Authors: Seth Shulman
Baldwin came by train to Hammondsport in the fall of that year directly after a stunning success with his dirigible at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world’s fair held in St. Louis, Missouri. The fair was an enormous event, designed to commemorate the centennial of the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. President Teddy Roosevelt even attended to review the opening parade. With a $100,000 grand prize for the best demonstration of an aircraft, the fair’s organizers had drawn the attention of every aviator in the world, including Santos-Dumont.
Even the Wright brothers were tempted to display their flying machine. With the urging of their mentor Octave Chanute, the Wrights went so far as to visit the St. Louis fairgrounds and to ask the rules committee to make the contest guidelines more favorable to the inclusion of heavier-than-air machines. But ultimately, even
the lavish prize money could not lure the Wrights into a public display.
With the Wrights’ refusal to enter and with Santos-Dumont’s dirigible unexpectedly damaged, it was Baldwin’s airship—powered by a Curtiss engine—that won top honors after making a controlled flight over St. Louis. Mismanagement led the organizers to rescind their lavish reward, but even this didn’t dim the acclaim Baldwin won. Banner headlines proclaimed him the leading airship designer of the era. And Baldwin attributed his success in great part to the craft’s engine. Determined to meet personally with the manufacturer who had brought him such a triumph, Baldwin arrived in Hammondsport before Curtiss had even heard the news of his flight.
As Baldwin often explained afterward, he expected to find a big, important-looking industrialist at the helm of the Hammondsport manufacturing operation. He had a hard time believing that the lanky, unassuming twenty-five-year-old Curtiss, who sheepishly presented himself, was really the head of the firm. But if Baldwin was surprised by Curtiss, it is safe to say that Curtiss’s amazement with Baldwin was greater.
It is little wonder that Curtiss would be enthralled with his world-renowned visitor. A hulking two hundred pounds, with a broad face and winning smile, Baldwin was a celebrity, certainly not the kind of visitor who graced remote Hammondsport every day. He seemed to have been everywhere, while Curtiss had hardly ever left Hammondsport. And best of all, under the circumstances of Baldwin’s recent success in St. Louis, he didn’t even sound too farfetched when he predicted grandly that Curtiss engines would soon power fleets of airships around the world.
Curtiss immediately invited Baldwin to stay as his houseguest.
Lena couldn’t help but be excited. She fretted about the simplicity of their home and made Curtiss wear his good suit to dinner. They were both grateful and relieved at how unpretentious Baldwin turned out to be. But it was his stories that charmed them the most: his seemingly endless stream of tales kept them rapt and often made them quite literally gasp in amazement.
As Baldwin recounted to the young couple, he had first taken his act to Europe in the late 1880s, after encouragement from world-famous, Wild West showman “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Baldwin’s act was a roaring success and he performed his aerial feats before a long series of wildly cheering, sold-out crowds. On one of his European visits, he was the first foreigner Count Zeppelin ever took through the interior of the aircraft that bore his name. In London, the British Parliament had adjourned to see him perform. Baldwin even wore a diamond ring presented to him by Queen Victoria “for his daring, skill and aid to science.”
Baldwin’s personal history was as twisted and exciting as that of earliest aviation itself. Orphaned at the age of twelve, young Thomas Baldwin soon ran away to find his fortune. He sold newspapers in Missouri, worked as a street lamp gaslighter, tried his hand as a railroad brakeman in Illinois and followed that with a stint as a door-to-door salesman throughout the Midwest. After a chance encounter with a trapeze artist, Baldwin joined a traveling circus. He soon mastered the tightrope and received top billing for his fearless performances. In one of his most spectacular feats, Baldwin walked a high wire strung along the coast of San Francisco from the well-known Cliff House to Seal Rocks, some 700 feet long and 90 feet above the ocean.
In 1887, at the age of twenty-nine, Baldwin teamed up with a balloonist named Park A. Van Tassel and made a parachute jump from
Van Tassel’s balloon before some thirty thousand paying spectators in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. From then on, Baldwin was irrevocably hooked on aviation. Before long he began experimenting with his own hot-air balloon and his own design for a parachute with many visionary new features. It was made of pure silk, completely collapsible with flexible shroud lines and an eighteen-inch hole cut in the top for the air to escape through. The design was so effective that, even though Baldwin never patented it, he would long be credited with inventing the collapsible parachute in 1885.
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Baldwin’s success in St. Louis and his visit to Hammondsport did much to change Curtiss’s cautious skepticism about aviation. With Baldwin’s encouragement, Curtiss plunged into designing engines specifically for use in dirigibles. Curtiss even constructed a land vehicle he called a “wind-wagon,” replete with three wheels and propeller mounted in the rear, to test the power of the new motors and to help design an efficient aerial propeller. He took great glee in testing the machine on the outskirts of town. Much to the horror of his Hammondsport neighbors, the deafening prototype frightened farm animals and raised a cloud of dust in its sputtering wake. They wondered if Curtiss was getting carried away, quite literally, on a flight of fancy.
Curtiss even got his first taste of air travel by making an ascent in one of Baldwin’s dirigibles in a pasture outside of Hammondsport. Theirs would be a lasting friendship. Ultimately, Baldwin would even move his operations to Hammondsport. He would make a total of thirteen airships outfitted with Curtiss motors in the years to come,
including the first aircraft ever purchased by the U.S. military (aside from its abortive attempt to underwrite Langley’s efforts).
Soon virtually all dirigible balloons operating in the United States would be driven by Curtiss motors. First prize at the St. Louis exposition in 1904 was followed by a dramatic and awe-inspiring flight over Portland, Oregon, at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in the spring of 1905. As was increasingly his penchant, the hefty Baldwin remained on the ground, sending in his place a fearless—and much more lithe—teenager named Lincoln Beachey, a man who would eventually become the most famous flier of his generation.
The Portland flight was so successful that Beachey decided to set out on his own. On a beautiful June morning in 1906, with no notice or official authorization, nineteen-year-old Lincoln Beachey took off from a park in Washington, D.C., in a dirigible outfitted with a Curtiss engine. He would be the first aeronaut to grace the nation’s capital. He soared above the treetops, circled the Washington Monument, and then landed on the lawn of the White House, climbing out of the airship to meet an astonished first lady—Mrs. Edith Roosevelt—who interrupted a meeting to examine Beachey’s contraption for herself. Awestruck, Mrs. Roosevelt rightly pronounced Beachey’s stunt the most novel call ever made upon the White House and said she was sorry her husband Teddy was off giving a speech and not there to see it himself. With Mrs. Roosevelt’s blessing, Beachey got back in the ship and breezed his way over to the Capitol Building, circling the dome several times as lawmakers flooded out from a joint session of Congress onto the Capitol steps for the spectacle. Beachey handily landed the dirigible before the spellbound leaders and sauntered over to spend the next hour answering their numerous and animated questions.
There was no doubt that the times were changing. Curtiss would still occasionally call his flying customers cranks, but like the rest of the world, he couldn’t help but take the idea of air travel more seriously. Interest in flying moved further into the mainstream with the founding of the Aero Club of America in 1905. Scores of inventors around the world were actively trying to solve the puzzle of heavier-than-air flight. Their efforts would bring dramatic changes. And Curtiss would soon find himself in the center of it all.
How did the airplane come into being? Some inventions arrive at once, presenting themselves in a brilliant flash of insight. Curtiss’s invention of the motorcycle’s handlebar throttle is a small example. Still other developments occur by accident, often in the active pursuit of something else. Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, was working to improve the telegraph when he first stumbled on the concept of the variable resistance of electric current that would make the telephone possible.
The airplane, however, was an invention categorically unlike these fortuitous or accidental developments. On the contrary, it had been envisioned in rich detail for generations and was doubtless a mainstay of the imagination ever since humans first observed birds in flight. Leonardo da Vinci famously drew diagrams of flying machines as early as 1483 and some intellectual historians champion far earlier antecedents. The problem was making an airplane that would actually work. And the quest was a long one indeed.
Dreams and visions aside, the heavier-than-air flying machine was actively under development for a full century before the Wright brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk. In fits and starts, with contributions from many sources around the world—some scientists and
engineers, some daredevil nonconformists—the airplane’s development moved incrementally forward.
Of course, these early efforts met with only limited success. Many pioneers displayed an incomplete understanding of aerodynamics. Others lacked a practical system of propulsion. Still other attempts at a working airplane led entire schools of researchers down blind alleys. Nonetheless, the standard engineering assessment that brands all these early efforts flatly as failures is a woeful misreading of history. Repeated and reinforced in scores of aviation texts and children’s history books alike, such a view does more than miss a crucial truth about the origin of the airplane. With it we willfully deceive ourselves about the way new technology evolves.
Like most other technologies—and in fact like so many of humanity’s great conceptual breakthroughs—the concept of the airplane percolated slowly, refined and distilled as many great minds grappled with different aspects of its deepening mysteries. In many ways, the airplane was like a difficult jigsaw puzzle; for it to succeed, many pieces had to be put together correctly. The puzzle would not be complete until its final piece was set in place. But many important victories would be achieved as seminal pieces came together along the way.
One extraordinary theoretical leap was achieved by Sir George Cayley, a British nobleman, who started his aeronautical investigations in 1796. Cayley was a gentleman scientist with a voracious and broad-ranging interest in the world around him. In his voluminous journal, he recorded all his measurements about the world around him, from the fact that crows flew 23 miles per hour on a calm day, to the observation that his thumbnail grew at a rate of exactly one-half inch in 100 days. He was the first to envision a practical airplane design as we know it today replete with fixed wings, a cruciform tail
unit and a propulsion system. Perhaps even more important, Cayley deserves recognition as the father of modern aeronautics for his surprisingly sophisticated understanding of air resistance and the need to control an airborne craft along all its axes, now known as pitch, yaw, and roll.
A visionary who published his research and inspired many others to come, Cayley called the air “an uninterrupted navigable ocean that comes to the threshold of every man’s door.” At a time in the early nineteenth century when the view was nothing short of heretical, Cayley never doubted the viability of a heavier-than-air craft. As he put it in 1809, for instance, he was “perfectly confident” that someday people would transport themselves, their families, and their goods, “more securely by air than by water and with a velocity of from 20 to 100 miles per hour”—an audacious and startling prediction for a man of his day.
As important as his theories were, however, Cayley’s work went far beyond the theoretical. In 1853, from the hill behind Brompton Hall, his British estate, Cayley launched the world’s first full-scale glider capable of successfully carrying a passenger. Oddly enough, a half century before Kitty Hawk, Cayley’s reluctant coachman was the first person ever to fly in a heavier-than-air contraption, soaring for some nine hundred feet over the British countryside and becoming so terrified in the process that he tendered his resignation immediately upon landing.
In retrospect, it seems clear that all Cayley lacked to make a working airplane was a lightweight engine. He quickly realized that the steam engines of his day were too heavy to do the job. And, after some brief experimentation with several alternative propulsion systems, he reluctantly gave up hope of motorizing his craft, once again writing presciently that a much cheaper “gaslight” engine would
likely be produced someday. Given Cayley’s precedent-setting place in history, decades before the internal combustion engine developed enough to be usable, that piece of the aeronautical puzzle would simply remain beyond his grasp.
Like Cayley, dozens of early aviation experimentalists played an indispensable role in amassing technical data about flight. Several of these, including Percy Pilcher in Britain, John Montgomery in California, and Otto Lilienthal in Germany, even lost their lives testing their designs.
Lilienthal’s experimental work was undoubtedly the most important. A professional engineer who manufactured steam boilers, Lilienthal was passionate about flying and undertook a systematic study of the lifting power of surfaces and the movement of the center of pressure when wings are placed at different angles—an important step in understanding the stability of aircraft.
Often working after dark to avoid the opprobrium of his neighbors, Lilienthal recorded the results as he jumped repeatedly into the wind in the Rhinower Hills, six miles northwest of Berlin in hang gliders of his own design, soaring at times for more than one thousand feet. Based on his experiments, Lilienthal published detailed tables in 1889 calculating the lift of wings with different designs and camber, or pitch. Convinced that powered flight would one day be practical, Lilienthal successfully completed more than two thousand flights with his various gliders before he was killed in August 1896 when a sudden gust caused his glider to stall and crash to the ground.