Unlocking the Sky (21 page)
Authors: Seth Shulman
And yet, oddly enough, precisely the same complaint can be leveled against the early
Wright Flyer,
with its flexible wings, unstable design, large front elevator, and cumbersome skids requiring a half-ton weight and derrick for takeoff. Only the Wrights’ biplane design—lifted directly from Chanute (with his magnanimous permission)—would bear fruit in future airplane models.
One of the most acerbic of the Wright critics, Charles Grey, an aviation buff who knew the early Wright and Curtiss airplanes intimately, makes such an argument. As Grey puts it, the intellectual ferment evident in the early, incomplete designs of Langley and many others, “show how ridiculous is the claim that the Wrights ‘invented the airplane.’
“The Wright type biplane with the small leading plane and a method of control which hardly anybody other than the Wrights could manage,” Grey argues, “killed most of its pilots and was obsolete and out of production by 1912 when many other designs were flying strongly and developing fast.”
By contrast, in spite of the court rulings in favor of the Wright patent, Curtiss’s innovations are notable for the way they have so often endured and flourished on their own merits. His airplanes introduced many features—like rigid wings, trailing-edge wing flaps, retractable landing gear, and pontoons—that continue to be time-honored elements of aeronautical design nearly a century later. In this way, Curtiss’s accomplishments live on even though his story has been largely forgotten.
From time to time numerous aerial craftsmen have flourished in the world’s eye, only to pass presently into comparative obscurity, while others too neglected or too poorly appreciated in their own day subsequently have risen to high estimation and permanent honor in the minds of men.
—A
LBERT
Z
AHM,
1914
A
t its core, the long, bitter fight between Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers pitted the virtues of open, shared access to innovation against the driving economic pressure for monopoly ownership, a debate that resonates through the years. Having accomplished a tremendous breakthrough in aviation, Wilbur and Orville Wright tried to control the development of the airplane in its first decade through patents and aggressive business tactics. Ultimately, their effort would fail.
By contrast, Glenn Hammond Curtiss permitted anyone to use the principles underlying his inventions—a strategy that enor
mously benefited the emerging industry. Unlike the Wrights, Curtiss believed his inventions and products should succeed or fail in the marketplace on their own merit. This, ultimately, is the way he would have wanted his career to be judged, and it is how it should be judged: by the lasting, unrivaled success of the aeronautical inventions he created.
Orville Wright continued to vigorously prosecute his lawsuit against Curtiss until 1917 when the U.S. government, responding to the overriding requirements of waging World War I, ordered the nation’s two largest airplane companies to settle their differences. The fruitless lawsuit had lasted nearly nine years and proved a costly drain on time, energy, and resources for both sides. With the pressure from the government, a cross-licensing agreement, paying modest royalties to both the Wright and Curtiss companies on the sale of all new American airplanes, was drawn up by Henry Ford’s lawyer Benton Crisp.
Years before the settlement, Orville had become a millionaire from the airplane business. But during the entire legal proceedings and for the rest of his life, he would make few further contributions to the fast-maturing aviation field. In fact, most of the Wrights’ engineering contributions were obsolete well before the conclusion of
Wright v. Curtiss.
Meanwhile, freed from litigation in 1917, Curtiss was finally able to take full advantage of his company’s superior technology. Even prior to the formal end of the lawsuit, contracts began flooding into his firm, including huge wartime orders from the British government. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Curtiss Aeroplane Company had become far and away the nation’s largest airplane manufacturer. The reason was as simple as it always had been: Curtiss built the best airplanes of his day.
And what of the
America
and Curtiss’s promise to build an airplane that could cross the Atlantic Ocean?
In August 1914, the war in Europe interrupted events in Hammondsport just as the
America
drew tantalizingly close to carrying the requisite fuel load. Lieutenant Cyril Porte,
America
’s pilot, was hastily called back into active duty in Britain. The project stalled: there could be no transatlantic flight with Europe at war.
In one of his first acts as wing commander of the British Royal Naval Air Service, Porte arranged to purchase the
America
from Curtiss and ordered more like it to be built for Britain. Within months, Britain deployed the
America
to patrol the English Channel and it sank no fewer than three German U-boats. The handful of “Americas” in the British fleet, in fact, would be the only American-built aircraft to see combat in World War I.
Curtiss was just short of the needed thrust in the
America
when the outbreak of war in Europe prevented his planned transatlantic flight. But at the war’s end,
America
’s successor, the
NC-4
—designed by Curtiss in collaboration with the U.S. Navy—made the first-ever airborne transatlantic crossing on May 27, 1919. U.S. Navy commander Albert Read piloted the
NC-4
(NC for Navy-Curtiss). It was one of a fleet of four identical planes that left the coast of Newfoundland heading for Plymouth, England. Facing storms, and high seas, it would be the only one of the four to successfully complete the voyage. The flight, which included a 1,200-mile hop from Newfoundland to the Azores islands, predated Lindbergh’s nonstop, solo Atlantic crossing by eight years.
Curtiss was understandably elated to have built the airplane that was the first to accomplish the transatlantic crossing he had promised and envisioned. He often later considered it his most important con
tribution to aviation. Astonishingly, even with the delay of the war, the flight took place just eleven years after Curtiss had flown his fateful first kilometer in the AEA’s
June Bug.
In these few years, the sky was conquered as air travel moved from the risky imaginings of a few visionaries to a full-blown industry. Throughout, Curtiss’s state-of-the-art aircraft flew in the vanguard, buffeted by the powerful gusts of change at an extraordinary period in history.
Ultimately, though, Curtiss’s success in raising Langley’s aerodrome helped undermine his place in history. Orville Wright never forgave Curtiss and dedicated himself to a long, bitter feud with the Smithsonian over the incident that raged for the next quarter of a century.
During that time, Orville refused to donate to the Smithsonian the original
Wright Flyer
that had first flown at Kitty Hawk even though the museum badly wanted it for their aeronautical collection. In retaliation for the Smithsonian’s role in the aerodrome episode, Orville had the Kitty Hawk plane shipped to the British Science Museum instead, and there it would stay until after his death.
Orville did finally decide to bequeath the original
Wright Flyer
to the Smithsonian Institution but only after demanding a formal apology for the institution’s role in the Langley aerodrome affair thirty-four years earlier. He even got then-secretary Charles G. Abbot to vow never to publish or display any statement that even lends the impression that an aircraft design prior to the
Wright Flyer
of 1903 could have been capable of successful piloted flight.
Abbot held out against some of Orville’s demands. He refused, given the lack of hard evidence, to impugn the reputation of his pre
decessor Walcott and the others involved in the reconstruction of Langley’s aerodrome. After lengthy negotiations, however, Abbot did agree to publish an apology for the confusion and consternation the incident caused as well as the list that Orville had cataloged of alleged modifications that the Curtiss team made to the Langley aerodrome.
As for Curtiss’s company: the development of the
Curtiss JN
airplane—the “Jenny”—would ensure its success. After reviewing the Jenny’s specifications and noting its comparatively reasonable price tag, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the British Admiralty, ordered the British military to “accept everything America can produce to these specifications.” Ultimately, the British would order thousands of them, and the Curtiss firm would manufacture more than six thousand Jennies by the end of World War I. The airplane was a two-seater, ideal for training; in fact, the vast majority of the almost ten thousand American wartime pilots were trained to fly these planes. The Jenny would formally initiate airmail for the U.S. Postal Service in 1918 and, after the war, the Jenny would become a favorite plane of the exhibition fliers in the 1920s known as the barnstormers.
With the Hammondsport plant swamped with orders for the Jenny, Curtiss reorganized and expanded to a facility in Buffalo, New York, employing as many as twenty thousand workers at its peak of production. Yet the corporate roster retained many familiar names: Harry Genung served as company vice president and plant manager; Henry Kleckler worked as a design engineer; Monroe Wheeler served as the company’s general counsel. Also high in the hierarchy were Charles Manly, Albert Zahm, and a host of others in
the aviation field with whom Curtiss had worked and who were eager to join his activities.
Much later, in 1929, the two large airplane firms merged to form the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. The companies’ combined stock was valued at $220 million immediately following the merger.
By this time, given the speed with which the aviation field was developing, both Orville Wright and Glenn Curtiss had backed away from central positions of authority in their respective organizations. It happened much earlier for Orville, but the fact is, it quickly became clear to both men that they were from a different time. Aviation was moving into an altogether new phase of engineering and production, one well beyond their hands-on kind of technical expertise.
In these years, Curtiss became famous for his largesse with former workers and those who had helped him along the way. He would regularly check to make sure his old workers and supporters had everything they might need. For intimates like Kleckler and Genung, Curtiss built houses in Florida and offered them a long stream of gifts over the years.
Orville’s world, on the other hand, closed in ever more tightly around him as the years went by. He lived until 1948, but for many years he rarely left Dayton and hardly even left his Hawthorne Hill mansion, choosing to live the life of a recluse and dedicate himself, as he would put it, “to putting Wilbur’s papers in order.” Orville never piloted an airplane after 1914 or even flew in one after 1918. Much of his work during the three decades after settling his lawsuit with Curtiss was devoted to fiercely guarding the Wright brothers’ legacy.
At the time of the corporate merger, while he had no say in the matter, Orville was reported to have fumed not only over the prospect of joining with Curtiss’s company, but especially at the indignity of having Curtiss’s name precede his in the new company’s title. It was, of course, a simple reflection of the relative size and power of the two firms.
Around this time, many prosperous years after their bitter battle, Curtiss wrote Orville a personal note, suggesting a meeting and a casual talk to lay aside old grudges.
His letter remained unanswered.
Listed below are some of the 500 inventions credited to Glenn Curtiss, primarily those specifically related to aircraft design. Asterisks denote a device for which Curtiss received a patent.
*Aileron (with Aerial Experiment Association)
Wind wagon for propeller testing
Twist-handle motorcycle throttle control
Wind tunnel design
Shoulder-yoke aileron control
Hydro-aeroplane (now known as seaplane)
*Hydro-aeroplane pontoon
Hydroplane step for pontoons
Tricycle landing gear
Amphibian airplane
Single-hulled flying boat
Machine for forming laminated wood ribs
Laminated-wood propeller and forming machine
Method of joining wood parts in airplane construction
Aerodynamically balanced rudder
Enclosed airplane cockpit
Biplane elevator control system for dirigibles
Steel propeller design
Crankcase reduction gear for propeller drive
Steering system for landing gear
Combined skid and wheel landing gear
Wheel brake for airplanes
Electrically operated throttle control
Retractable landing gear (with Hugh Robinson)
System of compression bracing for wings
Double-surface wings
Watertight double-surface wings
Interplane drift trussing for wings
Pontoon frame construction
*Compartmented pontoon
Propeller-tip reinforcement
Submerged hydroplanes
*Longitudinally continuous pontoon
Friction throttle control
*Dual controls for airplanes
Dual foot control
*Vent tubes to hydroplane step
Ship catapult launching device for aircraft
Aircraft landing and takeoff system from a ship
Wing beam construction
System of airplane anchorage
Folding hood
*Gyroscopic aircraft stabilizer (with Elmer Sperry)
V-bottom flying-boat hull
Multi-engine flying boat
Life preserver design
Adjusting and locking mechanism for retractable landing gear
Detachable airplane wings
Airplane drag brake
Folding operating brace for control surfaces
Tank suspension for upper wing
Streamlined radiator design
Streamlined landing gear