The Bishop's Boys (64 page)

The Wrights made a persuasive case for patent infringement, pointing to Herring’s presence at Kitty Hawk in 1902, their repeated contacts with Curtiss and the members of the AEA since 1906, and the broad and complete nature of their patent coverage. “They … put things in a very bad light, both on moral and legal grounds,” Bishop remarked to Monroe Wheeler, the Hammondsport judge who was serving as president of the Herring-Curtiss Company.
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Curtiss and Herring allayed Bishop’s concerns. Together at Reims, Curtiss and his principal backer assured reporters that the mid-wing ailerons of the
Golden Flier
and the Reims machine were not covered in the Wright patent. The matter was now in the hands of Judge John R. Hazel, of the Federal Circuit Court in Buffalo. Until such time as Judge Hazel either ruled in their favor or issued a restraining order
against them, the Herring-Curtiss Company would remain in operation and Glenn Curtiss would continue to fly.
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Orville and Katharine were in Berlin preparing for a series of demonstration flights to satisfy the requirements of two additional contracts when the news of the patent suit broke. “I have just read in the papers of the filing of suits against Curtiss & Co.,” Orville wrote to his brother on August 24. “I think it would be a good plan to give out an interview in which the announcement is made of suing all who have any connection with infringing machines.”
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Wilbur thought the matter over and filed an additional suit against Ralph Saulnier, a Blériot importer, in the Federal Circuit Court in New York on October 20.

The first of the agreements that had brought Orville and Katharine to Germany was with Herr Scherl, publisher of the Berlin newspaper
Lokal-Anzieger
. Scherl’s representative, Captain Alfred Hilde-brandt, a German officer and aeronautical writer, had called on Wilbur not long after he arrived at Pau in January 1909, offering a substantial sum in exchange for a series of flights to be staged in Berlin later that year. The Wrights, anxious to pursue the contacts that they had made in Germany in 1907, accepted.
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Some weeks later, Captain Richard von Kehler visited the Wrights at Centocelle. Kehler, whom Wilbur had met in 1907, was the managing director of the Studien Gesselschaft, the Society for Airship Studies which had sponsored the development of the Parseval dirigible.
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The wealthy members of the Gesselschaft were interested in forming a German company to produce Wright aircraft under an arrangement similar to that concluded with Lazare Weiller and the CGNA. In exchange for the German patent rights, a sales monopoly in Germany, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Luxembourg, and the usual course of demonstration flights and pilot training, the new firm—to be known as Flugmaschine Wright Gesellschaft—would provide the Wrights with a cash payment of 200,000 marks, stock in the new firm, and a 10 percent royalty on every machine sold. It was precisely the sort of agreement that the Wrights had hoped to conclude in Germany. They accepted immediately.

The Germans, well aware that they did not have a single pilot or airplane capable of competing at Reims, welcomed Orville and Katharine with great fanfare. The meet shaping up in France was very much on Orville’s mind as well—he came within a hairsbreadth of postponing the German flights and rushing to France as a last-minute entry. It required an urgent cable from Will to keep him in place. Orv
wrote back to reassure his brother that he would not go to Reims, but added: “if I had gone … I think we would have taken everything.”
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Orville took every opportunity to prove this during the course of the nineteen flights that he made from military parade grounds at Berlin and Potsdam between August 30 and October 4. He moved the family name back into the record books, recapturing the world marks for altitude, flight duration, and duration with a passenger.
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The Germans had waited a long time to see an airplane in flight. Crowds of up to 200,000 people, as large as any that had gathered at Reims, came to see Orv fly. At times the crush was frightening. On September 17, following a flight witnessed by members of the royal family, Orville joined Katharine and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Flint, who were touring Germany. After several minutes during which the crowd threatened to overwhelm them, Orville left his sister and guests in order to draw the well-wishers away.
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The Kaiser and his family were taken with the Wrights. As part of the official response to the French spectacular at Reims, the Emperor had arranged for Count von Zeppelin to fly the great airship LZ 6 from Friedrichshafen to Berlin. The Kaiser insisted that Orville join him in greeting the count upon his arrival in Berlin on August 29, and hosted both heroes of the air at a dinner that evening. Two weeks later, on September 15, Orville flew from Frankfurt to Mannheim aboard the LZ 6.
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Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm was an enthusiastic supporter of the Wrights. Orville took the young man up for a fifteen-minute flight on October 2. As a memento of the occasion, the first member of any royal family to fly removed a stickpin from his tie and presented it to Orville. The diamond-encrusted “W,” he explained, could as easily stand for Wright as for Wilhelm.
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By the time Orville completed his duties in Germany, Wilbur was also back in the air, and in the news. While he was in New York filing the patent suits in August, representatives of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Aeronautics Committee had offered Wilbur a $15,000 contract for a flight of at least ten miles in length or one hour in duration plus any other flights he would be willing to make during the two weeks following September 25. The flights would be the highlight of a great celebration in honor of the centennial of the first voyage of Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat and the three hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s entry into New York Harbor. To add spice to the proceedings, the committee also offered Glenn Curtiss a
$5,000 contract for a flight from Governors Island to Grant’s Tomb and back.
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Wilbur accepted his offer and was back in New York on September 20 with a crated airplane and Charlie Taylor to assist in its assembly. A day later Glenn Curtiss stepped off the ship from France. On the morning of September 22 he visited Wilbur at Governors Island, where hangars had been provided for both of them. The meeting was outwardly pleasant. Wilbur plied the man against whom he had already filed an infringement suit with questions about Reims.
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Curtiss traveled to Hammondsport for a welcoming ceremony, returning to New York with a new airplane on September 29. The Reims Racer was no longer available—Herring had accepted $5,000 from Rodman Wanamaker to exhibit the craft in his department store, provided that it could appear immediately after the return from France.
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Curtiss, his one-week contract about to expire, made one short hop early the next morning. Convinced that the underpowered substitute airplane was unequal to the task of flying on a windy day, he rolled it back into the hangar and left.

Wilbur saw a golden opportunity to show Curtiss up. He took off for the first time at nine o’clock that morning and flew a two-mile circuit of Governors Island. The standard Wright Flyer looked a bit different this time. Never having flown over water for any distance, Wilbur purchased a bright red canoe from a New York store, sealed it with a canvas cover, and strapped it between the skids on the underside as a flotation device. The short test flight was to determine what impact the canoe would have on the handling quality of the airplane.

Satisfied that all was in order, Will announced that he would make his first public flight before noon. He took off and, to everyone’s delight, headed straight toward the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island. The airplane dipped into a sharp bank around the statue’s waist as the hundreds of ships gathered in the harbor for the celebration tooted and honked. The Wrights might eschew competition, but they had some showmanship in them.
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High winds kept Wilbur and Curtiss on the ground the next two days. Curtiss made a second attempt to fly to Grant’s Tomb late on the evening of Saturday, October 2, but as before he was scarcely off the ground when he realized that flying was simply too dangerous in the prevailing high winds. Faced with another contract obligation in
St. Louis in only four days, he withdrew from his agreement with the Aeronautic Committee.

Wilbur turned up on Governors Island early on the morning of Monday, October 4, and announced that he was not only prepared to make the long flight as he had promised, but would combine it with the flight which Curtiss had contracted to make. He was off the ground at 9:53 that morning, the canoe still tied between the skids and two small American flags fluttering from the elevator struts. He flew ten miles up the Hudson, passing over the enormous fleet of U.S. and foreign ships assembled for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. One million New Yorkers witnessed some portion of the flight.

Wilbur flew the twenty-mile round trip to Grant’s Tomb in 33 minutes, 33 seconds, averaging 36 miles per hour. “It was an interesting trip,” he wrote to Milton, “and at times rather exciting.” New Yorkers certainly thought so. For a time, Wilbur had recaptured the excitement of the year before.
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Wilbur canceled a second flight planned for that afternoon when the engine blew a cylinder head straight through the top of the wing. He packed his gear and boarded a train for Washington the next morning. There was still one task to complete under the terms of the Army contract—pilot training for a select group of officers.

The parade ground at Fort Myer had been only marginally acceptable as an area for the demonstration flights. A larger and more open spot would be required for the daily in-flight instruction. Frank Lahm found just such a place during the course of a balloon flight, a large pasture near the Maryland Agricultural College at College Park, a Washington suburb.

When Wilbur reached College Park on October 6, the U.S. Army’s only flying machine, the aircraft flown at Fort Myer that spring, was waiting in the hangar at the new flying field. Wilbur made fifty-five flights between October 8 and November 2. Most of his time was devoted to teaching two students, Lieutenants Frank Lahm and Frederick E. Humphreys, to fly. Benny Foulois, also desperate to go through the training course, had been ordered to represent the government at an aeronautical congress in France. He left early and reached College Park on October 19, in time to receive his first three lessons.

Wilbur set his final record at College Park: 46 miles per hour over a measured 500-meter course. He also took a friend of Katharine’s, Mrs. Ralph Van Deman, aloft—the first American woman to fly from
American soil. Wilbur’s final flight was a two-minute hop with Frank Lahm as a passenger on November 2. It was the last time he would ever fly in public, and one of his last flights as a pilot.
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But if one era was ending, another had begun. While in New York for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, Wilbur had met Clinton R. Peter-kin. Peterkin was only twenty-four years old, and looked younger, but his appearance and age belied his experience. He had gone to work as an office boy at the investment banking firm of J. P. Morgan at fifteen. Since that time, he had kept his eyes and ears open and had repeatedly demonstrated uncanny business judgment.
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Recently recovered from an illness and anxious to make his mark in the world, Peterkin called on Wilbur at the Park Hotel, offering to spearhead the establishment of an American company to manufacture and sell Wright machines. Wilbur liked the brash young man. He listened to his proposition, then cautioned that he and his brother would only consider an arrangement in which important men of affairs, “men whose names would carry weight,” were involved.
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Peterkin took the matter straight to J. P. Morgan. Morgan, who had met the Wrights in Europe the year before, was interested, and promised to attract his acquaintance, Elbert Gary, the head of U.S. Steel, into the venture. Peterkin next drew DeLancy Nicoll, a Wall Street lawyer, into the new firm. Nicoll, in turn, opened other doors. Within a matter of weeks Peterkin’s list of investors included Cornelius Vanderbilt; August Belmont; Morton Plant, chairman of the board for the Southern Express Company and vice-president of the Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville; Thomas F. Ryan, director of Bethlehem Steel; and Theodore P. Shonts, president of the New York Inter-borough subway.
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Aware that things were moving more rapidly than he expected, Wilbur made a quick trip back to New York from College Park on October 29. Suitably impressed with the preliminary list of investors, he asked Peterkin to contact Russell and Fred Alger, of the Packard Motor Car Company, with whom the Wrights had earlier discussed forming a company. In addition, Robert Collier, of
Collier’s Weekly
, should be included. Many details remained. Peterkin discovered to his surprise that many of the largest investors objected to Morgan and Gary, convinced that they would dominate the board of directors. The two men voluntarily withdrew.
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Wilbur was on the dock to meet Orville and Katharine when they disembarked from Europe on November 4. They traveled straight
home to Dayton, where the family was reunited for the first time in many months. The first order of business was a financial stocktaking. Lorin, a bookkeeper by profession, had become the family accountant. Since the receipt of the original 25,000 franc forfeiture payment from the Letellier syndicate in 1906, he had deposited a quarter of a million dollars in local banks and building and loan associations.

The money included the first payments from the French syndicate; the prize money and various cash awards earned or accepted in Europe in 1908; the fees paid by Pirelli and his Italian friends for the flights and flight training at Centocelle; and the payments from Short Brothers for the use of the Wright patents and the sale of several aircraft. Over the past six months alone they had received $30,000 from the Army contract, $48,000 from the two German contracts, and $12,500 of the agreed-upon $15,000 from the Hudson-Fulton Celebration committee. “It is doubtful whether I ever get any more,” Will remarked to his father on the subject of the Hudson-Fulton money. “The treasury is about empty.”
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