He told me that he had never been so thrown about in his life, as when he got into this valley. He made two complete circles, and his machine was pointing out to sea when he came to the ground. The front chassis was wrecked, the propeller blades broken, but the wings and tail of his monoplane were intact. Blériot was not hurt.
From Washington, Katharine wrote to assure the Bishop that the brothers were not at all disturbed by Blériot’s flight. And, as widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic, the brothers joined in giving Blériot due credit for his performance, which they characterized as “remarkable.” “I know him well,” Wilbur said in an interview with the New York Times, “and he is just the kind of man to accomplish such an undertaking. He is apparently without fear, and what he sets out to do he generally accomplishes.”
Orville noted the many accidents Blériot had had with a machine over which he had so little control and expressed amazement that he had succeeded. Wilbur was asked if he and Orville would be making any attempts to win some of the prizes to be offered at the European air meets such as that at Reims. No, they would not, said Wilbur. Their time would be put to better use, though what that was he did not say.
All the same, throughout France, indeed throughout much of the world, Blériot’s flight was taken as only a prelude to the very burgeoning of French aviation that the New York Times had made so much of earlier in the year.
As if by magic, everything started to work at Fort Myer as it was meant to. On the evening of July 27, Orville took off with Lieutenant Frank Lahm as passenger on an official endurance trial and in an hour and 12 minutes flew around the field 79 times, at an altitude of 150 feet, not only passing the test but breaking a world record that Wilbur had set at Le Mans the year before. An estimated eight thousand spectators saw him take off and among them was President Taft.
On Friday, July 30, Orville flew what was the official cross-country speed trial required by the army. The course covered from Fort Myer to Alexandria, Virginia, a distance out and back of 10 miles. Records of the speed flown varied, from 42 to 45 miles per hour, but there was no question that Orville passed the test.
An especially smooth landing was made to the accompaniment of honking horns and cheering. Wilbur rushed to the plane, his face covered with a broad smile. Their contract with the War Department would be signed. The price to be paid by the department was $30,000—a figure that made headlines—but far more importantly their own country was at long last committed to their achievement.
“Orv finished the Fort Myer business in a blaze of glory,” wrote Katharine, who ten months earlier, sitting by his bedside there at the post hospital, had wondered if he might ever have strength enough to walk again.
III.
As reported in the Chicago Tribune, the eager interest shown by the French people in the progress of aviation could hardly be appreciated in America, and foremost among that summer’s scheduled aeronautic events was the Reims “congress of aviators where it is expected great things will be done.”
It was to be the world’s first international air race, and financed entirely by France’s champagne industry. Its official title was “La Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne,” and among the French aviation stars to take part were Henri Farman, Louis Blériot, Léon Delagrange, two of Wilbur Wright’s protégés, Charles de Lambert and Paul Tissandier (flying French-built Wright planes), as well as the American Glenn Curtiss, who had been chosen to participate by the American Aero Club when the Wright brothers declined.
At age thirty-one, Curtiss was a lean, shy, intensely serious competitor who, like the Wrights, had started out as a bicycle mechanic in his hometown of Hammondsport, New York, then began building and racing motorcycles. (He became the first acclaimed American motorcycle champion, “the fastest man in the world,” achieving speeds on his motorcycle as high as 130 miles an hour.)
His interest in aviation had begun when a balloonist named Tom Baldwin asked him to build a lightweight motor for a dirigible. Once, in September 1906, while in Dayton, Baldwin and Curtiss had visited Wilbur and Orville at their shop. Baldwin had thought Curtiss asked the brothers far too many questions, but, as he later said, they “had the frankness of schoolboys.” The year after, Curtiss met Alexander Graham Bell, who made him “Director of Experiments” for the Aerial Experiment Association.
In 1909, with a wealthy aviation enthusiast who had worked with Octave Chanute and Samuel Langley, Augustus Herring, Curtiss formed the Herring-Curtiss Company to build flying machines. Those they built relied on movable flaps on the wings—ailerons, “little wings”—instead of wing warping, to control rolling and banking. The idea had occurred earlier to a young French engineer, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, and had been tried by Santos-Dumont, Blériot, and others. Alexander Graham Bell, too, had become interested, but whether on his own or having heard about Esnault-Pelterie, is not clear. Also, it had already been described for all to see by the Wrights as an alternative to wing warping in their patent published in 1906.
But for Curtiss at Reims, speed would be the point and the small, new biplane he would fly had been built strictly for that, with a powerful, lightweight engine.
Anyone wanting proof of the pace of change in the new century had only to consider that just one year before, in August 1908, at Le Mans, all the excitement had been about one man only, Wilbur Wright, flying one airplane before about 150 people to start with. This August at Reims, a total of twenty-two pilots would take off in as many planes, before colossal grandstands accommodating fifty thousand people.
The grand opening took place Sunday, August 22, and by then Orville and Katharine had once more sailed for Europe, heading this time for Berlin, the brothers having concluded that demonstrations there were a necessity. Orville, as a result of his “blaze of glory,” was the one in most demand. Wilbur remained in Dayton, concentrating on motors with Charlie Taylor, and seeing to business of the kind he most disliked, including the commencement, in mid-August, of a lawsuit against the Herring-Curtiss Company for violation of Wright patents.
Events at Reims created an even greater sensation than promised. By the last days the crowds numbered 200,000, four times the capacity of the grandstands. The contestants flew higher, farther, and faster than anyone ever had, breaking every record set by the Wright brothers in the past year, and the biggest winner, the most celebrated of the contestants, was Glenn Curtiss, who won the prize for speed.