Unlocking the Sky

by Seth Shulman

  Perhaps most notably, the import of the flight is recognized at once. “Man has conquered the air,” the New York Times announces. “Accomplished with wonderful courage and skill,” Curtiss’s flight, “seems to make human flying more a reality than hitherto it has been.”

  Thanks to Curtiss’s feat, the New York Times coverage continues, “the development of the airship practically and commercially and the growth of its usefulness as a carrier are only matters of time.” In all, the Times devotes six full pages of text and photos to Curtiss’s Hudson flight. It is the most space the newspaper of record has ever devoted to a single news event.

  TEN

  NEW BEGINNINGS

  It would be indeed little less than miraculous if the way to success were not taught by failures at first, here as everywhere.

  —SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY, 1892

  With the Albany–Manhattan flight, Curtiss becomes a bona fide American hero. For many years to come, however, the ongoing saga of the Wrights’ bitter lawsuit against him sets all Curtiss’s accomplishments against a charged, highly partisan backdrop. The Wrights loathe his success. They consider their discovery of wing warping to be the singular development that makes the airplane possible. Not only does Curtiss rebuke their exclusive claim on this seminal contribution but, from their point of view, he flaunts his piracy, garnering accolades and worldwide acclaim.

  As a result, the Wrights want not just to fight Curtiss, but to punish and destroy him. It becomes an obsession. People close to the Wrights note with some alarm how the irrepressible Curtiss becomes a chronic focus for their bitterness. As the Wrights’ colleague Grover Loening puts it later, Orville “openly despised” Curtiss and nurtured a “vicious hatred and rivalry” toward him as the lawsuit dragged on.

  Before long, in fact, litigation comes to dominate the Wrights’ lives as the brothers spend increasingly long periods giving testimony in court and less time updating and improving their airplanes. Their official statements become more shrill. “We shall hold all persons using or engaging others to use infringing machines strictly accountable for all damages and profits accruing there from,” their company literature warns. They even threaten to sue the U.S. military on the suspicion that Navy officials are considering the purchase of an “infringing” airplane other than theirs.

  Feeding the Wrights’ fury, a federal appeals court overturns Judge Hazel’s injunction against Curtiss in June 1910, just weeks after the Albany–Manhattan flight. The three-judge panel rules that Curtiss’s alleged “infringement was not so clearly established as to justify a preliminary injunction.” Plus, the judges note, a number of affidavits in Curtiss’s favor have been presented after Hazel’s decision and deserve a fair hearing.

  Curtiss knows that the legal sparring over an injunction is just a prelude. Now he faces an uphill and sure-to-be grueling legal battle on the merits of the patent infringement case—with Judge Hazel once again presiding at the bench. But, for the moment at least, he is legally free to continue in the aviation business.

  With the injunction lifted, and riding high on the accolades—and prize money—from the Hudson River flight, Curtiss seizes the chance to start again. He forms a new company from the tattered remains of the debacle with his former partner Herring.

  Curtiss has, by this point, learned something of the rough and volatile world of business. He makes far sounder choices this time in establishing two new firms—the Curtiss Aeroplane Company and the Curtiss Motor Company. In each case, the company’s stock is tightly held by a small, trusted group including Lena Curtiss, Monroe Wheeler, Harry Genung and Henry Kleckler. As he sets out anew, Curtiss will need every bit of the business acumen he has acquired to keep the company afloat while Wright v. Curtiss proceeds through years of affidavits, expert testimony, and mounting legal fees.

  Underscoring the sense that things are on a more secure and optimistic footing, Curtiss becomes a father in June 1911. His son—Lena insists on naming him Glenn Jr.—is born nine years after the traumatic death of their firstborn infant. Lena is thrilled to learn her new son is healthy.

  During this period, much of the income of the Curtiss Aeroplane Company derives from exhibitions. After the Albany–Manhattan flight, it seems, the entire country wants to see Curtiss fly. Nonetheless, given Curtiss’s new paternal role, Lena urges him to let others do the exhibition flying. Training a strong new crop of young pilots, Curtiss agrees to curtail his own flying, at least over land, so as to focus on the inventing he loves best.

  The next few years are Curtiss’s most productive, despite the drain on his time and money from the Wrights’ lawsuit. His prodigious stream of inventions surely rivals any in the annals of aviation. Curtiss invents the hydro-aeroplane—now called the seaplane—including a pontoon design, still in use today, that handily allows the aircraft to break away from the surface tension of the water upon takeoff. He masterminds the first launch of an airplane from a ship, presaging the modern aircraft carrier. He is the first to design retractable landing gear on an ingenious aircraft he calls Triad that can take off or alight on land or water. He perfects a design for a “flying boat” in which the airplane’s fuselage itself doubles as a hull for landing on water. He works with Elmer Sperry Jr. to help develop a gyroscopic automatic stabilizer for airplanes. All the while, he designs and builds ever stronger engines. And, perhaps most important to the future of his company, he lays the foundation for a new airplane, the Curtiss JN, that will come to be known as the “Jenny”—one of the most popular and successful airplanes in the history of aviation.

  Throughout, Curtiss retains his characteristic openness and optimism. Theodore “Spuds” Ellyson, who works closely with him over these years, later recalls his extraordinary focus and determination. In his initial design for the hydro-aeroplane, for instance, Curtiss and his team experiment with some fifty different pontoon designs before they can get one to work satisfactorily. “Those of us who did not know Mr. Curtiss well,” Ellyson says, “wondered that he did not give up in despair.”

  Those who do know Curtiss, however, know he is not the type to despair, no matter what the circumstances. He thrives on problem solving and experimentation. And he is good at it. Navy Captain Washington Irving Chambers, who worked with both the Wrights and with Curtiss notes that Curtiss was “always ready to make experiments and was as progressive as the Wrights were conservative.” Chambers describes Curtiss as “a mechanical wizard” who would “speak little as he attacked a problem with logic and at-hand materials, cutting and trying until it worked.”

  “Experimenting is never work—it is plain fun,” Curtiss once explained to a reporter. He could work eighteen hours a day when occasion required it without feeling any special fatigue, Curtiss said, because he always spent at least half of his time experimenting with new ideas. He called the process “rejuvenating,” adding that “the man who works himself down can work himself back up if he will develop a turn for experimenting.”

  Coupled with Curtiss’s love of experimenting is the same straightforward, competitive verve that led him to championships as a bicycle and motorcycle racer years earlier. Curtiss retains that driven, restless energy throughout his work in the aviation field. Perhaps most noteworthy, though, especially in light of his treatment at the hands of the Wright brothers, Curtiss always shares the fruits of his inventive imagination freely with others. Over the course of the years in litigation with the Wrights, Curtiss, advised by his attorneys, does register some aviation patents—such as a patent on the flying boat. But it is a small handful compared with the estimated five hundred aeronautical inventions he is ultimately credited with. And, even when he does patent his inventions, he never once uses his patents as a weapon to control the technology’s development or shut out competitors.

  Nor does Curtiss, unlike the Wrights and Henry Ford, ever become bitter from the chronic legal machinations he faces. When others copy his machine—even openly selling “Curtiss-type” aircraft—Curtiss pays practically
no attention. As he tells his colleague Lyman Seely, all the lawsuits convince him that the best approach is “to forget about patents and look for the business.” The goal, he says, ought to be simply to keep building better airplanes than anyone else.

  The strategy earns Curtiss even more recognition and success. He wins every top honor in the field for his accomplishments including, in 1911, the Aero Club’s newly established Collier Trophy—the highest award for achievement in aviation—and, in 1913, the Langley Medal, an award the Smithsonian had formerly bestowed only upon the Wright brothers.

  Ironically, even in these years while the lawsuit moves glacially forward, the Wright Company will appropriate some of the best of Curtiss’s inventions. Purportedly as an aid in their lawsuit, Wilbur and Orville quietly procure a Curtiss plane, study its construction, and fly it repeatedly in Dayton. Before the lawsuit is over, in fact, Wright Company planes will abandon the wing-warping system in favor of ailerons, the U.S. patent for which is finally granted to Curtiss and the AEA in 1914, after being held up for years at the patent office by the Wrights’ lawyers. By that year, the Wright Company even starts selling “flying boats” that look suspiciously similar to Curtiss’s patented design.

  But Orville will not stop the lawsuit against Curtiss over the antiquated wing-warping technique—especially after Wilbur dies in 1912. And, with strong legal representation, Orville prevails in court. On February 1913, Judge Hazel rules against Curtiss and this time, in January 1914, Curtiss loses his appeal in the case as—crushingly—the federal appeals court upholds Hazel’s broad interpretation of the Wrights’ wing-warping patent.

  In retrospect, the verdict says more about the strength of the Wrights’ legal team and the woeful failure of the U.S. patent system than it does about the rightful progenitor of aeronautical technology. Here again the Wrights’ secrecy played a role. Had the Wrights, back in 1906, been willing to demonstrate their airplane to the patent examiner, they might have garnered a patent on their particular airplane design itself, as so many airplane designers would subsequently do. But, of course, the Wrights were unwilling to show anyone their airplane, and the patent office was unwilling to hand out patents on flying machines without proof that they could work.

  Of necessity, in the years following their 1903 success at Kitty Hawk, the Wrights’ clever legal team gambled that the brothers’ patent might be even broader and more invincible if it focused on the principle of lateral control embodied in the early Wright Flyer.

  The improbable strategy paid off.

  Now, the 1914 federal appeals court verdict against Curtiss places him in an all-too-familiar position. Once again, his options seem impossibly few. And his future in the airplane business stands at the mercy of his bitter adversary Orville Wright. Curtiss doesn’t want to be bankrupted a second time. Nor does he want to move his company to a foreign country—another of his possible options. But he has little more recourse through the U.S. courts.

  Normally, at the end of such a titanic legal battle, the winning company would negotiate terms to its own advantage. But, to Orville, it seems, hurting Curtiss is more important than helping his own firm. He sticks to his demand for 20 percent royalties on all airplanes Curtiss has ever sold or exhibited, knowing full well that the demand will likely bankrupt him once again.

  Orville’s vindictive strategy is well recognized at the time. “It is difficult to believe that Mr. Wright is actuated by other than personal animosity,” notes an editorial in the Boston Transcript in 1914, for instance. “He must see that his course will not pay in a financial sense, for under his terms he can secure no licenses, as he could easily do under a more liberal policy.”

  Not knowing where else to turn, Curtiss decides in the spring of 1914 to take up Henry Ford’s offer for assistance and Ford is eager to help. “My entire legal staff is at your disposal,” he tells Curtiss.

  “Patents,” Ford says, “should be used to protect the inventor, not to hold back progress.”

  From the start, Ford’s brilliant attorney Benton Crisp begins to reap rewards for Curtiss. Initially, in the summer of 1914, he devises a legal stalling tactic. Noting that the Wrights’ wing-warping patent specifies that the wings must be twisted simultaneously, he helps Curtiss devise an “interlock” for his airplanes’ ailerons making them operate independent of one another on each of the airplane’s wings. These so-called nonsimultaneous ailerons could be seen as an advance that would not be covered by the Wright patent. As expected, Orville is not satisfied with the change. But the tactic profitably moves Curtiss back to court for yet another round.

  In the meantime, characteristically, Curtiss looks for another show stopper like Rheims, or the Hudson River flight to somehow transcend his legal woes. The idea for a flight across the Atlantic Ocean fits the bill nicely. So does the notion, first broached by Lincoln Beachey according to one account, to see whether a new trial of Langley’s aerodrome—the ill-fated dragonfly—might somehow dent Orville Wright’s expansive legal claims over the airplane. After all, Samuel P. Langley’s aircraft predated the Wright Flyer; the courts’ decisions in favor of the Wrights hinge largely on the fact that their patent’s pioneering status merits an expansive interpretation.

  At the end of May 1914, Hammondsport is buzzing. Work on the proposed Atlantic-conquering America is already under way. Zahm, Manly, and Walcott are in town and, after nearly two months of work, the first phase of the aerodrome reconstruction is nearing completion.

  As the final repairs to the aerodrome are made, workers from the Curtiss shop carry its pieces to a hangar near the shore of Lake Keuka. Late into the evening, they work to assemble Langley’s restored aircraft for launching.

  The next day, May 28, 1914, Curtiss and the restoration team are back at work by sunrise.

  It is a clear morning with a mild, shifting breeze. Ready for action, Curtiss surveys the scene from a familiar spot at the southern tip of the long and narrow Lake Keuka. The verdant, tree-lined hills rise from the lake’s distant banks in dark silhouettes against the rosy morning light and the day’s first rays of sunlight glint off the water.

  From this exact location just seven winters ago, Curtiss first felt the thrill of aeronautical success when Casey Baldwin made his first brief flight in the AEA’s Red Wing. From this very spot, over the ensuing years, Curtiss has tested dozens of other prototype aircraft, including the Albany Flier, and his early hydro-aeroplanes.

  Along the way, as Augustus Post has put it, Curtiss has “worked his way up from the making of bicycles to the making of history.” Through his own creativity and perseverance, he designed and built a motorcycle to carry him faster than anyone had ever traveled over land. As a member of Bell’s team, he crafted an airplane that flew in public before the Wright brothers did—a plane that incorporated more lasting aeronautical features than any of the Wrights’ early designs. In France, he tested his skill as an inventor and pilot against the greatest aviators in Europe and beat them all. He mastered the problem of taking off and landing from the water. And, with his daring flight above the Hudson River, he helped open the eyes of the world to the practical potential of air travel.

  Altogether, it is a stunning string of successes for a man just past his thirty-sixth birthday.

  But this morning’s flight is different. For once, Curtiss and his team won’t be forging new technological ground but looking backward, promoting an appreciation of the fact that sometimes a seminal technological “failure” can be as important as the successes that may follow it. Already, the reconstruction effort has paid homage to Langley’s brilliant, creative work. Now, perhaps, a successful flight in Langley’s rebuilt aerodrome will restore his reputation and forever alter the way the story of the airplane is told.

  Just a decade earlier, the aerodrome had brought Langley nothing but ridicule and the world scoffed at the possibility of heavier-than-air flight. Now airplanes have become commonplace. They have transformed the world. And yet the courts continue to wrangle—
unproductively—over who should get the rightful credit for the airplane’s invention.

  Given the charged backdrop of the Wrights’ protracted lawsuit against him, Curtiss surely knows that the reconstruction of Langley’s aerodrome somehow represents a fight for his own place in history as well. By resurrecting the Langley, Curtiss champions his view that technological breakthroughs emerge not in isolation but by building upon the work of those who have come before. As Zahm will express it in his official monograph for the Smithsonian on the aerodrome reconstruction: “The aeroplane as it stands today is the creation not of any one man, but rather of three generations of men.”

  Curtiss squats by the lakeshore. There are no whitecaps on the water, but, with a practiced eye, he gauges the wind gusts by studying the movement of the shallow streaks of waves across the lake’s surface. Frowning, Curtiss opts, as usual, to wait until the wind dies down to his satisfaction.

  Finally, at around 7 A.M., a dozen men, in rolled-up shirtsleeves and knee-high rubber boots, lift the gangly aerodrome and wade into the water to set it down carefully on its pontoons. Improbably enough, alighting on the surface of Lake Keuka, Langley’s ill-fated dragonfly is reborn. Now the craft will get an exceedingly rare opportunity: a second chance to make history.

  From the ankle-deep water, Curtiss climbs aboard the craft to sit, as Manly had once done, on the wooden board in the little fabric-sided booth under the forward part of the frame that serves as the cockpit.

  By now, many eager spectators, reporters, and photographers have gathered along the shore, including seven whom Zahm and Walcott designate as official witnesses. Unlike many of Curtiss’s demonstration flights, a quiet, almost reverential mood descends upon the crowd. The strange circumstances of the flight and the antiquated look of Langley’s contraption conspire to make everyone not just excited for the outcome but somehow mindful of the sweep of history.