The Bishop's Boys (79 page)

4. What bearing did the flights of Langley’s models in 1896 and 1903 have on the determination of the capacity of the full-scale 1903 Aerodrome to fly?

5. What other facts, if any, would assist in determining the capacity of the 1903 Aerodrome to fly?

Orville was not willing to accept such a committee. Each of the Secretaries, he noted, already had some official connection with the Smithsonian. He left unspoken the obvious fact that he should have an opportunity to participate in the selection process. Moreover, he believed that Abbot’s proposed charge to the group was much too broad. Orville was really interested in only two things: a published list of the differences between the 1903 Aerodrome and the 1914 Hammondsport machine, and an admission by the Smithsonian that the craft was heavily modified.
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Orville then proceeded as if the committee proposal had never been made. He sent Lindbergh a list based on Griffith Brewer’s 1921 paper, with the specific dimensions of the 1903 Langley Aerodrome on one side of the page and those of the 1914 machine on the other, so that any reader could see the differences at a glance.

Lindbergh passed this list on to Abbot who, finding no substantial errors, proposed that it be published as part of a long article which would include:

1. An account of Langley’s work up to 1903.

2. A history of the Aerodrome from 1903 to 1914.

3. Republication of Zahm’s original article of 1914.

4. Orville’s comparison of the 1903 and 1914 machines.

5. Zahm’s notes on Orville’s list of changes.

6. The facts relating to the subsequent exhibition of the 1903 machine since 1914.

Once again, Orville demurred. Abbot was suggesting that his simple comparison of the 1903 and 1914 machines be buried in a mass of extraneous material, including a republication of the offending article
that launched the controversy in the first place. On March 15, 1935, he wrote to Abbot outlining in clear and precise terms the sort of article that might lead to the return of the 1903 Wright Flyer.
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It was Orville Wright’s last word on the subject. He would not require the Smithsonian to admit that the 1903 Aerodrome was incapable of flight. A simple admission that the Smithsonian statements relating to the 1914 tests were untrue would do. Abbot did not respond to the proposal.

Lindbergh, both fascinated and puzzled by the controversy, offered a thoughtful assessment in a 1939 diary entry. The fault, he believed, lay “primarily with the Smithsonian people. But Orville Wright is not an easy man to deal with in the matter. I don’t blame him much, though, when I think of the way he was treated for a period of years. He has encountered the narrow-mindedness of science and the dishonesty of commerce.”
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The tide of public opinion was clearly running in Orville’s favor. During the next eight years Abbot was bombarded with scores of petitions, most of them the result of a drive sponsored by the aviation magazine
Contact
, asking that the Smithsonian take the requisite steps to get back the 1903 Flyer. Bills were introduced into Congress calling for an investigation and the creation of a committee to resolve the dispute. A new organization, Men With Wings, was established to support the return of the airplane from England. Private citizens and aviation leaders offered to mediate a solution.

Liberty, Collier’s
, and other national magazines took up the cry with articles entitled “Bring Home the Wright Plane,” “The Road to Justice,” and “Bring Back Our Winged Exile.” With the exception of the acerbic English editor C. G. Grey, the aviation trade press was almost exclusively pro-Wright. Some of these journals, notably Earl Findley’s
U.S. Air Services
, the oldest-surviving American aviation magazine, waged editorial campaigns against the Smithsonian.

It was an extraordinarily difficult time for Abbot. By the mid-1930s, the feud threatened to do irreparable damage to the reputation of the Institution. Orville was portrayed as the oppressed citizen beset by a powerful government bureaucracy blind to justice.
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By 1940 both men had given up hope of reaching an agreement. In response to a letter from the president of the National Cash Register Corporation asking that he make one more attempt to negotiate a solution, Abbot replied: “I regret that the Institution’s experience on this subject during the past ten years, when it has made many efforts to compose these differences, has been so unpleasant and discouraging that without trustworthy assurances of success, the Institution would now hesitate to move at all … lest it should only arouse renewed misrepresentation.”
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From the time of his entry into the controversy, Charles Abbot had labored under a delusion. He expected to negotiate a solution. It was a misunderstanding that everyone else at the Smithsonian shared, including Paul E. Garber, the Institution’s resident aeronautical expert, who found it hard to understand why his boss and Orville Wright could not “put their legs under the same table” and talk the situation out.
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Orville had no interest in reaching a compromise. The Smithsonian had lied about the 1914 tests of the Aerodrome, and would have to make amends or face the consequences. In preparing his will in 1937, he stipulated that the 1903 airplane should remain in London after his death unless the will was amended by a subsequent letter from him indicating a change of heart.

The controversy with the Smithsonian represented the most publicized challenge to the priority of the Wrights, but it was by no means the only attempt to obtain some measure of posthumous credit for a flying-machine pioneer at Wilbur and Orville’s expense. The specter of John Montgomery, for example, refused to be laid to rest.

In 1917 Montgomery’s widow Regina, together with his mother, brothers, and sister, brought suit against the Wright-Martin Company,
holders of the original Wright patents, and the U.S. government, which had arranged the joint license agreement that ended the Wright-Curtiss patent suit. The plaintiffs argued that the Wrights had infringed on an essential provision of the patent granted to Montgomery in 1906 for the glider design that killed Dan Maloney. The Wright patent referred to the wings of the airplane as “normally flat.” The Montgomery patent, however, described wings with a parabolic curve, as in the arc of a circle. As a Montgomery attorney noted, everyone knew that practical airplanes have curved wings.
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Harry Toulmin’s use of the phrase “normally flat” had nothing to do with camber. He was referring to the fact that in normal flight the wings were flat across the span. When warped to turn or bank, they had a helical twist. Toulmin did not refer to camber, reasoning that the increased efficiency of arched wings was so well known that it was not patentable. A precise description of the Wright wing camber had no value in the patent, although it would reveal important proprietary information on the wind-tunnel studies.

Orville offered depositions on behalf of Wright-Martin in 1920 and 1921. He also assembled the 1903 airplane in January 1921 for a complete set of photographs to be used in the trial. The Montgomery heirs dropped the Wright-Martin suit as a hopeless cause that year. Many years later, Orville’s friend Fred C. Kelly edited his 1920–21 depositions into a short book,
How We Invented the Airplane
, which remains the best first-person account of the Wright story.
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The Montgomery suit against the federal government continued until 1928, when the court handed down a final decision in favor of the defendants. The judges in the case noted: “It seems to us idle to contend that Montgomery was a pioneer in this particular field.” Yet the Montgomery legend continued to grow. Family members and enthusiastic Californians refused to let his story die.

Publicist Victor Lougheed led the way, making totally unfounded claims for his one-time business associate. James Montgomery did his part, telling and retelling the story of his brother’s early work, extending the number and length of his flights in the process.

The process of enshrinement was complete by the mid-twentieth century when Hollywood took up the cause of this “forgotten” California pioneer. Glenn Ford portrayed Montgomery in the film
Gallant Journey
, while Walt Disney opened his cartoon history of flight with a comic version of the story. Monument builders and the anonymous bureaucrats responsible for naming schools, highways, and airfields
followed, enthusiastically endorsing Montgomery as the man who “opened the skies for all mankind.”

The strange case of Gustav Weisskopf, or Whitehead, first came to public attention through an article published in
Scientific American
on June 8, 1901. Written by Stanley Yale Beach, son of the editor of the magazine, the story provided a detailed description of a monoplane “built after the model of a bird or bat,” by a Bavarian immigrant named Whitehead living in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Ten days later the
New York Herald
followed up with a well-illustrated piece entitled “Connecticut Night Watchman Thinks He Has Found Out How to Fly.” The article included Whitehead’s offhand remark that he had already flown his machine for a distance of a half mile.
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On August 18, 1901, the Bridgeport
Sunday Herald
carried what purported to be an eyewitness account of yet another half-mile flight. In another article published in the
American Inventor
for April 1902, Whitehead claimed to have made flights of two and seven miles over Long Island Sound in January of that year.
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The stories created a brief flurry of excitement, but interest quickly died when no corroboration followed and no further flights were announced. Langley dispatched a Smithsonian employee to Atlantic City when the Whitehead machine was exhibited at Young’s Pier. He returned with the comment that the craft did not appear to be airworthy.
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Whitehead remained on the scene for a number of years. In 1904 he built and flew gliders vaguely reminiscent of the Chanute craft of 1896. By 1911 he was working on an unsuccessful helicopter design featuring sixty rotors. He also constructed an unsuccessful flying machine for Stanley Beach, who remained a major supporter.

Whitehead exhibited photos of his machines, including a fuzzy image reputed to be the 1901 or 1902 machine in the air, at the two New York Aero Shows of 1906, and later in a Bridgeport store window. He also displayed his line of aeronautical engines at exhibitions in New York and St. Louis. The engines apparently worked better than the flying machines; at least one of them powered a pioneer aircraft built by a New Yorker.

Never part of the mainstream, Whitehead became a laughingstock when he announced plans to fly the Atlantic in an outlandish machine after World War I. He died a pauper in 1927.

The first serious retelling of the Whitehead story came in an article published by Stella Randolph, an aspiring writer, and Harvey Phillips,
an aero history buff, in the June 1935 issue of
Popular Aviation
. Two years later, Ms. Randolph offered a more complete account in her first book,
The Lost Flights of Gustave Whitehead
.

Ms. Randolph told the compelling story of a poor inventor who had achieved great things only to have his work forgotten. “If this tale is true,” the Los Angeles
Times
noted, “the little be-moustached Bavarian … sped farther, faster and better than the Wrights.” The Washington
Herald
added that “the history of aviation may move back a page from the Wright brothers flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. to the experimental flights of Gustav Whitehead at Bridgeport, Conn.”
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It did not take long for the first holes to appear in the Whitehead yarn. In 1935, John Crane, a young Harvard Ph.D., inspired by the Randolph and Phillips article, traveled to Bridgeport to investigate the story. He began with the original news article of August 18, 1901. Three alleged witnesses were named in the account. One, Richard Howell, the editor who had written the piece, was dead. Another, Andrew Cellic, could not be located. No one remembered a local resident by that name, nor did he appear in any of the turn-of-the-century Bridgeport directories.

Crane did find the third man—and James Dickie offered unequivocal testimony. He remembered Whitehead, but denied ever having seen him fly. He had not been present on the morning in question, and regarded the entire story as a hoax concocted by Howell on the basis of planned flights that Whitehead had described during an interview.

Crane also talked to some of the reputed witnesses whom Stella Randolph had interviewed. One man gave her a particularly detailed account after having been promised a financial interest in her book. Most of the other testimony fell apart in similar fashion. Even the members of Whitehead’s family could not recall his having specifically mentioned the long flights of 1901–02 at the time.
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The evidence continued to accumulate. Financial supporters, especially Stanley Beach, who had originally convinced his father to underwrite Whitehead’s work, rejected the claim. “I do not believe that any of his machines ever left the ground,” Beach commented, “in spite of the assertions of many people who think they saw them fly. I think I was in a better position during the nine years that I was giving Whitehead money to develop his ideas, to know what his machines could do, than persons who were employed by him for a short period of time, or those who have remained silent for thirty-five years about what would have been an historic achievement in aviation.”
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