Unlocking the Sky

by Seth Shulman

  The AEA quickly incorporated Bell’s novel suggestion for ailerons into the airplane whose design Baldwin oversaw. With their supply of red silk depleted, they called the craft White Wing, covering its wings with cotton sailcloth. The aircraft would mark a pivotal step for the AEA, including many innovations—not just the ailerons but a stronger, laminated wood propeller and the inclusion of a wheeled, tricycle undercarriage.

  On May 18, 1908, White Wing flew for the first time, covering a distance of 85 meters with Casey in the pilot’s seat. On May 19, Lieutenant Selfridge became the first member of the U.S. Army to pilot an aircraft. Two days later, on his thirtieth birthday, Curtiss flew an airplane for the first time, setting a distance record for the group of 310 meters. Curtiss said afterward that the biggest surprise was how sensitive the plane was in the air. When he pulled back on the steering wheel, he was surprised at the way White Wing rose swiftly into the air. He immediately countered the effect so hard that the plane bounced to the ground. “As is usual in any balancing act,” Curtiss said later, “the novice overdoes matters…. I realized that vertical control was a very delicate thing, and although I did my best to keep on a constant level, there was more or less hitching up and down through the entire distance.”

  White Wing was the cause of much elation and pride on the part of its designers. But like its fragile predecessors, the aircraft would not last long. It made just seven flights before crashing beyond repair with McCurdy at the controls, although he was not badly injured.

  With the destruction of White Wing, the next AEA design fell to Curtiss and afforded the group the chance to consolidate all it had learned so far. During the first three attempts, Curtiss had mostly confined his input to the aircraft’s power plant and propellers. While the long hours and constant aeronautical discussion had drawn the team close, Curtiss was always cognizant that he was the only member without an advanced degree and so he deferred, mostly watching, studying, and learning. But he was a quick study and a remarkable hands-on engineer, improving upon past failings, learning from prior mistakes. Now he had his chance to prove it.

  As Curtiss and the group worked on the plane they would eventually call the June Bug, the nightly conferences continued. One evening, a particularly productive discussion about the way air passes over a wing—or airfoil—led Curtiss to surprise the group by designing and building an innovative wind tunnel. A coffin-like box, it had an electric exhaust fan on one end and a radiator pulled from an automobile on the other. As Curtiss demonstrated to the group, a model wing or aircraft could be hung inside the box and observed through the glass window in the top as a swift current of air swept through the apparatus. According to one account, Curtiss, in a fit of inspiration, had Harry Genung come and puff his pipe in front of the radiator to help the group actually see the air turbulence. As the smoke was sucked into the machine, the five AEA members watched fascinated as it flowed over the little wings, making swirls and eddies around the edges. Bell called it an enormous contribution to aeronautics, and all agreed that it helped to streamline their design. They were so taken with the contraption that they failed to realize that Genung was puffing so hard on their behalf he was making himself sick and had to be escorted outside for fresh air.

  Genung’s voluminous smoke would be replaced by threads of scarlet silk that would serve the same function of highlighting air turbulence for the increasingly scientific AEA designers. And, with the help of the wind tunnel and the group’s lengthy, increasingly knowledgeable discussions, Curtiss introduced several vital modifications to the earlier AEA efforts. He lengthened the airplane’s body to improve its horizontal, front-to-rear stability. For easier storage and transportation, he devised a means to make the wings removable and to allow the tail section to be folded up. And he refined the ailerons.

  In just one month, Curtiss led the group to once again refine their design. The result, the June Bug, finally met their elusive goal: in an extraordinarily short and intensive design period, the AEA had built a fully controllable flying machine.

  On July 4, the early morning train from New York City brings the distinguished aeronautical delegation to the tiny Hammondsport train station. The group includes nearly two dozen members of the Aero Club of America, among them Stanley Y. Beach, editor of Scientific American. Allan R. Hawley, a Wall Street stockbroker and balloon hobbyist, officially represents the club. None other than Charles Manly, Langley’s former assistant at the Smithsonian, will serve as the official starter for the test. Other members of the delegation include Augustus Post; Simon Lake, inventor of the submarine; Karl Dienstbach, representing the imperial German government; George H. Gary of the New York Society of Engineers; Ernest L. Jones, editor of the American Journal of Aeronautics; and Wilbur R. Kimball of the Aeronautical Society of New York. As this is the first publicly advertised flight in America, a large number of reporters, photographers, and even a motion picture crew have made the long trip from New York and other parts of the country to Hammondsport.

  By 5 A.M., the rural roads are already clogged with traffic. Spectators find spots along the surrounding hills, where they have a clear view of Harry Champlin’s racetrack. By midmorning, at least a thousand spectators have crowded in for the show; everything else in town has ground to a halt. Many bring picnic baskets, and an air of excitement and high spirits pervades the scene. As the morning wears on, families chat with one another, children frolic in the fields, and farmers stand side by side with the formally dressed visitors from out of town.

  The weather, however, looks increasingly ominous. Although the day is warm, the wind is strong, and the threat of rain grows as the morning edges on. Curtiss, utterly immune to the crowd’s growing impatience, simply will not fly until the skies settle to his satisfaction. Too much is at stake, he says, to risk another accident.

  Early in the afternoon, a summer shower drenches the festivities, yet, as spectators huddle under umbrellas and blankets, their numbers still grow. Despite the miserable weather, few are willing to pass up their first-ever opportunity to see an airplane fly. In an effort to keep up the spirits of the eminent visitors and reporters, vintner Harry Champlin invites the dignitaries to duck inside his nearby winery during the rainstorm, offering them free food and his company’s Great Western champagne. According to one report, Champlin later explained his generosity by saying that he wanted to help so that if Curtiss’s flight failed, the reporters wouldn’t treat him as badly as they had Langley in 1903.

  Finally, with the approach of evening and the appearance of patches of blue sky, Henry Kleckler and several AEA members roll the June Bug out of its tent, where it has waited shrouded in mystery. Hawley and Manly promptly slog through the mud and wet grass to measure off the one-kilometer course, marking it officially and decisively with a pole topped by a red flag.

  Upon their return, Curtiss starts the June Bug’s engine and quickly takes his place at the controls. With a wave of his hand, the rest of the crew lets go of the wings and steps back as their remarkable craft begins to roll along the muddy runway. Before a silent, awestruck crowd, the airplane rises into the air. And then rises further. As Curtiss struggles at the controls, something seems to be amiss. Continuing its steep ascent, the June Bug is now more than two hundred feet above the crowd, causing Lena Curtiss to loudly cry out, “Oh, why does he go so high? Do you think he’s going to make it?”

  Just then, forced to kill the engine, Curtiss glides to a gentle landing less than halfway to the distant marker. Some in the delegation, most notably Stanley Beach, are heard to mutter and scoff. But, undaunted, Curtiss and crew drag the June Bug back to the starting point and huddle for a conference. After a short discussion, Selfridge discovers the tail section has been accidentally set askew, tilted in a negative angle, causing the added lift. Making the minor adjustment, Curtiss once again climbs into the pilot’s seat.

  It is now around 7:30 P.M., but in midsummer there is still a good hour before sundown. On its second attempt, the June Bug once
again bumps over the muddy ground and rises cleanly to an altitude of about twenty feet. Curtiss and craft are off and running.

  Although Alexander and Mabel Bell returned to Beinn Bhreagh several days before, their daughter and son-in-law, Daisy and David Fairchild, are among the witnesses that day and they offer a memorable recollection of the historic event. For David Fairchild the flight was “the experience of a lifetime.” As he wrote shortly after the event, the people gathered around the aircraft suddenly backed away into the surrounding field. “Curtiss climbed into the seat in front of the yellow wings, the assistant turned over the narrow wooden propeller, there was a sharp, loud whirr and a cloud of dust and smoke as the blades of the propeller churned in the air.

  “Then, before we realized what it was doing,” Fairchild recalls, “it glided upward into the air and bore down upon us at the rate of 30 miles an hour. Nearer and nearer it came like a gigantic ocher-colored condor carrying its prey. Soon the thin, strong features of the man, his bare outstretched arms with hands on the steering wheel, his legs on the bar in front, riveted our attention. Hemmed in by bars and wires with a 40-horsepower engine exploding behind him leaving a trail of smoke and with a whirling propeller cutting the air 1,200 times a minute, he sailed with forty feet of outstretched wings twenty feet above our heads.”

  To Fairchild, and undoubtedly to many of the other spectators, the sight is overwhelming. All at once, he conjures up “strange visions of great fleets of airships crossing and recrossing both oceans with their thousands of passengers. In short we cast aside every pessimism and give our imaginations free rein as we stood watching the weird bowed outline pass by.”

  If David Fairchild’s account captures the elation of witnessing the flight itself, Daisy Fairchild’s recollections offer a sense of the pandemonium that ensues as Curtiss crosses the finish line. “As Mr. Curtiss flew over the red flag that marked the finish and way on toward the trees, I don’t think any of us quite knew what we were doing. One lady was so absorbed as not to hear a coming train and was struck by the engine and had two ribs broke…. We all lost our heads and David shouted, and I cried, and everyone cheered and clapped, and engines tooted.”

  As the June Bug dips to a landing out of sight, the crowd spontaneously erupts in cheers and onlookers swarm over the potato fields, pastures, and adjacent vineyards and railroad tracks in celebration. As they reach Curtiss and his airplane just beyond a tangle of vines at the field’s edge, they find him calmly examining the June Bug’s engine, though his enormous smile reveals his pride. Amid the turmoil, Hawley and Manly carefully measure the official distance of the flight, announcing to the crowd that Curtiss has flown 5,090 feet—just shy of a mile—or 1,810 feet more than the required kilometer.

  Everyone jumps, cheers, and hugs one another. The shy Lena Curtiss joins in fully in the impromptu festivities along with the rest of the AEA members, as well as others from the Curtiss shop, including her good friends Harry and Martha Genung. Even the once-skeptical Aero Club members are beside themselves with delight to see the fulfillment of their fondest dreams. Some have studied and experimented with heavier-than-air flight for years. Now, at last, they have witnessed a self-powered flying machine carry a pilot into the air. One formerly skeptical newspaper photographer admits that, while his paper has had him chasing alleged birdmen for two years, he never believed they could really get off the ground.

  The flight resoundingly wins the Scientific American Trophy for Curtiss and the AEA. Despite the prior claims of flight by the Wright brothers, the contest committee of the Aero Club will also ultimately award Curtiss the nation’s first-ever pilot license, ruling that, with the June Bug, Curtiss has made the first officially observed flight in America and properly deserves the honor.

  Curtiss, like the eye of a storm, remains eerily calm at the conclusion of his triumphant flight. He is proud but the attention seems to leave him even stiffer and more tongue-tied than usual. When a reporter asks about the flight, Curtiss can speak only of his focus and determination, noting honestly, “I could hear nothing but the roar of the motor and I saw nothing except the course and the flag marking a distance of one kilometer.”

  If Curtiss can’t find the words to capture the significance of the flight of the June Bug, there is no shortage of others willing to fill in on his behalf. To the many astonished spectators and reporters on hand, it seems as though the world is changing before their eyes. Headlines across the country blare news of “the first official test of an aeroplane ever made in America.” The Associated Press reporter on the scene calls the flight a matter “of the utmost importance.” As others write, Curtiss and the AEA have done more in one afternoon to boost public faith in the promise of aviation than the Wrights had done in the five years since they claimed to have flown above the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk.

  Reflecting on the day much later, Curtiss biographer C. R. Roseberry would note: “There was nothing he could do about it. The newswires had suddenly made Glenn H. Curtiss a famous man. Neither of the Wright brothers had yet flown in public. More than any other aircraft up to that moment, the June Bug convinced the world of the reality of human flight.”

  SEVEN

  SKY KING

  Whoever will be master of the sky will be master of the world.

  —CLEMENT ADER, FRENCH AVIATION PIONEER, CIRCA 1909

  Early in August 1909, eight months into what is already an extraordinary year, Glenn Curtiss gazes down at the crowd from the deck of the steamship La Savoie, departing New York City for France. Curtiss’s wife, Lena, and his best friends, Harry and Martha Genung, stand among the well-wishers on the dock below waving hats and handkerchiefs.

  On deck, Curtiss sports a natty, wide-brimmed Panama hat and a small goatee he has grown to cover a lingering scar he received months earlier in an iceboat accident at Alexander Graham Bell’s estate in Nova Scotia. The getup almost succeeds in giving Curtiss a suave, worldly air. But it can’t mask the earnest Hammondsport native underneath or hide his trepidation about the voyage ahead.

  Curtiss is heading to Rheims, France, to represent the United States at the world’s first international flying tournament. He has never traveled to Europe—a considerably bigger trip even than to Bell’s estate in Nova Scotia. He has never been on an ocean liner. Of more importance, the airplane lodged safely in the cargo hold belowdecks, has never been flight-tested. And yet now, at age thirty-one, with a career already full of show-stopping feats, Curtiss’s participation in the Grande Semaine d’Aviation promises to mark a new international pinnacle.

  Just over a year since Curtiss’s June Bug flight, a vast sky of opportunity has opened to him—and the world of aviation has changed dramatically. Prodded by the success of the Aerial Experiment Association and by burgeoning developments in France, the Wright brothers finally decided to demonstrate their aircraft to the public in August and September of 1908. And even aside from the Wrights, an astonishing flurry of activity has thrust the airplane onto the European scene with a dynamism and pace of development few could have anticipated.

  As one eminent aviation historian observes, 1908 marks the airplane’s annus mirabilis—its miracle year. With the maturation of the internal combustion engine and a working understanding of the aerodynamics of lateral control, the final obstacles to manned, powered flight have been overcome. And almost all at once an assortment of airplane designs has begun to appear in Europe—primarily in France—with dozens of daring and glamorous aviators taking to the skies.

  For Curtiss, the past year has brought both tragedy and opportunity. At the Wrights’ first public demonstration in the United States—for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer in Virginia in September 1908—Orville crashed his Wright Flyer with Lieutenant Selfridge on board as his passenger. The Army had stipulated to the Wrights that they were interested in an airplane that could carry a passenger. Orville broke several of his ribs, but young Tom Selfridge, dedicated AEA member and undoubtedly the most competent and knowledgeable aviator in the U.
S. military, became the airplane’s first fatality. Selfridge’s death was a terrible personal blow to Curtiss, and it also hastened the demise of the AEA.

  With Selfridge’s untimely death, the AEA’s collective undertaking seemed to come to a natural, if heartrending end. The year-long contract the AEA members had made with one another was due to expire and they had achieved success far beyond their wildest expectations. While the remaining members remained close for the rest of their lives, the loss of a vital team member precipitated their somber decision to dissolve their formal association. McCurdy and Casey Baldwin chose to continue their aeronautical research in Canada with Bell as a senior consultant. Curtiss, with the group’s blessing, opted to try manufacturing more airplanes in Hammondsport, building upon the success of the June Bug. In a somewhat impetuous move, Curtiss also decided to team up with a quixotic Aero Club member named Augustus Herring.

  It is not entirely clear what Curtiss saw in Herring, but most likely he was taken with Herring’s indisputably vast aviation experience as well as his claim to having numerous seminal aeronautical patents. Herring was urbane, educated, and as Curtiss put it admiringly, “a marvelous talker.” Plus, he seemed to have an uncanny knack for attaching himself to many of the legendary names in the field of aviation. He had assisted Octave Chanute with his biplane glider design and had worked for Hiram Maxim in Britain when Maxim was attempting to build a flying machine toward the end of the 1880s. He had even briefly helped Langley with the aerodrome’s construction. And he had won a contract from the U.S. Army to build an airplane, even though he had yet to actually deliver it. To Curtiss, still a relative neophyte in the aviation field, Herring’s résumé, contacts, and grandiose testaments of his accomplishments must have seemed like an important asset to a new company hoping to build and sell airplanes.