Authors: Tom D. Crouch
They arrived in Leipzig on February 26, just in time to hear the German Supreme Court render a verdict in the long-standing German patent suit. With “great regret,” the court upheld the ruling of the Patent Office. Although the Wrights were indeed the inventors of wing warping, they had forfeited all rights through prior disclosure, but were still entitled to patent control over the combined use of wing warping and the rudder. Orville once remarked to an early biographer that the German verdict was something akin to excusing a pickpocket because the victim had indicated the location of his purse.
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They went on to Paris in time to assist Flint Company attorneys with the final presentation to the French high court. The ruling seemed to be completely in favor of the Wrights. Even the use of the
rudder disconnected from the wing-warping system was allowed. Once again, however, the judges accepted a defense motion for yet another panel of experts to study prior art. Peartree and the Flint lawyers advised Orville that the infringers would be able to keep the proceedings alive until the patent expired in 1917. Accepting the inevitable, they decided to leave for home.
They sailed for America on March 9. For once, there was good news waiting in New York. On February 27, Judge Hazel handed down his final decision in the case of
Wright
v.
Curtiss
, upholding the Wright position. Curtiss was enjoined from the continued manufacture, sale, or exhibition of aircraft.
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Curtiss immediately appealed and was allowed to continue operations until the Federal Appeals Court handed down its ruling, but his situation did not look hopeful. It seemed to Orville that they were very close to the legal vindication he and Will had sought so long.
They arrived back home on March 19—just in time for the greatest natural disaster in the city’s history. A hard rain began to fall on Easter Sunday, March 23. Dayton, at the confluence of the Miami, Stillwater, and Mad rivers with Wolf Creek, had always been prone to flooding. Six times in its history rampaging waters had swept through the streets of the city.
This time it was far worse. Torrential rains poured down all over the area drained by the rivers and creeks that met in the center of Dayton. By Monday afternoon, the Miami River was rising at the rate of six inches per hour. Flooding was inevitable.
The real disaster began with the collapse of an earthen dam containing the Loramie Reservoir in Shelby County, Ohio, at seven o’clock the next morning. The water poured down the valley of the Miami past Sidney, Piqua, and Troy to reach Dayton that afternoon. The levee along Stratford Avenue was breached at about four o’clock; within an hour water was pouring though additional breaks on East Second and Fifth streets. West Dayton, built on low-lying land bounded by the Miami and Wolf Creek, got the worst of it.
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Orville and Katharine overslept on the morning of March 25, and rushed out of the house for an appointment in another part of town. High water made it impossible for them to return to Hawthorn Street late that afternoon. They spent the night at the home of E. L. Lorenz, a friend who lived on higher ground a few blocks away on Summit Street.
Like thousands of other Daytonians, Orville had a sleepless night.
His concern for Milton’s safety was paramount. The telephones were completely out of service; before nightfall Orv and Katharine posted notices asking anyone with information as to the bishop’s where-abouts to contact them at Summit Street. The next day a passer-by informed them that he was safe.
Milton and his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Wagner, had been rescued by a good Samaritan with a canoe and taken to William Hartzell’s house on Williams Street just before nightfall. Milton estimated that Hawthorn Street lay under eight feet of water by nine o’clock that evening.
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Orville had other worries that first night. The priceless photographic negatives of the flying-machine experiments of 1900–05 were in the old shed at the rear of the house. Letters, diaries, and other records of the invention of the airplane were stored in his second-floor office at the bicycle shop on Third Street, where the water was said to be over twelve feet deep. Fires fed by escaping gas broke out all over the city that night. From his vantage point on high ground Orville could see the glow created by a major blaze in the neighborhood of the bike shop. The entire West Side business district was in danger of going up in flames.
The floodwaters receded by March 30, enabling the citizens of Dayton to assess the damage: 371 lives had been lost and property damage was estimated at $100 million. Determined that nothing of the sort would ever happen again, local leaders banded together to form the Miami Conservancy District, an intergovernmental agency that would oversee the construction and operation of a system of local flood-control dams. The effort was a success—the dams were built and the conservancy program became the model for similar programs undertaken across the nation.
The Wrights had escaped with their lives and property losses of less than $5,000. Like everyone else they now faced a daunting clean-up effort. One reporter left a graphic description of the scene on the West Side:
The streets are seas of yellow ooze. Garden fences and hedges are twisted or torn away. Reeking heaps of indescribable refuse lie moldering where there were smooth lawns and bright flower beds. The houses that stand are all smeared with dirt that shows the height of the flood. But inside the houses, that is the dreadful thing. The rooms that the water filled are like damp caves. Mud lies thick on the floors, the walls are streaked with slime, and the paper hangs down in dismal festoons.
Some pictures may remain hanging, but they are all twisted and tarnished. The furniture is a jumbled mass of confusion and filth. But the worst is the reek of death about the place.
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The things that had remained downstairs at 7 Hawthorn Street and in the bicycle shop were a total loss. Fortunately, the materials relating to the invention of the airplane survived with little damage. Rummaging through the shed, Orville found that some of the emulsion had begun to peel from a few of the glass plate negatives, but none was a total loss. The most important photo—the plate that John Daniels exposed just after the machine lifted off the rail for the first time on December 17, 1903—had lost only a small bit of emulsion in one corner. The image was undamaged.
The records of their experiments were safe as well. The water had not reached the second-floor office, and the fire that swept through other buildings on West Third left the bicycle shop untouched. Even the remnants of the 1903 airplane, stored in the low shed at the back, survived unharmed. The precious bits of wood and fabric, submerged beneath twelve feet of water, were protected from damage by a thick layer of mud.
Of all the surviving reminders of their early work, the world’s first airplane was probably least important to Orville. He and his brother had never given much thought to their old machines. Each of the three gliders had been discarded in turn at Kitty Hawk, as had the 1905 airplane when its career was concluded in 1908. They stored the 1904 machine over a single winter in the shed at Huffman Prairie; the following spring the wings and frame were hauled out and burned to make room for the new machine.
The 1903 airplane was the only one they had saved, stowing the shipping crates away behind the bike shop without unpacking them. Now it had survived the great flood. Orville cleaned the mud off the top of the crates as best he could, and put them back in the shed. Soon he would be very glad that those shattered bits of wood and torn fabric had been preserved one more time.
T
he Wright factory escaped the flood. Orville called the men back to work on April 10, but only five of them made it to the plant. “There is some prospect that the street railway service will be resumed in the early part of next week,” he told a friend, “in which case I think we will have a fairly full force.”
1
As master of those workmen and president of the company, Orville was badly out of his depth. Wilbur had not been especially fond of management, but he had worked hard at it, driven by an ambition that would not permit failure. At the deepest level, he had undertaken the search for a practical airplane as a means of distinguishing himself from the common herd. The opportunity to stand in the spotlight on his own terms and to be accepted as an equal by the industrialists who had invested in the Wright Company was proof that he had achieved his goal. For Wilbur, the stresses of the company presidency were offset by very real psychic rewards.
Orville had almost none of his brother’s restless ambition nor the energy and drive to succeed that came with it. Alone with his friends he was a delightful conversationalist; among strangers he grew silent and withdrawn. He had few illusions about his capacity for leadership. The thought of attending a board meeting, let alone presiding at one, was abhorrent to him. Moreover, with the single exception of Robert Collier, he felt little other than contempt for the rich New Yorkers whom Wilbur had regarded as friends and associates.
2
Orville accepted the presidency of the Wright Company because he
had no choice. The position enabled him to maintain control over his own financial destiny while at the same time drawing on corporate resources to carry out litigation at company expense.
He would use the power of his office, but he had no intention of reshaping himself into the image of a corporate executive. From the members of the board of directors to the men on the shop floor in Dayton, they would have to take him as he was.
Nor did he make any secret of his distaste for management. Orville physically distanced himself from the factory, maintaining his old office above the bicycle shop. In addition, he insisted on conducting business through intermediaries like Mabel Beck, his forceful and protective secretary, who became a legend in the company.
3
Yet there was no doubt who was in charge. Wilbur had never been especially fond of Frank Russell. Orville, who liked him even less, fired Russell less than a year after taking over the reins. He hired a replacement, Grover Loening, during a business trip to New York in July 1913.
Loening, a recent graduate of Columbia, had met Wilbur in New York in 1909. The young man subsequently worked as chief engineer of the tiny Queen Aeroplane Company in New York, and constructed a flying boat of his own design.
Loening’s earlier acquaintance with Wilbur was relevant. Throughout their relationship, Orville would treat him as a younger brother—a young Wilbur, in fact. He enjoyed his company, and tried to lure him into the sort of arguments he and Wilbur had found so productive. For his part, Loening was extraordinarily fond of his employer but not blind to his weaknesses. “Factory organization was pretty rough,” he recalled many years later. “Orville … would delay making an important decision and drive us all nuts trying not to disobey his orders on the one hand and yet not knowing what to do.”
4
Loening admired the fact that no one ever put anything over on Orville, but he was puzzled by his apparent lack of vision, saying: “He certainly did not have any big ‘business’ ideas or any great ambition to expand. He seemed to be lacking in push.” Part of the problem, Loening thought, was that Orville missed his brother. In addition, he was battling recurrent back pain resulting from the crash at Fort Myer in 1908.
5
The patent suit was the most serious problem, however. Loening described the ongoing court battle with Glenn Curtiss as “the one great hate and obsession” preying on “the minds and characters” of
both Orville and Katharine. He saw the patent fight as a two-edged sword. While it might ultimately put the competition out of business, it also monopolized Orville’s attention and discouraged any attempt to incorporate the latest technical advances into the design of Wright aircraft.
6
The standard Wright production of 1913, the Model C, was an obsolete machine. Compared to contemporary European aircraft, it was slow, tail-heavy, and unstable. Other flying-machine builders, notably Esnault-Pelterie and Blériot, pioneered a natural control arrangement combining the use of a stick and rudder pedals. Orville retained the cumbersome and confusing system of twin levers developed in 1908.
In part, Orville’s technical conservatism was based on a reluctance to move too far from the classic Wright pattern developed at the start of the century. Until the patent suit was settled, there was a danger that a radical design change might be seen as an admission that the original required improvement. Moreover, Orville was reluctant to adopt innovations pioneered by men whom he had accused of infringing on his ideas.
Take the case of the flying boat. Since the day in 1910 when the French aviator Henri Fabre lifted off the water for the first time, hydroaeroplanes—flying boats—had enjoyed enormous popularity. Recognizing the extent to which the Wrights would dominate the U.S. Army market, Glenn Curtiss made a concerted effort to sell his machines to the U.S. Navy. He offered the Navy a cut-rate flight training program, staged the first takeoff and landing from U.S. naval vessels, and paid close attention as the Navy formulated its requirements.
His most important achievement, however, was the development of the flying boat. Curtiss began his experiments in the fall of 1908 with the rebuilt version of the
June Bug
called the
Loon
. He continued to develop his ideas with a variety of machines during 1909–11, finally introducing the Model E, his first genuinely practical flying boat, in 1912.
The Model E and subsequent variants were so successful that Curtiss not only dominated the U.S. Navy market but received the first great batch of orders from European purchasers. In 1913 he completed work on the
America
, a giant flying boat designed to cross the Atlantic. With the advent of war, the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company would become the major supplier of large flying boat patrol aircraft to both the British and American governments.
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