The Bishop's Boys (74 page)

But the rivalry was the least of their problems. On February 9, 1914, Lieutenant Harry Post was killed while flying a Wright Model C at North Island. The Army had originally purchased six Model C aircraft; five of those machines had now killed six men. One half of
all the Army pilots who had died in air crashes to date had met their end in Model C aircraft. Selfridge, Rockwell, Scott, and Call had been killed flying earlier Wright machines. So far as Major Samuel Reber, the officer in charge of Army aviation, was concerned, that was enough.

Reber called for a board of investigation, which determined that the design of the Model C, not pilot error, was primarily responsible for the accidents. The officers suggested that the rear elevator was too small and weak to enable a pilot to recover from a rapid descent.
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Orville disagreed with their conclusions but did his best to cooperate. After a series of conferences with Reber, Thomas Milling, and others in Dayton, Oscar Brindley, the leading instructor at Huffman Prairie, was dispatched to North Island to study the training situation. His initial report noted that aircraft maintenance was a major problem. Reber responded by advertising for a civilian engineer to oversee the airworthiness of machines in the Army inventory and organizing a small research and development unit.

Loening, who “did not see much of an immediate future with the Wright Company the way things were going,” applied for the job and was hired. For years thereafter he was convinced that Orville regarded him as disloyal and ungrateful. Loening’s first step after arriving at North Island was to declare all the Wright and Curtiss pushers unsafe to fly. “The pusher planes were not only easily stallable,” he explained, “but in a crash the engine generally fell on and crushed the pilot.”
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Loening and the group of pilots and mechanics who were assisting him went a step further, rebuilding one of the antiquated Burgess tractor machines into an adequate training aircraft that reflected the latest European developments. The engineers at the Curtiss Company scarcely needed that lesson, being already involved in the development of a modern tractor machine of their own. The Curtiss Model J, unveiled later in 1914, was the first step toward the immortal JN-4D “Jenny” of World War I.
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Curtiss now had an entire staff of engineers and designers. Orville had no taste for that sort of corporate expansion and no desire for personal power. Even more surprising, he had little interest in managing a research and development program that would keep him at the forefront of aeronautical advance. Uncomfortable with the pressures of the job, he was fully aware that the company fortunes had dived under his leadership.

He knew precisely what had to be done. In the early spring of 1914 he began to buy up the company shares held by members of the board of directors. The project was risky—most of his own capital was tied up in the company. For the first time in his life, Orville was forced to borrow very large sums of money.
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The attempt to gain full control of the company helps to explain Orville’s behavior during these months. His refusal to file a new suit against Curtiss was almost certainly part of a carefully considered plan to discourage and alienate his own board. The New Yorkers were dumbstruck when he vetoed their request to hire a new lawyer with close connections to the Wilson administration, a man who could bring high-level influence to bear against Curtiss. It was a clear signal that Orville would stop at nothing in his efforts to frustrate the company board and encourage them to sell out.

The strategy worked. Orville bought up the stock held by every member of the board with the exception of his friend Robert Collier. But the takeover was expensive. In order to close the deal, he had to guarantee a 100 percent profit on each man’s investment, exclusive of dividends. The problem now was to make good on his enormous investment.

In full control at last, Orville’s indecision vanished. His first step was to fire Alpheus Barnes. With personal business out of the way, he brought suit against the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company on November 16, 1914. Over the next few months he spent long hours with the company lawyers preparing depositions to be used against Curtiss when the new case came to trial. In addition, he filed for a new patent incorporating changes and improvements developed since 1906.
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Orville was now ready to reveal the final step in his plan: putting the Wright Company up for sale. In spite of the reverses suffered in 1913–14, it remained a going concern. In addition to the factory in Dayton, the Wright name was still worth a great deal to anyone interested in manufacturing airplanes. Moreover, by renewing his pursuit of Curtiss in the courts, Orville underscored the continuing value and importance of his patents.

In the end, Orville proved to be a very successful businessman. His handling of the negotiations for the sale was masterful. The final agreement with a group of New York financiers was signed on October 15, 1915. Although the full amount of the purchase price was not disclosed, the
New York Times
reported that Orville received roughly
$1.5 million, plus an additional $25,000 for his services as chief consulting engineer during the first year of the new company’s operation.
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The reorganized Wright Company made a valiant effort to keep pace with advances in aeronautical technology. The first models developed under the new management, the Wright K and L, were tractor biplanes that bore little resemblance to the old Wright pattern. Ultimately, however, the effort was unsuccessful. The Wright Company continued to lose money until 1916, when it merged with the Glenn L. Martin Company and the Simplex Automobile Company of New Brunswick, New Jersey, to create the Wright-Martin Company. The new organization transferred operations to the Simplex manufacturing plant and obtained a major contract from the French government for the production of 450 Hispano-Suiza aircraft engines.
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Wright-Martin prospered as an engine, rather than airframe, producer. Dissatisfied with that orientation, Glenn Martin left the firm to reestablish his own Glenn L. Martin Company in 1917. The Wright-Martin Company was reorganized once again in 1919 as the Wright Aeronautical Company; it would emerge as the most innovative and successful aeronautical engine company in the nation during the 1920s.

With the sale of the company in 1915, Orville walked away from the entire business. He did not have much serious involvement in developing the last of the Wright Company machines, nor did the new management feel that he had done much to earn his contract salary. The arrangement was not renewed and Orville broke his final connection with the firm that he and his brother had founded only five years before.

The patent suit was no longer his problem. Orville accepted the appellate court decision of January 1914 as his final vindication. The Wright Company continued to pursue the matter in court, but there would never be a firm legal resolution of the remaining issues. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Curtiss, which now held a number of significant patents of its own, began to threaten other companies with infringement suits.

With American entry into World War I in April 1917, the government took steps to resolve the entire patent mess. Representatives of the concerned companies formed a Manufacturers Aircraft Association. As part of a plan developed by W. Benton Crisp, who was still working as a Curtiss retainer, the members of the new organization
entered into cross-licensing agreements permitting a member firm use of the patented technology after payment of a blanket fee. In exchange for that agreement, the principal patent holders, Wright-Martin and Curtiss, resolved their differences and received $2 million each. Seven years after Wilbur brought the original suit against Curtiss, the patent wars died.
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The extent to which the old animosities were left behind was evident in 1929, when Clement M. Keys merged Wright Aeronautical and Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor to form a giant new combine, Curtiss-Wright, the second-largest manufacturer of aircraft and engines in the nation. Scarcely anyone noticed the irony.

O
rville Wright was forty-three when he sold the Wright Company in the fall of 1915. The arrangement freed him from burdensome duties and left him a very wealthy man. He paid off the loans that had financed the company takeover and spread the profits through a program of investments that gradually increased his fortune and enabled the family to live well for the rest of their lives.

Orville broke one more tie with the past soon after disposing of the company. In June 1916, he began work on a one-story laboratory at 15 North Broadway, just down the block and around the corner from the bicycle shop.
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He and Will had long dreamed of a specialized workshop where they could recapture the thrill of discovery. The brothers had purchased the lot in 1909, when they were too involved with business problems to plan the laboratory. Now it would be Orville’s building alone. He moved in that November, finally giving up the lease on the old shop at 1127 West Third that held so many memories.

Orville was not certain what sort of research he would pursue, but he did have several ideas he was anxious to explore and a group of friends willing to invest in him. Those friends—Edward A. Deeds, Charles F. Kettering, and the Harold Talbotts, a father and son team—were long-time associates and business partners.

Deeds and Kettering earned their reputations while working under John H. Patterson at the National Cash Register Company. They founded a company of their own in 1914, the Dayton Engineering
Laboratories (DELCO), to produce an automobile self-starter developed by Kettering in Deeds’s barn. The profits of that venture were plowed into a second firm, the Dayton Metal Products Company, which they founded with the Talbotts, local building contractors.
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The Dayton Airplane Company was their next joint project. The new firm was organized immediately after the Wright-Martin Company shifted production from Dayton to New Jersey in March 1917. The original Wright Company factory buildings had been leased to another firm, but some of the department heads and many trained workmen were reluctant to move. Orville believed that the availability of this pool of skilled labor inspired Edward Deeds “to start a small company to carry out some experiments in connection with some ideas of mine which he wished to see brought out.”
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Whatever Orville’s ideas were, the new company did not pursue them. War had raged in Europe for over three years and, in spite of President Wilson’s assurances, America was being drawn into the conflict. Deeds and his associates knew nothing about airplanes but they were convinced that their experience in solving production problems could be helpful when there was a fortune to be made in military contracts.

Moreover, they had several major advantages over potential competitors, including their friendship with Orville Wright, who not only loaned his name to the enterprise but signed on as consulting engineer. Other friends were even more useful. Howard Coffin, president of the Hudson Motor Car Company and an old friend of Deeds and Kettering, was the new head of the Aircraft Production Board, an agency charged with mobilizing American industry to produce enough airplanes to darken the skies over the battlefields of Europe.

With American entry into the war, Deeds was commissioned a colonel and placed in command of aircraft procurement for the Aircraft Production Board. He divested himself of his financial interest in the firm, which had been reorganized as the Dayton-Wright Company in April, then awarded his old associates two contracts for the production of 4,400 aircraft, 4,000 warplanes, and 400 trainers. Dayton-Wright operated out of a series of buildings constructed at South Field, near Dayton, on land owned by Edward Deeds.
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Orville was commissioned a major in the Aviation Section of the Signal Officers Reserve Corps, but he did not wear a uniform or refer to his rank in correspondence. He told his English friend Griffith Brewer that there was some talk of calling him to Washington for the
duration. Instead, he was ordered to remain at home, working with the engineers at Dayton-Wright.

Air Service officials decided that the time lost in designing and testing new American aircraft could be saved by contracting with U.S. manufacturers for the production of proven European models. A sample De Havilland 4, a British-built two-seat observation and bombing aircraft, was delivered to Dayton-Wright in April 1917. The company had a contract to produce four thousand of those machines, and four hundred J-1 trainers designed by an American firm, Standard Aircraft.

The task of building the DH-4s was more difficult than Dayton-Wright officials had supposed. The first problem was to prepare a complete set of new drawings, including the basic design changes required to accommodate an American-built Liberty engine power plant rather than the Rolls-Royce original.

Orville was heavily involved in these preparations that spring, summer, and fall, but he was far more interested in another project—the Kettering Bug. Designed to be sent against targets far behind German lines, the Bug was an unmanned flying bomb powered by a four-cylinder engine. Orville went to work on the project in the fall of 1917 and remained with it for the next year. The Bug showed promise, but was still in development when the Armistice was signed.
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