Chasing Icarus

by Gavin Mortimer

  Before the year was out, the first successful message had been sent from an airplane to a wireless station midflight, and Phil Parmalee had demonstrated the commercial capabilities of the airplane by transporting a consignment of silk from Dayton, Ohio, to a dry-goods firm in Columbus, only sixty-five miles but the first air-freight flight. Also the United States Aeronautical Reserve, established on September 10, 1910, had expanded at a prodigious rate, boasting among its members not just military men but “financiers, sportsmen and hundreds of others interested in aeronautics, from President Taft down to the humblest airplane mechanic.”

  In an end-of-year article for Fly magazine, Glenn Curtiss described 1910 as “a year of triumphant progress,” and Louis Blériot enthused that “the airplane as it exists today really stands upon the threshold of the most amazing, sporting and commercial possibilities . . . There is absolutely nothing to prevent flight becoming one of the greatest developments in the world’s history.”

  Fly’s rival publication, Aero, joined in the applause in its editorial of December 31, 1910: “Perhaps when years pass and the airplane is accepted universally upon its superior merits, when it is admittedly the King of Transit; when the sight of the flying machine is no rarer than that of its gasoline motored cousin on the ground; then, let us hope, some altruistic pioneers will look backwards, remember 1910, and erect a giant pylon of marble in the memory of the year when aviation came into its own. Good old 1910!”

  The Wright exhibition team traveled to Denver in mid-November 1910 to put on a show. Flying at five thousand feet above sea level was a new experience for Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxsey, but they dazzled the huge crowds with stunts over the foothills of the Rockies. Walter Brookins joined in, too, in his first public appearance since his Belmont Park smash. The morning demonstration on November 17 had been rapturously received, and in the afternoon the trio were up again, Brookins and Hoxsey performing a series of death-defying stunts close to the ground while Johnstone climbed to one thousand feet to demonstrate one of his legendary spiral glides. “He swooped down in a narrow circle,” wrote a reporter from the Chicago Daily Tribune, “the airplane seeming to turn almost in its own length. As he started the second circle, the middle spur which braced the left side of the lower plane, gave way and the wing tips of both upper and lower planes folded up as if they had been hinged.”

  Shrieks came from the stands as the biplane started to hurtle toward the ground. Johnstone was pitched forward out of his seat, but his body caught on the wires between the planes. His cap flew off and fell from the sky. One of the aviator’s flailing arms grasped a wooden brace, and as his legs dangled nine hundred feet above the Denver earth, with extraordinary strength and dexterity he pulled himself up so he was standing between the two planes. The crowd wasn’t sure if it was Johnstone’s latest trick, but the reporter from the Tribune had attended enough aviation meets to know this was no stunt. He looked up as Johnstone tried to manipulate the two planes with his hands and feet. For a second the reporter thought he’d succeeded—perhaps so did Johnstone—“but the hope was momentary, however, for when about 800 feet from the ground the machine turned completely over and the spectators fled wildly for safety as the broken airplane, with the aviator still fighting grimly in its mesh of wires and stays, plunged among them with a crash.”*

  Johnstone lay under his engine, which was enveloped by the white canvas wings, a shroud for the dead aviator. The hordes that had been fleeing paused, turned, then ran toward the wreck. “Frantic for souvenirs,” wrote the Tribune’s correspondent, “the spoilers quarreled and pulled and tugged among themselves even for the possession of the gloves that had protected Johnstone’s hands. These had been torn from his hands by the first of the mob, but even more heartless was the action of one man, who, cheated of any other booty, tore a splinter of the machine from Johnstone’s body and ran from the scene, bearing his trophy with the aviator’s blood still dripping from its ends.”

  Brookins and Hoxsey had seen the whole incident, every terrifying, desperate second. Hoxsey was led away from the broken body of his friend, murmuring the same words over and over: “Poor Ralph, poor Ralph.”†

  In the days following the Belmont Park Meet, John Moisant became the idol of America. The tournament had enriched him to the tune of $13,550 (although the $10,000 for the Statue of Liberty race had been held back while Grahame-White’s appeal was taken to the International Aviation Federation), and not a day passed without his appearance in a newspaper or magazine. His life story was told in comic strips, and he became a favorite subject for feature writers. Kate Carew salivated over him in a piece for the New York American on November 6: “His head is round and shapely. His face tapers from the cheekbones to a square chin, chiseled as if by a sculptor. His mouth is large, full-lipped and very widely arched—a bold, Roman mouth to match the dark, imperturbable eyes. You’d look at him twice, dears, I know you would.” In short, who needed Claude Grahame-White?

  Moisant capitalized on his fame by forming the Moisant International Aviators, combining his flying skills with his brother Alfred’s finances. In the long term Moisant planned to open an aircraft factory and manufacture dozens of his aluminum airplanes, but for the rest of 1910 he and his troupe of aviators—including Roland Garros, René Simon, and Edmond Audemars—toured America thrilling their legions of fans.

  In late December they were performing in New Orleans, and John Moisant had his eyes on a $4,000 prize tabled by the French tire manufacturer André Michelin, for the longest sustained flight of the year. Some of his team, however, were becoming ever more concerned with Moisant’s daredevilry; earlier in the month he’d glided down from nine thousand feet after suffering a frozen carburetor while trying for the world altitude record. One of his business managers, Albert Levino, advised him to be more prudent, but Moisant brushed him off, saying, “There’s no danger in making an airplane flight if the machine is properly adjusted before the ascent is made.” Don’t worry, he told Levino, “I don’t expect to die in an airplane flight.”

  Moisant woke early on the morning of Saturday, December 31, in more of a frenzy of activity than usual. He had only a few hours before the window closed on Michelin’s prize. He took off at nine fifty-five A.M. from City Park aviation field in New Orleans, said the correspondent from the Indianapolis Star, “confident of winning the Michelin Cup record for 1910 as a final triumph to his year of achievement.” The reporter was among a sizable crowd that had already gathered to watch his attempt, and for the first few minutes they were treated to some of Moisant’s most daring stunts as he warmed up his machine, including “his famous right circle . . . pronounced the most daring feat ever attempted by an airman.” They purred with delight as Moisant swerved suddenly to the left, then the right—then something went wrong. The machine got caught in one of the holes in the air, and instead of making the famous right circle, it “pointed its nose directly at the ground and came down like a flash.” The first people to reach the wreckage were a group of railroad laborers; they found Moisant lying in some long grass, without a bruise on his body, and with not the “slightest trace of fear or pain” on his face. His neck was broken and death had been instantaneous.

  News of Moisant’s death hadn’t yet reached California as the passengers stepped off the Pacific Electric trains at the stop for Aviation Field. The sky was gray and overcast, with the same zephyr as there had been in January, when Louis Paulhan so enraptured the spectators. People skipped along the road in merry anticipation as the sounds of the revving motors grew louder. Whom were they looking forward to seeing most? The daring Frenchman Hubert Latham? Boyish but indestructible Walter Brookins? Eugene Ely? Charles Willard? No, they all wanted to see the hometown hero, Arch Hoxsey.

  Five days earlier Hoxsey had climbed to 11,474 feet, a new world’s record, and one he dedicated to his friend Ralph Johnstone, whose Belmont Park mark had been bettered by a Frenchman called Georges Legagneux in early December. Hoxsey had won back the record f
or the Stardust Twins, but he’d warned his rivals he’d raise the bar even higher before the year was out. His mother, Minnie, had seen him break the record, as she’d seen him on every day of the meet, but today being Saturday she had a few chores to do before she would be able to travel from her Pasadena home.

  Hubert Latham was first in the air in his yellow-winged Antoinette, then James Radley took up his Blériot. Hoxsey was in his hangar making his final preparations for his flight when a friend appeared in the doorway. He was panting and held in his hand a newspaper. “It’s an extra,” he said between gasps. “Moisant’s killed!” The friend told reporters later that Hoxsey took the news “almost listlessly” and said in a barely audible voice, “Poor fellow. He must have become tired out fighting the wind.” Hoxsey’s friend was alarmed by his reaction and tried to talk him out of flying that day, but the aviator shook his head and smiled. As his machine was trundled out of its hangar, Hoxsey turned to his friend and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder: “If it’s after me, it’ll get me any other place as well as here.”

  Walter Brookins stood in front of the press stand chatting to some reporters as Hoxsey’s biplane rose into the air. Hard to credit, isn’t it, he said, that Arch was here in January as a spectator, and now eleven months later he’s the star turn.

  They watched as Hoxsey began to ascend in his familiar long spirals, and Brookins gave a running commentary on his friend’s altitude. Guess he’s at five thousand feet now, six thousand feet, seven thousand feet. Brookins turned to answer a question from a reporter, and as he did, someone in the crowd let out a scream. “Brookins whirled round at the sound of the cry,” wrote the reporter from the Colorado Springs Gazette, and as the biplane dropped from the sky, “. . . he uttered but one word, ‘God,’ his legs gave way and he fell into the roadway. Although he had been in several serious accidents himself, he rose thoroughly unnerved and cried like a child. At the time the field announcers were rushing up and down, shouting through their megaphones: ‘No cause for alarm. Hoxsey is all right.’ But Brookins was not convinced. ‘That’s a lie,’ he shouted back at one of the announcers. ‘Hoxsey’s dead. I know it.’ And again he burst into tears.”

  They wouldn’t let Brookins near the crash site. Kind arms ushered him away. Latham had been the first to reach Hoxsey, and Latham now sat in his hangar, silent and white and trembling. The sight of Hoxsey impaled on the wooden strut, his legs contorted under his body, the crushed rib cage, the blood seeping from under the shattered goggles . . . Latham’s mind was seared with the image.

  A squad of mounted police patrolled the field, driving away those who wished to ransack Hoxsey’s corpse the way the Denver crowd had Johnstone’s, while other spectators angrily demanded a refund when the organizers canceled the rest of the day’s events. Glenn Curtiss watched in silence, then, turning to his mechanics, he said, “Tear down the bunting, lower all the flags.”

  Reporters besieged the home of Minnie Hoxsey for the rest of the day, hoping for a few words. They waited on the porch, well wrapped up against that chill zephyr, and “every little while could be heard the suppressed sounds of sobbing.” Finally, when she had run out of tears, Mrs. Hoxsey emerged from the gloom of her house. “I wish I had gone up with Arch,” she said. “Then I would have died with him. All along I have been in dread he would someday meet with accident, but I rather he would have been killed outright than crippled for life. For, knowing my son as I did, I feel certain he would have lived a life of torment had he been compelled to have gone through life maimed and helpless.” One of the reporters, greedy in his ghoulishness, wanted to know if she would be visiting the undertaking rooms to view her son’s body. She stared long and hard into the reporter’s eyes: “I shall not look on his dead form. I wish to remember him as he was—cheerful, loving, and smiling.”*

  Claude Grahame-White heard the news of the double tragedy from his hospital bed in Dover, where he had lain since December 18, after a horrific accident that shattered his leg and ankle, slashed open his temple, and reduced his airplane to “matchwood.” In chasing a $20,000 prize for the longest nonstop flight from England to the Europe an mainland, Grahame-White had crashed into a stone wall on takeoff. He was helped in his recuperation by the charming bedside manner of Pauline Chase, who had returned to England with him in early December. Miss Sears? A delightful young woman, he had told reporters quayside in New York, but she was just a good friend, at least as far as he was concerned. Marry Miss Chase? “Oh, dear, dear. Stop your spoofin’!” he’d said, laughing.

  A Grahame-White quip, now that was a rarity in the weeks that had followed the Belmont Park kerfuffle, although admittedly there’d been precious little to smile about for the Englishman since that roistering good evening at Sherry’s. He’d become Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the American press, with the Philadelphia Inquirer accusing him of “mighty poor sportsmanship,” the New York Morning Telegram labeling him “foolish, unsportsmanlike and grasping,” and the New York Town Topics ridiculing him in a poem called “Discontent”:

  Britons never shall be slaves

  Britain h’always ruled the air

  Blimey, and it ain’t quite fair

  Why she shouldn’t rule the air

  I’ve a challenge for the world

  Everywhere the same I’ve hurled

  Blast yer eyes, come get in line

  Guided by these rules of mine.

  The hostility had eventually died down, but then, on the eve of his departure from New York, Grahame-White was informed that the Wrights had filed suit against him. He was summoned to appear before a circuit court judge on December 4 and told to bring with him details of his earnings in the three months he’d been in America. As for his airplanes, the port authorities in New York had been ordered to embargo them the moment he tried to ship them back to Europe. Grahame-White was livid and he impugned the Wrights’ integrity to the papers because “they had promised they wouldn’t make trouble.” But he wasn’t that surprised, he added, as “the Wrights are frightened. I’ve scared them so bloody well that they are terrified. I’m their most formidable competitor and they know it.”

  Grahame-White let it be known that if there was any trouble at New York, he’d contact his friend the British ambassador, in Washington, but behind the threats he moved with alacrity to outwit the Wrights; he sent his machines home on a freighter from Philadelphia, then booked his passage from New York at the very last minute. He left on board the Mauretania, not only with Pauline Chase, booked to play Peter Pan for another season, but with checks totaling $82,000 (approximately $1,312,000 today). That didn’t include the $10,000 for the Statue of Liberty race, a sum he vowed to pursue with the same dogged endurance that he’d exhibited in winning the International Aviation Cup at Belmont Park.

  The conquering hero was feted upon his return home. Photographs of Grahame-White posing with the International Aviation Cup adorned the London papers, and in one, the Evening Times, he hinted at skulduggery. Leaving aside the question of the Belmont Park organizers and their tinkering with race rules, the Englishman found it “unaccountable” that Moisant had beaten his time to the Statue of Liberty when he was flying a markedly inferior airplane to his own. “The same judges [who had changed the rules] acclaimed him the winner, and as having beaten my time by forty seconds. This in a thirty-five-mile flight is a narrow margin.” The inference was clear: Grahame-White believed that the judges had knocked off a few minutes from Moisant’s time so that their man would win.

  A year later, in December 1911, Grahame-White returned to America, this time alone. He and Pauline Chase had drifted apart six months earlier, and while the aviator had remained tight-lipped on the subject, she was happy to inform reporters from her suite in London’s Savoy Hotel that she had “concluded that Mr. Grahame-White could not compensate me from retirement from the stage.”*

  To Chase’s evident dismay, Grahame-White had plowed most of his earnings from 1910 into forming the Grahame-White Aviat
ion Company, and into establishing London’s first aerodrome, at Hendon, on the northern outskirts of the city.

  Given his many business commitments throughout 1911, Grahame-White had done precious little flying. One or two exhibitions here and there, but he’d been unable to find the time to participate in the International Aviation Cup race, and in the United States, the Wrights kept him grounded when he returned at the end of the year. Although a judge had thrown out one of the brothers’ suits—the one that demanded a full accounting of Grahame-White’s earnings in 1910—on the issue of the airplane patents the judge was waiting for a panel of experts to report back before delivering his verdict.†

  Not that Grahame-White minded his aerial embargo when he arrived in New York in December. On the passage out from England he had got talking to a beautiful American socialite named Dorothy Taylor, and by the time they docked, they were in love. In between calling on old friends such as Armstrong Drexel, Clifford Harmon, and Eleonora Sears—with whom he attended a charity ball in Madison Square Garden*—Grahame-White wined and dined Miss Taylor and had his proposal of marriage accepted.

  His spat with the American press had long since been forgotten— particularly since his appeal against Moisant’s victory in the Statue of Liberty race had been successful†—and he happily consented to have lunch with Walter Brookins on December 30 as guests of the World. The venue, appropriately, was the Plaza Hotel, where fourteen months earlier he and Cortlandt Bishop had glared at each other over the International Aviation Cup. Brookins and Grahame-White had never been good friends, but a warm camaraderie prevailed between them as they shook hands like two old soldiers at a regimental reunion.