Unlocking the Sky (11 page)

Mabel is also deaf, having lost her hearing to scarlet fever when she was a small girl. In fact, it was Bell’s desire to build an electrical device to help her that led to his invention of the telephone. As a good speaker and excellent lip reader, her handicap hardly slows her down.

Curtiss is particularly sensitive to her situation because his own sister Rutha had lost her hearing to meningitis as a young girl. As a result, Curtiss had learned both sign language and the habit of clearly enunciating his words so that his lips could be easily read. This knowledge proves useful before that first evening is over. At one point, Curtiss notices an unhappy expression creeping onto Mabel’s face, and he realizes that she has lost the thread of the conversation. Quietly turning toward her, he deftly signs the missing words with his fingers. Her eyes light at once with surprise and gratitude, and the two form a special bond from that time forward.

So begins a week of exploration and camaraderie that is a revela
tion to Curtiss; Bell’s home provides a creative atmosphere that falls somewhere between the rigors of a fast-track engineering laboratory and the playful pleasures of a child’s summer camp. During the day, Curtiss works closely with the rest of the tight-knit group, running propeller tests and teaching them about the functioning and maintenance of his engine. The time passes swiftly as the men work in the lab, talking incessantly about airplane design and testing Bell’s tetrahedral kites. Ultimately, Bell hopes to install Curtiss’s engine in a large version of the kite in an effort to fly it on its own power with a pilot.

Around sundown, the group normally retires to the porch or the great hall to play with the children and drink hot tea. Evenings mean long and stimulating discussions punctuated, at the Bells’ irresistible urging, by singing. The group talks about everything from atmospheric pressure and the inherent strength of tetrahedral construction to the mechanics of propeller torque. As often as not, Bell draws upon his vast intellectual passions, bringing into the mix everything from his early experiments with the telephone and telegraph to genealogical deductions about gender and disease drawn from his card-indexed classification of seven thousand members of a randomly chosen family called the Hydes.

As the evening hours wear on, some indefatigable subset of the group invariably adjourns to the study where Bell, smoking his pipe, opens his voluminous notebooks crammed with wide-ranging ideas and sketches. Bell always retires last; his preference is to work in the quiet of the night and sleep until noon. As a result, he also frequently chooses to muffle his telephone with towels, though it invariably manages to wake him nonetheless. “Little did I think, when I invented this thing, that it would someday rise up to mock me!” he exclaims to Curtiss one disgruntled morning on a separate occasion.

While Curtiss is the only team member at Beinn Bhreagh without an advanced degree, his mechanical genius and practical engineering experience offer a vital and formerly missing element. In this sense, Bell’s plan begins to come to fruition. In anticipation of Curtiss’s visit, Bell had noted in his journal that Curtiss’s input would create a group with the “ideal combination for pursuing aerial researches.” Now, during Curtiss’s stay, his journal entries reiterate the sentiment more emphatically. His elation is clear: “I now have associated with me gentlemen who supplement by their technical knowledge my deficiencies; in this combination I now feel that we are strong, where before we were weak.” Best of all, he writes, all members of the group are united by a common desire: “to get into the air.”

On Friday, July 19, Bell invites the group into his study after a morning of experiments to formally discuss the possibility of forming an aviation enterprise. He has already broached the plan with each of them individually, but this is the first time they meet together to consider the matter in detail. With only a brief break for dinner, the lively meeting continues late into the evening.

For his part, Bell offers to conduct the experiments under his auspices and to raise the seed money necessary for the task. As Bell explains, Mabel has generously offered to sell a piece of property she owns in Washington, D.C., in order to supply the business with $20,000 in start-up capital. Further, Bell offers the use of his labs and guarantees to supply another $10,000 of capital, if required. In return, he proposes that he and Mabel will share a controlling interest in the new association.

Even beyond these logistical details, Bell has thought a good deal about the role he anticipates in the association. As he writes in his journal: “My special function, I think, is the coordination of the whole—the appreciation of the importance of the steps of progress
and the encouragement of efforts in what seem to me to be advancing directions.”

In mulling over Bell’s proposal, Curtiss tries not to let the romance of Beinn Bhreagh cloud his business sense.

Is Bell close to inventing a flying machine? His tetrahedral kite-like gliders certainly seem strange, but it is hard to tell how they might fare with a motor attached. One question is the extent to which Bell’s dramatic earlier success with the telephone—success that brought him fame and fortune by the time he was thirty years old—relied on the special circumstances of his background.

From the time of Bell’s birth in 1847, his father had been well established in Edinburgh teaching speech and elocution and beginning research on what he called a “visible speech” system: a means to represent with symbols all possible positions of the vocal organs and the sounds to which they corresponded. George Bernard Shaw, a family friend, would immortalize Bell’s father and his speech research as Professor Henry Higgins in the play
Pygmalion
(later adapted into the musical
My Fair Lady
).

From the earliest age, Bell had been further influenced in his interest in speech and acoustics by the fact that his mother was nearly deaf and, even as a young boy, Bell, of all his family members, could best communicate with her. After studying at the University of London, it was only natural for him to become involved in teaching speech to deaf pupils. For the rest of his life Bell considered this his core profession and always identified himself as a teacher of the deaf.

In 1871, when Bell was twenty-four years old, he moved with his parents from Edinburgh to Ontario, Canada, and then soon moved
again, this time alone, to accept a professorship at the recently opened Boston University. There he introduced Helen Keller to her life-changing teacher, Anne Sullivan, a fact that would lead Keller to dedicate her autobiography to him. “Child as I was,” Keller would write, “I at once felt the tenderness and empathy which endeared Dr. Bell to so many hearts. That interview would be the door through which I should pass from darkness to light.”

To be sure, by the time Bell set out on his telephone research, he had developed a remarkable and unusual constellation of talents, including a mastery of aspects of speech, music, acoustics, mechanics, and electricity. The big question for Curtiss is whether Bell can bring his many talents to bear effectively on the field of aeronautics.

In this regard, Curtiss’s time in Nova Scotia has shown him that there is much more to Bell’s capacious repertoire than the telephone.

In his Georgetown lab, for instance, Bell developed the graphophone, a machine that used cylinders of hardened beeswax to replay voice recordings. Edison bought the rights and used Bell’s work to help develop his phonograph. Among many other lesser-known accomplishments, Bell even invented a portable desalination device for use by shipwrecked sailors.

In one episode illustrating the breadth of his work, the White House called upon Bell when U.S. President James Garfield was shot in the back by a disgruntled federal worker in 1881. The bullet had lodged in the president’s chest but did not kill him, and Garfield’s advisers asked Bell to see if he could devise a means to help surgeons locate the bullet. Working frantically, Bell met the challenge by developing a crude metal detector using induction coils and a telephone. The machine worked brilliantly, but Bell was stymied in trying it on the ailing president when he couldn’t make
the machine stop buzzing. He never imagined that Garfield’s state-of-the-art, high-tech mattress contained metal springs, and no one in the White House had known to mention it. Within days, Garfield died from the infected wound, despite Bell’s frenzied and creative efforts.

Not long afterward, when Bell’s son, Edward, died of a collapsed lung soon after birth, Bell combated his grief by developing a “vacuum jacket” apparatus to help patients with similar respiratory ailments to breathe. That invention predated the so-called iron lung by some four decades.

Now Bell is devoting his formidable inventive attentions to the challenges of flight. He will, Curtiss feels sure, bring a vast knowledge of many related scientific fields to the enterprise. He has traveled the world and remained in close contact with an extraordinary collection of colleagues from scientific and high-society circles. He is also an impressive polymath who seems to read everything, keeping voluminous notebooks and scrapbooks of clippings drawn from a mind-boggling array of American, British, French, and German publications.

Even more attractive to Curtiss than the breadth of Bell’s knowledge and contacts is the simple fact that, after Bell’s extraordinary initial success with the telephone, he has never stopped inventing and is wholly unafraid to apply his talents to wildly disparate ventures. He is an energetic and independent thinker who has made his own, distinct route through the world. Bell’s many successes attest to the fact that he can bring vast experience in the day-to-day process of technological invention that will be indispensable to the group.

If he ever doubted it, Curtiss’s extended visit helps fully persuade him of Bell’s brilliance. Despite Bell’s modest diary entry
about being merely a coordinator of the project, Curtiss recognizes that he is a remarkable inventor, one of the true scientific and technological powerhouses of his day. Equally impressive is the undeniable way he has thrown himself wholeheartedly into the project. Even at age sixty, with a full life and a long record of achievements behind him as well as ongoing projects, Bell is embarking with gusto upon the task of designing a flying machine.

In addition to all these assets, Curtiss adds the fact that aviation is Bell’s most enduring interest aside from speech. Even his telephone assistant Thomas A. Watson recalled, “From my earliest association with Bell he discussed with me the possibility of making a machine that would fly like a bird. He took every opportunity that presented itself to study birds, living or dead…. I fancy, if Bell had been in easy financial circumstances, he might have dropped his telegraph experiments and gone into flying machines at that time.”

Bell’s passion to build a flying machine was only heightened through his close friendship with Samuel Pierpont Langley. Thinking of Mabel’s story of Bell’s unswerving attention to the sugar cubes at his honeymoon breakfast table, Curtiss considers it an undeniable asset that, as Mabel now likes to remark, her husband Alec is “just gone about flying.”

At the end of his weeklong visit, Curtiss is sorry to leave the remarkable, close-knit group. He returns to Lena in Hammondsport with a new outlook about the prospect of developing a working airplane—and also, perhaps, with a new sense of what it means to be an inventor.

Curtiss’s style and his approach to engineering problems in the future will be forged by his association with Bell’s team. Before
meeting Bell, Curtiss had harbored a deep skepticism not only about aviation but about inventors in general.

“I used to resent being called an inventor,” Curtiss said much later. “An inventor, as people in country towns thought of him, was a wild-eyed, impractical person, with ideas that wouldn’t work. Perhaps I got some of that impression from J. T. Trowbridge’s poem, ‘Darius Green and his Flying Machine.’ My grandmother knew Mr. Trowbridge very well, and used to recite that poem to me as far back as I can remember.” The popular poem, published in booklet form with comic illustrations, lampooned an inventor’s harebrained efforts to fly. Trowbridge’s characterization, Curtiss said, simply reflected that, in terms of public esteem, inventors “didn’t stand very high in rural communities.”

Curtiss’s visit to Beinn Bhreagh all but erases this childhood prejudice. His time at Bell’s estate was one of the most exciting experiences of his life. But he still worries about taking time away from his rapidly expanding business to explore aeronautics. Ultimately, according to at least one source, Lena encourages her husband to continue with Bell, counseling him to trust his instincts and Bell’s spectacular earlier success with the telephone.

Within a week of returning to Hammondsport and receiving Lena’s blessing, Curtiss cables Bell to express his interest in joining the group. “I have given the Association plan considerable thought,” he writes, “and am very favorable toward it.”

When he learns that Captain Baldwin has an engagement to exhibit his dirigible in Halifax, Curtiss uses the event as an impetus to schedule a return visit to Beinn Bhreagh at the end of September. With logs blazing in the cavernous stone fireplace of the great hall, the group formally votes to establish their association.

After lengthy discussions, they amicably settle most of the par
ticulars. They decide, for instance, that each person will get a chance to test his own aeronautical design. But their first effort will be to finish Bell’s pet project, a piloted, tetrahedral kite.

Bell reiterates that, as an association dedicated to experimentation, he expects that there will be little or no profit, although any earnings will be divided equally among the partners. In her role as a funder, Mabel says, she will advance funds up to the amount of $20,000. As a show of gratitude, the group decides that, for each $1,000 she contributes, she will be assigned a 1 percent interest in any proceeds that might result from the group’s work.

The group also settles on titles and salaries for the members: Bell is appointed the association’s chairman with no salary. As a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, appointed secretary, also declines a salary. Casey Baldwin will serve as chief engineer and Douglas McCurdy is named treasurer. Each of the young men will receive an annual salary of $1,000. Reflecting his status and esteem within the group, Curtiss is formally appointed director of experiments, with a salary of $5,000. He says he will draw his salary only when his business frees him enough to participate fully in the aeronautical work.