Authors: Tom D. Crouch
It would be a busy spring. The machine to be flown in France still sat in a crate at Le Havre. Bariquand et Marre had won the contract to produce an engine for that craft. Now the Wrights must rush a second machine and engine to completion for the Army trials. Moreover, they had not flown since the fall of 1905. Before attempting to do any flying in public, they would retire to Kitty Hawk with the refurbished 1905 machine, complete with upright seats and an improvised control system.
The Wrights knew that they would not be the only ones in the air in 1908. Farman continued to stretch his time and distance aloft, finally capturing the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize with a circular flight of 1,500 meters in 1 minute, 28 seconds on January 13. It was obvious that Farman, Delagrange, Blériot, Esnault-Pelterie, and others had matured; by midsummer, these Europeans were flying more than fifteen minutes at a time, and covering many kilometers. Farman flew at Ghent, Belgium, that spring, then visited the United States where he made a number of disappointingly short hops at Brighton Beach, New York, in July.
But the real excitement was generated by a group of newcomers who called themselves the Aerial Experiment Association. The AEA was born on September 30, 1907, when six people filed into the office of the American consul in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to sign articles of agreement. They were a diverse group, drawn together by Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel.
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Thomas Watson, his assistant and friend, later recalled that Bell
had spoken of the possibility of heavier-than-air flight during the course of their early telephone experiments. On one occasion Watson had stood well upwind and watched as Bell examined the wing structure of a very dead gull washed ashore on the beach.
As early as 1891, Bell, now a world-famous inventor, had conducted flying-machine experiments at his estate, Beinn Breagh,
*
near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. But it was his friendship with Langley, and his minor involvement in the Smithsonian Aerodrome program, that fired Bell’s aeronautical interests. Encouraged by Langley, he began his own program of aeronautical research in 1896. Fascinated by kites since his childhood, Bell developed a series of new designs that would enable him to study the problems of aircraft stability.
Like the residents of the Outer Banks who had long puzzled over the antics of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the sturdy Cape Breton fishermen looked askance at Bell’s kites. One local citizen reported:
He goes up there on the side of the hill on sunny afternoons and with a lot of thing-a-ma-jigs fools away the whole blessed day, flying kites, mind you!
He sets up a blackboard and puts down figures about these kites and the queer machines he keeps bobbing around in the sky. Dozens of them he has, all kinds of queer shapes, and the kites are but poor things, God knows! I could make better myself. And the men that visit him—old men—that should have something better to do. They go up there with him and spend the whole livelong day flying kites. It’s the greatest foolishness I ever did see.
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By 1902, that foolishness had produced the first of Bell’s famous tetrahedral kites. Loosely based on the Hargrave box kite, these large craft were built up of individual cells, constructed with triangular faces, arranged in great tetrahedral banks. Beginning with relatively simple single-cell assemblies, the kites grew to enormous multicellular aggregations, some twenty-six feet wide. The giant
Frost King
of 1905 contained 1,300 cells arranged in twelve layers. It once carried a man thirty feet into the air.
Bell was less interested in how much weight his kites would carry, or in how high they would fly, than in stability. For
Frost King
he sought absolute stability in a machine which, if powered, would be capable of flight with a man on board. Like Langley, he hoped to launch the craft from water, and immediately forged ahead with a series of hydrofoil tests.
Bell’s wife Mabel, a partner in the fullest sense, followed his experimental program from the outset, offering suggestions that shaped his work. It was Mrs. Bell who volunteered to put up $20,000 to create an experimental association comprised of the young men her husband had drawn into the aeronautical project.
John Alexander Douglas McCurdy and Frederick Walker (“Casey”) Baldwin were the first two employees. McCurdy, the son of Bell’s secretary and photographer, came home for a visit from the University of Toronto in the spring of 1906 with his friend, Casey Baldwin. Bell liked the two young men, recognizing the talents needed for his burgeoning airship program. Baldwin, a gifted young engineer, was persuaded to enter Bell’s employ after his graduation in the fall of 1906; McCurdy joined the team after his own graduation the following spring.
Thomas Etholen Selfridge was the next recruit. A native of San Francisco, Selfridge graduated from West Point in 1903. After distinguished service as a troop commander during the San Francisco earthquake, his decision to pursue aeronautics seemed odd to his superiors. Bell recognized it for a carefully calculated career move:
[In the spring of 1907] a young man called upon me in Washington, an officer of the U.S. Army, who turned out to be Lieut. Thomas E. Selfridge. He showed a great deal of interest in the whole subject of aerial locomotion, and expressed a desire to witness our experiments with tetrahedral structures in Nova Scotia. I found that he had devoted a great deal of attention to the subject of Aeronautics, and what was being done in relation to heavier-than-air machines in all parts of the world with the idea that sometime or other the U.S. government would require flying machines in the army and that, when that time came, the services of an officer who had made an expert study of the subject would be in demand, and he would be sure of promotion into a field of great usefulness.
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Bell wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt, seconding Selfridge’s official request for temporary duty at Beinn Breagh. By December 6, Selfridge was a full-fledged member of the team, having ascended to an altitude of 168 feet during a 7-minute flight aboard a new kite, the
Cyqnet
.
The final, critical, member of the AEA arrived at Baddeck in July 1907. Glenn Hammond Curtiss had sold Bell an engine at the New York Aero Club show the winter before. Curtiss promised to deliver the engine in person and to instruct Bell’s engineers in its operation.
Bell easily persuaded the quiet, competent Yankee mechanic to stay on as chief engineer of the new organization.
Loyalty to Bell ensured that the first AEA effort would be the completion and testing of the tetrahedral aerodrome
Cyqnet
. Then “Bell’s Boys,” as they became known, were eager to move into the mainstream of world aeronautics. Operations shifted to Hammondsport during the winter of 1907–08, where Curtiss workmen were already putting the finishing touches on a variant of the old Chanute-Herring glider.
Test-flown from mid-January through March 1908, the little glider gave the younger members of the AEA their first real opportunity to skim through the air. It also convinced them that kites were not the future. Outvoted by his associates, Bell withdrew to Beinn Breagh to continue the kite work on his own.
The members of the AEA knew where to turn for advice. Curtiss wrote to the Wright brothers late in December, describing the creation of the AEA, and offering to furnish, “gratis,” a 50-hp Curtiss engine for their own experiments. Selfridge followed with a letter of his own on January 15, 1908. He put a series of straightforward questions to the brothers. What was their experience with the travel of the center of pressure on a wing? What was “a good efficient method” of constructing light, strong ribs that would maintain their camber? How should fabric be applied? Could the Wrights offer any general advice on aircraft construction to a group of first-time builders?
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The Wrights answered the questions, directing the newcomers to their patents and published papers for additional details. They assumed that the AEA could not pose a threat. Bell’s involvement with the group spoke well for the program—he had always defended their claims in the press and seemed to be an honest man. So long as Bell was in command, the AEA would prefer pure research to commercial enterprise. At any rate, all the information they offered was protected by their patents.
Work on the
Red Wing
, the first powered AEA machine, began at Hammondsport late in January. Selfridge, who had been among those pushing hardest to switch from kites to conventional aircraft, was the designer. Named for the red fabric (left over from the
Cygnet
) that covered its wings, the first AEA venture into powered flight displayed all the external Wright characteristics so familiar on French aircraft. It was a pusher biplane with a canard elevator and a rudder at the
rear. There was no attempt at wing warping. The upper and lower wingtips were trussed so close together that they almost touched. Selfridge hoped this pattern would improve lateral stability.
Selfridge was recalled to active duty before the
Red Wing
was complete. That did not deter Curtiss, McCurdy, and Baldwin. After some preliminary runs across the frozen surface of Lake Keuka, they transported the little machine to a smooth patch of ice five miles from Hammondsport on March 12. The first test, with Baldwin at the controls, was to be a high-speed run down the ice. To the surprise of the small crowd of observers, the machine rose into the air some 200 feet from the start and flew a short distance forward until the tail buckled, sending the craft into a sharp descending turn to the right. It struck the ice with some force, breaking a runner and damaging a strut on the right wingtip. The distance from takeoff to touch down was 318 feet, 11 inches.
Far from being discouraged, the members of the AEA immediately set to work on their next project—
White Wing
. Casey Baldwin designed this craft, which was complete and ready for testing by May 9. Except that it featured wheels rather than sled runners,
White Wing
appeared to be a virtual replica of its predecessor. There was one significant difference: Baldwin had mounted two small ailerons at the upper wingtips.
The ailerons functioned like the warping wings of the Wright machine. The Wrights had, in fact, recognized that lateral control could be obtained with such surfaces—a description of them was in their patent. Bell suggested the need for a lateral-control mechanism after the crash of the
Red Wing
. Whether he first encountered the idea of the aileron in the Wright patent, or in the work of Santos-Dumont, Esnault-Pelterie, or Samuel Cody, all of whom had used them earlier, matters little. The important thing was that the ailerons transformed the AEA machine into a flyable airplane.
Casey Baldwin made the first successful flight with
White Wing
at the Stony Brook race track near Hammondsport on May 17, covering 285 feet. Selfridge tried his hand the next day: he flew 100 feet on one flight and 240 feet on another. It was Curtiss’s turn on May 21. From the outset it was apparent that the skills honed in bicycle and motorcycle racing were transferable to aeronautics. On his first attempt he covered an incredible 1,017 feet. McCurdy flew 720 feet later that day, but wrecked the machine in landing. The men of the AEA abandoned
White Wing
and moved confidently toward better things.
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The Wrights paid scant attention. On March 23, Lazare Weiller had agreed to terms for the French rights to their invention. Two weeks later, on the morning of April 6, Wilbur caught the train for Norfolk. Memories must have come rushing back. As before, he bought lumber in Norfolk, then proceeded to Elizabeth City where he laid in a stock of supplies and registered at the Southern Hotel to await the arrival of “Little” Spencer Midgett, now skipper of the
Lou Willis
, which would transport the lumber over to the Banks.
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This time Will himself crossed the Sound in relative comfort and safety aboard Captain Franklin Midgett’s gasoline launch, the
B. M. Van Dusen
. It was a wise decision. A few days later the
Lou Willis
once again lost her sails in a gale off the mouth of the Pasquotank, and was forced back to port for repairs. At the time, she was ferrying another load of the Wrights’ lumber.
Will walked into the old camp at the Kill Devil Hills early on the morning of April 11.
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There was not much left. The side walls and south end of the original hangar were still standing, but the roof and north side had collapsed. The floor lay beneath a foot of sand and debris. The “new” building had vanished completely, victim of a recent storm. The lifesavers had pulled the pump out of the sand and reinstalled it near the Kill Devil Hills station.
The skeleton of the 1902 wing protruded from a small dune just east of the original hangar. A crate stored in the rafters of the old structure had crashed to earth when the roof collapsed, spewing the sad remains of the two Chanute gliders onto the sand. An odd assortment of bits and pieces—ribs, spar sections, the cradle of the 1903 machine—littered the surface. Spencer Midgett, who had driven Will down to the camp in a pony cart, explained that a group of boys vacationing at Nags Head had walked down to the site and carried away everything that looked interesting.
Will hired Oliver O’Neal, a relative of Uncle Benny, and one of the Baum boys to help him put up a new building. Bad weather and ill health slowed their progress. Will came down with intestinal flu, and transporting the building materials from the landing at Kitty Hawk to the old fishing dock near the camp proved a problem. Charlie Furnas, a Dayton mechanic who had expressed a repeated desire to fly, suddenly showed up in camp on April 15. Will was pleased to have him and immediately placed Furnas in temporary command of the local building contractors.
Will and Charlie lodged with the Kill Devil Hills lifesavers. The
station did not provide the most comfortable accommodations or the best food, but the company was entertaining. Will reported that Bob Westcott, the surf man who had watched the flights of December 17, 1903, through a spyglass, was discussing his plans for a perpetual-motion machine with anyone who would listen. “He did not explain its nature except that it had to do with the boiler or generator of the gas or medium rather than the engine,” Will noted in his diary. “He thinks it will practically eliminate the necessity of fuel or at least reduce the quantity to insignificant proportions.”