Langley’s experiment, theirs was a small, private venture. No advance notices, or big investments, drew reporters and official witnesses. Someone mentioned the flights on the Coast Guard party line along the Carolina-Virginia outer beaches. This word reached a couple of Norfolk newspaper men, who then offered garbled versions to distant papers. Conservative editors refused to buy; sensational papers printed implausible accounts of the machine’s cabin and the big propeller underneath that held it up.
When the Wright brothers went home to Dayton they were just small business men with the problem of a successful but unmarketable invention. In February 1904, the New York Independent printed a brief factual account of the flights over Wilbur’s signature. The Scientific American quoted it. Neither editor risked an opinion about the report.
That summer, from a leased field near Dayton, they flew and practiced turns in the air. Only a few farmer friends watched them. Big prizes were attracting many unsuccessful flying machine inventors to the St. Louis Exposition. But Orville and Wilbur stayed away. They considered their machine too simple and too valuable to show publicly before they were protected by patents.
9. A 1907 Wright aeroplane in flight at Pilot Training School, Montgomery, Alabama, 1910. (Wide World Photo)
10. Glenn L. Martin taught himself to fly and built his own Wright-type planes. (National Archives)
In January 1905, they made their first offer to demonstrate the machine to the Army at no cost to the government. The letter went to the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications. But its members, still touchy over the Langley debacle, wanted nothing to do with any flying machine. Even though no money was involved, they gave the Wrights a polite brush-off.
A year and a half later the brothers received a basic patent. It was so general that besides the warping of the wings, it covered every other system of lateral flight control that has ever succeeded. Nevertheless, the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications still refused a free look at their flying machine.
That summer, the Wrights planned to startle the government into action by suddenly appearing in their machine, as a floatplane, over the navies of the world assembled in Hampton Roads for the Jamestown Exposition. But they dropped the plan before the floats were ready because a British-French syndicate, which had quietly investigated their activities, invited them abroad to demonstrate their craft.
Their skill as fliers, acquired in seven years’ practice, made the Wrights an immediate success. By the end of summer, European companies were being licensed to build Wright machines, and American papers were spreading their fame. President Roosevelt prodded William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War, and Taft pushed the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications, which at long last got in touch with the Wrights. In December, the Board invited them to build and demonstrate, at no cost to the government, a machine that could take off in a short space, carry two persons for an hour at a speed of at least 40 miles per hour, hold enough fuel for a flight of 125 miles, and be easy to take apart and fold into an Army wagon.
In September 1908, by Army invitation, the Navy sent Lieutenant George Sweet and Naval Constructor William McEntee to be members of the Aero Board appointed to observe Orville Wright’s demonstration at Fort Myer. His plane was larger; the engine produced 25 horsepower. The pilot sat on the leading edge of the lower wing, instead of lying on his stomach. A foot throttle freed his right hand to manage the lever that now controlled wing tips and rudder. The passenger seat beside him on the centerline was partly in front of the radiator and engine. The outriggers could fold to let the machine ride atop a wagon. For the short takeoff, the plane straddled a monorail with one of its landing skids resting lightly on the ground. A line led from the machine, over a head-sheave on the track, then back to a weight hanging from a timber tripod to the rear of the monorail.
11. Captain Thomas S. Baldwin flying his balloon over Fort Myer, Virginia, 12 August 1908. Glenn Curtiss is running the four-cylinder, 24-horsepower motor. This first water-cooled Curtiss engine had enough power to drive the gas bag at twenty miles per hour. (National Archives)
On 3 September, at the Fort Myer, Virginia, parade ground, Sweet, McEntee, and a few hundred skeptics gathered around the Wright flying machine. Orville took his seat on the wing and raced the engine. Then he yanked a release rope, the weight fell, and the plane scooted along the rail and skimmed up into the air. Orville flew one and a half times around the parade ground in less than two minutes, then landed. He made it look easy and the crowd went wild.
Every day for the next two weeks, thousands of persons jammed the field to see a flight. Twice they saw Orville carry a passenger. When he stayed up for an hour and a quarter, it was a world’s record. Sweet was enthusiastic. He talked to Orville about flying from a ship. The inventor thought it would be easy. He offered to help draw up practicable specifications for a suitable machine.
Then, on 17 September, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, United States Army, rode as Orville’s passenger. They had planned a passenger-carrying test flight to Alexandria and back. Moments after they left the ground, a propeller tip cut a tail brace wire. The rudder flopped over, trailing at a crazy angle. Orville tried to avoid trees and rough ground ahead by turning back toward the field. On the turn, the machine stalled and dove into the ground. Selfridge, crushed by the engine and radiator, was the first man killed in an aeroplane.
George Sweet’s original report of the trials proposed that the Navy take up Orville Wright’s offer and get planes for shipboard tests. This suggestion stopped with his superior, Rear Admiral Cowles, Chief of the Bureau of Equipment. Two and a half months later, Cowles signed an emasculated revision which stated in part: “From recent tests at Fort Myer and reports of this machine from France . . . it has been demonstrated beyond a doubt that aeroitation [sic] is finally an accomplished fact . . . and man can fly when he wants to within the limits of the machine.” The remainder of seven pages listed possible future aeroplane developments and obvious naval applications. There was no account of the Fort Myer flights, no mention of Orville Wright’s offer of assistance, and no recommendation for Navy action. Consequently, nothing came of it.
However, George Sweet had a recompense of sorts. On 9 November 1909, Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, one of the Army’s first three pilots, who had been one of Sweet’s fellow members on the observing team, carried him as a passenger in the Army’s first Wright plane. Thus Sweet became the first naval officer to fly in a heavier-than-air machine.
Glenn Curtiss was a young man with an ingenious and inquiring mind who also got his start in a bicycle shop. His desire to get something to push his bicycle up the hills of Hammondsport, New York, led him to buy a mail-order engine, which he shortly improved upon. When other people saw his motorized bicycle, they wanted one like it, and soon Curtiss found his bicycle shop had turned into a motorcycle shop. He, like the Wrights, worked by trial and error, and his mechanical ability proved to be a great asset in designing his engines.
12. Glenn Curtiss in his June Bug, 4 July 1908. (Clara Studer)
One of his 2-cycle gasoline motorcycle engines was purchased by Captain Thomas S. (“Cap”) Baldwin, a builder of primitive blimps of the day. Baldwin hung the engine under a gas bag, called it an “airship,” and demonstrated it successfully at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. Would-be blimp builders, of whom there were quite a few, were soon ordering Curtiss engines. Later,
