Unlocking the Sky by Seth Shulman Read Free Book Online Page A

knows that if Langley’s plane flies, it could raise profound doubts about the Wrights’ claim to being the first with a “useful” aeronautical invention.
    In fact, Curtiss is quite candid about his motives. As he writes to Lincoln Beachey, another target of the Wrights’ patent claims, the aerodrome restoration “would go a long way toward showing that the Wrights did not invent the flying machine as a whole but only a balancing device.” If they are successful in getting the aerodrome to fly, he says, perhaps in court “we would get a better decision next time.”
     
    Today, nearly a century into the age of aviation, the Wright brothers have become a part of our collective mythology—lone inventors who single-handedly turned a fantastic dream into a practical reality. Of course, the myth captures a truly monumental achievement. But it also willfully ignores half of the Wright brothers’ story, obscuring the role the Wrights played once their invention took flight.
    Now largely forgotten, the Wrights made no secret of the fact that they sought a monopoly on production of the airplane comparable to the one Alexander Graham Bell had won for the telephone. After all, monopoly was the hallmark of the Wright brothers’ era—the Gilded Age—with vast, vertically integrated empires of oil and steel built by titans like Rockefeller and Carnegie. Securing monopolycontrol of the commercial airplane was the linchpin of the Wrights’ business strategy. It helped them to attract a bevy of heavyweight backers that came to be known in many circles as the Wall Street Air Trust, including powerful financiers like Robert Collier, August Belmont, and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
    With the help of Vanderbilt and the others, the Wright brothers came close to achieving monopoly control over airplane production in the United States through broad patents and aggressive business tactics. But unlike Bell’s phone lines, which were conducive to a centralized monopoly, the chaotic, creative drive to conquer the sky in the first decade of the twentieth century would prove exceedingly difficult for the Wrights to contain. And the biggest obstacle they faced was their most formidable competitor: Glenn Curtiss.
    After the appeals court decision in 1914, Orville Wright boasted to the press that the Wright Company had secured “absolute control” of the emerging airplane industry. His remark was delivered with a shrewd eye toward his company’s investors but a remarkable blindness to its effect on the industry.
    The truth is, by this time, the Wrights’ handling of their proprietary rights over the course of nearly a decade had already alienated most of their colleagues in the young aviation field. Even Grover Loening, a loyal friend to the Wrights and onetime chief engineer of the Wright Company noted later that, by filing suit—and, in particular, by prosecuting their case so aggressively against Curtiss—the brothers “turned the hand of almost every man in aviation against them.”
    The Wrights’ legal case against Curtiss hinged on a particular technical issue. The Wright brothers had solved the difficult problem of stabilizing an aircraft by making the wings of their planes flexible. In their patented “wing warping” method, the Wrightstwisted the airplane’s wings in a system wired to the plane’s rudder. When the Wrights steered their airplane, their wing-warping system twisted each wing slightly in the opposite direction to help the plane bank on turns without losing control. Although some of the most respected aviation pioneers claimed the underlying principle was well known for as many as fifty years before the Wrights, their wing-warping stabilizing device was nevertheless an important advance that helped the airplane achieve controlled flight.
    From the first plane Curtiss ever built, he and his team solved the stability problem in a related, but notably different way. Realizing that the function of the rudder and the need