Authors: Tom D. Crouch
Orville could trace his interest in flying boats to 1907, when he and
Will had dreamed of a surprise appearance over the fleet during the Jamestown celebration. His first successful water takeoff and landing were made with a Model CH on a secluded stretch of the Miami River in 1913. Essentially a Model C fitted with a 240-pound pontoon, the clumsy machine was a far cry from the sleek Curtiss Model E with its rakish boat hull.
Grover Loening designed the first Wright flying boat, the Model G of 1913–14. Orville did not make it easy for him, insisting that the craft should in no way resemble the Curtiss boats. The result was much inferior and fell short of U.S. Navy requirements.
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The Wright Company floundered through the years 1912–15. New machines developed during this period failed to keep pace with the competition; more important, the standard Model C fell into ill repute with the U.S. Army. Art Welsh and Lieutenant Leighton Hazelhurst were the first men killed in a Model C, dying in the crash at College Park on June 11, 1912. The next fatalities at College Park came on the afternoon of September 28, when Lieutenant Lewis Rockwell drove his Model B straight into the ground at 50 miles per hour, killing himself and his passenger, Corporal Frank Scott.
The death toll continued to mount. Lieutenant Loren H. Call died in a Model B crash at Fort Sam Houston on July 8, 1913. Lieutenant Moss Love was killed in a Model C at the Army’s new North Island, California, facility on September 4. Lieutenant Perry C. Rich died when his Model C nosed into Manila Bay on November 14. Ten days later Lieutenant Hugh Kelly and flight instructor Eric Ellington died in a second Model C crash at North Island.
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Ellington’s death convinced Grover Loening that there was a major defect in the design of the Model C. “He was one of the leading Wright pilots in the Army and was constantly corresponding with us on details of his machine and his troubles,” the engineer recalled. “Finally, one morning I read of his death in the papers and arrived in the office, only to find a long letter from him, predicting that something would happen, as he was feeling sure the Wright Model C was too tail heavy and didn’t answer the controls properly.”
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Orville rejected the notion of a fundamental design problem, maintaining it was a matter of pilot error. The Model C was equipped with a new six-cylinder engine developing 60 horsepower—the aviators simply were not accustomed to so much power.
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Most of the crashes, he was convinced, were caused by stalls. The pilots misjudged the angle of attack, diving and climbing at too steep
an angle. He developed an angle-of-incidence indicator—a simple pointer that sensed small changes in the angle of attack and warned the pilot when his climb or dive became too steep.
Orville thought that the automatic pilot on which he had been at work since 1905 would also help to solve the problem. The device, complete and ready for testing by the fall of 1913, was designed to keep an airplane flying straight and level without the intervention of the pilot. It included a pendulum to control the wing warping and a horizontal vane to operate the elevator, both working through servomotors powered by a wind-driven generator.
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He received a patent on the automatic pilot in October 1913, by which time he had installed a prototype system on a special single-seat Model E. He had tested the thing in secret and knew that it worked. The first public demonstration would be a particularly sweet moment, for he had found a way to use the invention to triumph over Glenn Curtiss.
In 1911, Orville’s friend Robert Collier established what was to become the most prestigious award in American aviation. The Collier Trophy was to be presented annually for the most significant contribution to aeronautics made during the year. Curtiss had won the trophy two years running for his flying boats. Orville was determined to snatch the award from him in 1913.
Remembering Wilbur’s stratagem for winning the Coupe Michelin at the last minute, Orville scheduled his first public demonstration of the automatic pilot for December 31. He made a total of seventeen flights before the Aero Club of America observers gathered at Huffman Prairie that day. The most spectacular performance included a takeoff followed by seven full circles of the field with his hands held high in the air.
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Orville was awarded the Collier Trophy on February 5, 1914, but it proved to be a hollow triumph. In the spring of 1913, just as he was putting the finishing touches on his automatic stabilizer, a twenty-year-old engineer named Lawrence Sperry reported to the Curtiss flight school at Hammondsport for pilot training. The son of Elmer Sperry, who had developed a gyroscopic stabilizing system for ships, Lawrence was determined to perfect a similar device for aircraft.
Sperry earned his wings and traveled with the Curtiss crowd to winter quarters at North Island, California, a five-mile-long sandbar separating San Diego Bay from the Pacific, where the work on the gyroscopic stabilizer continued. Like Orville, young Sperry developed
a mechanism that would sense deviations from straight and normal flight and apply corrective action.
Rather than using mechanical vanes and pendulums, however, he established a stable platform for two gyroscopes in the cockpit of a Curtiss flying boat. One gyro sensed deviations in the yaw axis and operated the rudder. The other functioned for the roll and pitch axes and controlled the ailerons and elevator.
Sperry unveiled his invention on June 18, 1914, as part of a great safety competition sponsored by the Aéro-Club de France and the French War Department. He took a Curtiss C-2 off the Seine, climbed to altitude, and flew back down the river. At the appropriate moment, his mechanic, Emile Cachin, crawled seven feet out onto one wing as Sperry lifted his hands from the controls and stood up in the cockpit. The airplane flashed past the judges as the crowd went wild.
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Orville’s automatic stabilizer worked, but Sperry had broken entirely new ground. His brilliant solution to the problem rivaled what the Wrights themselves had achieved in the invention of the airplane. Not only did it form the basis for all subsequent automatic stability systems, it opened an entire range of new possibilities. The enormously complex inertial navigation system that guided the first men to the Moon in 1969 was directly rooted in Sperry’s automatic pilot of 1914.
In the summer of 1913, with attention focused on the bottom line of corporate account books and general operations in Dayton, the board of directors of the Wright Company dispatched the company treasurer, Alpheus Barnes, to keep a close eye on the situation. Orville, working through Loening, remained in charge of production. Barnes took over bookkeeping, advertising, and contract negotiation.
Loening remembered Barnes as “a hearty, well-built, and genial character, smoking cigars continually and full of good stories,” who regarded Orville’s Dayton friends as provincial hicks. From Orville’s point of view, the company treasurer was the worst of the New York crowd. That, Loening commented, “did not bother Barnes much.” In addition to his other duties, Loening served as a mediator between the two men.
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Orville and Barnes could not even agree on a response to good news. On January 13, 1914, the United States Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the original decision in the case of
Wright
v.
Curtiss
. The Wright patent was valid and Glenn Hammond Curtiss had infringed upon it. This time it seemed that Curtiss had run out of space in which to maneuver. His only possible resort was to the Supreme Court of
the United States, and there were no apparent legal grounds on which to base such an appeal.
Alpheus Barnes and his New York colleagues were overjoyed. Grover Loening listened for hours as the treasurer spun bright visions of what such a decision would mean to the company—opening the way for a legal monopoly as all-inclusive and remunerative as that granted to the Bell Telephone Company.
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It might have worked. Loening spent considerable time in later years speculating on what might have occurred if Barnes and the other members of the board of directors had been given a free hand to expand production and exploit a monopoly.
There were untold millions of dollars ready in New York to be invested in such a trust. In no time Curtiss and what other companies there were could have been closed down or bought up, and we would have seen a totally different development of flying starting here and spreading to Europe exactly as the telephone monopoly did. When we look back on it, it might have been a better thing for aviation. Many destructive rivalries would have been stopped, and with the World War just getting ready to start, one hesitates to think what a difference a great rich legal trust might have made.
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“At any rate,” Loening concluded, “it did not happen because of one man—Orville Wright. With the winning of the suit, his revenge on Curtiss seemed satisfied, and all he wanted was tribute—royalties from everyone.”
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Badgered by the New York board to take immediate action that would drive Curtiss and the others out of business, Orville refused, announcing that everyone, with the possible exception of Curtiss, would be free to continue doing business so long as they paid the Wright Company a 20 percent royalty on every machine produced.
W. Starling Burgess, a wealthy yacht designer turned aircraft builder, was among those who jumped at Orville’s offer. Glenn L. Martin of California was another. But those men ran very small operations compared to the Curtiss Aeroplane Company.
By the early spring of 1914, Curtiss was the largest and most successful producer of aircraft in the United States, the only firm that could compete with leading European manufacturers. Glenn Curtiss was a man of few illusions. He knew that the offer made to other manufacturers would not be available to him. The Wright Company would take legal action to shut him down. Not long before, Henry Ford had been caught in just such a situation.
When Ford entered the automobile business before the turn of the
century, the Selden patent had dominated that industry. Unlike the Wright brothers, George Selden was not an inventor in any important sense, but he had taken note of the rapid development of lightweight steam and internal-combustion engines during the years after 1870 and had drawn some conclusions. The day of the “road engine,” the self-propelled vehicle, was not far distant. He filed for a patent in 1879, describing his “invention” in such broad terms that it would be virtually impossible to build a “road engine” without infringing upon it. His plan was to wait until someone else built such a machine, then launch a patent infringement suit that would make his fortune.
Selden kept his patent application pending until 1895, by which time there were, at long last, a handful of auto builders to sue. When the preliminary decisions were handed down in his favor, most of the manufacturers caved in and agreed to pay a royalty for use of the patent. Henry Ford was the only major auto builder to fight to the end, emerging victorious just months before the Selden patent would have lapsed.
There was an enormous difference between the Selden case and that of Wilbur and Orville Wright. The Wright patent covered a brilliant achievement that deserved protection under the law. Selden had simply found a legal loophole to exploit the system. Henry Ford, however, was unable to distinguish between the two situations. Convinced that this was a repetition of his own experience, Ford offered Curtiss the services of W. Benton Crisp, the lawyer who had finally broken the Selden patent.
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With Crisp’s assistance, Curtiss devised a new strategy. Accepting the fact that the combined use of wing warping and rudder was fully covered in the Wright patent, and that his ailerons were analagous to wing warping, he announced that henceforth he would construct machines designed to use only one aileron at a time. That is, he would disconnect the ailerons on the right and left wings so that simultaneous action would no longer be possible. While that might make his machines more difficult to fly, it would also place them outside the bounds of the Wright patent.
In fact, a comparable situation was covered in Claim 1 of the Wright patent. Unfortunately, Claim 1 had not been cited or included in the earlier suit and had yet to be adjudicated. Curtiss had found his loophole. The Wright Company would have to bring suit all over again.
Orville was outraged but strangely indecisive. He recognized that
the whole business was nothing more than a ploy to buy time, yet he refused to take action.
The board of directors were as angry at Orville as they were at Curtiss. Quick legal action on the basis of the original ruling might force Curtiss out of business, preserving the dream of monopoly. By dragging his feet, Orville allowed his rival to catch his breath and devise a fresh legal gambit.
The Wright-Curtiss feud had become a public relations disaster. While the Wright Company had its defenders, it was increasingly portrayed as a cutthroat organization, determined to smash honest competitors by fair means or foul. The fact that Curtiss continued to prosper throughout the period of the patent suits was generally overlooked. Moreover, there was a growing assumption that the patent suits had retarded the development of American aeronautics, enabling European competitors to forge ahead.
It is impossible to gauge the impact of the patent wars on the growth of aviation in America. Clearly other factors, including government subsidies, prize competitions, and international rivalry, provide a full explanation for the rapidity of European advance during 1906–14. At the most basic level, the situation was proof of the old adage that it is sometimes better to be a fast second. The French, having lost the race for the invention of the airplane, had swept past the Wrights and everyone else by sheer momentum.
At the same time, the Wright-Curtiss feud did create serious divisions within the American aeronautical community. As Grover Loening noted, these divisions extended into the tiny band of U.S. Army aviators: