The Airplane - Jay Spenser [74]
The reason for this unusual holiday activity was a $2,500 prize and solid silver trophy offered by Scientific American, a leading publication, for the first person to complete a public, officially witnessed airplane flight of more than 1 kilometer in the United States. Curtiss had seen pictures of the trophy, which depicted an eagle atop a globe with winged horses ringing its base. He meant to claim it and had chosen this time and place.
The magazine had posted this prize in part to make amends to the Wright brothers, whom its staff had too long ignored. To Scientific American’s consternation, however, the Wrights—aloof and dismissive of anything smacking of showmanship—passed up this golden opportunity despite having made unofficial flights before invited guests and passersby of up to 40 kilometers back in 1905.
Curtiss flies his June Bug to win the Scientific American trophy, July 4, 1908.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Right now Wilbur was in France preparing to fly. As for Orville, he was readying a different Model A for demonstration to the U.S. Army near Washington, D.C., in September. This left the field wide open for Glenn Curtiss. Conditions being favorable, Curtiss climbed into the June Bug’s seat and set his shoulders in the yoke that controlled triangular ailerons at the airplane’s wingtips.
The propeller was spun and the engine caught with a bellow. Breaking free of the ground, the June Bug wallowed unsteadily through the air in a straight line. Curtiss passed the 1-kilometer flag marker and kept going. Only when hemmed in by looming trees at the end of the meadow did he set down, unwilling or unable to attempt a turn. He had flown just over a mile (1.6 kilometers) to claim America’s first aeronautical trophy.
The June Bug was a poor airplane by all accounts. Curtiss demonstrated great bravery just flying it. Although it nominally had the Wrights’ idea of three-axes control, Curtiss put little faith in the plane’s ability to do more than stay on an even keel. The Golden Flyer, his next design, was far better. That classic pusher biplane—prototype of the famous Curtiss Model D series—featured ailerons mounted between the wings. Curtiss mastered control in the air in this later type, setting the stage for his win at Reims in 1909.
At the start of 1909, Wilbur Wright relocated to Pau in the south of France to train French pilots. Shortly after arriving there, he was joined by his sister, Katharine, and a convalescing Orville. On September 17, 1908, while demonstrating the Wright Military Flyer to the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia, the younger brother had crashed when a propeller split, breaking the airplane. His passenger—Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, a colleague of Glenn Curtiss’ in Alexander Graham Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association—was killed, gaining the unfortunate distinction of being the world’s first aviation fatality.
At the start of April, the three Wright siblings relocated to Rome, where the brothers showed off their airplane to Italy. They remained a month before returning home in triumph. In July of that year, Orville returned to Fort Myer to complete his demonstration to the U.S. Army of what became history’s first military airplane. Thereafter, Orville traveled to Germany for flight demonstrations at Berlin and Potsdam through the end of October. Today displayed by the Deutsches Museum, the German-built machine he used there is the only surviving Wright Model A.
The Europeans and British learned very quickly from the Wrights. Almost immediately, the continent’s airplanes began flying with roll control added to their wings for full three-axis control. This was achieved with either wing warping (changing the camber of the wing itself) or ailerons (a movable surface