"I hated to beaten!"
In 1909 Glenn Hammond Curtiss was unknown in Europe, but in the United
States he carried impressive credentials. Curtiss had first achieved fame as a
motorcyclist, winning a number of races and setting speed records. Turning his
attention to aviation, he polished his reputation through well-publicized
accomplishments as an engine builder, airplane manufacturer and pilot. By
1909 he had emerged as the leading challenger to the Wright brothers'
dominance of aviation in the United States. In time, his name would rank second
only to those of the Wrights in the ledger of American air pioneers.
Early Days Of Speed
Glenn Curtiss was just 31 in the summer of 1909, but he seemed older. Lanky
and gaunt, with dark, bushy eyebrows and a perpetual frown, Curtiss had
nothing of the suave, stylish manner of the gentlemen-sportsmen-aviators of
Europe. He spoke little and, on the flying field and off, he was all business. He
was considered a mild man by those who were close to him, but in competition
he could be ferocious. "I hated to be beaten," he once said. An obsession with
speed had driven him since boyhood. Raised in Hammondsport, a village in the
scenic vineyard country of upstate New York, Curtiss dropped out of school at
the age of 14 and began racing bicycles at county fairs. Then, like his eventual
rivals the Wright brothers, he opened a bicycle repair shop. His urge to go
faster led to an attempt, in 1901,to many a gasoline engine to a bicycle chassis.
One of the first engines he used, a crude mail-order behemoth that weighed 180
pounds, was so overpowering, Curtiss said, "it almost tore itself loose from the
frame." Abandoning this unhappy union, Curtiss decided to make his own
engines, and from there it was only a short step to motorcycle manufacture.
Racing his own machines, Curtiss soon filled a room with trophies; in 1907, on
the broad, hard strand at Ormond Beach, Florida, he drove an eight-cylinder
stretched-out motorcycle to an unofficial world's land speed record of 136.3
miles per hour. Of his vision-blurring dash down the straightaway, Curtiss said
only: "It satisfied my craving for speed."By this time, he had earned a reputation
not only as a daredevil racer but also as the builder of one of the finest engines
in the country. His motorcycle power plant--small, powerful, yet
lightweight--was also ideal for aeronautical use, a fact not lost on a few aerial
experimenters in the United States. Among them was Thomas Scott Baldwin, a
veteran carnival balloonist and parachute jumper; Baldwin ordered a Curtiss
engine in 1903, slung it beneath his dirigible, the California Arrow, and in 1904
completed the first flight around a circular course made by any dirigible in the
United States.
Alexander Graham Bell
By 1906 Curtiss was soliciting the Wright brothers for business writing,
telegraphing and finally calling on them in Dayton. The Wrights professed no
interest in his engine. They were steadfastly guarding their invention from prying
eyes and, though polite, gave Curtiss short shrift. But other aviation enthusiasts,
like Baldwin, sought Curtiss engines. The most significant of these was
Alexander Graham Bell, who in 1876 had invented the telephone and had grown
rich as a result. Bell brimmed over with scientific curiosity; he was building
enormous kites fashioned from hundreds of peculiar tetrahedral, or
pyramid-shaped, cells, a construction he thought would solve the problems of
heavier than-air flight by providing inherent stability aloft. The kites led nowhere
aeronautically, but Bell was nonetheless impressed with the Curtiss engine that
he planned to hitch to them
.
Aerial Experiment Association
In July of 1907, Bell invited Curtiss, as a mechanical expert, to join a group of
young aerial experimenters who were gathered under his patronage at his
summer home in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.
At the urging of Bell's wife, Mabel, the group formally registered itself in
September as the Aerial Experiment Association, and Mrs. Bell, who had
money of her own, put up $20,000 to finance it. Bell named himself chairman
and Curtiss director of experiments. Others in the A.E.A. included two
Canadian engineers recently graduated from Toronto University, John A. D.
McCurdy and Frederick Walker "Casey" Baldwin (no relation to dirigible
enthusiast Thomas Baldwin), and Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, a United States
Army officer intent on making a military career out of aeronautics. Selfridge had
been assigned by the War Department, at Bell's request, to follow the
experiments.
The A.E.A. started out working with a glider, but its declared aim was "to get
into the air'' with a practical man-carrying airplane. Its problem was to do this
without infringing the Wright patents on wing warping. ''Of course we could not
use that," Curtiss wrote later, "but we believed there were other ways of
controlling the plane." As A.E.A. secretary, Selfridge wrote to the Wrights for
information on glider construction. The brothers replied affably enough. But
they did not forget Selfridge's approach--later, when a long patent battle
unfolded in the courts, they would claim Selfridge had tricked them by saying
that the A.E.A. wanted the advice for experimental purposes only.
At the beginning of 1908 the A.E.A. moved its headquarters to Curtiss' home in
Hammondsport, on the shores of Keuka Lake. There the pontifical Bell led
late-night discussions on everything from aeronautical theory to the sex
determination of sheep. Bell's Boys, as they were called, would rise at dawn to
catch the early-morning calm they found ideal for flying, while Bell stayed abed
until noon, assuring himself of undisturbed sleep by wrapping the telephone in
towels.
The Red Wing
On March 12, 1908, the A.E.A.'s first airplane, a curve-winged bi-plane
christened Red Wing, was tested before a well-bundled audience on frozen
Keuka Lake. "It sped over the ice like a scared rabbit for two or three hundred
feet," Curtiss wrote, "and then, much to our joy, it jumped into the air." After a
319-foot hop at an altitude of six to eight feet, the plane crash-landed on one
wing. "it had taken just seven weeks to build the machine and get it ready for the
trial; it had taken just about 20 seconds to smash it," Curtiss recalled. "But a
great thing had been accomplished. We had achieved the first public flight of a
heavier�-than-air machine in America."
Curtiss' claim was outrageous; the Wrights had accomplished much more,
much earlier and before reliable witnesses. The A. E. A. had, however, thrust
itself into the limelight, and not without some justification for its subsequent
planes demonstrated the group's steadily improving talent for aircraft design.
The White Wing
The A.E.A.'s next model, called White Wing, had wing-tip ailerons to control
roll and a new wheeled landing gear instead of skids; it managed five respectable
hops. On May 21, at the Stony Brook Farm race track outside Hammondsport,
Curtiss flew the White Wing 1,017 feet, landing without damage in a plowed
field. Immediately a rumor spread--fueled by publication in the prestigious
magazine Scientific American--that the A.E.A. was going into manufacturing,
offering planes for $5,000 each, delivery within 60 days. "They have got good
cheek!" Orville Wright observed contemptuously when he read the story.
But for all Orville's pique, the A.E.A. was already threatening the Wrights'
position.
The June Bug
A new plane, the June Bug, the first to be designed by Curtiss, was completed
in less than a month, tested and entered in the Scientific American's $2,500
silver-trophy competition for the first public flight in the United States over a
one-kilometer straightaway course.
The A. E. A.'s unexpected entry put the Scientific American in a quandary. The
most popular scientific journal in the country, it had been painfully slow in the
past to acknowledge the achievements of the Wright brothers. To make amends
for this awkward lapse, the magazine's publisher, Charles A. Munn, had
established the prize in 1907 as a virtual gift to the Wrights, anticipating that they
would step forward and claim it easily. Characteristically, the Wrights showed
no interest.
When the A.E.A. put in its bid, Munn wrote to Orville, urging him to enter.
Orville turned him down, partly because of Munn's own rule that the takeoff of
any contending plane be unassisted. The Wrights were still using a catapult
launching system; while they could have adapted a plane for wheeled takeoff,
Orville wrote to Munn that they were too busy to make such a modification.
The United States Army had expressed interest in buying their invention and
Orville was preparing a plane for trials--a venture that had clear precedence over
vying for prizes. Wilbur was in France, readying a Wright machine for the
demonstrations later that summer that would so impress the Europeans. So the
field was open to Curtiss and the A.E.A.; publisher Munn found himself in the
awkward position of accepting their lone entry. Curtiss, with his entrepreneur's
eye for publicity, set the Fourth of July holiday of 1908 as the trial date and
invited members of the three-year old Aero Club of America to Hammondsport
to watch.
From New York and Washington they came, together with reporters and
photographers, to join the crowd of locals who thronged the Stony Brook Farm
race track and the surrounding hillsides. The Wrights' flights had been
haphazardly witnessed. But these spectators at Stony Brook were the first large
gathering of Americans summoned expressly to see a manned airplane fly.
The "Competition?"
Coatless, with his sleeves rolled up, Curtiss climbed into theJune Bug and fitted
his shoulders into the yoke by which he would control the ailerons. He yelled
for the men holding the plane to let go, headed down the track and took off.
The flag marking one kilometer "was quickly reached and passed," he wrote
later, "and still I kept the aeroplane up, flying as far as the open fields would
permit, and finally coming down safely in a meadow, fully a mile from the
starting place." Curtiss added that he "might have gone a great deal farther, as
the motor was working beautifully and I had the machine under perfect control,
but to have prolonged the flight would have meant a turn in the air or passing
over a number of large trees."
Like so many of the early European aviators, Curtiss was obviously having
problems with anything but straight flight. Yet the Scientific American trophy
had been won and an ecstatic victory cable went off to Bell at his summer home
in Canada. Even though it was a Sunday, Bell wired his attorneys in
Washington: Get up to Hammondsport to examine the June Bug for patentable
features. Pending their arrival, Bell ordered the plane grounded. IMPORTANT
TO KEEP MACHINE UNINJURED UNTIL THEN, he cabled.
�
Trouble With the Wrights
The June Bug's success had an instant effect on the Wrights as well. Within the
week, from France, Wilbur instructed Orville to warn Curtiss against patent
infringement; on July 20, Orville wrote to Curtiss, reminding him of Selfridge's
earlier request for information: "We did not intend, of course, to give
permission to use the patented features of our machine for exhibitions or in a
commercial way. ... If it is your desire to enter the exhibition business we would
be glad to take up the matter of a license to operate under our patents for that
purpose." Curtiss deflected the Wrights' letter with a qualified assurance that he
was not intending to go into the exhibition business.
Army Trials
Tension continued between the Wrights and the A.E.A., however, and increased
when both Curtiss and Self ridge appeared at Fort Myer, Virginia, where Army
acceptance trials were scheduled in September for the Wrights' new
passenger-carrying military airplane.
Lieutenant Selfridge, in fact, was to be a member of the aeronautical board
appraising the Wright machine. Orville was plainly unhappy at his presence.
Though Self ridge was a warm, outgoing man, with the look of a large, friendly
puppy, he was still considered one of the enemy. "I will be glad to have
Selfridge out of the way. I don't trust him an inch," Orville wrote to his brother
in France. "He plans to meet me often at dinners, etc., where he can try to pump
me. He has a good education, and a clear mind. I understand that he does a
good deal of knocking behind my back."
Nor was Orville pleased to find Curtiss around the test field, even though the
New Yorker had been summoned there only to help his old friend Thomas
Baldwin solve mechanical problems on a Curtiss- powered military dirigible. It
was in this atmosphere of suspicion that tests of the Wright plane commenced
on September 3.
All went well at first. Plane and pilot performed superbly in several duration
flights, astounding the Army brass with their effortless soaring
above the Fort Myer parade ground.
Tragedy!!
Finally, in the late afternoon of September 17, 1908, with 2,000 spectators
crowding the field, Orville took Selfridge up as part of a series of tests to
demonstrate that the plane was capable of carrying two persons who together
weighed at least 350 pounds. For the occasion Orville had mounted two longer,
more powerful propellers in an effort to gain additional speed. Eagerly, Selfridge
climbed onto the cushioned seat on the wing, at Orville's right. Neither man
wore a seat belt--no aviator, anywhere in the world, yet had. Orville made three
laps of the field at about 150 feet. "Selfridge sat, arms folded, as cool as the
daring aviator beside him," noted a photographer named W. S. Clime, who was
watching from the ground. On the fourth lap, Orville heard a light tapping to his
rear and glanced backward, toward the sound. Nothing seemed wrong. But
within seconds came what Orville later described as "two big thumps, which
gave the machine a terrible shaking." Suddenly the plane veered to the right. No
question now, they were in serious trouble. Orville cut the power and struggled
to control the aircraft. "The machine would not respond to the steering and
lateral baIancing levers, which produced a most peculiar feeling of
helplessness,"
Orville would recall. "Yet I continued to push the levers, when the machine
suddenly turned to the left. I reversed the levers to stop the turning and to bring
the wings on a level. Quick as a flash, the machine turned down in front and
started straight for the ground. Our course for 50 feet was within a very few
degrees of the perpendicular. Lieutenant Selfridge up to this time had not uttered
a word, though he turned once or twice to look into my face, evidently to see
what I thought of the situation. But when the machine turned headfirst for the
ground he exclaimed 'Oh! Oh!' in an almost inaudible voice."
On the ground almost directly beneath them, the crowd watched in alarm as the
crippled plane lurched out of control. One of the new propellers had cracked
lengthwise and lost its thrust; the other had run wild and fouled a rear guy wire.
"There was a crack like a pistol shot coming from above," said the
photographer Clime. "I saw a piece of a propeller blade twirling off to the
southward. I stood riveted to the spot with my eyes on the machine. For a brief
period it kept on its course, then swerved to the left and with a swoop
backward, but in an almost perpendicular manner, it fell for half
the distance to the ground. Then, suddenly righting itself, it regained for
an instant its normal position only to pitch forward and strike on the
parallel planes in front."
The crash raised an immense cloud of dust that momentarily hid the fallen
aircraft from view. Clime sprinted to the wreck, arriving just behind two
mounted soldiers. They found Orville dangling from the guy wires. "His feet
were barely touching the ground, and his hands were hanging limp; blood was
streaming down his face and trickling in a tiny stream from his chin, but he was
conscious and feebly said, 'help me.' "
Amid more broken wires, struts and torn canvas lay Selfridge. "He had
apparently struck the ground with the back of his head and base of the spine,"
Clime said. "His knees were slightly drawn up. His face and clothing were
covered with blood. He was unconscious and if he spoke at all I did not hear
him."
Selfridge died that night, the first person ever to be killed in an airplane. The
impact of the American officer's death was felt around the world. In Paris,
Gabriel Voisin wrote of.''the wings that fly, the wings that kill." Orville Wright
came home to Dayton in a wheel chair six weeks later.
�Curtiss Gallery
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