AEA’s proposed flight, Munn wrote to Orville again the next day, offering to delay Curtiss and the AEA if the Wrights would consent to make a trial.

  Orville and Wilbur remained unmoved. As with so many previous offers, the trophy failed to draw the Wrights into a public demonstration. In his reply to Munn, Orville complained about Scientific American’s stipulation that the aircraft must take off from level ground under its own power—meaning, in essence, that the prospective machine must include wheels.

  As Orville explained, “All of our machines have been designed for starting from a track.” Actually, built on sled runners, the Wright Flyer required not only fifty feet of track but an accompanying derrick several stories tall to get airborne. The brothers would drop a half-ton metal weight from the top of the derrick which, attached to their airplane by a cable and pulleys, would push the craft forward with enough thrust to get it aloft by the track’s end. Orville griped to Munn that pneumatic wheels did not seem like a “satisfactory” thing to include on a flying machine. “Personally,” he wrote, “I think the flying machines of the future will start from tracks, or from[a] special apparatus.”

  Ultimately, Munn’s reluctance to deal with the AEA is no match for the enthusiasm in Hammondsport. Selfridge and Curtiss make a quick trip to New York City to appeal personally to him and other members of the Aero Club. They point out that the rules specifically allow a contestant to choose the trial’s location. They know their chances of success will be far greater if they make the flight from familiar terrain, but they are also eager for the home-court advantage offered by the encouragement of friends and relatives.

  After several hours of discussion, aided by support from secretary Augustus Post, the Aero Club agrees to send a team of observers and judges to Hammondsport. Still, most members of the visiting delegation have low expectations, as do the veteran reporters following the story who venture forth from New York City. They grumble about the three-hundred-mile trip and voice skepticism that the little-known AEA team will succeed.

  For the AEA, the path to a working airplane has been remarkably swift, with surprisingly few missteps.

  By December 1907, the group completed its first glider, the Cygnet, based on the unusual tetrahedral glider design Bell favored. The Cygnet was a fifty-foot-wide array of more than three thousand fabric-covered tetrahedral cells set into an aluminum frame. Bell developed the design, which looked like an oversized, triangular honeycomb, on the sensible theory that the small, pyramidlike openings would provide lift, even at relatively low speeds. On December 6, 1907, the team put the Cygnet on floats and, attaching it by a long cable, towed it behind the lake steamer Blue Hill on Nova Scotia’s pristine Bras d’Or Lake. The Cygnet, pulled behind the boat, carried the daring Lieutenant Selfridge 168 feet into the air and remained aloft above the lake for seven minutes. In the excitement, though, the boat crew forgot to cut the line to the glider. As a result, when the steamer slowed, the Cygnet landed gracefully on the lake only to be dragged roughly through the water until it tipped over and broke up. Selfridge dove clear just in time to escape injury, but the Cygnet, painstakingly constructed over many weeks, was beyond repair.

  As the AEA members had agreed, Selfridge oversaw the next attempt. After much discussion, he helped nudge the group away from Bell’s complex design to experiment with the comparatively simple biplane glider long championed by Octave Chanute. The Cygnet showed promise, he argued, but it was cumbersome. With a unanimous desire to “get into the air” as quickly as possible, the group returned to first aeronautical principles for two productive months of experimentation with glider
s modeled after Chanute’s biplanes.

  From the start, Selfridge wrote, the object of the AEA was “to walk in the footprints of those who had gone before and then advance beyond.” Selfridge solicited advice from a wide range of colleagues, including everyone from William Avery, Chanute’s assistant, to the Wrights themselves. In a letter to the brothers in January 1908, Selfridge asked if they might share some particular information about their understanding of where the center of pressure fell on a wing. Wilbur’s reply, offering some advice and referring Selfridge to several other sources, would later be used by the Wrights as evidence that the AEA stole their invention, but the charge is all but baseless. While helpful, Wilbur’s letter did little but confirm what the group was quickly learning on its own.

  In the effort to glean as much extant knowledge as possible, the AEA was aided by its decision to move from Nova Scotia to Curtiss’s Hammondsport shop. Not only could the group take advantage of the milder climate; they were stimulated by the large number of aviation researchers who had gravitated to the town. With the lure of Curtiss’s motors, Bell exclaimed, no other place on earth could boast “such an assemblage of genius along the line of aerial work as Hammondsport.”

  Captain Baldwin, at work building his latest dirigible for the U.S. Army, had moved his entire operation to Hammondsport. Another aeronaut, Charles Oliver Jones, a former engraver, was building a dirigible powered by an eight-cylinder Curtiss engine. Lieutenant Alexander L. Pfitzner, a former Hungarian officer from Budapest, was on the scene attempting to build a lightweight monoplane, again around a Curtiss engine. And J. Newton Williams, a former typewriter manufacturer from Derby, Connecticut, had relocated to Hammondsport to build an experimental helicopter that would, eventually, lift itself several feet off the ground.

  In addition, Augustus Post, secretary of the Aero Club and lifelong ally of Curtiss and the AEA, came to town upon hearing of their work and, for several months, became almost an adjunct member of the team. An independently wealthy balloonist, Post was an enthusiastic observer and a cheerful extra hand. He was also a prolific writer who would ultimately pen some of the most colorful and detailed remembrances of Curtiss’s exploits.

  For all the ferment and camaraderie, though, the AEA operated in virtually uncharted territory. Everything the five men undertook had to be carefully thought out and crafted from scratch. The group needed to develop a thorough working knowledge of aerodynamics. But even more, with the help of Curtiss—and often with additional help from workers in his shop—the AEA needed to master the finer points of airplane construction, from welding metal and laminating wood to sewing fabric and crafting fasteners that could withstand vibrations without coming loose. They experimented with a wide range of materials and suppliers, sending away as far as to Japan for bamboo. At the time, there were no ready supply houses for many of the materials they required.

  By early March 1908, Selfridge’s biplane, with a rudder on the tail and a single-plane elevator on the front, was ready to be tested. The group called it Red Wing because they had used the same red silk that had covered the Cygnet. Given the time of year, they decided to mount the plane on sled runners and try to take off from ice-covered Lake Keuka.

  As the craft neared completion, the U.S. Army called upon Selfridge—still a commissioned officer—to report to Washington, D.C., but despite his absence, the group moved ahead, fearing that the onset of milder weather could weaken the ice on the lake. They chose Casey Baldwin as pilot simply because, aside from the older Bell, he was the only one without skates and would thus be of little assistance on the ground crew. On March 12, 1908, before a handful of friends and acquaintances, Red Wing, the AEA’s first motor-powered biplane, rose to a height of about ten feet off the ground and flew for about thirty yards before its tail buckled, forcing Baldwin to land. The aircraft had accomplished no more than a large hop, but the group was elated: their flying machine had risen into the air on its own power and under the pilot’s control.

  The AEA knew it was now on a promising path indeed. The team immediately wired the news to Selfridge, but detained in Washington, he would never see Red Wing fly. Five days later, upended from the side by a gust of wind, it crashed onto the ice. Pilot Baldwin escaped injury, but the accident destroyed the craft and its motor. It was a setback, but the AEA, hot on an inventive streak, hardly broke stride. The team was too excited by the chance to refine their design.

  This time, it was Casey Baldwin’s chance to oversee the work as the AEA hit a new level of intensity as a design team. In Hammondsport, the group held discussions in Curtiss’s shop almost every evening. In the shop’s annex, which they dubbed the “thinkorium,” they talked about everything: airfoils, atmospheric pressure, engine refinements, landing gear. McCurdy and Selfridge regularly faced off in a running debate over how best to improve a propeller’s torque—the force with which it could move the aircraft. Whenever this subject came up, Curtiss recalled later, the team knew the argument was likely “to keep up until one or the other would fall asleep.”

  Bell’s influence was clearly visible in the disciplined and formal procedures the AEA adopted. Each night the minutes of the previous meeting would be read and discussed, with notes assiduously kept by Selfridge. Because members, especially Bell, often had to leave Hammondsport to attend to other business, the AEA created a weekly, typed publication to chronicle their day-to-day progress. This internal newsletter, the AEA Bulletin, stands as one of the most remarkable firsthand records of technological development ever produced.

  A major design problem confronted the group, especially after the Red Wing accident: how to control their aircraft’s side-to-side motion. Indeed, lateral control was on the minds of aviation researchers around the world. As on other aeronautical matters, the AEA members showed not only prodigious inventive powers but also the strength they drew from the diversity of the team Bell had drawn together. They came up with the solution that would stand the test of time: ailerons, from the French for “little wings.”

  Aviation historians have long debated the provenance of the idea for these stabilizing flaps. The question is of particular interest because the matter would soon stand at the heart of the bitter lawsuit brought against Curtiss by the Wright brothers. In fact, neither Curtiss nor the Wrights can claim all the credit for the invention of ailerons. It is now clear that they had been imagined in full some forty years earlier and patented by a British inventor, M. P. W. Boulton. In 1868, Boulton spelled out the invention in detail, including the need for the flaps to tilt in opposite directions on each of an airplane’s wings to keep the aircraft laterally stable.

  While Boulton’s prescient invention was fully functional, the same cannot be said for the airplane he designed, which never flew. As a result, his idea lay dormant until 1904, when a French aviation pioneer, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, experimented with two tilting, horizontal rudders in one of his glider designs. Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont adapted much the same idea in 1906, adding two tilting, octagonal flaps into an early airplane he built Number 14-bis (so named because it was raised into the air for launching by his balloon Number 14). All these efforts predate the AEA’s use of flaps, and yet none produced successful results in the air for their creators.

  Nor did the AEA know of these efforts in 1907.* Regardless of the rich, overlapping milieu in which many researchers sought to solve the problem of lateral control, all evidence, including Bell’s testimony, points to his having arrived independently at the idea for movable surfaces at the tips of the wing. As a seasoned inventor of great integrity, Bell was meticulous about assigning credit for his ideas. His habit was to write all his ideas in a notebook and have them promptly witnessed and notarized. He surely would have attributed the idea of ailerons if he believed he owed anyone such a debt. As he would testify later, though, the idea for movable surfaces at the tips of the wing occurred to him from studying birds.

  Certainly, the AEA knew a great deal about the problem of lateral stability
by 1907. And they were familiar with the Wrights’ wing-warping technique, as well as the other details of the Wright brothers’ patent for their flying machine, which had been issued in May 1906. For example, Bell marveled in a letter to Mabel as early as June 1906 that the Wright patent—which was, technically at least, a public document that spelled out their invention—was receiving so little notice in the United States.

  But, just as the early uses of ailerons indicate, the issue of lateral control had long been a secondary concern among those who strove to create an airplane. It remains a controversial point, but there is evidence that even the Wrights’ vaunted concept of wing warping had been in the aviation literature for many years. The early aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal experimented with wing warping in a glider design as early as 1895. And, as Octave Chanute would later claim in court, the naturalist and aviation expert Louis-Pierre Mouillard had even patented a wing-warping method in 1898.

  One way the Wrights’ patent was influential, though, is that the AEA took pains to steer clear of the Wrights’ idea of bending the wings of their airplane. Aware of the Wrights’ proprietary claim, the AEA looked for a separate method to keep their aircraft under lateral control. Bell in particular tackled the problem with his usual acumen. On March 20, 1908, he wrote to Baldwin from Washington, D.C., mentioning the aileron idea after mulling over the reports the team had sent him about Red Wing’s demise. In this letter, Bell suggests the tilting flaps, as well as several other related approaches the group might pursue. “It may be that a lengthening of one wing and a shortening of the other is what is wanted,” Bell surmises, outlining a possible design in which an extension piece on the tip of a wing might open and shut like a fan. “This kind of action is employed by birds,” Bell writes. “I have often seen birds suddenly reef their wings, so to speak, during a sudden squall, thus diminishing the supporting area of their wings.” AEA’s goal, as Bell puts it, should be to find a way to “reef one wing and expand the other.”