Chasing Icarus (16 page)

Claude Grahame-White showed up soon after with Pauline Chase, whom he escorted to her seat in the grandstand. Having kissed her goodbye, he walked over to the hangars, stopping for a friendly word outside most, but not the four cavernous tents in which were housed the Wrights’ machines.

Although the rain had started to leak through the roof of the tents, forcing the machines to be covered with tarpaulin, Wilbur Wright was surprisingly unconcerned. In fact, for a man who was usually solemnly reserved, he seemed in singularly good humor. When the correspondent from the
Washington Post
plucked up the courage to ask why, Wright explained that shortly after breakfast he had received a telegram from his legal team. “All our suits for infringement of patent rights have been decided in our favor in the German courts,” he exclaimed, his hawklike eyes bright with triumph. The suits elsewhere were still pending, he continued, but Wright was clearly “confident that the courts of America and Europe an countries would follow Germany’s lead.”

Word of the decision carried swiftly down the row of hangars, and, said the
Post
’s correspondent, it “concerned the foreign fliers.” If other countries did indeed endorse the German ruling, then “no Blériot, Cur-tiss, Farman, or in fact any make of machine that has adapted the . . . vital points first worked to a practical solution by the Wrights—which includes every design of air machine in existence—henceforth can legally be flown.”

It wasn’t just the foreign aviators who now faced the prospect of being grounded by the Wrights’ bloody-minded tenacity. Glenn Curtiss, the winner of the 1909 International Aviation Cup, was also embroiled in a bitter legal battle with the brothers, one that was being buffeted from court to court, and although for the moment he was still at liberty to fly and manufacture airplanes, the German decision had worrying implications for his company.

Curtiss and his team of fliers arrived at the racecourse from the Belvedere Hotel, bringing with them on the back of a truck their new airplane, the one that was almost as secret as the Wrights’ and had so excited the
New York Herald
a few days earlier. Enmity ran deep between the two factions, and the Curtiss aviators received welcoming sneers from the Wright fliers as they approached hangars 5 and 6. Curtiss considered the brothers grasping and dogmatic, while the Wrights let it be known “that they didn’t think the Curtiss planes were any good and that they were dangerous to fly.” Furthermore, Walter Brookins, Arch Hoxsey, Ralph Johnstone, and Frank Coffyn (who had recently retired from flying but who was present at Belmont Park) “were taught by the Wrights that the Curtiss crowd was just no good at all.” Curtiss and his quartet of fliers shut the door of hangar No. 5 and began to uncrate the airplane as the rain continued to drum on the roof. The eldest of the four aviators was James “Bud” Mars, a thirty-four-year-old from Michigan, who had changed his family name from McBride to Mars on joining a circus as a trapeze artist. Further stints followed as a high diver and fairground parachutist, before Mars earned his aviation license in August 1910. Two months later, on October 1, he’d unsuccessfully tried to win the $1,000 on offer for the first man to fly across the Rocky Mountains. He was found by a search party sitting unharmed beside his smashed machine having crashed into a rock face.

Mars was best pals with Eugene Ely, a married man from Davenport, Iowa, who carried the nickname King of the Ozone and was famous for thrilling the crowds with the Ely Glide. Climbing to a thousand feet, he would then shut off his engine and rush down to earth at an angle sometimes as steep as thirty degrees before pulling out of the dive at the last moment.

The other two members of the team were Charles Willard, “Daredevil” to his friends, a twenty-seven-year-old Harvard graduate who seemed to eat nothing but chocolate, and a twenty-four-year-old Canadian, John McCurdy, who had first flown in 1907, a year after graduating from Toronto University with an engineering degree.

As Curtiss and his men started to assemble their new airplane, Wilbur Wright was inviting members of the press into his hangar to view his latest invention. “The cup will remain in America,” said Wright, patting the machine’s yellow-pine propeller. Reporters gathered round the aircraft asking questions as they examined it. It was built of ash and spruce, with the wings covered with bleached cotton. Some of the taller correspondents could reach up on tiptoe and almost touch the top of the six-foot-ten-inch biplane. The
New York Herald
reporter scribbled furiously as Wright gave the visitors a tour of the machine that he and his brother had christened the Baby Grand. “The exact dimensions of the new Wright racer can now be given,” he wrote. “The planes [wings] are 26 feet long and 3 feet 4 inches wide. They are set 3 feet apart, and the radiator and gasoline tank are placed directly behind the driver. There is only one seat on the racing machine.”

Compare this new compact plane with the traditional Wright biplane, Wilbur said, the wingspan of which was thirty-nine feet. He invited reporters to have a look at the rudder—“hardly larger than a handkerchief”—and he also drew attention to the four-wheeled undercarriage and the antiskidding blinkers on the forward skids, which would increase the machine’s keel. “The engines used are the same that have been used by the Wrights for years,” added the impressed correspondent from the
New York Herald
, “but they are far more powerful than any so far set up in the Wright factory.” Instead of four cylinders, the Baby Grand had twice that number. Yes, admitted Wright when asked, the sixty-horse power engine was still inferior to the hundred-horse power engines of the Blériot, but that wouldn’t matter come the day of the big race. He paused for dramatic effect . . . before revealing that in a series of trial flights in the Baby Grand, his brother, Orville, had reached a top speed of 72mph. There was an intake of breath from the correspondents. If that was true, then Wilbur was right, the cup would remain in America.

Later in the morning, when the rain had eased, members of the Glenn Curtiss team folded back the doors of hangar No. 5 and bade reporters inside to view their latest innovation. An awkward silence ensued as the newsmen made mental comparisons between what was now before them and what they had just seen in the Wright hangar. The
New York Herald
correspondent turned a page in his notebook and wrote, “The Curtiss racer, on the other hand, looks like a handkerchief just out of the shop.”

The man from the
New York Sun
made the mistake of asking Curtiss to describe some of the features of his monoplane; he soon stood corrected. “He calls [it] a ‘single surface’ airplane,” explained the
Sun
’s reporter, “which at first glance looks like a monoplane. In fact the secondary plane is merely a small auxiliary only 8 feet long and 2 feet wide.”

Other outstanding details noted by the newsmen were the aircraft’s fifty-horse power engine, its tricycle undercarriage, its wingspan of twenty-six feet, and its size, just twenty-five feet from tip to tail. Unusually for a new monoplane, it was a
pusher
, the name given to those airplanes in which the engine was situated to the pilot’s rear. Most manufacturers had stopped producing pushers after several men had been crushed to death by the engine in crashes they would otherwise have survived. Curtiss shrugged when pulled up on the point and admitted that the plane “has never been flown and is wholly an experiment.” The
Sun
reporter told Curtiss that a few hangars along, Wilbur Wright was fizzing with confidence about his prospects in the International Aviation Cup, so how did he rate his own chances? Curtiss didn’t want to speculate, and if anything, he sounded rather diffident about his new invention. “Whether it will fly well—or fly at all—remains to be found out at the present meet,” he said.

The first “special” train, laid on solely for the benefit of the meet, arrived at the Belmont Park station at noon and the race-goers were ready with their umbrellas as they stepped onto the platform. Having seen a large white flag atop the 395-foot-high Times Tower on Forty-second Street a while earlier as they made their way to Pennsylvania Station, they were confident of seeing some flying, despite the rain. The owner of the tower, the
New York Times
, had agreed to a request from the meet organizers to communicate to New Yorkers the course conditions by way of one of three flags: blue—no flight; white—flight probable; red—flight in progress. Thousands of spectators drove from Manhattan, and the prime parking spaces were soon full of mud-spattered automobiles. Local residents were quick to spot the shortage of parking places, and soon signs appeared outside their homes offering the use of their front yards as parking spaces in return for $1.

The entrance to the course was flanked by two lines of gray-uniformed security guards, members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had been hired to control a tournament that was on private land and thus outside the jurisdiction of the Nassau County police. The guards had an unsmiling swagger, an enjoyment of the power that came with the well-cut uniform, and anyone who was slow in handing over the $1 entrance fee to the turnstile operator was harshly rebuked.

Once inside Belmont Park the whole atmosphere changed, and instead of menacing stares from Pinkerton’s men, the spectators were accosted by myriad “vendors who hawked programmes [
sic
], sandwiches, aviation postal cards, peanuts and candy . . . and the highest prices possible were asked of the spectators.”

Children pestered their parents for a toy airplane or a souvenir pennant from one of the many kiosks, while their fathers attempted to win choice cigars by knocking down puppets with three balls. Mothers browsed the knickknack stalls for house hold decorations made from smoked glass before the entire family eventually hired a set of camp stools—thirty cents each—and made their way to the field enclosure on the opposite side of the course to the grandstand.

Signs guided the bewildered with arrows pointing to the “popular-priced” restaurants and those, such as the Turf and Field Club, which were affordable only to the affluent. A reporter from the
New York Sun
stopped outside one of the more affordable restaurants and examined the menu. “Popular prices, eh?” grumbled the man next to him. “Popular with the man who owns the eatables, I guess.” The cheapest food joint was the kiosk under the grandstand where beef stew cost fifty cents, a plate of ham and eggs sixty cents, a roast fresh ham sandwich seventy-five cents, and an apple pie twenty-five cents.

The society correspondents of the newspapers, those same ones who had harassed Claude Grahame-White earlier in the week, had returned in force and were now either besieging the entrance to the members’ clubhouse or commandeering a table in the Turf and Field Club, fork in one hand, pencil in the other, noting which members of the fashionable set were present. There was Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt (recently returned from Europe, where she’d spent $18,000 on the latest Paris fashions) looking resplendent in an “apricot-colored polo coat and bell-shaped blue hat.” Was that a white muff she was carrying? wondered the correspondent from the
Sun
. No, it was her little white dog. Armstrong Drexel’s willowy sister-in-law, Marjorie, “excited much admiration in a gown of black velvet and a large black picture hat.” Mrs. Sidney Dillon Ripley, who wore a loose-fitting coat and black hat “with two quills jauntily fastened on the left side,” was lunching with Mrs. Tyler Morse, who had come “well prepared for the weather in a white fur coat worn over a checked polo coat.” The
Sun
’s society correspondent rated Mrs. James Brown’s outfit “one of the most startling costumes” he’d seen in a long time. A flame-colored coat fastened at the bottom with small black buttons was topped off with a black velvet hat adorned with feathers.

The
New York Sun
’s correspondent next turned his attention to the wisteria gown worn by the wife of General Stewart Woodford. She and her husband were hosting a lunch party in the Turf and Field Club, and so engrossing was the conversation that no one noticed it was nearly one thirty P.M., the hour when the tournament officially began. Over the polite murmur of luncheon chat there came the noise of an airplane engine. On hearing the sound, reported the
Sun
, General Woodford “became so excited . . . that he ran out of the dining room and carried his napkin along.”

As General Woodford hurtled out of the restaurant, a pall of yellow smoke drifted across the course from the aerial bomb that had just been exploded to signal the meet was under way. The wreckage of Tod Shriver’s machine had been cleared by workmen, his blood washed away by rain, and only a few early-bird spectators were aware he had ever flown.

The engine that had so galvanized the general was Claude Grahame-White’s, and as he continued to warm it up, Peter Prunty used his megaphone to inform the six-thousand-strong audience of the day’s schedule. From one thirty P.M. to two thirty P.M. was the Hourly Distance event; after a break of fifteen minutes, the second Hourly Distance event and the Hourly Altitude event would commence. At four P.M. the twenty-mile cross-country flight would begin, at the same time as the Grand Altitude competition. Prunty reminded spectators that the cross-country race, to a captive balloon ten miles east over Hempstead Plains and back, was dependent on the weather not deteriorating, as otherwise it would be deemed too hazardous.

Now Grahame-White was taxiing across the grass, and Prunty fell silent and watched with the rest of the crowd. In the grandstand Pauline Chase sat with her hands clasped tightly together as her fiancée with “an ever-increasing humming roar crossed the starting line.” He rose into the air as the band at the front of the grandstand struck up “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own,” and the crowd tapped their feet in time to the music. A couple of minutes later Armstrong Drexel was airborne, perched on the hollow body of his Blériot monoplane, which, to the
Washington Post
, sounded like a “mosquito,” but to the
New York
Herald
correspondent was more like a “bumblebee.”