Unlocking the Sky (12 page)

The next day, October 1, 1907, the group travels 230 miles to Halifax to make their new organization official. There, before a notary public and in the presence of the U.S. consul to Nova Scotia, the five members and their benefactor Mabel sign an agreement spelling out a yearlong arrangement. With this earnest and auspicious start, the Aerial Experiment Association, or AEA, is officially formed.

As soon as they are through, the group celebrates with a trip to the Halifax fairgrounds to see Captain Baldwin fly his dirigible. The cool fall day offers fine and clear weather for flying and, as
usual, Captain Baldwin puts on an impressive show, piloting his dirigible in controlled circles above the avid spectators. Bell is delighted. For all his interest and enthusiasm in aviation, it is the first piloted, motorized flight he has ever witnessed.

With everyone in high spirits that evening, Captain Baldwin joins the group at a dinner hosted by the Bells at the Halifax Hotel to celebrate the new association. Bell toasts Curtiss and Captain Baldwin for the aeronautical accomplishments they have already achieved.

Never much of a speech maker, it testifies to his ease with the group that Curtiss now offers up a formal statement noting that he is “honored to have the opportunity to associate myself with Dr. Bell and the other members of the Association.” With one big step, he has leaped into the vast unknown: the quest to design and build a working airplane.

Back in Hammondsport, in a swirl of excitement, Curtiss again contacts the Wrights. His inclination is to cooperate in some fashion, and he offers this in a letter to the brothers on December 30, 1907. His tone is deferential and warm. He tells the Wrights of his role with the newly formed AEA. He invites them to visit Hammondsport. And he offers to provide them his latest V-8, 40-horsepower engine for free.

Wilbur writes back declining both offers. But his tone is still friendly. “We remember your visit to Dayton with pleasure,” he notes. “The experience we had together in helping Captain Baldwin back to the fairgrounds was one not soon to be forgotten.”

Less than a month later, in correspondence with Octave Chanute, Wilbur writes that, despite the stepped-up efforts of aviation researchers like Curtiss, he and Orville are confident that “an independent solution to the flying problem is at least five years
away.” But Wilbur underestimates Curtiss and his new team. In an extraordinary collaborative effort, with Curtiss’s superior engine, Bell’s shrewd oversight, and many of the pieces of the aviation puzzle falling into place, the AEA will independently develop a working airplane in just five months.

J
ust past dawn on July 3, 1908, Glenn Curtiss, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, Douglas McCurdy, Casey Baldwin, and Henry Kleckler venture out to a makeshift hangar on the outskirts of Hammondsport. Their excitement mounts as first light streams across the verdant farmland around them.

Since midwinter, when the Aerial Experiment Association moved its operations from Nova Scotia to Hammondsport, many in town have realized that Curtiss and his team are on to something extraordinary. Despite the early hour, about a dozen of Curtiss’s neighbors have trekked the two miles from Hammondsport to witness a spectacle. The team members stand quietly now on the edge of Stony Brook Farm. Here, beside a large potato patch, Harry Champlin, founder of the Pleasant Valley Wine Company, has built
a half-mile racetrack for his horses. And, while the word has yet to come into common parlance, this morning the track will serve as a runway.

The team gingerly rolls the new fragile contraption they call an aerodrome out from its makeshift tent. To the assembled spectators, it is a fabulous and strange hybrid machine, with vast, yellow wings of fabric and bamboo atop three delicate-looking bicycle wheels. Except for the large motorcycle engine behind the pilot’s seat, the curved, sail-like wings and slender brace wires give the contraption a vaguely nautical look. Tomorrow, on Independence Day, they will unveil their flying machine to the world, including a delegation of some of the country’s leading aeronautical experts. Today, however, Curtiss and his colleagues ready it for a final test run.

As planned, the members of the Aerial Experiment Association have rotated responsibility for each prototype that the team has created together. Today, Curtiss, who has masterminded this airplane, will serve as pilot.

The machine has been painstakingly handcrafted, blending proven features with a few untested innovations. Like its predecessor, this is a biplane; its top wings arch downward at the tips while the bottom set arcs gently upward. The effect, as one observer will note later, is reminiscent of a large, sideways parenthesis. Among the novel features, perhaps the most notable is the means of lateral control. It sports a pair of small, triangular flaps at the tips of each set of wings. The wing flaps are adjusted by means of a yoke that fits over the pilot’s shoulders. The pilot can keep the airplane from rolling out of control simply by leaning as it banks on a turn. Now known as ailerons, they are a feature of almost every modern airplane.

This latest AEA machine also boasts improvements to the wings themselves. At the suggestion of Octave Chanute, the team has coated them with a paintlike formula—a mixture of paraffin, gasoline, turpentine, and yellow ochre—that both reduces air resistance and enhances the craft’s visibility.

June Bug,
as Bell has christened the flying machine, is powered by the Curtiss shop’s largest motor: a 40-horsepower, 8-cylinder, air-cooled engine weighing nearly 200 pounds. A year earlier, Curtiss used a similar motor, built onto an elongated motorcycle frame, to careen at an astonishing 136 miles per hour along a track in Ormond Beach, Florida, earning himself the title of “the fastest man on earth.” Now the same engine model drives one large screw propeller located behind the wings of an audacious machine designed to thrust him not just faster than anyone, but into the sky.

The AEA has entered the
June Bug
into competition for the
Scientific American
Trophy, a highly publicized prize offered for the first airplane in America that can prove, before judges, its ability to remain airborne for one kilometer. Unfortunately, though, while Curtiss has been practicing intensively with the
June Bug
since its completion a week earlier, he has only once managed to keep it airborne for that long. Yet the AEA has already confidently announced that it will fly for that distance before a visiting delegation of judges in a demonstration tomorrow. On this, the final dress rehearsal before the official trial, the team urgently hopes to live up to the claim with a successful dry run.

Beneath a nearly cloudless sky, Curtiss straps himself into the pilot’s seat. The engine roars and the airplane’s propeller whirls behind his head. As the rest of the team backs away, the
June Bug
starts to roll along the racetrack and then, almost magically, lifts from the ground. But just a few hundred yards into the flight, Cur
tiss feels the machine shake. He struggles at the controls, but there is little he can do as an unexpected gust knocks the
June Bug
askew, causing it to tumble roughly to the ground.

Fearing for Curtiss’s safety, the team runs across the field to his side. The shaken pilot emerges unscathed, but then a bleak realization quickly takes hold. The airplane is badly damaged, its left wing broken, its front control smashed, and one of its wheels twisted nearly in half. With the invited aeronautical delegation due the next day, the AEA’s vaunted, one-and-only prototype now lies before them as a crumpled wreck. Silence betrays the group’s disappointment and gloomy sense of defeat.

Selfridge is the first to voice the unspeakable, suggesting that they postpone the public flight and telephone the delegation in New York City immediately to urge them to delay their visit. Curtiss alone is unwilling to accept such a setback. He insists that they can rebuild the aircraft in time, turning to Kleckler—as much for moral support as in the hope that, given his technical assessment, he will concur.

Kleckler, like the others, is skeptical. They roll the damaged machine back to its tent and start to debate the matter in earnest. Curtiss ignores the heated discussion, beginning instead to work quietly and furiously to repair the damage. His determination is infectious. Soon all are working in a frenzy, racing to and from the shop to repair the
June Bug
’s broken parts. With help from Kleckler and from Curtiss employees at the shop, the AEA actually restores the aircraft, completing a week’s worth of repairs in just twelve hours.

By day’s end, the team is confident that the
June Bug
is once again functional, but they can’t risk flying it untested. So, in the last light of a very long day, they once again roll the aircraft onto the
racetrack. Despite some trepidation lest he cause further damage, Curtiss gets the machine aloft for a one-minute flight.

It is too dark to fly the full kilometer in the refurbished aircraft. Nonetheless, after a perfect landing, Curtiss greets his teammates on the racetrack with a broad smile. He can’t account for it, he says, but the
June Bug
seems to fly better than ever before.

The impression is not just his imagination. As he realizes later, the group, faced with a shortage of material, gave the updated version a slightly smaller elevating rudder, which made the craft easier to handle in the air.

As they roll the
June Bug
back to its tent, the AEA members all tiredly agree they would feel better having had a smoother and more thorough day of testing. But there is little they can do about the situation now. The aeronautical delegation is en route by train to Hammondsport. And the esteemed visitors will pass judgment on the AEA’s machine. On the eve of the official trial for the
Scientific American
Trophy, the group has little assurance that the
June Bug
can meet the challenge. But thanks to their last-minute efforts, they take some comfort that the aircraft is at least intact for its debut.

For months, the
Scientific American
Trophy, established by the monthly science magazine, has been a major subject of discussion in aviation circles, especially at the staid, wood-paneled headquarters of the Aero Club of America where the shiny and substantial prize physically resides. At the start of the year, not long after the formation of the AEA, Curtiss personally admired the trophy on a trip to the club on Forty-second Street in New York City. It stood prominently displayed in a glass cabinet—a large and elaborate sil
ver sculpture of an airplane resembling Langley’s aerodrome circling the earth above a pedestal ringed by flying horses.

To Curtiss, and to all AEA members, the trophy has come to assume a significance far beyond its monetary worth: a tangible and much coveted validation of their efforts. They badly want their names engraved on the cup for posterity. In late June, when the team sees how well its newest prototype flies, the first thought is to notify
Scientific American
immediately that the Aerial Experiment Association is ready to compete for the trophy.

Curtiss and his friends are so eager, in fact, that Selfridge telephones Charles Munn, publisher of
Scientific American
(and also president of the Aero Club), on June 24, before the
June Bug
has even flown the requisite distance in tests. On behalf of the group, Selfridge proposes to make the official flight ten days later. He asks Munn to send a delegation of judges to Hammondsport.

Unexpectedly, Munn is somewhat hesitant about the AEA proposal. In particular, he balks at the team’s desire to make the demonstration in Hammondsport. Despite Bell’s reputation, Munn knows relatively little of the AEA, and he is reluctant to send a group of judges hundreds of miles to such a rural locale.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Munn had hoped the trophy would lure the Wright brothers into a public display. When he had first announced the new prize in the pages of
Scientific American
in the fall of 1907, Munn wrote that he hoped the trophy would spur innovation in the aviation field. But his editorial also complained that, four years after word broke about their work at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers had yet to publicly demonstrate their alleged invention. The Wrights’ secrecy, Munn said, raised doubts about what they might have accomplished. Actually, Munn’s editorial was far more measured than some in this period. As one newspa
per editorial had already challenged, for instance, the Wrights “were either fliers or liars” and without proof it was beginning to look like the latter.

Munn had followed his goading editorial with a personal letter to Orville Wright, encouraging the brothers to try for the trophy. When he received word of the AEA’s proposed flight, Munn wrote to Orville again the next day, offering to delay Curtiss and the AEA if the Wrights would consent to make a trial.

Orville and Wilbur remained unmoved. As with so many previous offers, the trophy failed to draw the Wrights into a public demonstration. In his reply to Munn, Orville complained about
Scientific American
’s stipulation that the aircraft must take off from level ground under its own power—meaning, in essence, that the prospective machine must include wheels.

As Orville explained, “All of our machines have been designed for starting from a track.” Actually, built on sled runners, the
Wright Flyer
required not only fifty feet of track but an accompanying derrick several stories tall to get airborne. The brothers would drop a half-ton metal weight from the top of the derrick which, attached to their airplane by a cable and pulleys, would push the craft forward with enough thrust to get it aloft by the track’s end. Orville griped to Munn that pneumatic wheels did not seem like a “satisfactory” thing to include on a flying machine. “Personally,” he wrote, “I think the flying machines of the future will start from tracks, or from[a] special apparatus.”

Ultimately, Munn’s reluctance to deal with the AEA is no match for the enthusiasm in Hammondsport. Selfridge and Curtiss make a quick trip to New York City to appeal personally to him and other members of the Aero Club. They point out that the rules specifically allow a contestant to choose the trial’s location. They know
their chances of success will be far greater if they make the flight from familiar terrain, but they are also eager for the home-court advantage offered by the encouragement of friends and relatives.

After several hours of discussion, aided by support from secretary Augustus Post, the Aero Club agrees to send a team of observers and judges to Hammondsport. Still, most members of the visiting delegation have low expectations, as do the veteran reporters following the story who venture forth from New York City. They grumble about the three-hundred-mile trip and voice skepticism that the little-known AEA team will succeed.

For the AEA, the path to a working airplane has been remarkably swift, with surprisingly few missteps.

By December 1907, the group completed its first glider, the
Cygnet,
based on the unusual tetrahedral glider design Bell favored. The
Cygnet
was a fifty-foot-wide array of more than three thousand fabric-covered tetrahedral cells set into an aluminum frame. Bell developed the design, which looked like an oversized, triangular honeycomb, on the sensible theory that the small, pyramidlike openings would provide lift, even at relatively low speeds. On December 6, 1907, the team put the
Cygnet
on floats and, attaching it by a long cable, towed it behind the lake steamer
Blue Hill
on Nova Scotia’s pristine Bras d’Or Lake. The
Cygnet,
pulled behind the boat, carried the daring Lieutenant Selfridge 168 feet into the air and remained aloft above the lake for seven minutes. In the excitement, though, the boat crew forgot to cut the line to the glider. As a result, when the steamer slowed, the
Cygnet
landed gracefully on the lake only to be dragged roughly through the water until it tipped over and broke up. Selfridge dove clear just in time to escape injury,
but the
Cygnet,
painstakingly constructed over many weeks, was beyond repair.

As the AEA members had agreed, Selfridge oversaw the next attempt. After much discussion, he helped nudge the group away from Bell’s complex design to experiment with the comparatively simple biplane glider long championed by Octave Chanute. The
Cygnet
showed promise, he argued, but it was cumbersome. With a unanimous desire to “get into the air” as quickly as possible, the group returned to first aeronautical principles for two productive months of experimentation with gliders modeled after Chanute’s biplanes.