Unlocking the Sky (14 page)

In just one month, Curtiss led the group to once again refine their design. The result, the
June Bug,
finally met their elusive goal: in an extraordinarily short and intensive design period, the AEA had built a fully controllable flying machine.

On July 4, the early morning train from New York City brings the distinguished aeronautical delegation to the tiny Hammondsport train station. The group includes nearly two dozen members of the Aero Club of America, among them Stanley Y. Beach, editor of
Scientific American.
Allan R. Hawley, a Wall Street stockbroker and balloon hobbyist, officially represents the club. None other than Charles Manly, Langley’s former assistant at the Smithsonian, will serve as the official starter for the test. Other members of the delegation include Augustus Post; Simon Lake, inventor of the submarine; Karl Dienstbach, representing the imperial German government; George H. Gary of the New York Society of Engineers; Ernest L. Jones, editor of the
American Journal of Aeronau
tics;
and Wilbur R. Kimball of the Aeronautical Society of New York. As this is the first publicly advertised flight in America, a large number of reporters, photographers, and even a motion picture crew have made the long trip from New York and other parts of the country to Hammondsport.

By 5
A.M
., the rural roads are already clogged with traffic. Spectators find spots along the surrounding hills, where they have a clear view of Harry Champlin’s racetrack. By midmorning, at least a thousand spectators have crowded in for the show; everything else in town has ground to a halt. Many bring picnic baskets, and an air of excitement and high spirits pervades the scene. As the morning wears on, families chat with one another, children frolic in the fields, and farmers stand side by side with the formally dressed visitors from out of town.

The weather, however, looks increasingly ominous. Although the day is warm, the wind is strong, and the threat of rain grows as the morning edges on. Curtiss, utterly immune to the crowd’s growing impatience, simply will not fly until the skies settle to his satisfaction. Too much is at stake, he says, to risk another accident.

Early in the afternoon, a summer shower drenches the festivities, yet, as spectators huddle under umbrellas and blankets, their numbers still grow. Despite the miserable weather, few are willing to pass up their first-ever opportunity to see an airplane fly. In an effort to keep up the spirits of the eminent visitors and reporters, vintner Harry Champlin invites the dignitaries to duck inside his nearby winery during the rainstorm, offering them free food and his company’s Great Western champagne. According to one report, Champlin later explained his generosity by saying that he wanted to help so that if Curtiss’s flight failed, the reporters wouldn’t treat him as badly as they had Langley in 1903.

Finally, with the approach of evening and the appearance of patches of blue sky, Henry Kleckler and several AEA members roll the
June Bug
out of its tent, where it has waited shrouded in mystery. Hawley and Manly promptly slog through the mud and wet grass to measure off the one-kilometer course, marking it officially and decisively with a pole topped by a red flag.

Upon their return, Curtiss starts the
June Bug
’s engine and quickly takes his place at the controls. With a wave of his hand, the rest of the crew lets go of the wings and steps back as their remarkable craft begins to roll along the muddy runway. Before a silent, awestruck crowd, the airplane rises into the air. And then rises further. As Curtiss struggles at the controls, something seems to be amiss. Continuing its steep ascent, the
June Bug
is now more than two hundred feet above the crowd, causing Lena Curtiss to loudly cry out, “Oh, why does he go so high? Do you think he’s going to make it?”

Just then, forced to kill the engine, Curtiss glides to a gentle landing less than halfway to the distant marker. Some in the delegation, most notably Stanley Beach, are heard to mutter and scoff. But, undaunted, Curtiss and crew drag the
June Bug
back to the starting point and huddle for a conference. After a short discussion, Selfridge discovers the tail section has been accidentally set askew, tilted in a negative angle, causing the added lift. Making the minor adjustment, Curtiss once again climbs into the pilot’s seat.

It is now around 7:30
P.M
., but in midsummer there is still a good hour before sundown. On its second attempt, the
June Bug
once again bumps over the muddy ground and rises cleanly to an altitude of about twenty feet. Curtiss and craft are off and running.

Although Alexander and Mabel Bell returned to Beinn Bhreagh several days before, their daughter and son-in-law, Daisy and David
Fairchild, are among the witnesses that day and they offer a memorable recollection of the historic event. For David Fairchild the flight was “the experience of a lifetime.” As he wrote shortly after the event, the people gathered around the aircraft suddenly backed away into the surrounding field. “Curtiss climbed into the seat in front of the yellow wings, the assistant turned over the narrow wooden propeller, there was a sharp, loud whirr and a cloud of dust and smoke as the blades of the propeller churned in the air.

“Then, before we realized what it was doing,” Fairchild recalls, “it glided upward into the air and bore down upon us at the rate of 30 miles an hour. Nearer and nearer it came like a gigantic ocher-colored condor carrying its prey. Soon the thin, strong features of the man, his bare outstretched arms with hands on the steering wheel, his legs on the bar in front, riveted our attention. Hemmed in by bars and wires with a 40-horsepower engine exploding behind him leaving a trail of smoke and with a whirling propeller cutting the air 1,200 times a minute, he sailed with forty feet of outstretched wings twenty feet above our heads.”

To Fairchild, and undoubtedly to many of the other spectators, the sight is overwhelming. All at once, he conjures up “strange visions of great fleets of airships crossing and recrossing both oceans with their thousands of passengers. In short we cast aside every pessimism and give our imaginations free rein as we stood watching the weird bowed outline pass by.”

If David Fairchild’s account captures the elation of witnessing the flight itself, Daisy Fairchild’s recollections offer a sense of the pandemonium that ensues as Curtiss crosses the finish line. “As Mr. Curtiss flew over the red flag that marked the finish and way on toward the trees, I don’t think any of us quite knew what we were doing. One lady was so absorbed as not to hear a coming train and
was struck by the engine and had two ribs broke…. We all lost our heads and David shouted, and I cried, and everyone cheered and clapped, and engines tooted.”

As the
June Bug
dips to a landing out of sight, the crowd spontaneously erupts in cheers and onlookers swarm over the potato fields, pastures, and adjacent vineyards and railroad tracks in celebration. As they reach Curtiss and his airplane just beyond a tangle of vines at the field’s edge, they find him calmly examining the
June Bug
’s engine, though his enormous smile reveals his pride. Amid the turmoil, Hawley and Manly carefully measure the official distance of the flight, announcing to the crowd that Curtiss has flown 5,090 feet—just shy of a mile—or 1,810 feet more than the required kilometer.

Everyone jumps, cheers, and hugs one another. The shy Lena Curtiss joins in fully in the impromptu festivities along with the rest of the AEA members, as well as others from the Curtiss shop, including her good friends Harry and Martha Genung. Even the once-skeptical Aero Club members are beside themselves with delight to see the fulfillment of their fondest dreams. Some have studied and experimented with heavier-than-air flight for years. Now, at last, they have witnessed a self-powered flying machine carry a pilot into the air. One formerly skeptical newspaper photographer admits that, while his paper has had him chasing alleged birdmen for two years, he never believed they could really get off the ground.

The flight resoundingly wins the
Scientific American
Trophy for Curtiss and the AEA. Despite the prior claims of flight by the Wright brothers, the contest committee of the Aero Club will also ultimately award Curtiss the nation’s first-ever pilot license, ruling that, with the
June Bug,
Curtiss has made the first officially
observed flight in America and properly deserves the honor.

Curtiss, like the eye of a storm, remains eerily calm at the conclusion of his triumphant flight. He is proud but the attention seems to leave him even stiffer and more tongue-tied than usual. When a reporter asks about the flight, Curtiss can speak only of his focus and determination, noting honestly, “I could hear nothing but the roar of the motor and I saw nothing except the course and the flag marking a distance of one kilometer.”

If Curtiss can’t find the words to capture the significance of the flight of the
June Bug,
there is no shortage of others willing to fill in on his behalf. To the many astonished spectators and reporters on hand, it seems as though the world is changing before their eyes. Headlines across the country blare news of “the first official test of an aeroplane ever made in America.” The Associated Press reporter on the scene calls the flight a matter “of the utmost importance.” As others write, Curtiss and the AEA have done more in one afternoon to boost public faith in the promise of aviation than the Wrights had done in the five years since they claimed to have flown above the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk.

Reflecting on the day much later, Curtiss biographer C. R. Roseberry would note: “There was nothing he could do about it. The newswires had suddenly made Glenn H. Curtiss a famous man. Neither of the Wright brothers had yet flown in public. More than any other aircraft up to that moment, the
June Bug
convinced the world of the reality of human flight.”

E
arly in August 1909, eight months into what is already an extraordinary year, Glenn Curtiss gazes down at the crowd from the deck of the steamship
La Savoie,
departing New York City for France. Curtiss’s wife, Lena, and his best friends, Harry and Martha Genung, stand among the well-wishers on the dock below waving hats and handkerchiefs.

On deck, Curtiss sports a natty, wide-brimmed Panama hat and a small goatee he has grown to cover a lingering scar he received months earlier in an iceboat accident at Alexander Graham Bell’s estate in Nova Scotia. The getup almost succeeds in giving Curtiss a suave, worldly air. But it can’t mask the earnest Hammondsport native underneath or hide his trepidation about the voyage ahead.

Curtiss is heading to Rheims, France, to represent the United
States at the world’s first international flying tournament. He has never traveled to Europe—a considerably bigger trip even than to Bell’s estate in Nova Scotia. He has never been on an ocean liner. Of more importance, the airplane lodged safely in the cargo hold belowdecks, has never been flight-tested. And yet now, at age thirty-one, with a career already full of show-stopping feats, Curtiss’s participation in the
Grande Semaine d’Aviation
promises to mark a new international pinnacle.

Just over a year since Curtiss’s
June Bug
flight, a vast sky of opportunity has opened to him—and the world of aviation has changed dramatically. Prodded by the success of the Aerial Experiment Association and by burgeoning developments in France, the Wright brothers finally decided to demonstrate their aircraft to the public in August and September of 1908. And even aside from the Wrights, an astonishing flurry of activity has thrust the airplane onto the European scene with a dynamism and pace of development few could have anticipated.

As one eminent aviation historian observes, 1908 marks the airplane’s
annus mirabilis
—its miracle year. With the maturation of the internal combustion engine and a working understanding of the aerodynamics of lateral control, the final obstacles to manned, powered flight have been overcome. And almost all at once an assortment of airplane designs has begun to appear in Europe—primarily in France—with dozens of daring and glamorous aviators taking to the skies.

For Curtiss, the past year has brought both tragedy and opportunity. At the Wrights’ first public demonstration in the United States—for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer in Virginia in September 1908—Orville crashed his
Wright Flyer
with Lieutenant Selfridge on board as his passenger. The Army had stipulated to the Wrights
that they were interested in an airplane that could carry a passenger. Orville broke several of his ribs, but young Tom Selfridge, dedicated AEA member and undoubtedly the most competent and knowledgeable aviator in the U.S. military, became the airplane’s first fatality. Selfridge’s death was a terrible personal blow to Curtiss, and it also hastened the demise of the AEA.

With Selfridge’s untimely death, the AEA’s collective undertaking seemed to come to a natural, if heartrending end. The year-long contract the AEA members had made with one another was due to expire and they had achieved success far beyond their wildest expectations. While the remaining members remained close for the rest of their lives, the loss of a vital team member precipitated their somber decision to dissolve their formal association. McCurdy and Casey Baldwin chose to continue their aeronautical research in Canada with Bell as a senior consultant. Curtiss, with the group’s blessing, opted to try manufacturing more airplanes in Hammondsport, building upon the success of the
June Bug.
In a somewhat impetuous move, Curtiss also decided to team up with a quixotic Aero Club member named Augustus Herring.

It is not entirely clear what Curtiss saw in Herring, but most likely he was taken with Herring’s indisputably vast aviation experience as well as his claim to having numerous seminal aeronautical patents. Herring was urbane, educated, and as Curtiss put it admiringly, “a marvelous talker.” Plus, he seemed to have an uncanny knack for attaching himself to many of the legendary names in the field of aviation. He had assisted Octave Chanute with his biplane glider design and had worked for Hiram Maxim in Britain when Maxim was attempting to build a flying machine toward the end of the 1880s. He had even briefly helped Langley with the aerodrome’s construction. And he had won a contract from the U.S.
Army to build an airplane, even though he had yet to actually deliver it. To Curtiss, still a relative neophyte in the aviation field, Herring’s résumé, contacts, and grandiose testaments of his accomplishments must have seemed like an important asset to a new company hoping to build and sell airplanes.

Before this new partnership began, Curtiss and Kleckler built an airplane under a commission from the Aeronautical Society in New York. Called the
Gold Bug,
it was the first commercially sold airplane in the United States—a fact that sent the Wrights into paroxysms of fury. Adding to the Wrights’ indignation, Curtiss piloted the
Gold Bug
to victory in a second competition for the
Scientific American
Trophy. In this round, Curtiss flew nonstop for 24.7 miles over a circular course on Long Island, New York, close to double the 25-kilometer circle required to engrave his name for the second consecutive time on the nation’s most prestigious, independent aviation award. Equally important, Curtiss more than amply demonstrated the airplane’s capabilities to its proud new owners at the Aeronautical Society. They had little doubt that Curtiss had built—and they had purchased—by far the most successful flying machine in America.

On board the ocean liner
Savoie,
Curtiss sits on a deck chair, flanked by the two assistants he is bringing with him to Rheims. He has left his Hammondsport business in the trusted hands of Kleckler and Genung. For the trip, he has done his best to replicate the pair who have always offered him their unstinting support. To aid with the engine in Kleckler’s stead, he has brought Tod Shriver, a promising young mechanic; while for the personal loyalty and all-around support usually provided by Genung, he has asked Ward
Fisher to come to France with him. A Hammondsport local, Fisher has been a good friend ever since Curtiss’s bicycle-racing days. The three peruse an advance program advertising the meet and marvel at the turn of events that has brought them to this ocean crossing.

Just two months earlier, Cortlandt Bishop, the wealthy, debonair president of the Aero Club, heard of Curtiss’s feat in the
Gold Bug
and cabled urging him to enter the Rheims meet. Curtiss hesitated. He had no airplane and had never tried to build one to race for speed. Bishop convinced him to try nonetheless. If for no other reason, Bishop said, Curtiss should enter the meet to represent the United States, especially because the Wrights, as usual, had declined to participate. Once again, the Wrights had protested to the Rheims organizers that the rules required contestants to take off on level ground on their airplane’s own power without benefit of tracks or derricks. This time, however, the French organizers called the Wrights’ bluff, offering to modify the rules on their behalf. But the brothers still refused to enter, even though Orville was scheduled to be in Europe at the time. Their petty objections assuaged, the Wrights were left only to gripe about the Rheims meet itself, telling the press that “circus performances like this do no good for the science of aviation.”

For his part, Curtiss was captivated by Bishop’s suggestion, but bringing a plane to Europe was a big undertaking. Bishop, who had inherited millions from his father’s real estate interests, finally convinced Curtiss by offering to personally reimburse all his expenses if the plane failed to win any of the meet’s $40,000 in prize money. Ever the businessman, Curtiss easily figured that he had nothing to lose. At the very least, he would see what Europe was like, and with luck, it could help attract a world of business to his new aeroplane manufacturing venture.

Although Curtiss knew from Bell and others that European aviators were making great strides, he received stunning news just shortly before his departure: On July 25, 1909, Louis Bleriot triumphantly piloted a small monoplane across the English Channel. Curtiss’s own 24.7-mile flight on Long Island earlier that month had been slightly longer than Bleriot’s 22-mile journey from Calais, France, to the Cliffs of Dover, England. But the distance was all but irrelevant. Fully capturing the European imagination, Bleriot’s feat had an impact incalculably greater.

Because of his last-minute decision to enter the Rheims meet, Curtiss opted to build a machine much like the
Gold Bug.
To increase its speed, he made the new machine a bit lighter and added a new water-cooled, 50-horsepower engine and a longer propeller. There was no time to build many spare parts, but Curtiss did manage to pack an extra propeller in case the original broke. His chief concern—and, he believed, the linchpin to any possibility of success against his competitors—was the motor, just as it had been with his motorcycle triumph years earlier. As a result, he fussed relentlessly to refine the engine design, working all night long with Kleckler and Shriver on the eve of his departure to get it to reliably develop the desired 50 horsepower on the test block. Given the time constraints, though, the new motor had only one day of bench testing. The team didn’t even have time to give the aircraft a trial flight.

Working up to the very last moment, Curtiss nearly missed the train to New York. Lena, Harry, and Martha had to rush ahead to Hammondsport station to convince the conductor to hold the train while Curtiss and his workers hurriedly packed the engine and dashed to the station, where the crate was quickly shoved into a boxcar alongside the packing boxes containing the aircraft’s frame.

Upon his arrival in France in late August, Curtiss finds the country agog over the airplane. The Rheims meet offers the biggest and best example: twenty-two fliers are slated to attend. They will bring airplanes representing no fewer than ten manufacturers, further testifying to the ferment that has taken place in aviation, especially over the past year. European inventors have made many important incremental steps toward a working airplane ever since the turn of the century, but the work has recently grown into a full-blown renaissance. Most of the aircraft are French—Voisins, Bleriots, Antoinettes, and Farmans—but three French pilots are scheduled to fly Wright aircraft. Even though the brothers will not attend, three of their airplanes, assembled under contract in France and modified to take off from wheels, have been entered. Curtiss and his
Rheims Racer,
as he has named his entry, will be the only fully American entry. Curtiss knows little about the French-designed planes, but he relishes the chance to go head-to-head in the air against the Wright brothers’ airplanes.

The continent is so keyed up over its first competitive flying spectacle that, as one U.S. reporter puts it, the excitement is hard to convey to an American readership. “It is as though,” he writes, New York were about to host a simultaneous combination of “the Vanderbilt Cup Race, the Futurity, a Yale-Harvard boat race, a championship series of ball games between the Giants and Chicago, and a municipal election.”

Seeking to create the aura and grandeur of a world’s fair, the French have spared no expense for the weeklong event. The Grand Marquis de Polignac has supervised the planning with the Aéro-Club de France, agreeing to oversee the various races. Eager to attach themselves to this latest, glamorous, and wildly popular
sport of aviation, the region’s major champagne producers, including Bollinger, Moët et Chandon, and Veuve Cliquot, have contributed handsome sums toward the site’s preparation and offered much of the meet’s lavish prize money.

For the site, the committee has chosen the plain of Betheny, on the outskirts of Rheims, eighty miles east of Paris. Steeped in history, the ancient cathedral city is the heart of France’s champagne-producing region, as well as the site where French kings have been crowned for centuries. Now, in the heady thrall of the early twentieth century, the organizers hope Rheims might forever be associated with something equally glamorous but considerably more modern: the crowning of a sky king.

To accommodate the race, the organizers have built grandstands for 50,000 spectators modeled after those at the world’s elite horseracing venues. They have even constructed a railroad line and new stations to transport visitors to the site. And they have designed the ten-square-kilometer flying field to include hangars, barber shops, florists, and a 600-seat restaurant with 50 cooks and 150 waiters. Of course, they also included ample space for a terrace bar where patrons could sip the world’s finest champagne as they watch the show.

With aviation excitement gripping France after Bleriot’s flight across the English Channel, the Rheims event could not be better timed. The organizers had hoped for some 250,000 spectators over the course of the week, but by the time the
Grande Semaine d’Aviation
is through, they will attract more than twice that number. As the opening draws near, eager visitors have reserved even the tiniest bedrooms in humble houses near the site and driven the prices of accommodations to unheard-of heights, with suites at Rheims hotels going for as much as $5,000 for the week.

In Paris, Curtiss is greeted at the station by the ever-cosmopolitan Cortlandt Bishop and immediately feels out of his depth. Bishop is amazed to discover that Curtiss and his team brought the entire aeroplane, packed in crates, along with them on the train as personal luggage. As Curtiss explains, the freight carrier would not guarantee timely delivery of the aircraft to Rheims. Most shocking to Bishop, as it will be to almost all the European aviation enthusiasts, is how compact Curtiss’s machine is. Curtiss’s entire aeroplane fit into a passenger compartment across from the one they sat in. Among Curtiss’s innovations, he has manufactured the wings in sections so that they can be more easily shipped.