Unlocking the Sky by Seth Shulman Read Free Book Online

the planes lost fore and aft stability, leading to a sudden, uncontrolled dive. He believed that his new lab could help the aviation industry by reviewing the tandem principle adopted by Langley to see whether Langley’s design might “lessen, if not entirely prevent a fatal dive.”
    In interviews in Hammondsport after Zahm’s arrival, Curtiss explains his undoubtedly heartfelt admiration for Langley. And he echoes Zahm’s hope that experimenting with Langley’s tandem-wing design might, as he put it, “affect the form and structure of aeroplanes” in the future. But Curtiss has another reason to try to resurrect the old aerodrome—a reason so urgent and explosive that it will, as his friend and colleague Lyman Seely puts it, ultimately help spawn “the most persistent and the most misleading propaganda ever attending a scientific test.”

TWO
WRIGHTS AND WRONGS
    In Hammondsport, the old-timers used to say that if you jumped up in the air and flapped your arms you’d be infringing on the Wrights’ patent.
    —T ONY D OHERTY, SON OF C URTISS’S ASSISTANT E LLWOOD “G INK” D OHERTY
    B y the time the aerodrome arrives in Hammondsport in the spring of 1914, Glenn Curtiss faces an extraordinary situation. He has won almost unanimous admiration from practitioners in aviation around the world. His airplanes have broken distance, speed, and altitude records. But in January, the U.S. Court of Appeals has just handed down a permanent injunction that prohibits Curtiss from manufacturing or even exhibiting his aircraft in the United States without a license from Orville Wright. And, despite Curtiss’s repeated attempts to negotiate, Wright has announced that he will consider lenient royalty arrangements with anyone in the field except Curtiss.
    In a startlingly broad interpretation of the Wright brothers’ patent, the courts have sanctioned their exclusive claim to the sole practical means of stabilizing an aircraft in flight. As the Wrights had hoped, their sweeping patent has become, in effect, a patent on the airplane. And especially since the death of his brother Wilbur in 1912, Orville Wright is in no mood to compromise: he unwaveringly demands 20 percent of the revenue generated by any competitors’ airplanes whether through their sale or exhibition.
    As a result, unless Curtiss decides to move his company to another country that does not recognize the Wright patent claims, he will be forced to either cease his operations or pay such a crippling mountain of back royalties on the planes he has already sold or flown that he will surely be bankrupted.
    There is also no question that the feud has become personal. In a front-page interview in the New York Times in February 1914, Orville accuses Curtiss of stealing the Wrights’ designs and even blames him for Wilbur Wright’s death from typhoid fever. According to Orville, Wilbur’s agitation over the case “worried him to his death…first into a state of chronic nervousness, and then into a physical fatigue which made him an easy prey for the attack of typhoid which caused his death.”
    Calling Orville’s claims “absurd, if not malicious,” Curtiss publicly retorts that he never “had an item of information” from the Wright brothers that helped him build his airplanes. As for the contention about Wilbur’s death, Curtiss describes it as a bunch of “insinuations easily interpreted as such untruths as I cannot believe Mr. Wright, or any other sane man, ever made.”
    Curtiss has repeatedly appealed to the Wrights for a settlement. With no success in negotiations and no satisfaction in court, he has few remaining options. In a move born of desperation, Curtissembarks on the aerodrome restoration as an ambitious effort to set the record straight.
    The Smithsonian’s involvement in restoring Langley’s aerodrome lends an aura of objectivity but, in 1914, the question of Langley’s contribution to aviation is of more than academic interest to Curtiss. He