Unlocking the Sky (16 page)
Authors: Seth Shulman
The support of the French fliers bolsters Curtiss’s confidence that the AEA’s ailerons are a distinct and separate invention from the Wrights’ technique of bending an airplane’s wings. Ailerons operate completely separately from the airplane’s rigid wings, tilting to create extra drag on one side of the airplane or the other to correct unwanted lateral tilting in flight. Far simpler and more efficient than the Wrights’ system, which needs to be tied into the plane’s rudder, ailerons are already becoming the industry standard. Reflecting the prevailing sentiment at the meet, Curtiss wires home not to worry. “No one here thinks there is any infringement,” he writes to Lena, adding optimistically that the Wrights’ suit might be a bluff.
Curtiss will learn soon enough that the Wrights are not bluffing. For the time being though, the clouds that have plagued the air meet finally begin to lift, even if the Wrights, in one dramatically timed move, have managed to hang dark psychological ones over Curtiss.
The weeklong meet reaches its climax on Saturday, August 28, with the race for the Gordon Bennett Trophy. Despite the Wrights’ machinations, Curtiss, an intense competitor, has a race to win. He
has an athlete’s ability to shut out everything but the event at hand, born of long years racing bicycles and motorcycles. And in this case, he wills himself to put aside all thought of the Wrights’ legal claims for the moment, letting the Gordon Bennett Trophy—without question, the most coveted prize of the meet—occupy his full attention.
Contenders for the $5,000 prize and trophy donated by the newspaper mogul must fly twice around the rectangular ten-kilometer course, staying to the outside of pylons several stories tall that mark the airfield’s four corners. The way the race is organized, the contestants can make their official flight at any time between 10:00
A.M
. and 5:30
P.M
. Curtiss, who has always favored flying at the first light of day, decides to make his practice run at the earliest possible moment. At ten o’clock sharp, it is, finally, a perfect summer morning, clear and windless. In his brown leather jacket and visored cap, Curtiss takes his place in the pilot’s seat. His lithe aircraft seems to almost hop into the air on takeoff, and the crowd watches his practice run intently.
Once Curtiss is aloft, his
Rheims Racer
jolts and rocks roughly through the course. The air, as Curtiss later describes it, is “boiling,” with strong thermal updrafts caused by the now-hot summer sun beating on the open plain. The effect in flight is like repeatedly hitting vicious, invisible boulders while traveling in an automobile at high speed. Landing safely after the trial, Curtiss is unhurt, but he is badly shaken by the turbulent flight. Checking his time, though, Curtiss realizes that if he can power his way through the bumps, the windless morning is likely to offer the day’s best conditions.
He decides to make his official flight for the trophy without delay.
This time, after takeoff, Curtiss stuns the sea of spectators by circling higher and higher to nearly 500 feet, then swooping into a steep dive to build as much speed as he can across the starting line. Full throttle into his official trial, Curtiss draws upon his experience as a motorcycle racer to lean sharply into the turns. He banks so steeply and shaves the pylons so closely, in fact, that many in the stands gasp, sure he will clip his wings. The stunned crowd has never seen anyone fly this way before, nor has Curtiss ever pushed an airplane so hard. All the while, he has to contend with turbulence that has grown even stronger since his practice run. The violent shocks lift him completely out of his seat. Curtiss has to wedge his feet tightly against the airplane’s frame to keep from being thrown from the pilot’s seat.
As Curtiss sweeps past the finish line and slows to a landing, a mob of cheering Americans rushes upon him. He has set a new world’s record, flying the course in just under 16 minutes, with an average air speed of 46.5 miles per hour. As the first contestant to fly, however, Curtiss must now sit by and watch the other contenders, each time wondering if they will beat his time. It is a fate he likens later to that of “a prisoner awaiting the jury’s verdict.”
Over the course of the morning, there is much to see. The British flier George Cockburn runs into a haystack on his flight and fails to finish his trial. Latham makes his try in the afternoon, flying at low altitude, as he always prefers to do, ending the run with an average speed 5 miles per hour slower than Curtiss’s. Most of the other contestants, like Farman, do not even come that close, averaging about 35 miles per hour at their top speeds.
Notably, most of the other entries easily outpace the Wright planes. Even in 1909, the fundamental limitations of their design are evident. Much the way a bicycle cannot maintain its balance unless
it is moving, the Wrights have purposefully designed their planes to be inherently unstable, believing, mistakenly, that this is an essential factor to control in the air. As a result, the
Wright Flyers
are especially difficult to fly and require the pilots to actively control them in all three dimensions—pitch, roll, and yaw—during every moment they are airborne.
Bleriot, however, has yet to fly.
All day long, Bleriot tinkers with his assorted airplanes. He adjusts the engine on one and attaches a new propeller to another. Over the course of the day, he takes several practice laps but touches down each time, frowning, dissatisfied with some aspect of his aircraft.
By late afternoon, Bleriot has settled upon
Number 22,
his largest airplane and the one Curtiss fears most. It is equipped with the much-ballyhooed eight-cylinder, 80-horsepower motor. Equally worrisome to Curtiss, Bleriot fits the plane with a large, four-blade propeller.
As the afternoon progresses, Bleriot’s delays cause mounting concern among the quarter million mostly French spectators assembled for the main event. Finally, at the last possible moment, Bleriot signals that he is ready. It is 5:10
P.M
., just twenty minutes before the race’s official close. The tension of a long day has begun to wear on Curtiss. When he sees Bleriot take off, he is sure the Frenchman will prevail. As Curtiss later recalls, “It looked to me as if he must be going twice as fast as my machine had flown.”
Bleriot doesn’t bank his large craft the way Curtiss had, but he makes two flawless laps of the course and lands to thundering applause from the mostly French crowd. As Bleriot walks over to the judges’ booth, Curtiss keeps a respectful distance. The crowd is absolutely quiet until the silence is suddenly pierced by a joyous
shout from near the judges’ stand. It emanates from none other than Cortlandt Bishop. Flailing his arms, Bishop runs to Curtiss, shouting, “You win! You win!” As Bishop explains, Curtiss has beaten Bleriot’s time by six seconds.
Almost before Curtiss can comprehend the news, the band strikes up the “Star-Spangled Banner” and an American flag is raised above the judges’ stand. The predominantly French audience, stunned at first, graciously joins in the raucous applause of the American delegation to honor Curtiss’s achievement. Newsreel footage shows a young American beaming at the apex of his career. Henry White, the U.S. ambassador to France, rushes from his box in the grandstand with his party—including Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, wife of the ex-president (Teddy is away hunting big game in Africa) and three of the Roosevelt children, Ethel, Quentin, and Archie—to congratulate Curtiss in the name of the government and people of the United States. By Bishop’s side, James Gordon Bennett swaggers over to shake Curtiss’s hand, beaming as though he had believed in Curtiss all along.
Just then, Bleriot bursts into the midst of the patriotic scene. He flings his arms around the surprised and flustered Curtiss and kisses him heartily on both cheeks.
The close of the
Grande Semaine d’Aviation
throws France further into its frenzy of aeronautical excitement. As news of Curtiss’s upset victory spreads, the always shy aviator is nearly overwhelmed by his sudden celebrity. He is the subject of adulation everywhere he goes. Kings, ministers, and wealthy socialites deluge him with offers to fly his plane all over Europe. Bishop calls his feat, “the greatest sporting victory the world has seen.” Banner headlines proclaim him
“Champion Aviator of the World,” and, recalling his past glory on his motorcycle, “Fastest Man of the Earth and Skies.”
Christening its new hot-air balloon the
Curtiss No. 1,
the Aéro-Club de France urges him to ride as passenger on its maiden voyage along with Bleriot and Bishop. In his first ascent in a spherical balloon and basking in his good fortune, Curtiss marvels at the breathtaking French countryside below as Bishop’s chauffeur follows them on the ground to drive them back to Paris at the end of the day.
As proud as he is for what he has accomplished, Curtiss would have preferred to go back to tinkering quietly with new improvements to his airplane. He is distraught by the Wrights’ lawsuit and knows he must swiftly return to handle his company’s affairs. Plus, he misses Lena; never again will he leave her behind on a major trip. But tonight he must attend a dinner in his honor at the U.S. embassy where five hundred elegantly attired people will dine in stately splendor. As the
New York World
accurately reports, Curtiss seems to “fear ceremony more than he fears the most perilous flight.”
The guest of honor has little choice but to attend, but Curtiss does try to get Bishop to arrange it so no one will call upon him to make a speech. The effort is futile. The moment Curtiss walks into the grand dining room, arm in arm with Bleriot, he receives a standing ovation, and he remains the center of attention for the entire evening. Ambassador and Mrs. Henry White are particularly gentle and kind hosts. And Curtiss finds neither the gold-plate service nor the lavish repast as intimidating as he has imagined. But, as he recalls later, “when they wanted me to stand up and make a speech, I was lost.” Nonetheless, the audience is forgiving. Curtiss has earned their admiration the hard way: in the sky. And they are willing to crown him the master of it, tongue-tied or not.
To make it official, his latest accolade, the Gordon Bennett Trophy, sits prominently in the middle of the table of honor. Curtiss finally gets a chance to inspect it for himself. It is a large, silver sculpture that fittingly depicts a person climbing a mountain and reaching upward toward an intricately detailed airplane. It is a handsome award, but Curtiss notices at once its fundamental irony: the hiker is reaching toward a precise and unmistakable rendering of a
Wright Flyer.
GROUNDED
Mr. Curtiss’s opinion, as expressed to us at Rheims, is that the proprietors of the Wright patents think no one can make an aeroplane without them and, said he, “they’re about the only people who do think so.”
N
EW
Y
ORK
D
AILY
T
ELEGRAPH,
1909
F
ollowing his victory at Rheims, an assortment of Europe’s royalty and wealthy socialites fete Curtiss for nearly two weeks and acclaim him an international hero. But for Curtiss nothing can match his homecoming in September 1909. On a cool, damp evening, as his train pulls into the Hammondsport station, Curtiss marvels wide-eyed as the skies over Lake Keuka explode with an extravagant fireworks display to mark his arrival.
As Curtiss makes his way among the jubilant crowd, bonfires blaze by the lake and the ground shakes with the boom of ceremonial cannon fire. A committee of admirers has erected a triumphal arch across from the station, with the word “Welcome” emblazoned in electric lights. The entire town is festooned with American flags.
Corks from New York champagne bottles pop into the air all around him and people raise glasses brimming with the local bubbly in tribute. And, of course, there is an outdoor stage in the center of town where it seems everyone Curtiss knows expects him to make a speech. Yet even here before the adoring assemblage of friends and neighbors—and with Lena at his side—words mostly fail him.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, visibly overcome by the festivities, “I’m back from France. Had a very nice time. Had a whole lot of luck and a little success. As you know,” he continues haltingly, “I just had a common school education. I didn’t learn any words big enough to show you my appreciation of this welcome home.”
His words are quite big enough for Hammondsport and the town elders are especially proud. Their local son with his common school education has accomplished a remarkable feat on the world stage. Of his own initiative and after only an extraordinarily short period of experimentation, he designed and built an airplane that proved itself the fastest in the world. In France, when the editors of the magazine
L’Auto
assessed the aerodynamic efficiency of the different planes at the Rheims meet, they rated Curtiss’s plane number one and ranked the
Wright Flyers
in last place.
But, for all the accolades and festivities, Curtiss can’t shake a sense of foreboding. He may have mastered the engineering and technical aspects of the airplane, but he is far less confident about the legal quagmire looming before him.
Most pressing is the fiasco that has come of his alliance with Augustus Herring, which he had hoped would reap rich rewards in the young aviation field. Herring has failed to deliver the vital working capital he had promised in his partnership with Curtiss; even more worrisome, he has refused to reveal a single item of his
vaunted inventions and patents. By now it seems painfully obvious to everyone in Curtiss’s company that Herring is an unscrupulous fraud. As Curtiss will lament to Cortlandt Bishop, who has invested in the company, Herring “has fooled Mr. Chanute, Hiram Maxim, Professor Langley, and the U.S. government.” Now, Curtiss writes, he has “deceived you and me.”
Even as Curtiss tries to extricate himself from his business ties with Herring, he must contend with the much larger and more vexing problem of the Wrights’ lawsuit. It seems inexplicable to Curtiss that his airplanes—with their rigid wings and ailerons—could be thought to infringe a patent that specifies the flexing of an airplane’s wings in conjunction with the use of the rudder for lateral control. If the Wrights had conceived of ailerons themselves, Curtiss reasons, they would have explicitly incorporated the design into their patent.
Nonetheless, Curtiss knows that the technological complexity of the Wrights’ case will make it difficult to successfully defend himself in court. And he cannot ignore the fact that the Wrights, represented by a top patent lawyer, seem determined to punish him for entering the field of aviation they had hoped to control alone.
Curtiss knows he needs the best advice he can find. Bell is encouraging and supportive, but, understandably, he is hopelessly partisan on the subject of ailerons. Meanwhile, Curtiss has agreed to demonstrate his airplane at an exhibition in St. Louis. Much ballyhooed, it will be the first demonstration west of the Mississippi of an airplane in flight. So after just a brief stay in Hammondsport, he takes Lena with him on the road. The flight is a tremendous success and, to celebrate, the two buy a big, new Chalmers-Detroit automo
bile to drive home. On the way, Curtiss arranges to visit Octave Chanute at his Chicago home. As perhaps the world’s leading authority on aviation history, Chanute has intimate knowledge of the Wrights’ aircraft and their process of invention leading up to it.
The visit with the venerable Chanute, now seventy-seven years of age, is both edifying and heartening. “I spent two evenings in Chicago with Dr. Chanute,” Curtiss writes Bell confidently, “and from what he says the Wrights have little chance of winning.”
Following Curtiss’s visit, Octave Chanute issues his views publicly on the matter of
Wright v. Curtiss.
The Wrights, he says, are not the first to incorporate the concept of warping an aircraft’s wings. “On the contrary,” Chanute writes, many inventors have developed the notion since the time of Leonardo da Vinci. “Two or three,” he says, “have actually accomplished short glides with that basic warping idea embodied in their machines.”
Among these inventors, Chanute cites the work of his French colleague Jean-Pierre Mouillard. According to Chanute, in 1898 in Egypt, Mouillard successfully tested a glider that employed wing warping. With Chanute’s help, Mouillard patented the device in the United States but never developed the idea further because he suffered a stroke and died shortly after its invention.
Furthermore, Chanute argues, the Wrights’ design owes a heavy debt to his own work and that of many others. As he notes, “When the Wrights wanted to start, they wrote to me that they had read my book on gliding and asked if I would permit them to use the plans of my biplane.” Chanute made all his data freely available to them. “I was glad,” he writes, “that someone wanted to continue the work.”
Chanute is clearly angered to see the Wrights now seeking to “shut off” the work of others. “Public competition,” he writes emphatically, will best serve the field of aviation. This conviction
offers Chanute’s ultimate testament on the matter; he dies within the year.
Even if the patent office and the courts judge the Wrights’ wing-warping patent to be a wholly novel invention, Curtiss feels buoyed by a growing body of analysis that considers ailerons to be outside the scope of the Wrights’ patent. Most notably, Thomas A. Hill, a prominent New York patent attorney who studied the Wrights’ patent on behalf of the Aeronautical Society, argues persuasively in the October 1909 issue of
Aeronautics,
the society’s journal, that ailerons fall outside the Wright claims.
Curtiss’s design, Hill explains, may produce an effect similar to that of the Wright brothers’ airplane, but it only does so through the use of pivotally mounted “supplemental or auxiliary surfaces, planes or rudders.” It is, he notes plainly, impossible to flex, warp, or otherwise bend or move the main surface on a Curtiss aircraft.
As Hill sees it, nothing in the Wright patent suggests “that they at any time intended to use supplemental surfaces for accomplishing substantially what they accomplish by warping, flexing, bending, twisting, or otherwise distorting the lateral margins of their main plane.” The omission, he concludes, casts doubt on the Wrights’ chances of success in their lawsuit.
The opinions of such distinguished experts as Hill and Chanute bolster Curtiss’s confidence. But he soon learns one exceedingly disturbing fact: his case will be heard by a judge notorious for his predilection for expansive patent interpretations.
It is a very unlucky and fateful piece of news indeed.
Judge John Raymond Hazel, appointed to the federal bench in 1900, brought relatively little legal experience to the job. His nomi
nation was widely criticized as political payback for his work on behalf of President McKinley’s Republican Party. Almost immediately after his appointment, the controversial Hazel presided over one of the biggest patent battles of the day: a fight over the invention of the automobile. His handling of that lawsuit would earn him a good deal of notoriety.
In the case, George Selden, a lawyer and part-time inventor from Rochester, New York, had built a rudimentary three-cylinder engine in 1878. Selden never perfected the motor but he recognized the possibility that it might be used in a “horseless carriage”—a quest akin to the Holy Grail for many inventors near the turn of the century. Selden never actually built such a vehicle. He never even tried. He was, however, indisputably the first to apply for a U.S. patent on the notion of using a gasoline engine to propel a carriage—an invention that would, of course, come to be called an automobile.
He may not have been much of an inventor, but Selden was an accomplished patent lawyer and he managed to secure U.S. Patent No. 549,160 for his “road engine.” Then, he cleverly nurtured along his patent in a “pending” status—a cunning but legal abuse of the rules of his day. Repeatedly amending his application slightly every two years as the rules generously allowed, he thereby dragged out his proprietary claim for more than a decade before it went into effect, waiting in a kind of legalistic ambush until someone actually did invent an automobile.
Sure enough, Selden’s plan worked. He allowed his patent to come into force in 1895 after he saw actual automobile designs start to emerge on the horizon. Before long, he had forced nine fledgling automobile manufacturers to pay a royalty of 1.25 percent of the retail price of each automobile they sold for the right to use the
Selden patent. Casting aside the fact that countless inventors had foreseen the possibility of an automobile, Selden had the U.S. government’s imprimatur. The idea for the automobile belonged to him, he believed, and he had the patent to prove it. By 1906, Selden was receiving royalties from almost every automobile maker in the United States.
Around this time, when Henry Ford set out to manufacture automobiles, he too was initially willing to pony up his royalty fee. But, branding him as a mere “assembler” of cars (and doubtless scared that he might undersell existing makers), Selden and the association he had set up to handle the patent refused to grant Ford a license, using the patent—as was technically their legal right—to block him from selling cars entirely. The move, needless to say, brought out Ford’s fighting ire.
Ford went to court to challenge what he saw as not just a bad patent but a broken system. He lambasted Selden’s claim, calling it “worthless as a patent and worthless as a device.” Unfortunately for him, however, it was Judge Hazel who heard Ford’s case. Undeterred by the vague and flimsy nature of Selden’s claim, Hazel upheld Selden’s patent, ruling that, as the first in its field, it deserved an expansive interpretation.
After a costly and well-publicized struggle that dragged on for years, the federal appeals court eventually overturned Hazel’s verdict, ultimately agreeing with Ford’s lawyer that Selden had disclosed “absolutely nothing” of social value in his patent. But the hard-fought case left Ford bitter despite the victory, with an abiding distrust of monopolistic power and, not surprisingly, more than a passing interest in Curtiss’s plight.
Before Curtiss’s ordeal was through, Ford would offer his assistance. As one story goes, while Curtiss was dining with his associ
ate Lyman Seely one afternoon in the Brevoort Hotel in New York, a trim, white-haired man left his own party and came to Curtiss’s table. He offered to help in any way he could in Curtiss’s lawsuit, then walked back to his table almost before Curtiss had a chance to thank him.
Curtiss didn’t know whether to be grateful or ashamed that his situation was so pathetic as to warrant the pity of complete strangers. While he never imagined he would pursue the matter, Curtiss asked Seely if he knew the man who had just offered his assistance.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” Seely replied. “Surely you recognized Henry Ford.”
In the matter of
Wright v. Curtiss,
Judge Hazel wastes little time. On January 3, 1910, he grants the Wright brothers the preliminary injunction they seek. The decision prohibits Curtiss from selling or exhibiting his airplanes. And it stuns almost every player in the youthful aviation field on both sides of the Atlantic.
For Curtiss it is a terrible blow. He learns of the injunction while readying his plane for the first international air meet in America—the “Air Tournament of Los Angeles”—beginning January 10, 1910. He recognizes immediately how bad the news is. Even though the case has yet to be tried on its merits, the judge has nonetheless deemed the Wrights claim strong enough to justify halting Curtiss’s operation immediately.
On the eve of the Los Angeles event, the organizers worry whether Hazel’s injunction might prohibit Curtiss’s flight at an aviation meet. The press speculates that the Wrights might even try to shut the meet down entirely to ground the many “infringing” non-
Wright aircraft on the program. To mollify the nervous organizers, Curtiss explains that he will not, strictly speaking, be making an exhibition for money so the event should not pose a problem. He offers to post a bond pending his appeal of the injunction, and the organizers agree to let him participate.
Curtiss approaches the problem like the mechanically minded inventor he is. From his perspective, his airplanes’ aileron system of lateral control has one difference from wing warping that is so glaring, it alone should turn the case in his favor. The way the Wrights’ patent is written, their wing-warping system is tied into their airplane’s rudder. When the wings are twisted, the Wright aircraft tends to turn. The Wrights correct for this tendency by wiring the rudder to turn slightly in the opposite direction whenever the wings are warped for lateral control.
Curtiss’s aileron system is completely independent of the airplane’s rudder. If he can simply demonstrate this, Curtiss figures, Judge Hazel will surely have to overturn the injunction. There at the meet in Los Angeles, Curtiss hatches a plan to publicly prove his point. And he announces it to the reporters assembled to cover the meet:
