Curtiss now went seriously into the aeroplane business. He taught himself more airmanship, and he advertised. In 1909, he delivered a plane to the New York Aeronautical Association at Mineola and showed a couple of its members, who were wealthy sportsmen, how to fly it. Later, financed by them, he represented America in France at the world’s first International Air Meet and brought home the Gordon-Bennett cup for speed. The Aero Club of America gave him the first Federation Aeronautique Internationale license issued in America.
13. Curtiss took the wheels off the June Bug, added two floats, or canoe-like pontoons, and renamed the contraption the Loon.
Curtiss experimented with the hydroaeroplane, as he called it, hoping to recoup his fortunes with basic patents almost as valuable as the Wrights’. In 1908, he began by mounting his June Bug on a pair of canoeshaped pontoons, but the plane could never get up sufficient speed to take off. Before the Belmont meet he tried hydroplane floats, got up to speed, but failed to break free of the water’s suction; however, he was certain that he was close to success.
Curtiss won $10,000, on 29 May 1909, which had been offered by the New York World, for the first flight from Albany to New York City. He made the 137-mile trip in 152 minutes, with two stops for gas; his fame now began to approach that of the Wrights. He organized the Curtiss-Herring Company to build planes, and air show teams to advertise them. The Wrights met this competition with exhibition teams of their own, and patent infringement suits.
On 22 October 1910, the aviation world gathered at Belmont Park, New York, for the United States’ first international air meet. The Wrights kept aloof from social functions, associating only with their own pilots. They looked on other fliers as chiselers, who by using bootleg craft sought to avoid the payment of license fees justly due the Wrights. The Curtiss clique and other pilots regarded the Wrights as dour, unfriendly, and unapproachable. This situation developed into a lengthy suit for patent infringement, initiated by the Wright brothers. The crux of the issue lay between the principle of wing warping, which they had developed, and the hinged aileron that Curtiss built between the wings of his biplanes.
This issue was most bitterly fought out. In the end the federal courts ruled that the principle of wing-warping, invented by the Wrights, had been infringed by Curtiss’ hinged aileron. The legal quarrel quickly developed into a vicious personal feud which divided the aviation world during its early years and vastly complicated the whole aeronautical situation prior to 1917. The Wrights’ cockpit control system was complicated and unnatural, and produced pilots who flew but could solo only if a weight was in the other seat. The Curtiss system used normal reactions somewhat like the Deperdussin, a system of stick control which had been developed in France, and which eventually became standard for all aircraft.
Nearly seven years had passed since the memorable flight of the Wright brothers on the dunes of Kitty Hawk. In the years to follow, the U. S. Navy would take the first moves in making this new plaything of the air a vital part of future fighting fleets.
1. Preparing for Eugene Ely’s flight off the USS Birmingham, 14 November 1910. Sailors had constructed an 83-foot platform from the bridge rail to the main deck at the bow. Ely’s Curtiss biplane was hoisted aboard, and while the Birmingham got under way, the flier and his mechanics installed the engine and double-checked the plane.
CHAPTER TWO: THE NAVY INVESTIGATES AVIATION
Washington Irving Chambers, Captain, United States Navy, was of medium height with brown hair that was beginning to grow thin and a half-moon mustache above his soft mouth. He had stood twenty-seventh in his 1876 class of forty-one graduates from the Naval Academy. In those days, promotion was slow. Two decades after graduation, during the war with Spain, he was a lieutenant commander at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island. Then followed successive tours of duty at sea. His first command was the schooner Frolic. Next came the gunboat Nashville, followed by the monitor Florida.
During the following years, Chambers had finally achieved the line officer’s goal—a battleship command—and wore his captain’s stripes with self-confidence and pride. Chambers worked for Admiral Dewey in 1904, but he did not accompany him to St. Louis when the Admiral watched Santos-Dumont fly his dirigible. When the Wrights flew from Fort Myer in 1908 and 1909, he was Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, but there is no evidence that he took a professional interest in them. When the Wright brothers flew up the Hudson River to Grant’s Tomb, he witnessed the event from his command, the battleship Louisiana, but he was unimpressed.
Less than three months later, because of his familiarity with ordnance material, the Navy Department cut short his captain’s cruise before it had well begun and ordered him back to Washington for duty. He asked to stay at sea, but was told his “special abilities” were needed in Washington, and in December 1909 he became assistant to Captain Frank Friday Fletcher, who was Aide for Materiel to Secretary of the Navy Meyer.
Nine months later Chambers was handed the aviation mail as an additional duty. There was nothing in his past experience to qualify him in the new field of aeronautics, so he proceeded to read everything he, or the naval librarian, could find on the subject. The mechanical details of the flying machines, both proposed and in use, fascinated him. But he had never been in the air, or closely observed any aircraft, and could only assess what he read against his own seagoing background. Thus he began his new career with some of Langley’s fallacious reasoning and with no conception of a plane’s weight-power-wing relationship. He pictured a naval plane as an unusually handy ship’s boat. It cost about the same. The steering of it, up and down, or right and left, appeared to him as similar to the work of a boat’s coxswain.
In October, his old boss, Admiral Dewey, nudged the Navy closer to aviation. He recommended that in the future the Bureau of Steam Engineering and the Bureau of Construction and Repair design scouting vessels with space for aeroplanes.
In those days Navy bureau chiefs had no military superior. Congress gave each bureau an appropriation and held its chief personally responsible for the way the money was spent. By law each bureau head was the adviser on his specialty to the Secretary of the Navy, who alone could coordinate their activities. The chiefs were jealous of Dewey’s General Board, and they frequently stood together to oppose its advice to the Secretary. At other times they were rivals. Always there was a scramble for control of any proposed new Navy equipment. Thus Rear Admiral Hutch I. Cone, the engineer in chief, used Dewey’s recommendation to open a new round in this continuing competition. Within a week he was asking the Secretary to let him buy an aeroplane for the USS Chester, and hire an instructor to show an officer how to fly it. But the aides recommended waiting until planes were better developed. Chief Constructor R. M. Watt tried to belittle the General Board by proposing that an officer from his bureau and another from the Bureau of Engineering study aviation and advise the Department on its naval applications.
2. Captain Washington Irving Chambers, U.S. Navy.
Secretary Meyer was busy inspecting Navy yards on the West Coast when these papers were put on his desk. Assistant Secretary Beekman Winthrop, who was “acting,” pigeonholed the aides’ recommendations and sent Cone’s request to Dewey for comment. Then he told Watt and Cone that Chambers had already been detailed to advise the Department about aviation. He suggested they each appoint an officer to work with Chambers. The Bureau of Engineering appointed Lieutenant H. N. Wright, and the Bureau of Construction and Repair named Naval Constructor William McEntee, who had accompanied Sweet to see the 1908 flights at Fort Myer. Thus Chambers’ letter-answering job expanded into one of liaison before it was