The Bishop's Boys (77 page)

Over the years he invited even distant relatives to spend time with him at Hawthorn Hill or Lambert Island. He offered career advice and assistance to the youngsters, and helped to put several of them through college.

This concern for family members was genuine, but it was not purely altruistic. Like his father and grandfather, the family was to be his shelter from life.

No incident more clearly underscores the importance of family unity and trust in Orville’s mind than his break with Katharine in 1926. The two had grown extraordinarily close over the years. Katharine was her brother’s staunchest defender, his strongest supporter, his best friend. He was closer to her than to anyone else in life, including Wilbur.

Orville believed that he and his sister were bound by a firm understanding—they were the sole survivors. Through it all, from Milton’s early church difficulties to the patent wars, they had avoided any entangling personal relationships outside the family circle. Their sole allegiance was to one another.

In this family, such informal agreements had the force of law. They loved, trusted, and depended upon one another to an extraordinary degree, but each expected the other to stick to a bargain.

In later life, Orville assumed that the old bargain of mutual and exclusive support was still in effect between Katharine and himself. He was satisfied and had no intention of violating the pact. No one would ever have a more important place in his life than his sister.

Katharine was less comfortable with the arrangement. In the summer of 1926 she announced her engagement to Henry J. Haskell, an old college friend and fellow Oberlin trustee. They had been courting for over a year before they even told Orville of the relationship.

Orville was dumbfounded. He turned his back on his sister, who married Haskell on November 20, 1926—at Oberlin rather than in her own home. The Haskells moved to Kansas City, where Henry became the editor and part owner of the Kansas City
Star
. Katharine was desperate for a reconciliation with her brother; Orville remained unyielding.

Two years after the wedding, Katharine contracted pneumonia. It
was obvious that she would not survive, yet Orville refused to go to her. He finally traveled to Kansas City at Lorin’s insistence, arriving in time to be with her when she died on March 3, 1929. With Haskell’s approval, he brought Katharine’s body back to Dayton and laid her to rest next to their father, mother, and older brother.

In 1915 Katharine told a visitor that, while they loved Hawthorn Hill, “we were always happy on Hawthorn Street.”

Some members of the family blamed the estrangement on the jealous influence of Mabel Beck, with whom Katharine had never gotten along. It is not necessary to look for any outside influence. From Orville’s point of view, it was brutally simple: Katharine violated a sacred pact. In admitting another man into her life, she had rejected her brother. Katharine, of all people, had shaken his faith in the inviolablity of the family ties that provided his emotional security.
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F
rom the year 1869, when the great debate over secret societies erupted within the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, until Orville’s death in 1948, there was scarcely a time when the members of the Wright family were not deeply involved in one controversy or another. They had survived them all: the Radical-Liberal fight; the schism; the Old Constitution–New Constitution legal suits; the Keiter affair; and the long string of disputes involving the invention of the airplane, culminating in the patent suits of 1910–15.

With the sale of the company, Orville hoped to retire from the battle. Instead, he was drawn into the longest and most publicized controversy of his career—a feud with officials of the Smithsonian Institution that would last for almost thirty years.

It began with the Curtiss patent suit. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed down its final decision in favor of the Wright Company on January 13, 1914, but that was not the end of the matter. Curtiss and patent specialist W. Benton Crisp had found that it might be possible to fly an airplane in which each aileron was operated separately without violating any of the provisions already upheld. Curtiss announced that he would do just that, forcing Orville and his company to bring an entirely new suit.

At best, the strategy was little more than a stopgap measure. Orville filed the new complaint on November 16, 1914. There was every indication that he would be upheld once again, but it would take time. Curtiss used that time to mount a fresh attack on the basic validity of the patent.

The fact that the Wrights had been the first to fly was essential to the broad interpretation of their patent. Curtiss could not prove that anyone else had flown before the Wrights. He might, however, be able to demonstrate that some experimenter had been
capable
of flight before December 17, 1903, but had not actually flown for reasons beyond his control. It would not be a strong legal argument, but Curtiss had few alternatives.

Looking for a suitable candidate, Curtiss began to consider the work of Samuel Pierpont Langley, who had died in 1906. Charles D. Walcott, now secretary of the Smithsonian, had played an important role in funding the 1903 Aerodrome and was anxious to redeem the reputation of his old friend.

Walcott had set a Langley Memorial Tablet into the wall of the Smithsonian Castle, established a Langley Medal for contributions to aeronautics, and created a Langley Laboratory that he hoped would become a national facility for aeronautical research. May 6, the day on which the first of the steam-powered Aerodrome models had been flown in 1896, was proclaimed an official holiday at the Institution—Langley Day.

On January 21, 1914, eight days after the U.S. Circuit Court handed down its decision in favor of the Wrights, Lincoln Beachey, the best-known American stunt pilot of the day, wired the Smithsonian requesting to borrow the surviving parts of the 1903 Aerodrome so that he could rebuild and fly the craft. Beachey was scarcely a disinterested party—he had learned to fly at the Curtiss school, had been the star aerial performer on the Curtiss exhibition team, and remained a Curtiss stockholder.

Smithsonian administrator Richard Rathbun passed the telegram on to Walcott with a recommendation: “I do not think you will want to grant Mr. Beachey’s request.” Alexander Graham Bell, a Smithsonian regent, and a friend of both Langley and Walcott, agreed. Bell felt that the Langley machine was too valuable an artifact to be tampered with or risked in flight, although he did suggest that an exact replica might be constructed.
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Walcott refused Beachey, but the idea took hold. The ultimate step in redeeming Langley’s reputation would be to fly the Aerodrome, proving that, had conditions been only slightly different, the honors heaped on Wilbur and Orville Wright might have gone to Samuel Pierpont Langley.

When Glenn Curtiss brought one of his float planes to Washington to participate in the 1914 Langley Day celebration, he remarked to
Walcott that he “would like to put the Langley aeroplane itself in the air.”
²
This time Walcott jumped at the chance. Without informing Bell or any of the Smithsonian regents, he authorized A. F. Zahm, a Curtiss witness in the patent trial who was now in charge of the Langley Laboratory, to turn over the fuselage, engine, propellers, various bits of tubing, and “a few wing ribs” of the old machine to Curtiss. In addition, Walcott provided $2,000 to underwrite rebuilding and testing.

“The main objects of these renewed trials,” Zahm explained, “were first to show whether the original Langley machine was capable of sustained free flight with a pilot, and secondly, to determine more fully the advantages of the tandem wing type of aeroplane.”
³
There were better ways to test tandem-wing airplanes than by rebuilding the shattered remnants of an eleven-year-old machine that had refused to fly in the first place. Clearly, the only real purpose of the tests was to demonstrate that the Langley machine had been “capable” of flight in 1903.

Curtiss, the Smithsonian, and Zahm all stood to benefit if the craft proved airworthy. Curtiss could return to court arguing that the pioneer status granted the Wright patent was unwarranted. Walcott would demonstrate to the world that his old friend Langley had not really failed after all. And Zahm would gain revenge on Orville for the supposed slights offered to him at the outset of the patent suit in 1910.

Curtiss and Zahm announced that they would return the Aerodrome to its condition at the time of the 1903 tests. If that was their goal, they failed to achieve it. The wings constructed in the Curtiss plant differed from the originals in chord, camber, and aspect ratio.
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The trussing system that linked the wings to the fuselage also bore little resemblance to the 1903 original. The kingposts had been relocated, and the wires were trussed to different spars at different points. This was particularly important, for most knowledgeable authorities believed that the failure of the wing structure, not a catapult defect, had been responsible for the disaster of 1903.

There were the other changes. Curtiss fitted the craft with his own yoke and wheel control system. After the first trial, the original rudder under the midpoint of the craft was tied off, and the large cruciform tail altered to serve as both rudder and elevator. Finally, Curtiss rejected the old catapult launch system, mounting the machine on floats. This last change can be excused in the name of self-preservation, though it does not seem to have occurred to anyone at the time
that Curtiss had finally come up with a way to land the machine safely, something impossible with the original craft.

On the morning of May 28, 1914, the rebuilt Aerodrome, with Curtiss at the controls, lifted off the surface of Lake Keuka and flew 150 feet. After a few additional short hops, it was taken back into the shop, where the 1903 Langley engine was replaced with a modern Curtiss power plant and additional changes were made to the structure. Further flights followed with the altered craft that fall.

Walcott and Zahm were overjoyed. In an account of the tests published in the 1914 Smithsonian
Annual Report
, Zahm claimed the Aerodrome had demonstrated that, “with its original structure and power, it is capable of flying with a pilot and several hundred pounds of useful load. It is the first airplane in history of which this can truthfully be said.” Far from providing a list of the alterations that had transformed failure into success, Zahm reported that the old Aerodrome had flown “without modification.” “With a thrust of 450 pounds,” he concluded, “the Langley aeroplane, without floats, restored to its original condition and provided with stronger bearings, should be able to carry a man and sufficient supplies for a voyage lasting practically the whole day.”
⁵

That was only the beginning. The 1915
Report
repeated the claim that “The tests thus far made have shown that former Secretary Langley had succeeded in building the first aeroplane capable of sustained free flight with a man.”
⁶
Similar statements were repeated in later Smithsonian publications.

Then there was the matter of labeling. When the Aerodrome was shipped back from Hammondsport, Walcott ordered it returned to its original 1903 condition. It was then exhibited in the Arts and Industries Building with a label explaining that it was “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.”

Orville Wright was justifiably outraged. At the very outset of their careers, he and his brother had written to the Smithsonian for advice as to useful readings in the field of aeronautics. They were always careful to mention that the involvement of the world-renowned Samuel Langley in aeronautics had given them initial confidence. At the same time, they owed no technical debt to Langley, nor had they ever believed that his machine was capable of flight.

The Wright brothers’ relationship with the Smithsonian began to sour after Langley’s death. Walcott, at Bell’s suggestion, presented
the first Langley Medal to the Wrights. In preparing the text of their remarks for publication, however, the secretary used a section of an earlier Wright letter which “helped to create a false impression over the world that the Wrights had acknowledged indebtedness to Langley’s scientific work.”
⁷

The brothers also became suspicious when, in 1910, Walcott all but refused their offer to donate the 1903 Wright airplane to the Smithsonian. Walcott had written in March 1910 requesting “one of your machines, or a model thereof, for exhibition purposes.” The Wrights responded by offering to have a model of any of their craft constructed for the museum; or they could “reconstruct the 1903 machine with which the first flights were made at Kitty Hawk. Most of the parts are still in existence.”

Walcott replied that the Smithsonian would really prefer the 1908 (actually 1909) military Flyer. In addition, he requested several scale models of Wright aircraft and some full-scale engines to display in conjunction with specimens from the Langley collection, “making the exhibit illustrate two very important steps in the history of the aeronautical art.”
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