by Seth Shulman
Into the morning’s hush, the original motor that Manly built so long ago now coughs and roars into life and the aerodrome’s propellers start to spin. The four-winged craft, headed across the wind, starts to skid over the little waves. Then, with its huge rudder acting like a weather vane, Langley’s aerodrome, of its own accord, veers straight into the wind under full power. In what Zahm describes as a slow and “stately” takeoff, it rises on an even keel, a few feet above the water, and heads airborne toward the distant shore.
Feeling disproportionate drag on the aerodrome’s left wings, Curtiss cuts the aerodrome’s engine and lets the aircraft alight softly on the water after flying for just 150 feet. As a motorboat tows Curtiss and the aerodrome back to the shore, he explains that he landed because, unfamiliar with the controls, he feared the craft might list or even keel over. Despite the flight’s brevity, though, there is no doubt about the outcome: Langley’s aerodrome has finally flown under its own power. Without delay, the reporters on hand scramble to town to wire their stories from the back of Jim Smellie’s pharmacy.
The Curtiss-Smithsonian team’s initial feat with an airplane approximating Langley’s original, firmly establishes the viability of the aerodrome and makes headlines around the world. The next day, a front-page article in the New York Times declares, for instance, “‘Langley’s Folly’ flew over Lake Keuka today—approximately eleven years since it caused the country to laugh at its inventor when on its trial flight it fell into the Potomac. “As the Times reporter puts it: “It was one of the greatest days for aviation that the town has known.”
Not surprisingly, the Hammondsport Herald goes even further, suggesting that a review of the aviation field “reveals the fact that practically every machine in existence traces its ancestry quite directly back to the genius of Dr. Langley.”
News of the flight of the rebuilt aerodrome particularly pleases the aging Alexander Graham Bell. Bell had long admired his colleague Langley, whose research had inspired him and so many others to enter the emerging aeronautical field. “Congratulations on your successful vindication of Langley’s drome,” Bell wires Curtiss upon hearing the news. “This is really the crowning achievement of your career, at least so far.”
That first day, no more tests can be made on the aerodrome because, when the team returns to the lake after an excited breakfast, they discover that a bearing on one of the propeller shafts has given way, requiring lengthy repairs. Over the next few days, however, Curtiss lifts the machine off the water for several more short flights, accommodating photographers and proving that his initial result can be successfully replicated. On June 2, Smithsonian Secretary Walcott, beaming, officially pronounces that the group has proven the viability of the original Langley aerodrome.
Before returning to Washington, Walcott orders the next phase of the work to begin with an installation of a Curtiss engine and propeller to further test the aerodynamics of Langley’s tandem-wing design.
The second phase of the experiments—to gather data on the potential of the tandem-wing design—will be placed on hold for the moment while the high-profile America moves to center stage. But ultimately, by the summer’s end, the aerodrome, with a new Curtiss engine and several other modifications, will remain airborne for nearly a half hour, flying in one test for a full ten miles into a stiff wind.
What did Curtiss and the Smithsonian team prove in the Langley reconstruction? The question has been asked and debated heatedly since the experiment was conducted in the spring of 1914 because, for literally decades to come, Orville carries on a campaign to discredit the group’s work.
Working with his British friend Griffith Brewer, Orville documents many changes that the reconstruction team made in Hammondsport. So many, in fact, that an exasperated Zahm retorts that he wonders why they don’t complain that the aircraft’s color changed from white to buff when its fabric was replaced.
Many of the changes Orville gripes about are incorporated only in the later, second phase of the work when the group makes no secret of the fact that it is introducing modifications to test the aerodynamics of Langley’s favored tandem-wing design. The details of Orville’s charges, after all, are gleaned in only in this second phase when, in two separate trips, Brewer and Orville’s older brother Lorin are dispatched to spy on the reconstruction effort.
Nonetheless, several of Orville’s charges are significant. Most troubling, perhaps, is the fact that, from the first, the Curtiss-Smithsonian team considerably strengthened the bracing of the wings—a change that alone may well have forestalled a repeat of Langley’s debacle. They justified the additional bracing, reasonably enough, by the fact that the aerodrome had to be able to support the pontoons. But even Zahm ultimately acknowledged that the 1914 test cannot be seen to definitively prove the structural soundness of the original Langley aerodrome, only the viability of its aerodynamics and the sufficiency of its engine.
Equally noteworthy, the reconstruction team omitted the sharp-edged front extensions to the wings that Langley added to his final aerodrome model. They opted instead to leave a more rounded—and aerodynamically sound—leading edge to the wing. It is debatable whether Langley’s extensions to the wings’ forward ribs were integral to his design. But there is little doubt that the reconstruction team realized their chances of success would be greater if they ignored this misguided feature. The omission can certainly be seen to diminish the team’s claim to scrupulous scientific accuracy. But arguably, at least, it should have done little to dent their credibility. Even with this omission, as they all contended, the reconstructed aerodrome was substantially as Langley had designed it.
Nonetheless, Orville’s charges of alterations to the aircraft were delivered by Brewer along with sensational allegations of fraud in a paper presented in 1921 to the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. In the view of Brewer and Orville, the reconstruction team knowingly misrepresented their work and perpetrated a fraud on the public in order to steal the Wright brothers’ reputation as the world’s first to fly.
As Zahm strenuously counters, “To impugn the motives of the Smithsonian men associated with the work of retesting the Langley aeroplane in 1914 is a discourtesy and injustice that well might be discountenanced by an impartial society.”
But history, it seems, is not written by an impartial society but, most often, by those who crow the loudest into posterity. Accordingly, Brewer’s trumped-up charges largely stick for many decades to come. It does not seem to matter that all the principal team members involved in the reconstruction address and refute most of Orville’s and Brewer’s claims. Perhaps Zahm answers most forcefully. Challenging Brewer’s charge of a conspiracy, Zahm declares that the experiments to reconstruct the Langley aerodrome “were no more initiated for the purpose of patent litigation than were Langley’s original experiments.” Charges of any kind of a conspiracy, Zahm said, were “the irresponsible gossip of a partisan who could easily have ascertained the truth.”
Nor does it seem to make a difference that Curtiss and Manly both separately express to Orville their willingness to undertake yet another test of Langley’s aircraft under any auspices he might suggest. Orville chooses to decline the offers.
Looking back, the Curtiss-Smithsonian group can perhaps be faulted for an excess of zeal—as well as an indisputable conflict of interest in the aerodrome affair. All the principal team members certainly wanted to see Langley’s rebuilt airplane succeed. About that there is no question. Most likely, their partisan enthusiasm crept into their work even while they were trying to be judicious. After all, Curtiss was particularly famous for tinkering with things until he got them to work.
Conspiracy, however, is another matter. Curtiss, Manly, Walcott, and Zahm were all accomplished and honorable men. When the controversy is inspected closely, there is little reason to doubt their actions or their word. Each of them maintained throughout their lives that they had faithfully tried to reproduce Langley’s aerodrome to his original specifications.
Such testaments are especially important because, even today, most history books accept Orville’s charges of collusion and fraud despite the fact that they prove themselves primarily to be the exaggerated claims of a bitter, aging man.
Of course, the Langley restoration did nothing to take away from Orville and Wilbur Wright’s brilliant contribution to the airplane. The Wrights’ seminal work to build the first controllable airplane is incisive, original, and clear-headed. It has been closely scrutinized by generations of scholars and justly studied as a model for technological innovation and experimentation.
Then, as now, it is beyond dispute that the Wrights were the first to fly, just as it is beyond dispute that Langley’s unmanned model flew years before the Wrights began their work in earnest.
Nor would the reconstruction effort change the outcome of Wright v. Curtiss. Larger historical forces would intervene to play a hand in that matter. But Orville is wrong if he would have us see the reconstruction of the Langley aerodrome as some kind of trick in which Curtiss and the Smithsonian team had to make many alterations to get the aerodrome to fly.
Quite the contrary. Even assuming Orville’s entire catalog of changes is accurate, the rebuilt aerodrome must be seen as having risen with relatively few major changes that could have enhanced its chance for success. The original motor—even in its diminished state—clearly had enough thrust to launch the aircraft; and the basic tandem-wing design, while not providing the lift of a biplane, clearly proved its viability over Lake Keuka. By any estimation, in other words, Langley must certainly be seen to have come close to creating a working prototype.
Perhaps more pertinent, as a number of aviation historians have rightly noted, with or without changes in the reconstruction process, Langley’s original aircraft itself suffered from a number of glaring deficiencies. The most obvious, of course, was the lack of any means to land. One wonders whether Langley was so focused on getting airborne that he hadn’t considered how best to land safely with a pilot. Langley is known to have been rigid in his engineering approach, and his aerodrome had a number of other important failings as well. The sharp leading edges of its wings produced unnecessary drag, for instance, and their curvature was not the most aerodynamically effective. From such a critical perspective, Langley’s aerodrome must be seen as nothing more than a dead end, despite the demonstration made by Curtiss and the Smithsonian team in 1914. No other inventors, after all, would carry forward Langley’s unusual tandem-wing design or his primitive balancing scheme.
And yet, oddly enough, precisely the same complaint can be leveled against the early Wright Flyer, with its flexible wings, unstable design, large front elevator, and cumbersome skids requiring a half-ton weight and derrick for takeoff. Only the Wrights’ biplane design—lifted directly from Chanute (with his magnanimous permission)—would bear fruit in future airplane models.
One of the most acerbic of the Wright critics, Charles Grey, an aviation buff who knew the early Wright and Curtiss airplanes intimately, makes such an argument. As Grey puts it, the intellectual ferment evident in the early, incomplete designs of Langley and many others, “show how ridiculous is the claim that the Wrights ‘invented the airplane.’
“The Wright type biplane with the small leading plane and a method of control which hardly anybody other than the Wrights could manage,” Grey argues, “killed most of its pilots and was obsolete and out of production by 1912 when many other designs were flying strongly and developing fast.”
By contrast, in spite of the court rulings in favor of the Wright patent, Curtiss’s innovations are notable for the way they have so often endured and flourished on their own merits. His airplanes introduced many features—like rigid wings, trailing-edge wing flaps, retractable landing gear, and pontoons—that continue to be time-honored elements of aeronautical design nearly a century later. In this way, Curtiss’s accomplishments live on even though his story has been largely forgotten.
EPILOGUE
ALL BUT THE LEGACY
From time to time numerous aerial craftsmen have flourished in the world’s eye, only to pass presently into comparative obscurity, while others too neglected or too poorly appreciated in their own day subsequently have risen to high estimation and permanent honor in the minds of men.
—ALBERT ZAHM, 1914
At its core, the long, bitter fight between Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers pitted the virtues of open, shared access to innovation against the driving economic pressure for monopoly ownership, a debate that resonates through the years. Having accomplished a tremendous breakthrough in aviation, Wilbur and Orville Wright tried to control the development of the airplane in its first decade through patents and aggressive business tactics. Ultimately, their effort would fail.
By contrast, Glenn Hammond Curtiss permitted anyone to use the principles underlying his inventions—a strategy that enormously benefited the emerging industry. Unlike the Wrights, Curtiss believed his inventions and products should succeed or fail in the marketplace on their own merit. This, ultimately, is the way he would have wanted his career to be judged, and it is how it should be judged: by the lasting, unrivaled success of the aeronautical inventions he created.
Orville Wright continued to vigorously prosecute his lawsuit against Curtiss until 1917 when the U.S. government, responding to the overriding requirements of waging World War I, ordered the nation’s two largest airplane companies to settle their differences. The fruitless lawsuit had lasted nearly nine years and proved a costly drain on time, energy, and resources for both sides. With the pressure from the government, a cross-licensing agreement, paying modest royalties to both the Wright and Curtiss companies on the sale of all new American airplanes, was drawn up by Henry Ford’s lawyer Benton Crisp.
Years before the settlement, Orville had become a millionaire from the airplane business. But during the entire legal proceedings and for the rest of his life, he would make few further contributions to the fast-maturing aviation field. In fact, most of the Wrights’ engineering contributions were obsolete well before the conclusion of Wright v. Curtiss.
Meanwhile, freed from litigation in 1917, Curtiss was finally able to take full advantage of his company’s superior technology. Even prior to the formal end of the lawsuit, contracts began flooding into his firm, including huge wartime orders from the British government. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Curtiss Aeroplane Company had become far and away the nation’s largest airplane manufacturer. The reason was as simple as it always had been: Curtiss built the best airplanes of his day.
And what of the America and Curtiss’s promise to build an airplane that could cross the Atlantic Ocean?
In August 1914, the war in Europe interrupted events in Hammondsport just as the America drew tantalizingly close to carrying the requisite fuel load. Lieutenant Cyril Porte, America’s pilot, was hastily called back into active duty in Britain. The project stalled: there could be no transatlantic flight with Europe at war.
In one of his first acts as wing commander of the British Royal Naval Air Service, Porte arranged to purchase the America from Curtiss and ordered more like it to be built for Britain. Within months, Britain deployed the America to patrol the English Channel and it sank no fewer than three German U-boats. The handful of “Americas” in the British fleet, in fact, would be the only American-built aircraft to see combat in World War I.
Curtiss was just short of the needed thrust in the America when the outbreak of war in Europe prevented his planned transatlantic flight. But at the war’s end, America�
��s successor, the NC-4—designed by Curtiss in collaboration with the U.S. Navy—made the first-ever airborne transatlantic crossing on May 27, 1919. U.S. Navy commander Albert Read piloted the NC-4 (NC for Navy-Curtiss). It was one of a fleet of four identical planes that left the coast of Newfoundland heading for Plymouth, England. Facing storms, and high seas, it would be the only one of the four to successfully complete the voyage. The flight, which included a 1,200-mile hop from Newfoundland to the Azores islands, predated Lindbergh’s nonstop, solo Atlantic crossing by eight years.
Curtiss was understandably elated to have built the airplane that was the first to accomplish the transatlantic crossing he had promised and envisioned. He often later considered it his most important contribution to aviation. Astonishingly, even with the delay of the war, the flight took place just eleven years after Curtiss had flown his fateful first kilometer in the AEA’s June Bug. In these few years, the sky was conquered as air travel moved from the risky imaginings of a few visionaries to a full-blown industry. Throughout, Curtiss’s state-of-the-art aircraft flew in the vanguard, buffeted by the powerful gusts of change at an extraordinary period in history.
Ultimately, though, Curtiss’s success in raising Langley’s aerodrome helped undermine his place in history. Orville Wright never forgave Curtiss and dedicated himself to a long, bitter feud with the Smithsonian over the incident that raged for the next quarter of a century.
During that time, Orville refused to donate to the Smithsonian the original Wright Flyer that had first flown at Kitty Hawk even though the museum badly wanted it for their aeronautical collection. In retaliation for the Smithsonian’s role in the aerodrome episode, Orville had the Kitty Hawk plane shipped to the British Science Museum instead, and there it would stay until after his death.