Appendix B: Early Aircraft of the U.S. Navy
Selected Bibliography
Index
1. Orville Wright flying an early Wright aeroplane, Fort Myer, Virginia, September 1909. (U.S. Army)
CHAPTER ONE: FIRST AMERICAN FLIGHTS
The United States Navy, which pioneered in ironclad warships, submarines, and nuclear power, was pushed into aviation. Man had been flying heavier-than-air machines for nearly seven years when the Navy first officially noticed aeronautics. Its natural conservatism should be viewed against the backdrop of what had been happening in the field of aviation.
Even after the Wrights had successfully taken to the air in 1903, scientists and engineers, such as Professor Simon Newcomb and Admiral George W. Melville, continued to prove in print that flying machines were impracticable, if not impossible. The Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute reflected professional naval thinking; no mention of flying machines is to be found in its pages before 1907.
At that time George Dewey, Admiral of the Fleet and President of the new General Board, was one who wondered if flying machines could be used at sea. He had been in the Navy before it had armored ships; he knew changes were possible. In 1904, he had gone to St. Louis to see Santos-Dumont fly his dirigible. The gas bag split before it got off the ground. But this experience did not disillusion the Admiral. He kept an open and inquiring mind. “If you can fly higher than the crow’s-nest, we will use you,” he told inventors.
In those early days, most men were so sure that aeroplanes were fakes that no mere news report could convince them; everyone had to see a flight for himself before he changed his opinion. Orville Wright’s flights at Fort Myer in 1908 converted the first large group of Americans. But at the time, most ranking naval officers were at sea, taking Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet around the world.
After the next Fort Myer show, the following year, the Fleet lay at anchor in the North River for the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Navy men then had a chance to watch the Wrights and their aircraft fight bumpy winds above Riverside Drive. But most of them did not think the Navy had a place for such things. Seafaring men are usually a conservative lot and to them the machine looked altogether too puny for use at sea.
The Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute reflected this traditionally conservative attitude. A British source was quoted praising a professor who had “demonstrated the small efficiency of the aeroplane as a war engine,” while it ridiculed a major who thought it might have military uses. A Scientific American author was also quoted as saying that no sane aviator would try to get off the ground if a breath of wind were stirring. He forecast a long wait before machines could land and take off with any degree of freedom. “The most absurd claim,” he said, “is . . . their ability to sail over hostile territory and destroy cities, fortifications, and military depots by dropping high explosives.” Other similar sources were presented arguing that artillery would force flying machines so high their bombs could not hit accurately, and anyway, the Russo-Japanese war had shown that good armor could not be punctured. In 1909, most military men agreed that flying machines had no present military value, could never be used as weapons, and offered only ultimate development as scouts.
2. The first powered heavier-than-air flight in the first Wright aeroplane, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, 17 December 1903. (U.S. Army Air Force Photo, National Archives)
3. The Wright brothers, 1910. (Library of Congress)
But outside the Navy, the exhibition flights of the Wrights had triggered a considerable change of sentiment. From disbelief, the popular view changed to gullible credulity. Aviation magazines flourished. The science fiction of 1910 blossomed with aerial adventure stories. Men who had never flown, been to sea, or experienced a battle, wrote of bombed-out navies, blasted cities, and helpless armies. Not in the future, they asserted, but right then, flying machines had made armies and navies forever obsolete.
Inventors, sportsmen, millionaires, stuntmen, society leaders—everyone wanted to play a part in aviation. It was popular. It was stylish. But the Navy Department was unimpressed. Air shows were making big money for the Wrights, Curtiss, some far lesser-known aviators, and plain frauds. Reporters who knew nothing about flying wrote reams of improbable bunk about the fad. A few aviators soon achieved fame in the new business. Eugene Ely, a skinny, young mechanic in Portland, Oregon, was one. In April 1910, he pieced together a wrecked Curtiss plane and practiced taxiing it on a race track, until one afternoon it accidentally bounced into the air. That night he began contracting for exhibition flights. In July, he joined the Curtiss Exhibition Company, and by fall he was one of the nation’s leading professional flyers, with Aero Club of America license number 17.
The Navy still sat tight. In 1910, the Proceedings mentioned aeroplanes only once, using a quotation which proved that planes could never affect the outcome of a naval battle. The article ended, “The flying machine of fiction may be a very formidable monster, but the real thing is feeble enough, the sport of wind and a hundred mischances.” However, in the Department, responsible men faced an increasing volume of mail from air-minded civilians.
The Secretary of the Navy was the Honorable George von L. Meyer, a Bostonian, who had inherited position and money, made more of the latter in business, and then served ably as an ambassador and as Theodore Roosevelt’s postmaster general. He was a friend of European rulers, understood the political aspects of the Navy, and was proud of his reputation as an efficient administrator. He wanted to retain that reputation in spite of his ignorance of technical engineering and naval matters.
One July evening in 1909, Secretary Meyer took Senator Henry Cabot Lodge out to Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, to watch Orville Wright make “a very successful and interesting flight.” Meyer later wrote that he considered the plane to be the “beginning of a new mode of transportation,” and he speculated on how different planes would look in 25 years. At the end of the month he noted in his diary, that “the Wrights made their flight to Alexandria and back to Fort Myer, carrying a passenger and averaging 42 miles an hour.”
4. Secretary of the Navy George von L. Meyer. (National Archives)
5. The Wright 1901 glider, being flown as a kite, on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. (Smithsonian Institution)
For several reasons no naval use for aircraft occurred to him. He was not a technician. More important, both he and Rear Admiral Wainwright, his Aide for Operations, believed that Navy money should go into fighting machines, that planes would never fight. Even if bombing, which had been suggested, became practicable, it would never be used, he thought. He was certain, as was Wainwright, that the rules of chivalrous warfare would preclude such barbarity.
But what about all those letters to the Department from air-minded civilians? In September 1910, Secretary Meyer called in his Assistant Aide for Materiel and told him to answer the queries, to watch developments, and to bring up any that should concern the Navy. In this offhand fashion, 54-year-old Captain Washington Irving Chambers became the first naval officer to be permanently assigned to duties involving naval aviation.
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