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

for lateral stability were separate, they designed flaps on the wings, so-called ailerons. * Like the Wrights’ technology, the ailerons on each wing tilt in opposite directions to stabilize the aircraft. Unlike the Wrights’ design, however, the ailerons operate separately from the plane’s fixed wings and from its rudder. Ailerons rapidly became the industry standard. With them, an airplane’s wings could be made rigid and much stronger, and they allowed the plane to remain stable independent of its steering mechanism.
    Curtiss and most other aviators of the day argued that the aileron was a significant and distinct advance that should not be legally covered by the Wrights’ claims. In essence, though, the Wrights claimed that their completion of the first proven invention to solve the problem of lateral stability gave them rights to any subsequent design, including ailerons. The Wrights’ patent itself repeatedly spells out this contention: “We do not wish to be understood as limiting ourselves strictly to the precise details of construction hereinbefore described,” the Wrights’ lawyers write at virtually every point in which the patent spells out the particulars of the brothers’ wing-warping technique. “We do not limit ourselves to the particular description of rudder set forth…” it reads when they describe the rudder. And, importantly, when they describe the way the wings can be flexed, the patent states: “Our invention is not limited to this particular construction.”
    With such all-encompassing language passing muster at the U.S. Patent Office, the Wrights’ lawyers argued that it mattered not that wing warping was virtually obsolete within six years from the time the patent was issued. Nor was it relevant that even the Wright Company would quietly begin to abandon wing warping in favor of ailerons by as early as 1915. As their lawyers argued, the Wrights had been granted exclusive rights to all known means to laterally stabilize an airplane; now Orville Wright could legally exercise this exclusive proprietary claim however he wished.
     
    It is a detail lost to history exactly when Orville Wright first learned that Curtiss and the Smithsonian team intended to restore Langley’s aerodrome. Most likely, he read it in his morning newspaper as did other Americans early in the spring of 1914.
    We can imagine him at home with his older sister Katharine and his father, Bishop Milton Wright, in their new mansion on Hawthorne Hill, southeast of Dayton, Ohio, reading the news, his cheeks flushing with rage. Not one to easily voice his anger, Orville might well have risen from the breakfast table in a wordless fury to pace and fume outside on the grand porch above his stately, sloping lawn.
    Or perhaps not.
    The particulars of the scene may have been forgotten, but we do know something about the degree of Orville’s distress over the aerodrome affair. Legal ramifications aside, he took the restoration of Langley’s airplane as a personal affront and believed that Smithsonian Secretary Charles Walcott was colluding with Curtiss in a plot to steal his and Wilbur’s rightful claim to being the first in flight. In the coming weeks and months, a wide variety of visitors to Hawthorne Hill note Orville and Katharine’s agitation over the matter with some alarm.
    According to historian C. R. Roseberry, Ohio governor and Wright family friend James Cox was taken aback with the vociferous way the usually demure Katharine denounced Curtiss’s aerodrome project as “a fake…so raw that it seems incredible.” Holden C. Richardson, who would go on to become a captain in the U.S. Navy, was an overnight guest in the Wright home during this period. “Katharine especially was terribly bitter toward Curtiss,” Richardson remembers, and couldn’t seem to forgive him. Moreover, he recalls, because he was known to be a friend of Curtiss’s at the time, Katharine had difficulty treating Richardson himself with