Unlocking the Sky (3 page)
Authors: Seth Shulman
Nonetheless, Langley used his own personal funds to carefully box up the pieces of the aerodrome for storage at the Smithsonian. He said he was sure the parts might someday “attest to what they really represent as an engineering accomplishment.”
Why did the aerodrome crash? Despite a century of speculation, the cause remains a mystery. We know the rear section of the machine dragged and collapsed before the aerodrome cleared the
houseboat catapult. But what caused it to drag remains uncertain. Given a history of trouble with the catapult, extraordinary care had been taken to ensure that the mechanism would function flawlessly.
Major Montgomery M. Macomb, the official observer from the U.S. War Department Board of Ordnance and Fortification, leaves the question open in his official rendition of events. As Macomb reports: “The car was set in motion, the engine working perfectly, but there was something wrong with the launching. The rear guy post seemed to drag, bringing the rudder down on the launching ways, and a crashing rending sound, followed by the collapse of the rear wings, showed that the machine had been wrecked in the launching; just how it was impossible to see.”
The wind could surely have been a factor. The day was clear, but the cold, gusty wind squalls added a considerable element of danger and uncertainty. Especially given the wings’ broad surface area, an untimely gust could easily have blown the plane out of kilter as it sped down the launching track, causing it to snag on the mechanism along the way. In fact, it remains unclear why Langley and Manly decided to make the attempt at all that day given the unfavorable weather conditions. In retrospect, it seems like an uncharacteristic rashness overtook them after years of long and patient labor.
Of course, the leading explanation for the crash was that the aerodrome’s frame was too weak or its design flawed. And this may have been the case. But Langley’s record of accomplishment with similar designs and his systematic testing regimen—all recorded in copious scientific notes—cannot be ignored. The frame of steel tubing and the wooden-ribbed wings had all survived elaborate stress tests. Increasingly heavy bags of sand had been placed upon them to simulate air pressure, and great care was taken to make sure the wings’ construction was both strong and flexible. As Manly put it:
“I cannot emphasize too strongly that there was neither fault in design nor inherent weakness in any part of this large aerodrome. The whole machine had been subjected to the most severe tests and strains in the [Smithsonian] Institution’s shops in the endeavor to find any possible points of weakness and had shown itself able to withstand any strain it would meet in the air.”
Today, of course, we would simply study the slow-motion replay or conduct a computer simulation to determine what went wrong. Certainly, even in 1903, a photographic record of the event might have helped solve the mystery of the flight’s failure. But not a single photo captured the disabled craft at the onset of its cataclysmic failure. By 4:45
P.M.
in December, the light had faded. The only known surviving picture of the flight itself, made by a
Washington Star
photographer, glimpses the aerodrome against a dark sky in a near-vertical position with its rear wings and tail in shambles.
Ultimately, all the second guessing cannot fully resolve the question of the aerodrome’s viability—a question all the more dramatic and mysterious given its precedent-setting place in history. True to form, Langley limited his comments about the affair to the facts. He took pride, he said, that he and Manly had indisputably built a powerful engine twice as light as deemed possible by the best engine builders of the day. As for the aerodrome itself, he objected strenuously only to the “erroneous accounts” that asserted that the plane could not fly, noting that “the machine has never had a chance to fly at all, but that the failure occurred on its launching ways; and the question of its ability to fly is consequently an untried one.”
While Langley was undoubtedly discouraged, turning away from the problem of flight at the end of his life, his younger colleagues and many admirers clung steadfast to the conviction that his “untried” plane would have flown if given the chance.
A decade later, when the age of aviation was in full bloom, a
New York Times
reporter looked back on his paper’s earlier dismissive coverage and concluded: “The history of invention has no record more pathetic than that of Samuel P. Langley. At the very moment when success was in his grasp, when the dreams of a lifetime were about to come true and the labors of years of toil to be rewarded, the cup was dashed from his lips through the failure, not of the invention itself, but of a purely mechanical contrivance of minor importance. Derided in Congress and held up by the newspaper wits of the world as a target for their jests, Langley must have died a thoroughly discouraged man.”
Alexander Graham Bell had arrived at a similar conclusion much earlier. After Langley’s death, Bell delivered a eulogy at a commemorative ceremony: “No one has contributed more to the modern revival of interest in flying machines of the heavier-than-air type than our own Professor Langley.” Bell added that his friend, as an aviation pioneer, had to face “not only the natural difficulties of his subject, but the ridicule of a skeptical world.”
Ironically, years before the aerodrome fiasco, Langley had ended his well-known scientific textbook,
The New Astronomy,
with a parable that presaged much about the aeronautical predicament he faced at the end of his life. Langley intended the fable as an optimistic gloss on how little scientists know about the universe, but it stands equally well as an epitaph for a man who persevered for years amid a chorus of conservative critics and naysayers:
“I have read somewhere a story about a race of ephemeral insects who live but an hour,” Langley wrote. “To those who are born in the early morning the sunrise is the time of youth. They die of old age while its beams are yet gathering force, and only their descendants live on to midday: while it is another race which sees the sun
decline, from that which saw it rise.” In Langley’s story, the generation of imagined insects alive at twilight gathers worriedly to hear from their wisest philosopher about what to make of the imminent sunset. The wise insect explains gloomily that generations of insect scientists have determined through induction that the sun moves only westward. And, since the sun is now nearing the western horizon, he says, “science herself points to the conclusion that it is about to disappear forever,” marking the certain demise of the insects’ world.
“What his hearers thought of this discourse I do not remember,” Langley writes, “but I have heard that the sun rose again the next morning.”
INTRIGUE AT HAMMONDSPORT
If the Langley aerodrome flies, several chapters of aviation history will have to be rewritten.
—
B
UFFALO
E
XPRESS
(B
UFFALO,
N.Y.), M
AY
20, 1914
T
he arrival of three imposing wooden crates has nearly halted work at the bustling Curtiss Aeroplane Company in Hammondsport, New York. It is a chilly afternoon early in April 1914 and, far upstate, spring has just begun to nudge the surrounding Finger Lakes region into bloom.
Workers haul the huge, pine-planked boxes, one by one, into the open courtyard outside the company’s collection of gray hangars. As they do, more than half of the plant’s one hundred employees stream outside to get a better look. Crates of parts, tools, and equipment arrive at this airplane factory almost every day. But today’s boxes—sent by rail from Washington, D.C.—are
an unprecedented delivery, the subject of hushed gossip at the plant for weeks.
Henry Kleckler, the shop foreman, wipes the grease from his hands and steps into the courtyard to help as his boss, Glenn Hammond Curtiss, approaches the largest crate. Curtiss is tall and trim, with a reserved intensity. He is just thirty-six years old, but his thinning hair and serious countenance give him an ageless air of authority. He is also a corporate executive more comfortable on the shop floor than in a boardroom. His easy rapport with his workers is obvious in the way they enthusiastically surround him.
Now, as Curtiss pries off the crate’s big wooden top with the back of a hammer, the crowd of assembled mechanics, carpenters, and engineers falls silent. Inside the box lie the crumpled wings of the most maligned airplane of all time: Samuel Langley’s aerodrome, his infamous seminal attempt to create a piloted, heavier-than-air flying machine.
The first peek is not encouraging. Packed over a decade ago according to Langley’s instructions, the contents appear a terrible mess, full of twisted metal, broken wood, and tattered fabric. But as the knowledgeable workers draw closer to inspect the pieces, their initial dismay turns to admiration. Though old and badly damaged, the antique machine’s craftsmanship is unmistakable. The wooden ribs of the aircraft’s wings are not only exquisitely joined; they have been hollowed out to make the craft lighter. Unlike the canvas muslin used on most modern airplanes in 1914 the wings of Langley’s plane are sheathed in a fine skin of now-rotted, oiled silk. Curtiss calls it the most beautiful piece of work he has ever seen.
Now the hard part must begin. At the behest of the Smithsonian Institution, a team at the Curtiss plant will try to restore the
machine to its original condition. The goal: to see whether, if properly launched, Langley’s plane can fly.
Confronted by the remains of the aerodrome, the workers recognize the scale of the painstaking restoration before them and wonder skeptically whether the battered and unconventional-looking machine will ever get aloft. Focused on the immediate problems of reconstruction, they are all but blind to the broader implications of tampering with the judgment of history. No one present realizes that before they are through, their efforts will ignite one of the most bitter controversies in the annals of aviation.
How strange are the whims of history and how difficult to predict and understand. Few could have expected the extent of ridicule Langley suffered for the aerodrome’s failure or that, after languishing for more than ten years in the back of a carpentry shop at the Smithsonian Institution, the crumpled aircraft would once again become the subject of intense interest. Fewer still could ever have foreseen the aerodrome’s voyage to this unlikely destination, rural and remote, some fifty miles southeast of Rochester, New York.
For generations, the Finger Lakes region has been known as New York State’s wine country, home to hundreds of acres of vineyards nestled among tree-covered hills that slope to the edges of a series of long and narrow freshwater lakes. In this bucolic area, Mark Twain spent most of his summers and wrote some of his best-known works, including
Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The towns here exude an upright American charm; peaceful, but too industrious-seeming to feel sleepy. In the heart of the region, the small town of Hammondsport is no exception, with a postcard village square lined with substantial brick storefronts.
Strangely enough, since the earliest years of the twentieth century, this improbable spot, far from any major metropolitan area, has seen a bustle of activity that will forever mark it as the “cradle of aviation.” In fact, by 1914, Glenn Curtiss has amassed in Hammondsport the best and largest collection of skilled aircraft mechanics to be found anywhere in the world. As a result, the town’s residents have never felt so much at the center of things as they do now. Over the past several years, it seems that everyone with an interest in airplanes—from inventor Alexander Graham Bell to industrialist Henry Ford—has made their way here to the Curtiss Aeroplane Company.
“Everybody in Hammondsport has an expert’s familiarity with aeroplanes,” gushes a reporter from Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York Sun
on assignment to Hammondsport in the spring of 1914. “The most astonishing experience of the visitor is to hear an eight-year-old child talk about the virtues of flat surfaces as compared to curved surfaces with the glib sureness of an expert,” he writes, “or to engage a charming young woman in conversation…and have her give a learned dissertation on the thrust of propellers.”
The catalyst for all this interest, the magnet for all this excitement and industry, is the quietly irrepressible Glenn Curtiss. Despite his relative anonymity today, Curtiss surely belongs in the pantheon of America’s greatest entrepreneurial inventors. With uncanny regularity, his remarkable career led him to the heart of some of the most important pioneering developments in the history of aviation. In the course of a few short decades, Curtiss arguably contributed more to the modern airplane than anyone before or since, including: the first public flight in the United States, the first commercially sold airplane, the remarkable first flight from one American city to another, the issuance of the first
U.S. pilot license, to name just a few momentous breakthroughs. Ask almost anyone today and they will likely tell you that these milestones were achieved by the Wright brothers, the legendary team that most of us—nearly a century hence—immediately associate with the dawn of aviation. However, the first public flight in America was not made by the Wrights, whose obsession with keeping their research secret shrouded the early years of aviation in internecine intrigue and legal wrangling. Rightful claim to all the above achievements belongs to Curtiss.
Like the Wright brothers, Curtiss ended his formal education in the eighth grade. But despite the lack of schooling, historians credit Curtiss with a central role in no fewer than five hundred aviation innovations. Even more impressive, many of his seminal contributions are still in use in airplanes today, including everything from wing flaps and retractable landing gear to the enclosed cockpit and the design of the pontoons used on seaplanes. By contrast, virtually none of the Wright brothers’ aeronautical designs has stood the test of time. Most of the Wrights’ practical engineering contributions were obsolete by as early as 1912.
If Curtiss’s phenomenal creativity was exceeded by anything, it was by his energy and drive. His competitive spirit was evident from the start of his career. A national bicycle champion by the age of twenty, he went on to win world renown as “the fastest man alive” by riding a motorcycle of his own design at a record-breaking 136 miles per hour in 1907. Curtiss’s talent and daring proved a formidable combination and he would need both to make his greatest contribution: opening the sky to the commercially viable modern airplane.
First and foremost here in Hammondsport in 1914, though, Glenn Curtiss is a local hero. Indeed within a radius of a hundred miles around Hammondsport, Curtiss and his aeroplanes have
become an almost ubiquitous topic of conversation. Everybody seems to feel a proprietary interest in his career. His portrait even hangs in the local post office, as it does in the window of Hoyt’s pharmacy, with the caption “He’s good enough for us.”
To some extent, Curtiss has been a local favorite since he was a boy. He was an enthusiastic and energetic child and, sadly, his father and his grandfather, both Hammondsport residents, had died by the time Curtiss was four years old. As a result, many in town took a special interest in him. Jim Smellie, a local shopkeeper and friend, helped coach Curtiss as a bicycle racer. And at a key juncture in Curtiss’s career when he was twenty-one, Smellie, who was expanding his general store, offered to turn over to Curtiss his bicycle repair and spare parts business. On the spot, Curtiss decided to open a bicycle shop in Hammondsport. Mrs. Malinda Bennitt, a wealthy widow in town who had always been fond of him, gave Curtiss rent-free use of a narrow storefront on the town square to help him get a start in business.
Hammondsport would never be the same.
Building upon his passion for bicycle racing, Curtiss moved quickly from repairing bicycles to building and selling them—and then to experimenting with the novel idea of motorized cycles. Locals could hear him for miles around careening wildly along dirt roads on the outskirts of town on an early belt-driven prototype he called the “Happy Hooligan.”
Curtiss learned remarkably quickly from his early experiments. Soon he was not only building motorcycles and lightweight motorcycle engines but filling orders for them from across the country. From the moment he started his own manufacturing outfit, tales of Curtiss’s inventive spirit became part of the lore of the town. One day, as one of these many stories goes, Curtiss idly twisted a rubber
grip on the handlebar of a motorcycle while he was standing outside talking with a customer. Abruptly halting the conversation, Curtiss ran into the shop, beckoned a mechanic, and on the spur of the moment invented the handlebar throttle control—a design that would, of course, become a signature feature on almost all modern motorcycles.
Within a few years, Curtiss transformed his modest bicycle shop into an impressive manufacturing operation, turning out a wide array of motorcycles, lightweight engines, and ultimately aircraft. By 1914, he reached a wholly new phase of prominence. The Curtiss Aeroplane Company not only had two large plants and more than one hundred workers; it occupied a place of international stature in the emerging aviation industry.
Nonetheless, as Curtiss biographer C. R. Roseberry notes, Curtiss always referred to his operation as “the shop.” The word “factory” was simply not his vocabulary. For Curtiss, his shop was a place in which workers collaborated, openly exchanging ideas for modifications and improvements. It was also a place where Curtiss could always dirty his hands alongside his employees to try out new ideas whenever he felt so inclined.
To help to ensure his vision of a vibrant, creative workplace, Curtiss surrounded himself with both close childhood friends and exceptionally skilled mechanics. Plant manager Harry Genung had been one of Curtiss’s best friends since grade school. Genung was affable, organized, and unfailingly loyal to Curtiss in a relationship that extended far beyond the confines of the rapidly expanding business. For years, Genung and his wife, Martha—who also worked at the “shop”—even lived in the back of the same big house where Curtiss resided with his wife Lena.
Meanwhile, Henry Kleckler, Curtiss’s shop foreman, earned a
near-legendary status among early airplane designers for his natural engineering gifts. As one account puts it, his coworkers used to say that Kleckler, a thickset man of Dutch descent with little formal education, could make a motor out of a piece of baling wire. They would call for him whenever they were stumped by a difficult piece of work. Kleckler would arrive grinning, listen intently to what was required, and invariably say, “I fix him.” No matter how big his company grew, Curtiss maintained: “I’d rather have Henry Kleckler on a project than six engineers.”
Like many of the employees, Kleckler and Genung had joined up with Curtiss early in the company’s phenomenal period of growth. In 1909, when A. P. Warner—the first private individual to buy an airplane in America—came to the plant to make the sale, he remembers Curtiss’s operation as “little more than a shed with a few tools in it.” As the company rapidly expanded over the next five years, Genung and Kleckler were indispensable to Curtiss. When Curtiss got swept up in a new idea, he needed Genung to manage an often overwhelming volume of existing business. And to bring his new ideas to fruition, Curtiss invariably relied on Kleckler to work out the knottiest engineering details.
But the two men were surprisingly representative of the devoted and genial workforce that Curtiss had assembled by 1914. Of all the many employees who worked for him over the years, few felt differently than Lewis Longwell, who joined the company in 1911. As Longwell puts it simply, “Curtiss was a good and honest man to work for.” A key secret to the company’s success, another Curtiss collaborator, Theodore “Spuds” Ellyson explains, was that Curtiss never set himself apart as a genius inventor. Rather he was “a comrade and chum, who made us feel that we were all working together, and that our ideas and advice were really of some value.”
Examining each piece of the Langley aerodrome carefully as it is uncrated, Curtiss and Kleckler personally supervise as workers carry the pieces into a newly created work area off the courtyard at the Curtiss plant. The outdoor space between the plant’s office building and the airplane assembly room has recently been walled in and roofed over and it will serve as the staging area for the months of work it will take to restore the aircraft.
It is an indication of the stature of the aerodrome restoration project that Curtiss has put Kleckler in charge. But, uncharacteristically, Kleckler is worried and, as the two quietly discuss the job, he doesn’t hesitate to say so. Chief among Kleckler’s concerns is that no expense was spared in the aerodrome’s original construction and he doesn’t know how he and his workers will be able to match it without spending a fortune far beyond the limited budget the Smithsonian has proposed for the job.